5 myths about virginity, busted
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By: health
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October 31, 2016
What is a virgin? The word is generally understood to refer to someone who’s never had sex, but that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Does oral sex count? If a woman only has sex with other women, is she a virgin? A woman who has only experienced forcible intercourse or rape is considered […]
No pain, no gain: The IUD insertion process
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By: health
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January 21, 2016
By Lena Chen. A version of this article was originally published on November 11, 2009, on SexReally.com. I wish I could say that getting the IUD was easy once I made my decision that the love affair with the pill was over. In reality, it took me three visits before I finally baby-proofed my uterus. […]
5 myths about getting HIV, busted
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By: health
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January 20, 2016
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is one of the most recently discovered viruses in the world, and we’ve learned a lot about it in the last 30 years. In that time, we’ve developed treatments that allow people with HIV to live long and healthy lives . Unfortunately, back when the virus was still new and misunderstood, […]
5 myths about living with HIV, busted
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By: health
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November 30, 2015
Today in the U.S., about 1.2 million people are living with HIV . Just like other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), there is no way to tell if someone is living with HIV just by looking at them. And just like other STIs, there are plenty of other myths about what it means to live with […]
My BFF has genital herpes
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By: health
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August 13, 2015
On the morning of my 26th birthday I went to work thinking about seeing my friends at the bar later. My best friend Abby* had just returned from visiting another friend out of state and I couldn’t wait to see her and hear what they had gotten up to together. I knew I wouldn’t be […]
5 things you really should know about female condoms
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By: health
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January 8, 2015
You may or may not realize that the female condom , a.k.a. internal condom, has been revamped in recent years to be more affordable and less, erm, squeaky. The revamped version is called the FC2, standing for—you guessed it—female condom 2. Less squeaking, lower price—and the perks of this underrated method don’t stop there. 1) […]
I’m trans. Do I need birth control?
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By: health
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December 2, 2014
Do trans people need to use birth control? Well, it all depends. It depends on what equipment you’ve got, what you’re doing with it, who you’re doing it with (and what they’ve got), and whether pregnancy is a goal or not. Briefly, being transgender (trans for short) is about living in a gender that is […]
Can menstrual products mess with your birth control?
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By: health
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November 3, 2014
Ever since I got my IUD , I’ve been pretty much in love, especially when my period comes around. Yes, I just said that. Getting to use my DivaCup with my Paragard IUD is possibly the best thing ever. So you can only imagine that my world stopped a bit when a few friends told […]
Gaining weight: Is it the birth control?
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By: health
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March 12, 2014
It’s a very common story. A woman starts using hormonal birth control, finds herself gaining weight, and assumes the birth control is to blame. The tricky thing is that lots of research about hormonal birth control shows that, with one important exception, it’s probably not the birth control. A note on personal experiences vs. the […]
5 myths about pulling out, busted
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By: health
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December 11, 2013
The withdrawal method, a.k.a. pulling out, sometimes gets a bad rap—some people don’t even consider it a “real” method of birth control, even though 60% of couples have used it at least once. Because pulling out is often dismissed as “better than nothing” by researchers, we don’t know as much about it as we do […]