Talk Hard!

By Mrissa

{Meet Mrissa, whom I met through friends who read and write science fiction and fantasy and go to conventions about it, like Minicon in Minneapolis. Mrissa originally posted these thoughts in a series of posts on her livejournal and I asked her to rewrite them together for this blog.}

At Minicon I was on a panel called “Geek, Be Not Ashamed”. Afterwards I posted about how a teenager was sitting in the back of the room during the panel, and I worried that the panel was not what she needed to hear, being from an adult perspective, for adults. If you’re going through a really awful high school, the things that will help you later in your life are not the things that will help you in high school; polite and slightly reticent dignity gets you absolutely nowhere in a bad high school. (On the other hand, maintaining a polite and slightly reticent dignity with people who dislike you can be its own reward.)

Someone was asking, in the comments to my post, what I’d recommend to someone going through a bad high school experience. What would help with that situation? It’s a good question. It’s one I’ve been thinking about. And I participated in Career Day at a local high school, so it’s got me thinking about that. And sure, like the man says, escape is a prisoner’s first duty — but nobody screws up high school so badly that they’re still a sophomore at 47. So there’s escape, but there’s also the consideration of how to do it so that you’ll be functional later. How to get free of it without chewing your leg off, so to speak. Not always easy.

Compliments were a major weapon at my high school. The barbed compliment, the sarcastic compliment, the compliment that turns on someone else present, the compliment that’s supposed to erase months or years of ill-treatment…and then the complimenter can turn to others and say, “I was just trying to be nice.” There was one girl at my high school — which was a pretty nasty one, although there were several salvageable experiences from it — who was clearly trying to be nice by her own standards. She wanted to be known as a nice person. She also wanted to be “popular,” in the high school sense of being in an in-crowd. And it did not occur to this kid that people would set the value of her attempted niceness much higher if she didn’t spend her time with some of the meanest people in the school. If the sort of people who would kick handicapped kids in their leg braces and make fun of the kids who could barely speak a sentence didn’t get a free pass from her on their behavior.

So I guess my first piece of advice for people trying to endure a toxic high school is to recognize that other people are having to live with the toxicity as well, and to be as kind as you can manage. Other people may not notice it. But it’ll be something you know about yourself. You don’t have to be indefinitely kind to people who are mean to you, but it might be useful to give people more than one chance; if they’re used to hearing, “Is that a good book?” with derisive snickers behind it, they may not be prepared to take it as a serious and congenial discussion question the first time around.

(This is not the same thing as being as nice as you can manage. Nice is a club you can give other people to beat you with. Nice conforms to local standards, particularly for girls. “Nice” may prevent you from taking a good swing at the guy who kicked the girl in her leg braces. “Kind,” on the other hand, may well tell you to go for it; sticking up for others can be very kind and well-remembered years later.)

When we as adults give advice to high school kids who are having a bad time at school, I think one of the ways it most easily goes wrong is that we make it sound like they ought to be able to do what we’re suggesting, rather than making it clear that it might be useful to them if they could. The phrase I’m thinking of here is, “Don’t let them bother you.” Also, “Don’t let them get to you,” or, “What do you care what they think?”

Of course it’s useful if you can simply not care whether people around you are being hostile and nasty. But really, how many of us as adults can, by sheer force of will, make it totally not matter that we’re spending forty hours a week with people who are willing to be as unpleasant as they can get away with? Not many. Not many of us as adults have to put up with that sort of thing. I have a friend who recently left a bad job, a situation in which people were relentlessly hostile to her and to each other for her entire work day, five days a week. It was extremely hard on her, not because she wanted to be cool or wanted them to be her best friends evAR!!!11!!1!, but because she is a human being, and that kind of toxic environment is hard on anyone.

I think we should be careful to make it clear to teenagers who are having a bad time at school that we’re not saying, “You should be able to do this; everyone can do this,” but rather, “Look, we’re focusing on you because you can’t control the other person. We know this is hard for most people, but it’s the best we can think of right now.”

