If you got an email today saying that your account was deleted please disregard it. The problem came from deleting some accounts on a test site. We did not realize that the test site sends out the same kinds of system emails that the live site does. 

If you want to be extra certain that your account is fine, please try logging in, or resetting your password. We have checked our databases, though, and all accounts appear to be fine. 

Please let us know if you experience any problems using the site. 

It's almost Independence Day weekend in the United States and so I am making my own very specific declaration of independence. In  honor of "the personal is political" and in honor of Independence Day (and because I happen to have a very recent photo of me swimming naked near an American Flag) I want to make a simple declaration: I need to be free to swim naked. I dislike the confinement of swimsuits. They cling and bind and besides, other than wet t-shirt contests, why would anyone put on clothes specifically to get them wet? We take off wet clothes! Why put something on to go in the water?

Reprinted from the Providence Journal (Rhode Island), June 19, 2009

by Ronald Weitzer

In the past few weeks, advocates of criminalizing prostitution in Rhode Island have made many assertions about the “horrors” of prostitution to push legislation forward. Most of these claims are myths.

via Mistress Aliya - Taiwan OKs legalized prostitution zone.

Taiwan began a process of legalizing prostitution Wednesday making the island the latest place in the world to decriminalize the world's oldest profession.

In six months, authorities will stop punishing Taiwan sex workers after prostitutes successfully campaigned to be given the same protection as their clients, a government spokesman said. [Reuters]

This after much campaigning by The Collective of Sex Workers and Supporters. Why?

A Father's Day Reflection  

The  story of Sarah Coral Hanson-Young illustrates two intersecting themes that entrench male privilege - the representation of gender in politics and the imbalance in responsibility for parenting. It is of concern that many (but not all) legislatures under-represent women, ensuring a cycle in which women's interests remain a low priority and decisions that are gendered continue to be taken. Yet so long as women carry an unequal burden of domestic and child-care responsibility this is unlikely to change appreciably.

I hesitate to make too much of small things. On the one hand i don't want to blow them out of proportion. On the other i don't want to jinx a process that might be just in its early stages. But despite those two concerns I am excited by two recent policy changes that the Obama administration has made which seem to indicate at very least a less restrictive interpretation of the Defense of Marriage Act and perhaps more than that: perhaps a slow chipping away at the act itself. 

First of all, today the New York Times printed an AP story reporting that the Census Bureau would in fact count same sex married couples as married. That reverses a Bush administration policy that I wrote about here explicitly stating that these couples could not be counted because DOMA prohibited the federal government from recognizing same sex marriages in any way. Apparently the Obama administration disagrees. Then again, the Obama administration also understands the need for accurate research and solid data when making policy decisions, and data provided by a census that did not count such marriages would be inherently flawed.

For the second year in a row I'll be posing in the Sex Blogger Calendar, a fundraiser for Sex Work Awareness. Sex Work Awareness (SWA) is an organization dedicated to building capacity and media skills for sex workers. In addition, they are involved in important research projects like the Exploratory Research on Internet and Sexaulity (EROTICS) project.

Last year SWA used funds from the calendar sales to put on a media training for NYC-area sex workers. That training resulted in Calico's having the skills necessary to record many of the Sex 2.0 presentations and distribute them online. The training materials themselves are available on the SWA web site. You can see that by supporting SWA you are helping to make information and educational materials available to a worldwide audience.

This year's calendar involves twelve different photographers and more than a dozen models collaborating on images that illustrate sexual freedom. (Yes, if you're doing the math that means there will be some group shots!) I expect it will be provocative! I'll be working with Vito Fun. I won't tell you yet where we'll be shooting but we're working on a very cool location that is memorable for its old machinery and stunning waterfront views.

The photographers are donating their time and their skills. The models are donating the use of their images. All we need is you. You can help us by purchasing a day on the calendar and placing your own message there. Promote yourself or your project. Say happy birthday to someone. Send a message about what sexual freedom means to you. 

Use the buttons below to buy days on the calendar or to buy days and preorder a calendar.

 Buy a day for $10.00.

Buy a day and a calendar for $30.

Sales are hosted at Audacia Ray's Waking Vixen store. Audacia Ray is one of the founders of Sex Work Awareness, and is also author of Naked on the Internet, director and producer of The Bi Apple, adjunct professor at Rutgers University, and social media guru for International Women's Health Coalition. 

At the beginning of the semester, my son brought home a permission slip to attend his Sex Ed class. My first thought was, "Oh, good. I hope they catch anything I forgot to tell him, clear up anything I might have..." And that's about where that thought died. I suddenly remembered I was standing in North Carolina, where they don't actually teach Sex Ed, but rather propagandize a useless religious doctrine.

There are few things in the world that get under my skin like superstition used as an excuse to hurt kids. Abstinence Only Mis-education is such a case.

It's not the teachers' fault, in North Carolina they are prohibited from educating our youth by state law. The law is clearly unconstitutional, though the religious fervor that blinds America has not yet subsided enough to hope for a successful court challenge to it here.

But regardless of blame, I had a decision to make about my son.

• A new color scheme and layout
• Sections, to better organize content (see them across the top menu bar, and note we're having to catalog the site, so do be patient)
• Better use of images
• Gravatar and OpenID integration
• Other cool stuff.
  Please let us know what you think as we continue to develop the site. Use this contact form.

Editor's note: What follows is a guest post by Melissa Ditmore, originally published on RH Reality Check in her reader's diary.

~~~

I'm working on a research project about women's use of the Internet to get information about sexuality. I posted this to the site project partners use to communicate, about the site we use.

Many servers and forums are based in the US, therefore the US research team's description of context is relevant to each of Erotics Project research countries. Sex Work Awareness is the US organization, and co-founder Audacia Ray pointed out to me that Ning, the networking site used for the Erotics Project, instituted a policy excluding 'adult' groups on the site. The research project information is not 'adult' but this is part of the context that we will include, which we discuss on Ning, bringing this exercise to a meta-level. The real question is how this plays out and affects users.

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