Sex In The Public Square Turns Two!

This year my partner and I both missed our anniversary. A week after it had passed, as we were talking on the phone while I was in my mother's hospital room, he said to me: Do you realize our anniversary was a week ago? I had not. And in a similar way I almost missed the second birthday of SexInThePublicSquare.org. Yesterday on Twitter CatalinaLoves said to me "So I read on the @NYCSexBlogCal that SITPS turns 2 tomorrow? RU Celebrating in some way?" I had specifically put the birthday on the calendar so that I would not forget it. And what happened? I forgot it!

It is hard to believe that it's been two years since Chris Hall and I launched this site. In that time we've welcomed new regular contributors (Lou FCD, Michael Goodyear, Caroline) and have been honored by the contributions of guests (Lorraine K, M. P. Clark, Lolita, LisaVNYC, Rebecca Deos). We held a very productive forum on sex work, trafficking and human rights, and we've created a space for the stories of outed sex workers who want to speak out.

Click here to read more about our past two years and get a glimpse into the future!

Heading into our third year I'm looking forward to more changes. We are redesigning the site, making it more streamlined, organizing it into sections and making it easier to contribute.

We are looking for more contributors and could really use the help of a Drupal-savvy volunteer! (If you are interested in contributing or helping out please drop me an email using this contact link.) 

We are planning projects with Center for Sex and Culture , and with Woodhull Freedom Foundation .

We are helping to build bridges between academic and activist groups and we want to put together a group of researchers so that we can provide critical analysis of sex-research as it is published and reported in the press. 

Sex in the Public Square has been represented at conferences from Sex 2.0  (2008, 2009) to the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality  (2009). We have been represented at The Eastern Sociological Society  (2008) and at South by Southwest Interactive  (2008). We are getting around on and offline!

We have, in two years, been visited about 200,000 times with a total of 400,000 page views. We want to increase this as we increase our capacity to update the site more frequently. (We are bemused that "barbie porn" continues to be the most frequent search term that lands people at our site.)

And we want to know what are the hopes you have for sexual freedom and social change in the coming year? To start out, here are a few that were sent via Facebook and Twitter:

Audacia Ray wants to see more solidarity across communities and identities.

Claudia Sawyer wants us to stop pretending that women don't like sex, and she also wants us to stop pretending that sex and society don't co-exist.

Amber Rhea wants to see decriminalization of sex work become an issue truly discussed in the political arena and seconds Audacia Ray's wish. 

Sabrina Morgan wants more trans visibility, and seconding @amberlrhea's wish.

I second all of those. In addition, I want to see better sex education available widely to kids, teens AND to adults, and I want it to include information on gender expression, sexuality, relationships, and self esteem, and not just on plumbing, pregnancy and STIs.

I want access to complete reproductive health care for everyone, and an end to the threats to the health care workers who provide it.

And, to adopt the mission of Woodhull Freedom Foundation for a moment, because nobody says it as clearly and simply:

I want to see freedom of sexual expression become protected as a basic human right. 

So, here's to a new year of agitation, activism and analysis all aimed at building solidarity and expanding freedom of sexual expression for all. Leave us your sex-and-social-change agenda items in the comments.

Cheers!