And you can’t control the other people in your class. You really, really can’t. So fixating on “making them see” or “showing them” or “making them feel [whatever],” is not useful. The win condition is not that your high school classmates flock around you telling you how much they respected the theorem you just proved or the book you just wrote or the marketing decision you just made or the way you just handled your kid’s tantrum. The win condition is that you can only remember the names of the ones who were kind and/or interesting to you. The win condition is that when you get news of something terrible happening to someone who smeared Ben Gay all over your friend’s locker or pushed another friend down the stairs or any of the other lovely things that happened in high school, you are not glad. Because you’re not just a bigger and better person than that, you’re so much bigger and better and have moved on with your life so far that you had to stop and think why that name sounded familiar. That’s what winning looks like.

So how do you move towards that win condition while you’re still in high school? I don’t know entirely; anyone with suggestions should feel totally welcome in the comments section. But I will note that the people I know who got through high school the happiest, healthiest people — even if it was a good high school — were mostly the ones who had other things outside school with which they strongly identified themselves. For a lot of them it was something computer-related, but that’s probably a major skew because of the type of people I know.

For me there was writing, and there was my piano, and both of those things were ways in which I could challenge myself and do interesting things that had nothing to do with school. I also had a bunch of pen-pals, which would probably translate to something internettish these days, but the point is, there were people who knew me and liked me and didn’t care what so-and-so said to me in gym because they would only find out what so-and-so said if I could make it an entertaining story to tell them, or if I needed to vent.

We stick kids in this environment and make it their major point of identity, which is disorienting enough at the end if the kids involved are in a good high school. When it’s a bad one, we’re strongly encouraging them to define themselves through something that makes them miserable. This is not healthy. It’s not okay. And even something as simple as, “I’m someone who likes to go fishing with my cousins in the summer,” or, “I’m someone who grows cucumbers,” is a better way to identify oneself than, “I’m the verbal punching bag for Mrs. X’s third period.”

By the time you’re in high school, having parents “put you in” a karate class or an archery class or a pastry-cookery class is not a good thing; if it’s not what you’ve chosen, it’s more of being shuffled around at other people’s whim, which is not something you’re exactly short on in high school. But sitting down and thinking to yourself, “What would be interesting to me apart from graduation requirements and college applications and dodging the jerks at school? What do I want to be able to do?” might be a good start. Everyone has to build a life that’s irrelevant of the structures of high school eventually. Everyone has to find an identity that doesn’t involve where your locker is or who you sit with in the cafeteria. No reason not to start as soon as you can.

Yesterday’s post might seem to have forgotten a whole category of sex outside, namely sex on the beach. So what about it? Well, it’s a tasty drink…

Aside from the fact that it’s still pretty cold for sex on any lakeshore here in the Great Lakes region, to be honest I’ve never had sex on the beach (apart from the cocktail that goes by that name). And I haven’t heard that it’s very fun. Sand is really gritty and full of things like stones and seashells, and it gets everywhere. Gritty sand and sex does not sound like a good combination to me.

I’ve done some really nice cuddling and even making out on beaches, and I’ve also gone skinny-dipping, which is a fun group activity. But I also like to take moonlit walks on the beach, which is part of why I think the beach is not such a good place to go all the way unless you’re fond of involuntary coitus interruptus.

Also, the beach can get quite hot during the day, and quite cold at night. It’s really all-around not the most comfortable place. If you do decide to try it, don’t forget towels and a blanket and make note of whether or not you’re above the high tide line, or you could end up with you or all your stuff getting wet while you’re otherwise distracted. Or, like I said Saturday, bring a tent. Camping on the beach can be fun too.

And if you’re going to be fooling around on a beach during the day, consider sunscreen. All over.  Which now that I think of it could make for some pretty fun foreplay, putting it on each other…

Have fun!

It’s spring, and love is in the air. Everything is warmer, the grass is green again, and it may start to be tempting to follow ancient fertility rites and lay down together in the fields. Well watch out, they’re still very muddy.

