Interview: Heather Corinna of Scarleteen

Do you know Scarleteen? You should know Scarleteen, as it’s the most comprehensive, inclusive, all-around best sex education resource geared at younger folk I’ve ever encountered. In fact, I spent the latter end of high school referring my friends to the site and I still surf it a lot. Scarleteen has information on anatomy and relationships and consent and friendship and pleasure and all manner of things. While it is aimed at younger folk, it’s well worth a read whatever your age.

Sometimes there are projects you yourself might want to participate in, like this series around forming conversations about shared experiences between people of different ages (of, for example, abortions, queerness, different family situations, being trans, bullying, being HIV positive). They even have message boards for support and advice, not to mention a group blog! There’s a great series running on the blog called Queering Sexuality in Color, which consists of first person profiles of queer people of colour. Check out their feminist sex ed policy.

Founder Heather Corinna kindly agreed to speak with us. She’s an activist, educator and the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College. She also co-founded All Girl Army, a group blog for girls and women from 10 to 25 years of age (the AGA is looking for new bloggers, so apply and pass the link on!). Heather’s personal site is femmerotic.com. Without further ado…

Please tell us about what Scarleteen does.

Every day, Scarleteen provides opt-in, progressive, inclusive and comprehensive sexuality, sexual health and relationship information, support and advice to around 25,000 readers and users around the world. We do that via static articles as well as interactively: via advice columns, our message boards and our text service. There are also some offshoots of all of this, like the local outreach work I do, my book, and other projects we help with. Because we’re mostly online, we can serve users who have sex ed in school already but want more (or want something different than they got), who don’t have comprehensive sex ed in school, or who aren’t in school at all, either because they homeschool or because they don’t get any kind of schooling, which is the case for millions of teens and twentysomethings all over the world every year.

Could you tell us about how feminism influences Scarleteen’s work?

I feel like it’s harder to figure how it doesn’t than how it does. Even that fact that I’m able to do any kind of work at all as a vulva-toting person obviously has a lot to do with feminism, and that we’re talking about sexuality for all people and coming from all people — not just as something to please or obey a certain social construct or one privileged group — has a lot to do with feminism. My whole interest in sexuality as something to study and work in when I was in college stemmed from my feminism — including having sexuality presented as something that had nothing to do with feminism, which I found and still find infuriating — and it’s a thread I don’t think I could ever unwind from the larger skein.

But gender inequities play SUCH a huge part in so many of the troubles we have with sexuality as cultures. They are gargantuan when it comes to sexual and interpersonal violence, in contraception and safer sex, even in the notion of whose sexuality someone’s sexuality really is. It wasn’t that long ago that everyone’s sexual behavior was seen as being only or primarily about heterosexual, cisgender men, and even though those attitudes are changing, they are changing very slowly, and still have not reached many people or cultures, including in the western world. Gender inequity has quite a lot to do with the fact that we still only have a small number of birth control methods, and nothing 100% effective, but have advanced technology to visit other planets. Gender inequity has everything to do with the way pregnancy and abortion are treated. Gender inequity has an awful lot to do with our STI rates, with how little we know about sound health for anyone who isn’t cis gender or “perfectly” XX or XY, with the increased rates of violence, homelessness and poorer health among those of us who are LGBT. Gender inequity has an awful lot to do with the way so much of sexuality is presented as being about reproduction when it’s really about pleasure.

All of that is just the tip of the iceberg, both in terms of how sexism can play a part, but also in how a world of -isms do. Because feminism is about addressing and working to correct gender inequities, and so much of the work we do is as well, it’s hard to see how we’d do what we do without feminism being central.

How did the site begin and have Scarleteen’s aims or methods changed over time?

