stigma

Saniya Lee Ghanoui is a historian and critical media studies scholar who focuses on the intersection of gender and sexuality, medicine, and media. Through her studies, she became intrigued by how society created stigma and taboo around the menstrual cycle, which led her to focus on critical menstrual studies investigating the construction and depiction of menstruation in television, the history of menstrual education films, as well as the history of sex education in the United States.

Despite the initial shame, guilt, name-calling, jokes, and fear related to disclosure, my STI presented me with a chance to love myself more deeply. It gave me a chance to sit with myself, who I thought myself to be, who I thought I was going to become, and who I really was.

The findings of a major eight-year-long HIV study known as the PARTNER2 study have shown that so long as HIV+ partners are being fully treated, there is no chance of passing on HIV to a sexual partner, even with unprotected sex. What does that mean, and where do we stand now that we know this?

In observance of World AIDS Day on December 1st, we take a look at what President Trump had to say (and chose not to say) about the impact of HIV on millions of Americans in his first proclamation and upate on the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.

Some thoughts and tips on navigating sexuality as a fat teen, and dealing with sizeism and fatphobia.

Casual sex is one of those things that, so far as we know from the study of people and sex in history, people have always done. Given that for most of human history, basic survival was seriously tough, people's lives and interactions often were more brief than either are now, and many people or...

Hi, bifabulous! Congrats on becoming more aware of your own sexuality! Sadly, you're right: some people do harbor misconceptions and sexist notions about bisexual women. Racism and sexism added to the mix make the issue even thornier; as you said, there are a lot of harmful stereotypes about Asian...

I realized that I was uncomfortable associating myself with genital herpes. Will people think I have it? Why else would someone write about genital herpes and risk that association if they didn’t have it, right? So I pressed on, putting myself at the center of an itty-bitty social experiment that resulted in some pretty big stuff.

Fairies' question continued: 99% of the time I don't feel bothered about it. But recently I had my first flare-up since I was infected two years ago and I feel so embarrassed that I let myself contract it. Worse, I row with my boyfriend about it because I feel like he wants to deny he gave it to me...

You will need to tell new partners about a sexually transmitted infection you have or have had, particularly one like human papillomavirus (HPV) where condoms reduce the risks of transmission, but not as well as they do for other kinds of infections. Putting someone knowingly at risk of an infection...