While sex outside can sound romantic, in practical application it can be fraught with bugs (evening, despite a nice sunset, is not the best time to have lots of skin exposed if mosquitoes are on the loose) and the potential for being interrupted. While the risk of being discovered may increase the excitement for some, it can really be very upsetting to all parties involved, so to be fair to both yourself and other people you should take great pains to avoid it. In order to avoid both bugs and people I personally recommend the very early hours of the morning (in other words the middle of the night) on a weeknight, and a nice secluded spot in the woods, on a river bed, or on a golf course, if you aren’t in a rural area that provides a nice overgrown farmer’s field. (If you *do* have a nice overgrown farmer’s field to play with, you might have the right conditions to try it during the middle of the day. I’ve done that. Sun on skin is a nice contribution to the warm glow of sex. But sex outside during the day is extra risky.) Test the ground with your hand before you sit or lie down to see if it’s dry—put weight on it to see if cold water will seep through if you sit or lie down there, or if you’re safely above the water line.

Now, if you live in a place that has a curfew for young folks, sneaking out at night could have worse repercussions than simple embarrassment if you’re caught, so think carefully and know your local laws before you decide to do that. You also want to be safe, so avoid going someplace like the national forests north of LA, which are reputed to be full of bear traps set by pot-growers trying to protect their illegal crops. That last could be a myth, but the best way to make sure your spot is safe is to plan ahead and visit it during the day, then go there at your chosen time and see what it’s like then.

Things to bring with you: a blanket, a flashlight, a bottle of water, condoms, lube, some toilet paper, and a plastic bag in which to carry away trash. The blanket is for the comfort of backs and knees. The outdoors can be very hard and bumpy. In a pinch a large coat also does pretty well, if you spread it out. The bottle of water is for drinking and possibly also for washing off hands and things, after. Toilet paper is also for cleaning yourself off. And for its usual purposes. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s healthier for women to pee within a short time after sex to avoid inflammation and infection in the urethra from fluids that might be pushed into there by the motions of sexual activity. Don’t let being out in the woods stop you (parks may have outhouses or restrooms, which is nice, but they are only open certain hours after which it’s trespassing to be there, so keep that in mind, and some parks lock their restrooms after hours). In any case, if you’re going to be out in the middle of nowhere, why not be prepared?

I really want to emphasize the importance of taking a trash bag with you. Don’t toss a used condom under a bush or something like that. It’s a health hazard, and it’s just plain gross. How would you like to be out in a park and have your dog trot up to you with a used condom in his mouth? Ew! (I’ve also heard of a dog leading its owner into a secluded corner of a park where a couple were trying out sex outside during the day. The dog was just curious but all the humans were quite embarrassed.) The flashlight is for finding things you may have lost, like that condom wrapper, or your date’s earing, or the way to get back to the car.

Any sex outside that isn’t in a completely private spot on your own property is potentially a way to get yourself charged with trespassing, indecent exposure, or creating a disturbance, so, um, I would tell you not to do it, but if you’re curious I doubt you will listen to that, so I’m giving you this advice too. (This is a general theme of this blog: you’re going to make your own choices. I’m here to try to help you make them safely and smartly.)

If you don’t want quite so many risks but would like to see what sex is like with an open breeze across you and the stars above, get a tent with a skylight and go camping. The tent will keep the bugs out and campgrounds come with restrooms open 24 hours a day. A nice tarp under the tent will keep you high and dry. The list of other things to take with you is the same. Just try to keep the noise down, will you? People around you will be trying to sleep. Or enjoying their own sex in the outdoors.

Condoms are great. Well, ok, they’re kind of silly, and can be awkward, but they are also important and you will miss them terribly when you want one and don’t have one (and you will be sorely tempted to have unprotected sex, which would be bad). For this reason it’s tempting to buy lots of condoms and store them all over the place in case you have an urgent need for one.

That is a pretty good idea, really, as long as you keep this in mind: Condoms are (generally) made of latex, which is a material that gets stiff and brittle as it ages and dries out, making it more likely to snap, crack, or tear when used. This is why there is an expiration date printed on each individually wrapped condom, and why you should always throw a condom out once it is past its expiration date. It’s also why you need to be careful how you store them.

