A Day in the Life of a Sexologist

Mailing out what feels like 7,000 free #sexpositive stickers! If you haven’t signed up to receive yours yet, do the thing! ➡️thesexologist.org/free-stuff.

This is important. Last week Tumblr, where I’ve written my A Day in the Life of a Sexologist blog since 2010, banned all adult content from the site. And Facebook, where I’ve been educating people about sexuality since 2005 (2005!!) instituted a new policy that bans sexual WORDS.

Anything that “encourages sexual encounters between adults” including “sexual slang”, discussion of “sex positions and kink”, or even a “hint” about sexual body parts, even the human “buttocks” can get you banned from Facebook.

And Facebook owns Instagram.

My presence here is precarious, as it is for anyone who acknowledges that human sexuality exists in either word or image. I’ll rant about corpo-cultural power over personal sexual expression another time, but for right now we need a contingency plan.

The only thing I currently have full control over is email so PLEASE sign up for my email list, and the email list of anyone you follow that you’d be devastated to find suddenly disappeared from social media, along with all their content, with no other way to keep up with them again. http://www.thesexologist.org/free-stuff.html

I only send 4-5 emails per year right now, so I won’t be spamming you daily. But I will send my content there if something ever happens to me here.

And I’ll mail you an awesome sex-positive stickers for your laptop/water bottle/phone case when you sign up. Even if I already have your email, sign up again and I’ll mail you a sticker!

#SESTA #fosta #adultcontentban

A better, more positive Tumblr

staff:

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

Tumblr, you are dead to me. Follow me on Instagram @sexdocjill (not that IG is much better) and subscribe to my blog on my website at www.thesexologist.org where I have 100% control over the content.

Mass shootings are a men’s issue

sexologist:

There have been 204 mass shootings- and 204 days- in 2015 so far.

And all of the known shooters are men.

If any other segment of society (let’s say for example, people in bowling leagues), and ONLY people in bowling leagues, took up fire arms *daily* and murdered people in movie theaters and hospitals and churches and schools, we’d have every expert, scientist, pundit, and commentator weighing in on what the hell is going on with bowlers. We would have national committees dedicated to learning what about bowling attracts or creates people who are so uniquely violent, in a way that no one else is.

But when men, and exclusively men, are committing these atrocities, no one attributes it to their gender. It’s just accepted that this is what men do. When the 205th shooting this year happens, you’ll ask “did they catch the guy?” Because you know it will be a guy, and it won’t even register that you’ve made this assumption. If you instead found yourself having to ask “did they catch the bowler?” because you were so confident that the latest carnage was caused by someone in a bowling league, because it’s always someone in a bowling league, and it’s never NOT someone in a bowling league, you might better recognize how it’s not a coincidence- there is something about bowling that needs to be seriously examined and changed. Because HELLO- bowlers, and bowlers alone, are shooting up hospitals and supermarkets and classrooms every. single. day.

“It’s mental health.” “It’s not enough good guys with guns.” “It’s violent video games and movies.” “It’s shitty parenting.” “Its getting bullied at school.” “It’s gun laws that are too lax.” “No, It’s gun laws that are too strict.” Or, IT’S FUCKING BOWLERS.

We have to talk about toxic masculinity. We must. We MUST!

Jackson Katz, noted violence prevention expert, says American violence is “overwhelmingly a gendered phenomenon, and any attempt to understand violence therefore requires that we understand it’s relationship to masculinity and manhood.”

He calls this “the crisis of masculinity”, and uses road rage as an example. He said, “people don’t typically think of road rage as a gendered phenomenon, but one recent study showed in 10,000 cases of aggressive driving and road rage, over 95% were males. But you read the editorials in newspapers across the country about the road rage and the articles, essays, and opinion columns, it’s rarely talked about as a masculine or male phenomenon. It’s just a phenomenon on our roadways. If women were doing it- if 95% of road rage was women, you can bet the single issue that would be talked about is why are *women* doing this? What is going on in the gender construction of *women* that caused them to act this way.”

Similarly, gun violence is a male phenomenon. And similarly no one talks about it as men’s gun violence, it’s just plain gun violence, as if all parts of society are doing it, and it’s a generic human problem.

If women, and only women, shot people daily, this would be a problem with women. If bowlers, and only bowlers, shot people daily, this would be a problem with bowlers. But men, and only men, shoot people daily, and it’s a gun problem. A violence problem. And it has nothing to do with men. No.

We have to talk about toxic masculinity. We must. We MUST!

/rant, and I apologize to any folks in bowling leagues out there for using you in my analogy. I’m sure you’re lovely people

I wrote this in 2015. Still relevant :(

And this about sums it up, doesn’t it?

This is the part that hurts the most. All the evidence, all of the corroboration, all the expert testimony, all the likeable snow white victims in the world won’t make them do the right thing.

There could be video of the whole assault. Hell, he could confess! And it still wouldn’t be enough. Because it’s never been about whether they #believesurvivors or not. THEY JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT SURVIVORS’ PAIN.

⚫Because they are selfish and sexual assault survivors are inconvenient to their goals and their worldview.

⚫Because they don’t value women enough to do the work of extending human compassion.

This is the sad reality that took me years as a young, optimistic sexologist to realize. Years and years of

⚫"maybe they don’t understand"

⚫ “maybe they just need it explained this way”

⚫"maybe they don’t know how common it is or how painful it is, so if we tell our stories and humanize it for them they will get it…“

…before finally it occurred to me that they understand perfectly fucking well. And they don’t care.

Btw: This "they” I reference isn’t just the Senate today. It’s the police. It’s college administrations. It’s the NFL. It’s the Catholic Church. It’s the news media. It’s every “nice guy” who seems like a perfectly normal rational functioning adult but is on Facebook saying “well I don’t know… she didn’t report it at the time…”

Because pretending be ignorant or judicious or “see both sides” makes you sound like less of a sociopath than that you’re simply cruel.

This is why I do the work that I do.

This is why WE NEED COMPASSION BASED SEXUALITY EDUCATION NOW.

It’s #WorldEmojiDay! 🎉‼️👍 Emojis are the latest mechanism of human communication to be driven by, or adopted early by, sexual communication. 👅🍆👉👌🍾

From Paleolithic cave art 🎨 to clay tablet writings 📜 from the printing press 📚 to the telephone ☎️ photography 📷 moving pictures 📽️ and the Internet 🌐 sexual communication and expression have ALWAYS been one of the first uses for a new technology.

So embrace the eggplant penis and taco vulva. Using symbols to talk about boning is part of what makes us human! 🍆🍆🍆🌮🌮🌮