We began through another website altogether. In early ’98, myself and a couple other women started one of the first adult women’s sexuality sites online (the now-defunct Scarlet Letters), and in very little time at all, young people started writing to us with sexuality questions. What I ideally wanted was to refer them somewhere that could serve them specifically, but there just wasn’t anywhere online to send them TO. So, I answered the questions I could, leaning on my background as an educator, having grown up in and around healthcare, as a voracious reader and with sound sexuality information I already had at the time from life, from school and from anywhere else I could find it. In a few months, I — with the help of a couple of those women, namely Hanne Blank and Suzanne Peak — put out a small offshoot site. Naively, I figured a few pages would suffice.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do feel very, very, VERY silly about that now. :) Between the static pages and the message boards, Scarleteen contains tens of thousands of pages and those STILL don’t answer anyone’s questions. Thankfully I’ve since wised up and realized nothing ever will, you just keep plugging away to fill gaps as best you can, knowing there will always be more.

We’re constantly in growth and flux. The model of education that we use — a model I was teaching with before I was a sexuality educator — requires that we do, because it’s based primarily on responding to what our readers and users ask us for, rather than in us deciding what people want and need based on our own ideas, agendas or from our own, anecdotal experiences. While broad public health and sexuality information informs what we do, it’s so important to us to be sure we’re serving our own population best, and so often what young people want and need is something decided by adults from adults, rather than by them and as coming from them. What young people express they want and need has some universals, but on the whole, we’ve just got to be ready to roll with wherever they take us in a day or a year.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve been able to build Scarleteen gradually as the Internet has built gradually. If I walked into doing this with this much traffic around, I would have had a heart attack. Often, I have to put the current numbers out of my own head because if I think about how many people are reading, I get struck with pretty overwhelming stage fright and a feeling of overexposure. So, that’s a way that it helps me to just and focus on the one person or small handful of people who are asking or have specifically asked for something.

As well, the other work that I do and have done, and that our volunteers do or have done, also plays a part. Coming into this with a background both as an alternative educator and a writer and artist influenced what it’s like and what we do, and work that I have done and do in the interim, like the work I’ve done at abortion clinics and the outreach I do with homeless and transient youth has influenced what both Scarleteen and myself do and how we do it. We also never had any real model for what we do and how we do it, so I’m fairly convinced pretty much all the time that we always need to be in growth and in flux, ever-adapting as we learn and refine what we do.

You’ve been running the site for over ten years now, which is pretty amazing. How does it feel to look back on all that?

Thanks! To be perfectly honest, this is the longest consistent, uninterrupted thing outside my own body and mind I’ve ever had in my life. We’re going on thirteen years now, and I don’t even know what that is in Internet dog-years. I haven’t had any interpersonal relationships, even family ones, that were uninterrupted for that period of time, no other jobs that lasted that long, and I’ve yet to live in one place for this period of time. So, it’s pretty overwhelming.

But it’s also really cool: I (usually, because some days I am tired) love that this is my long-term love affair. It’s amazing to be getting to the point where people who came to Scarleteen in the early days as older teen or people in their early twenties are getting ready to — or already have! — send teens of their own to us. It’s very satisfying to hear from people years later who, in finding out we’re still here, tell us how much we helped them out and how much better they feel about their sexuality thanks to us. I grew up with an activist parent who schooled me soundly in the idea that I should be an activist if I felt strongly about it, but never expect to see any impact in my lifetime. To see an impact like we have has been an extraordinary and wonderful surprise.

What are some common questions you receive?

“Am I pregnant?” always reigns supreme. Other common questions are, and pretty much always have been:
- is a given body part “normal,” usually genitals or other body parts considered by a person or others as sexual
- am I straight/gay/lesbian/bisexual/queer/asexual
- how does a given kind of contraception or safer sex work, how do I get it
- is this, that or the other thing a symptom of an illness, infection or pregnancy
- how can I give my girlfriend or boyfriend am orgasm, or how can I have an orgasm
- is it okay for me to have sexual feelings at all
- when is the “right” time for me to have sex
- how do I negotiate what I want with a partner or how do I even find out what I want in the first place?