Condoms will lose their elasticity and strength faster if they are exposed to heat and even faster if they are allowed to dry out. Try to make sure that wherever you store your condoms there is no chance that the package could be worn through, torn, or punctured. Be especially wary of that last, because if the package has a hole in it, the condom might too. (If you pick up condoms from a pile at a party or something, watch out for some prankster who might have done that on purpose. Some people have the stupidest sense of humor.)

As to exposure to heat, as this article points out, two popular places to store condoms, your wallet and the glove compartment of your car, are both likely to subject the condom to heat, at least if you carry your wallet in a pocket close to your body. Condoms were designed to be stored at a comfortable room temperature, and anything warmer shortens their usable lifetime. A car can heat up considerably while sitting in the sun, or running with the heater on. Your body heat alone is enough to speed up the rate at which the latex degrades. It won’t be instantaneous, so you can store a condom in your pocket or your car for a short while, like for a weekend or certainly the length of a evening’s date. But after a while you should discard any condom so stored and put a fresh one in there.

A safe interior pocket of a purse or backpack is a much better place to keep a condom or two, but you should keep the bulk of your supply someplace that doesn’t get exposed to sun at all and stays indoors, like in a nightstand or dresser. Keep them at room temperature (so, no, putting them in the fridge or freezer is not a good idea either), and go through them periodically to check the expiration dates, throwing away any that have expired. You ought to try to get in the habit of checking that date each time you open a condom package, but just in case you might be rushing, or in the dark, or forget, or your partner opens the package and doesn’t check, try to keep your condom supply current.

by Sarah

{Sorry I haven’t been posting for a couple of days. Comment! It will encourage me to keep doing this. In the meantime, it’s Wednesday, which means we have a Guest Post! Yay! Our new Guest Blogger this week is Sarah, with lots of good pointers about how to stay safe without letting condoms get in the way of good sex.}

It’s not uncommon for two people in a relationship to disagree about using condoms. Typically, it’s expected that the guy will be the one who doesn’t want to use a condom because it cuts down on sensation for him, but women sometimes object to using them as well. For instance, a guy’s girlfriend might think condoms are unnecessary because she’s on The Pill, and besides, it interrupts the flow of things when you have to stop, get out a condom, open the package, unroll it, and get it on properly.

But if you’re strongly dedicated to using condoms consistently, there are ways to talk to your partner about this and work around those objections. Here are some ideas.

Objection One: Condoms cut down on sensation

Answer: True, but they also protect against STDs and pregnancy. Also, cutting down on sensation isn’t always a bad thing, because it can make a guy last longer. If you find that condoms don’t let you feel anything, try experimenting with different kinds. Just because a condom is one marketed as thinner doesn’t necessarily mean that it is more likely to break. Consumer Reports magazine rates condoms on reliability and other factors, and a few “thin” condoms are usually in the top 5. Other tips to make condom use more pleasurable include using a drop of lube in the tip and making sure not to skip the foreplay. Don’t forget that many guys need just as much foreplay as their girls do, and this can make the overall experience more pleasurable even if condom use cuts down on sensation a little for him.

Objection Two: We don’t need condoms because she’s on birth control

Answer: That may be true, but hormonal birth control doesn’t protect against STDs. Many people have an STD without knowing it, because often the symptoms are subtle or even non-existent. Also, if you really and truly need to make sure she doesn’t get pregnant, having a second method is helpful. There is a small failure rate with the pill, and the failure rate increases the less careful you are about taking it at exactly the same time every day. Having a second method increases the security you can feel about having sex without unintended pregnancy as a result.

