No one likes getting tested for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). You have to talk about your sex life with a stranger. (Or, worse, the same health care provider your mom goes to.) You have to make time for, schedule, and go to an appointment. Then you have to have swabs and/or blood taken, neither of which is at the top of anyone’s “fun things to do” list. But in the age of telemedicine, a few companies are making it easier than ever to get tested.

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.

Whether you’re a sex toy connoisseur with five bins of toys under your bed, or you’re a total newbie, it can be scary to bring up the topic of incorporating toys into your sex life with a partner. And that applies to new partners as well as ones who have been around for a while—some people in long-term relationships have only ever used sex toys when masturbating, never with a partner.

There’s nothing quite like a pandemic and a local shelter-in-place order to throw a major wrench into your dating life. It was tricky enough to figure out what we wanted and how to find people who wanted that too before it became literally against the law to meet a stranger for a cup of coffee.