Being a gay teenager can be really, really hard. Teenagers who commit suicide are more likely to be gay. Teenagers who are homeless are more likely to be gay. (There was an article about homeless gay teenagers in yesterday’s New York Times that prompted me to write about the subject today.)
What all [...]
Archives for May, 2007
On Being Gay and a Teen
Perspective on HPV and Oral Cancer
Dan Savage is my favorite sex columnist. He is smart, concise, and offers up (usually) solid, well thought-out advice. He answers questions on a wide variety of questions, from the seriously kinky (like this) to relatively more pedestrian sexual issues (like this), and includes a good bit of political discussion as well (like [...]
Any questions?
Welcome! There are many new people coming to this blog, and a few who have been reading for a while now. I have lots to say about adolescent sexuality and the issues that surround it, but I am interested in your questions too. Do you have a question you’re just waiting for [...]
More on HPV, this time connected with oral cancer
The Voices of American Sexuality Blog recently included this post:
gone down on more than six people in your life? might as well be smoking two packs a day
Not the sort to provoke any additional moral panic around fellatio and its sista-friend, cunnilingus (that’s Oprah’s corner of the market; school bus episode anyone?) but according [...]
working links on the side effects of birth control
I regret to say that the links about the side effects of hormonal birth control from Friday’s posting are no good! I am so sorry! I hope everyone will accept this apology, along with some working links with similar information.Aphrodite Women’s Health website has an article about the side effects of hormonal birth [...]
Whose responsibility is this anyway?
I have recently heard from a number of parents of adolescent boys interested in the boys taking sex ed classes from me, and I am delighted! Until this recent spate of interest, all of the interested parents had girls. This is not to say that parents of boys were unsupportive or uninterested in [...]
HPV Vaccine and Chinese Abortions
The New York Times printed two interesting articles this weekend that I think are important to understanding the changing landscape of adolescent sexuality, here and elsewhere.
The first article is about the HPV vaccine. New Hampshire is offering the HPV vaccine for free to anyone who wants it. Washington and South Dakota have followed [...]
Birth Control?
The links below all work now!
This is from Jan Matney’s Parenting: Living With Your Zen Master about the emotional ramifications of oral birth control (and I’m not just linking to it because she references me!).
From Jan Matney:
I worked for fourteen years as a psychotherapist, and when dealing with women with depression and/or anxiety, I never, [...]
thinking about gender
Young children are socialized very early on into stereotypical gender roles. But what about the child who goes the other way? Last December there was a fascinating article in the New York Times (still available at that link) about young children who are drawn towards living as the opposite gender. The article [...]
learning how to put on a condom
Putting a condom on a penis correctly is not a terribly difficult thing to do, compared to the many difficult things people do in this world. But it is one of the only potentially life-saving activities that most people are never explicitly instructed in. Even more oddly, many of the young people who [...]