Objection Three: He loses his erection whenever he puts a condom on

Answer: That’s not uncommon, but this gets better with practice. Having good sex and learning to use condoms take practice, just like any other skill. The main reason a guy might lose his erection when he puts on a condom is nervousness. There’s some pressure on the guy not to “spoil the moment” and to quickly get the condom out of the package, unrolled, and put on properly. It’s easy to become nervous when you fumble one of the steps. The two best things a girl can do are to stay patient and to offer help if he’s willing. If the girl tries unwrapping and unrolling a condom a few times and sees that it’s not as easy as it looks, she will understand better why she should be patient with him the next time putting on the condom takes a little longer than expected. If you make this process a team effort, you can learn to get the condom on quickly and with little effort. This can help with another objection that sometimes is raised, that condoms interfere with the flow of sex and make it less spontaneous. If a guy is dealing alone with a condom, this can be true. If she keeps kissing and fondling him and offers to open the package or help unroll the condom for him, this becomes a team effort, and you can get the condom on in less than 30 seconds- hardly a huge interruption. And, so what if he loses his erection? It’s best to stay cool, have fun in other ways, and try again next time. You’ll get the hang of it if you keep trying.

Objection Four: Condoms are expensive

Answer: Buying condoms is less expensive than having a baby, so if that’s a consideration, you’re better off investing in condoms. You can often get a small amount of condoms for free from places like Planned Parenthood or other community health clinics, HIV resource centers, and college health centers. Plus, you can buy in bulk, either in a store or online from places like Condom Depot. You should check the expiration date on your condoms, but they’re usually a few years out, so buying in lots of 50 or more is usually a money-saver if you are having sex once a week or more. You can also split a bulk order with friends.

I hear many questions that kids ask about how to avoid getting a girl pregnant. There are rumors that you won’t get pregnant if you have sex standing up, or withdraw just before the guy cums, or only have sex at certain times of the month (that last is called the rhythm method of birth control. You know what they call a girl who uses the rhythm method, right? “Mom”). None of these is a reliable technique, and it seems to me that maybe people wouldn’t even consider them viable if we started out in the first place with a very basic explanation. Here it is.

How to get a girl pregnant:

Get viable sperm within reaching distance of a fertile egg.

That’s it. It’s that simple. Any activity you do that does this has a decent chance of getting someone pregnant. But let’s break it down.

First, what’s “Reaching Distance”?

Okay, sperm are motile. That means they can move. They have a little tail that whips back and forth to propel them along. Some people call them “little wrigglers” for this reason. They can travel a matter of inches, and they can survive for a while outside of the body, which is why artificial insemination works. Let’s consider anywhere within a couple inches of the outside of a girl’s vagina (this includes all her labia and other external genitalia down there) to be “within reach.”

Where do sperm come from?

They are produced and stored in the testicles, which are connected to the penis along with a series of ducts and various glands that produce fluids involved in sex. You’ve probably heard of semen, for instance, which is a mixture of sperm and a fluid produced by the seminal vesicles and prostate gland. You can see diagrams and all kinds of terms on this helpful site here. The point where the helpfulness of that site and other sex education materials breaks down is with sentences like this one: “When the male ejaculates during intercourse, semen is deposited into the female’s vagina.” Now, there’s nothing untrue about that sentence. However, it is the only mention in that document of how sperm might get into the vagina. In other words, it’s not the whole story.

There is another fluid that comes out of the penis called pre-ejaculate, or pre-cum, which is produced during arousal and before ejaculation (hence the name). This fluid can also have sperm in it. If you think about it, this makes sense—it comes out of the same plumbing as semen and it’s not like there are traffic cops in there saying “No, this isn’t an ejaculation, you sperm have to wait your turn.”

Further, the sentence quoted above only talks about ejaculation during intercourse. It doesn’t talk about ejaculation before intercourse, or after intercourse, or near but not in the vagina. So it’s easy to get the impression that ejaculation that happens with the dipstick deep in the tube is the only road to conception and pregnancy. That impression would be wrong.

Basically, getting an unprotected penis anywhere in contact with the female genitals—especially a penis that is aroused or that has just recently been involved in sexual activity—is possibly a way to get her pregnant. Alternatively, you can also get fluids containing sperm on or into the vagina with something other than the penis, namely your hands (or a syringe—remember the artificial insemination picture? Keep that in mind: objects other than the penis can transport sperm, is all I’m saying). Sex games that involve ejaculating on someone’s chest or face or in their mouth have a very low chance of getting someone pregnant, but you should take care not to have hands—yours or hers—that have played in those games then play with her genitals without washing the hands first.

