Sex toy company Good Vibrations began International Masturbation Month in 1995, soon after Surgeon General M. Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign for having the audacity to suggest that young people should learn about masturbation as part of sex education. The goal of the month-long celebration has always been to fight the taboos against self-pleasure and remind people that masturbation is not just safe and healthy but really good for us.
The point is that, despite what you may have learned from middle school sex ed and/or porn, sex is more than penetration and doesn’t have to involve penetration at all. Penetration is not the end goal of sex. You get to decide what sex is for you. So here are 7 super-hot sexy time things you can do that don’t involve penetration:
I spoke to four plus-size women—Chaya, Sarah, Liz, and Monica—and asked them to be as honest as possible about their experiences with birth control, including what has worked for them and what hasn’t. They talked about the stuff that surrounds the birth control convo that we almost never hear about. Here’s what they had to say:
We’ve rounded up our 10 favorite articles about sexual health and birth control from the past month to make it really easy for you to get the facts on the things that could affect your health.
Picture this: a 14-year-old girl is at the peak of body confusion and a hormone tsunami when her mother comes to her school to give a special presentation to her class about why abstinence is the only safe form of birth control. Yep, that was me. Having grown up in a religious household and spent my entire childhood attending a Christian school, from as far back as I can remember, I associated sex with pregnancy and STIs. But there was hope, or so I was told! All I had to do to be able to have safe sex was save myself for my future husband.