Over the last few years, we’ve also had an increase in questions about abusive/controlling relationships and about sexual abuse. Some of why is likely because we have a lot of visibility, these are things we talk about a lot, and a lot of our staff/volunteers are survivors. (On top of a strange majority of us being redheads.) But we also know the rates of intimate partner abuse and violence have been increasing in teens and young adults, which undoubtedly also plays a part. It also seems like we have had more and more users coming to us terrified and convinced they’re pregnant even when they’re clearly not, which seems to have a lot to do with what’s been going on on television of late with pregnancy and teen pregnancy. Yahoo answers is also big on my list of current offenders for misinformation (some awful bullying happens there, too) users come to us with.

How can our readers help you out?

One of the biggest ways we always need help is with funding. Unlike most other sex education initiatives, Scarleteen does not have any kind of government, institutional or foundational funding. We rely entirely on private donations in order to stay afloat. That’s pretty different from other organizations our size who do what we do and provide this level of service. We do things that way because the fact of the matter is that funding for sex education is very tough to get, especially when it’s not just about pregnancy or STIs, when it’s inclusive, when it’s holistic, when it’s feminist and when it’s for young people expressly. In order to get the big foundation bucks — something which is harder and harder for everyone to get, period — we’d have to be a very different enterprise than we are, and make compromises we don’t really want to make. There are some orgs out there doing good work within those boundaries already: doing the same things they’re doing would be redundant.

So, when we do fundraising drives, anything anyone can do to donate — even a little — and/or get the world out loud and proud makes such a difference. We are highly cost-efficient, but still have yet to have a year where our needs are truly met well. It doesn’t help that the majority of the people we serve would love to help financially support us, but few have their own incomes to do it with!

But it’s also a lot of work to run Scarleteen and to tend to as many users as we have, so when people can volunteer to actively help, that’s just as valuable. A vast majority of our content comes from my fingers and my mouth because so few people step up to guest-write for us. It’s always great when other writers can pitch in and do a piece for us, both because we always need more good content, but also because our readers benefit so much from a diversity of voices, rather than by only or primarily hearing my own.

Lastly, just letting young people in your life know we’re out there is a big deal. We don’t advertise, so word-of-mouth has always been how most of our users find us, and so many report they wish they’d found us earlier than they did.

Do you have any take-home messages?

Obviously, young people — any people — having accurate and non-anecdotal information about their bodies, about sexuality, about sexual health, about contraception and safer sex, the works, is so critically important. And obviously, not everyone has and can provide all of that information, because it’s just not everyone’s job, skillset or interest.

However, it’s very clear that what is just as critical is plain old kindness, compassion and support for ourselves and others with sexuality. That’s something everyone can both have and give. So, maybe you’re not someone who can tell others what all the stages of syphilis are or know what tends to impede sexual desire. Maybe you don’t know that epididymis is not something at the aquarium, or wouldn’t have the first idea about what muscles innervate the pelvis or where to refer someone for abortion funding, birth control or sex therapy.

But what EVERYONE can do is be a person who makes a difference when it comes to dismantling the fear and shame that surrounds pretty much everyone’s sexuality or sexual life. It’s so pervasive in our world, many people are deeply impacted by it and no one can completely avoid it. (If we think we have, we’re so kidding ourselves.) Young people are absolutely one of the groups who get whacked with a lot of shame and fear around sex, no matter what other groups they’re also part of. So, if and when a young person — or anyone — talks to us about their sexuality or sex life, or asks us about ours, we can all do our best to speak and listen mindfully, truthfully and with our hearts and minds open; to be supportive, accepting and flexible instead of judgmental, silencing or convinced we know How It Is just because we know how it is or was for us personally. I know it’s really hard for some folks to do that, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. Just doing that probably makes the most impact when it comes to people having a healthy personal sexuality and for all of us having a healthier global sexuality. We can help other people heal from sexual shame and fear that way while also healing ourselves. It’s so incredibly powerful and important.

In my job and with my organization, I try and do both, but not everyone finds services like Scarleteen, and even for those who do, we all need more than just one person or resource to give us that good stuff. Since most of our work is online, I also don’t think the emotional impact of having someone be supportive is as powerful online as it can be in person. Being able to have your sexuality supported and accepted by someone whose face you can see, and who can give you a hug if and when you need one, is a very big deal.