Okay, so what about the other side of the equation? How do you know if there’s a fertile egg in the picture?

To be on the safe side, you should assume anyone female you might be propositioning could potentially get pregnant. The onset of a girl’s period, or menses, is the symptomatic indication that a girl’s body has started to mature and participate in the monthly cycle of producing fertile eggs and preparing for pregnancy and then discarding the eggs and other preparation materials from the body (which is what causes the monthly “bleeding” that is not exactly bleeding, really, but can look like it). However, do not assume that just because a girl has not had her period that you can have unprotected sex with her without any worries about pregnancy. Plenty of girls have gotten pregnant before their first period. I believe the youngest on record was six years old. So don’t count on that.

Okay, assume someone has had her period so you know she’s producing eggs some of the time. Can you find out if she’s doing it right now?

Well, one way is to spend a few months taking the girl’s temperature every single day, observing the elasticity of her vaginal secretions, and otherwise monitoring her hormonal cycle to see if she’s ovulating or not. This is the most scientific version of the rhythm method, and it can cut your chances of getting pregnant by at least half if you don’t ever have sex while she’s ovulating (ovulating means fertile eggs are comin’ down the chute, ready to get fertilized). That leaves your chance of getting her pregnant pretty darn high. Remember, if 100 mature adult couples have unprotected sex for a year, at the end of that year 60 to 70 of those couples are pregnant. Cut that in half and that’s still at least 30 couples.

(If a girl is on the pill, that is designed to trick her body into believing she’s already pregnant, so her body doesn’t bother sending out new eggs. The pill and other hormonal treatments are pretty reliable (more on that later), but always remember they don’t protect you against STDs so you should still use condoms.)

The upshot is that the female body is pretty good at getting pregnant, and sperm have evolved to help as much as they can: they will take quite the journey, if necessary, to get to that egg. To be on the safe side, always use protection, including spermicide, and wash off thoroughly after any sex play. Any practice that potentially brings sperm in range of an egg without protection is just a good way to get a girl pregnant. And when you do use protection, make sure you use it correctly.

Good luck!

In general I have found that sex education programs spend too little time discussing the risks of oral sex. A lot of people take risks with their mouth that they wouldn’t take with their genitals, partly because it doesn’t really sink in that viruses like Herpes can find a home in your mouth and pass from there to the genitals and other parts of the body and really be a problem for you and your partners. One of those orally-transmitted infections is the human papillomavirus (HPV).

This common virus has a number of different strains, one of which causes genital warts, others of which are identified contributors to cervical cancer (the cervix is the lower interior surface of the womb, or uterus; incidences of cervical cancer are second only to breast cancer in terms of how common they are in women). They can also cause cancer elsewhere in the body, such as the penis and anus and, as this article discusses, the head and neck. How do you get cancer in the head and neck from HPV? Through your mouth.

A vaccine was recently developed that protects against four HPV types, which together cause 70% of cervical cancers and 90% of genital warts. It has been tested and approved for use in young women ages 9-26 by the FDA. Like all vaccines, it is best applied before a person has been exposed to the virus, so if you’re still not sexually active, now is the time.

Right now the HPV vaccine is not yet approved for use in boys, but I expect it will be. Once it is, consider getting it. In the meantime, men ( even relatively young men, especially those who have had multiple partners) should watch out for a lingering sore throat or a lump in the neck, which could be symptoms of oral cancer and should be checked out. When discovered early through a PAP test, cervical cancer is unlikely to be fatal, but doctors do not yet have a similar screening process for oral cancer. They say that two years after diagnosis, 95 percent of those with HPV-positive head and neck cancers were still alive in a study cited in the news article, but treatment can be disfiguring or cause long-term difficulty speaking or swallowing. Best to avoid it altogether if you can.

