Need a place to start in building your sexuality canon? Start at the bookstore or your local library, and get your read on with these books we suggest as cornerstones for a holistic, informed sex education!

If you're considering or planning an abortion, you need to know what your options are, what's involved before, during and afterwards, and how to consider or make this reproductive choice as best you can. We unload abortion for you so that you can inform yourself to be sure it's the right choice for you, and if you choose it, find out what you need to know to best take care of yourself throughout.

If you’re a guy with a female partner, even though you're not the one who can become pregnant, you still get choices, and you still should participate in birth control use and responsibility just as much as your female partner. Have a look at what you can do to manage your half of the burden. (Excerpted and adapted from S.E.X., the Scarleteen Book)

Menstrual suppression is becoming increasingly popular, and has been widely promoted for women. For some, especially women with reproductive health issues which are helped by suppressing periods, it's an obvious boon, and some using it electively also report it to be a blessing. But what about the health risks? What about the attitudes informing that choice which cheerlead suppression by maligning menstruation? What about the benefits, emotional and physical, our periods can offer us? An opinionated, no-holds-barred look at the whole works and a paean to the period, no matter what a woman chooses to do with it.

You can get an I Was Raped t-shirt seen on CNN through Scarleteen. Break your silence -- or help someone else with theirs -- just by getting dressed, help increase awareness of rape and support Scarleteen, all at the same time. Now in extended sizes for women and men.

I’m going to suggest you look at reciprocity in sex -- the idea that one person gives something, so the other should get something of equal value back -- in a different way than you might be used to. (Excerpted and adapted from S.E.X., the Scarleteen book.)

It’s typically assumed that sex and gender are the same. They’re not. What's gender all about, then? What is the range of gender and gender identity, and how does gender impact our lives and how we live them?

A basic lowdown on interpersonal abuse and assault: what all the terms mean, why strangers are the least of our worries, what a cycle of abuse looks like, how you can start seeing abuse for what it is, where it is, and how to protect yourself and others and make abuse stop.

When we look in the mirror as a culture, our tendency toward hysteria always seems to hover in our communal blind spot. We’re not very good at seeing when groups with a political or social agenda are manipulating us with fear, often the unreasonable, irrational fear of the taboo.

You probably know what abstinence-only sex education is, and you may also understand what comprehensive sex education is. But we feel we take it one step further around here, and aim to provide feminist comprehensive sex education, for women, men and everyone in between. So, what's that all about?

Jennifer talks with us about her new project about rape, which we're participating in at Scarleteen, what the project can do to increase awareness about rape and survivors, where she thinks we're at culturally with rape issues, and what young people can do to help transform rape culture and their own lives.

Have a look inside S.E.X.: the in-depth and inclusive young adult sexuality guide by Scarleteen's founder and editor. Full table of contents and links to online excerpts.

Hanne Blank is not a virgin. (She's almost 37 and she's been living with her life partner for nine years -- we just thought we'd get that out of the way.) But she is a historian, a writer, and an expert on virginity, having written the first-ever history of the subject, "Virgin: The Untouched History."