Heather is the executive director of and lead educator at Scarleteen.com, the inclusive online resource for teen and young adult sex education and information which she founded in 1998. She is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College; a founder of the All Girl Army; director of the CONNECT teen sexual health outreach program for King County through the Cedar River Clinics/Feminist Women's Health Center, and a sexual health consultant for the young women's site orb28. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board for the American Journal of Sexuality Education and a contributor to the forthcoming 2011 edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in online and print publictions including the anthologies Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Viscera, Aqua Erotica, Zaftig: Well-Rounded Erotica, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 1 & 2, Shameless: An Intimate Erotica and in the forthcoming anthology Breakthrough Bleeding: Essays on The Thing Women Spend A Quarter Of Their Time Doing, But No One's Supposed To Talk About, and her photographic work has been shown in several gallery shows and publications.
She was the founder of Scarletletters.com in the nineties, the first online sexuality and arts hub for women online, and has the either laudable or embarrassing reputation of having one of the longest running personal journals online. Also a lead plantiff for the ACLU in the case against COPA, in 2007, she was recognized for her activist work in sexuality and sexual health by the National Sexuality Resource Center with a Champions of Sexual Literacy Award. In 2009 she was awarded the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, Western Region's Public Service Award and an Our Bodies, Ourselves' Women's Health Heroes Award. Previous to her work in sexuality, Heather was a Montessori and alternative classroom educator for several years. A Chicago native, she now lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
Just. Slow. Down. You keep saying you just don’t know about all of this. That’s okay: you don’t have to know. But do yourself a favor and don’t put yourself in a position where you have to.
Ages of consent tend to vary from around the age of 15 – 18 in different states. But what kind of sex they’re talking about, and what kinds of charges might be involved, is where we see a lot more variation.
Rape is a violent crime, and it is normal for any of us to experience trauma from a violent crime being committed to, on or inside of us. And it is a unique trauma: physical, emotional, verbal, sexual, psychological, interpersonal.
What a person wants and enjoys in media — including pornography– may or may not have any relationship to what they want and enjoy in real life.
Heather shares her personal experiences growing up queer, and interviews Dan Savage about his new video project, It Gets Better, designed to reach out to gay youth in the wake of the devastating suicide of gay teen, Billy Lucas.
The lead-up to sex for newlyweds who wait for marriage is SO huge, unrealistic expectations–to be a “good” wife or a “good” husband, or have sex as some sort of duty– can create even more stress.
Knowing your own boundaries and communicating about them early on in a relationship is healthy and good sexual communication is critical.
It’s important to take a good, honest look at what you both want and need, what you both are and are not interested in sexually, and then to make some choices.
What you have described is beyond sexual harassment: it’s sexual assault. And it’s not your fault.
Just like some people have pervasive or seemingly illogical fears about heights or small spaces, some phobias are pregnancy-based, about becoming pregnant, being pregnant and/or giving birth.