So while you are young, be careful what you put in your mouth. You are what you eat and all that.

by Ed

{For a lighter note in this week’s theme of not letting someone pressure you into sex, here’s Ed talking about something he has a much better perspective on than I do.}

It’s a classic line but one many people of all ages still hear: “If we stop now I’ll have blue balls and it will hurt.” First off let me say, for the record, I have personally had blue balls. Most guys at some point in life are going to deal with this condition, and it’s not the end of the world. “Blue balls” is caused by a combination of over-sensitivity in a male’s genitals coupled with increased blood flow into the region: the two factors combined can lead to a man’s feeling a dull ache in his privates. The problem is that many guys feel that the only solution to this problem, or the best solution, is to ejaculate. This is an accurate assessment of the situation. However, the optimal solution for the guy (ejaculating) does not translate into their partner’s having to help them achieve that solution.

Having had blue balls myself on more the one occasion let me tell you from personal experience, masturbating takes care of the problem quite neatly. If you are being intimate with a fellow and you decide to stop, and he responds with a whiney complaint about blue balls and being in pain, don’t let that factor into your choice to continue. If you want to have further sexual play with the fellow complaining of aches in his loins, do so, but his complaining should not factor into that decision. If you don’t want to continue to play around with the complaining fellow, send him on his way with the suggestion that he masturbate when he feels comfortable. For the truly whining fellow pop an ice pack onto his painful member; ice constricts blood flow into the genitals and numbs the tissue. Trust me: an ice pack on an engorged set of male genitals halts most blue balls problems.

But on a broader note any partner who would use complaints of physical pain to push for further sexual contact is a partner you might want to be cautious about anyways. A good partner respects your decisions about intimacy and does not try to weasel more sex out of someone they care about, even if they are hot to trot at that moment. Asking and teasing are part of the fun in any good relationship but weaseling and using guilt to get sex really should not be. If you are with someone and they keep using blue balls as an excuse to try to get you to do more then you are comfortable with, you might want to re-evaluate them as a partner.

That or stock up on a really big pile of ice packs.

Okay, so in the last post I was talking about the risks of sex between young inexperienced people and older experienced people. But what about all the stories of young men being initiated by talented older women, or young women being gently deflowered and introduced to sex by caring older men?

First, I have to admit the situation is different for young men than for young women. Fair or not, young men can’t get pregnant. Also, post-menopausal women are less likely to get pregnant, so a sexual liaison between a young man and a truly mature woman can be relaxed in a way that sex between a young woman and an older man can’t. Unless he has a vasectomy, perhaps. (I’m not really joking, here. If a man is old enough to know he’s already fathered all the children he wants to, he probably should have a vasectomy. Even younger men who are sure they don’t want to have kids are getting vasectomies more commonly these days. It’s not very expensive, but I don’t recommend doing it until you’re at least, say, 27, since you can change your mind a lot about what you want out of life when you’re young. A vasectomy is reversible, but not easily so.)

My grandmother once quoted me a saying about sex with older women that went, “They won’t tell, they don’t swell, and they’re appreciative as hell.”

That said, I want to go back to the question of whether such sex is consensual or involves coercion.

When I taught first-year university students a few years back, we’d do a workshop with them to talk about the university’s sexual harassment policy—discussing sexual harassment and rape and who to talk to if they were feeling harassed or in danger or needed to report something that had happened. When we mentioned the idea of a guy getting unwelcome attention from a woman, the room inevitably erupted in laughter. In our society, we have this image that a young man wants any sexual attention he can get. It’s not true.

A guy can be raped. Not just through some sort of penetration by a man, like the catholic priest/choir boy situation we tend to hear about in the news, but also by a woman. It really is possible for a guy to have an erection due to physical stimulation and still have the queasy awful feeling that he doesn’t want to be doing what he’s doing and would get out of it if he could, or to later realize that while he was drunk or otherwise at a disadvantage he was taken advantage of and did something he’d never have chosen to do while sober and/or in control. Once we convinced the room we were serious and the laughter stopped, a few guys would speak up to relate their experiences or concerns, and we talked through a few scenarios, especially where someone with authority over you, like a teacher, a boss or an older relative or neighbor, could make unwelcome advances you could feel pressured to laugh off instead of complaining about, or even to accept, and then we talked about how to respond differently to protect yourself.

