The internet’s best sex information resource for teenagers needs your help.
For years, with no fanfare or even much recognition, Scarleteen.com has been doing an enormous amount of good. Deliberately targeted toward teenagers,they’ve been providing honest, thorough, nonjudgmental information about sex for fifteen years. They’ve never had much in the way of funding, or income of any kind, and right now they really need some help to keep the lights on.
Here at the Good Men Project, we talk a lot about the importance of teaching boys. It’s hard being a teenage boy, trying to deal with your developing sexuality in a healthy way, and good information and education can make all the difference in the world. Instead of a bunch of myths and rumors and outright lies, boys need the straight truth about sexuality, gender, STDs, consent, pregnancy, masturbation, and a lot more.
And while we’ve been talking about education, Scarleteen has been doing it. They’ve been providing honest, real facts for the people who need them. They’ve been counteracting the lies and half-truths of “abstinence-only” education programs. They’ve been telling the honest facts about contraception to the folks who need them most. They’ve been teaching the emotionally vulnerable that they don’t need to be ashamed of who they are or what they want. It’s impossible to calculate how many lives they’ve saved.
More than that, they’ve been doing it gratis. As Scarleteen’s Heather Corrina puts it:
For the fifteen years we’ve been working, we’ve stretched funds that have always been far less than we needed, and we’ve gone without a lot, including a consistent living wage for myself, our only full-time employee, an experienced teacher of nearly 25 years. Some years I’ve not only worked more than one additional job to support myself — often still working nearly full-time here — but have needed to put some of my own income into Scarleteen to keep it afloat. Our freelancers, when we can afford them, have always worked at a discount, and our hardworking volunteers only receive tiny stipends at the end of each year, if that: this is unacceptable and unsustainable.
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They’re looking for donations to support the vital work they do, and they deserve the help. You can donate to support them right now, and you can help spread the word about their situation by linking to this page, however you’re able to boost the signal.
If you’re still questioning whether you should help Scarleteen out, look over a few of their articles and ask yourself one question: do you wish you’d read those articles when you were a teenager?