Melissa Petro

Teaching sex ed the right way doesn’t have to be weird or hard.

There was nothing easy about recovery, but it helped that living the trainwreck lifestyle had stripped me of everything. Within sixteen months, I was unemployed with no job prospects, barely scraping through my last semester at school. I was drinking every day. Sex with classmates had led to casual encounters which bottomed out at trading sex for cash, something I spent a whole lot of time justifying.

How do you break up with a best friend?

“If you believe in the decriminalisation of sex work,” Ian Dunt rightfully points out, “you will instantly come under a sustained and highly emotive attack on your morality and your identity.” In this vein, when a man comes out in favor of sex worker’s rights, he becomes “a betrayer of women, a gender Judas encouraging violence against them.”

Especially if you’re a woman, people assume you’re hungry for a man.

The biggest fashion mistake of my lifetime may not be what I wore, but what I didn’t.

You may have heard the old joke that 98% of people masturbate, and the other two percent are lying.

A couple months before our official engagement, Arran and I had an uncomfortable conversation about getting married. Specifically, my dear boyfriend of two years chose a quiet brunch on one unassuming Sunday to bring up the fact that he was reluctant to propose.

"We built a luxury dream home but can only afford to have two children."

Mark prayed to Saint Francis, a patron saint of drunks and (according to Mark) lost causes. Mark wasn’t religious, but he wore a St. Francis amulet around his neck, a gift from his father. Nights when he didn’t come home, I prayed to St. Francis, too.