Consensual sex means having the freedom to decide when and who to have sex with.

Speaking of the news, last week’s headlines include a raid on a Texas compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway branch of Mormonism. Among other reports of abuse and rape, they reported finding beds inside the temple that were used by adult men to have sex with underage “wives.” Some of the 416 children taken out of there were girls who didn’t know for sure how old they were, or were pressured by their husbands to lie about their age. One 16-year-old had already had four children. There’s one type of deflowering for you. Not romantic at all. Pretty much yucky all the way around.

Remember, when you decide you’re ready to have sex, make sure you choose someone you trust. And if you aren’t free to choose, it isn’t right. Get out of there. Tell someone. No matter what you did before the point when you want to stop, you have the right to stop—the victim “was asking for it” is never an acceptable excuse for rape. There is no acceptable excuse. Even being married to someone is not an excuse for them to rape you. Especially if they married you when you were 13 or 14, jeez.

Well, this blog is starting to get some attention from teen porn site advertisers. Comments here are moderated, so you won’t see comments from the people running teen porn sites. Well, unless they have something interesting to say and are not merely posting to push their site. If you want to post a comment that mentions such a site, here are some rules:

1. It has to be relevant to the discussion at hand.

2. It should be interesting. I reserve the right to delete comments that are uninteresting (especially comments that are crude or that offer nothing except abuse or insults to other posters). Sexual harassment is a type of abuse and will not be tolerated.

3. Be honest: do not link to a commercial porn website in your backlink as though it is a personal web page, and DO NOT pretend to be a teenager if you are an adult.

This website is for teens, not for adults who want to have (or watch) sex with teens.

Do I object to teens having sex with adults? Well, I don’t advocate it, first off because it’s illegal. If you are not familiar with statutory rape laws, educate yourself about the age of consent in your country or state. The point of those laws and whether they work to protect young people or just make things pointlessly legally risky for teens who are on opposite sides of a particular age line is a whole discussion unto itself, but if you are considering getting involved with someone over 18, ask yourself why you are seeking to have sex with someone older than you and, perhaps more importantly, why they want to have sex with you. While I think that as a teen you might be mature enough to decide what you want to do with your own body, you may not be able to assert or defend what you do (or don’t!) want to do once you are in a sexual relationship with an older person, or to protect yourself from being abused, exploited, and taken advantage of by someone older whose motivations may not be what they say.

Here is an informative article that discusses many issues around this topic. For instance, more than half of the pregnancies of minor females in a 1995 study in the U.S. were fathered by adult men, often with an age difference of more than 4 years. What kind of good care were those men taking in those relationships by getting those girls pregnant, and what do you think the impact on those girls’ lives were? Do you suppose those sexual partners hung around to take responsibility for those pregnancies? Minors who were sexually experienced with adult (over 18) men were also found (in a different study) to be more likely to have experienced coerced sex (i.e. rape) than minors who were sexually active but with people more their own age.

Something that initially sounds fun can go downhill really quickly, and I do believe you are more likely to be taken advantage of by someone substantially older than you. That doesn’t mean such liaisons can’t be emotionally and physically safe, but with someone older you stand a higher risk of finding yourself on videos on the internet on some of those afore-mentioned teen porn sites making money for someone else against your will or, worse, peddling yourself on the streets for drugs, “owned” by the person who first started you on your addiction. Don’t believe that can happen? Read Sometimes God Has a Kid’s Face, by Bruce Ritter. It’s a short fast read, but not an easy one: the stories are hard. The author is writing about some of the kids who ended up at Covenant House in New York City, but that doesn’t mean similar things don’t happen in smaller cities and towns.

There’s a old proverb that says “Age and treachery will always overcome youth and skill.” It’s not always true, but it’s something to keep in mind, especially when you’re young.