Photo Credit: "Stargazers" on Photobucket
[NOTE: SINCE I WROTE THIS, I HAVE BEEN TAKEN DOWN FROM FB TOO. UNLIKE MANY SEX EDUCATORS, I AM NOT GOING TO THE TROUBLE OF SETTING UP AGAIN ON FB. OVERALL, I FOUND IT TO WASTE MORE TIME THAN IT CREATES USEFUL CONNECTIONS.]
Sex educators are disappearing one at a time from the pages of Facebook. Rather they are “disappeared”—their pages taken down, profiles deleted, contacts and posts lost to a black hole in cyberspace. The process goes like this: some anonymous person or persons (who have set out to target sex educators) makes a complaint or several to the great faceless god of FB. At an arbitrary point, the god (think the Wizard of Oz without the Wizard, just the gadgetry) eliminates them, usually without warning.
Their crimes? Posting sexual material that FALLS WITHIN Facebook guidelines. NO nudity, graphic genital interaction, racist or hate speech, violence. Being deleted indicates that a person must be in violation of community standards when, in fact, the people I know who have recently been deleted were not. When they tried to find a real person in the “help” maze of FAQ pages, they could not. Sound like a Draconian video game?
Within the community I call Sex World are some of the best people you could ever hope to meet. Sex educators, therapists, counselors; porn directors, producers, actors and actresses; burlesque dancers, strippers and performance artists; sex workers; artists, writers and publishers of sexually explicit material; sex researchers and sex journalists; sex toy designers, producers, marketers, and toy store owners—and, forgive me, if I have forgotten a category or two. In their personal practices, they range from vanilla monogamists to adventurers who break taboos (but not laws) and cut swaths through the fabric of polite social expectations about sexual behavior.
We share a common bond of mutual acceptance and wide tolerance of others' ways of being and a belief in the positive power of sexuality. We stand up for one another. And we stand up for you, for your sexual freedom, the right to pursue sexual expression with other consenting adults (or home alone with your toys.)
Recently these good people have gone down:
Violet Blue—(from Monday’s Auntie Sue post)
In fact, more than 3,000 people signed up on Facebook for Violet Blue’s sex-positive women’s empowerment community, “Our Porn, Ourselves.” Alas, FB deleted the page. The group “Porn Harms” thanked FB for helping them claim that victory.
Read Suzanne Forbes report on Carnal Nation which includes Violet’s letter to FB. Whether you like porn or you don’t, you should feel a little queasy about FB censorship. Anti-sex activists use Facebook to further their agenda, targeting people like Violet Blue—and me!—who are not violating the FB community standards
David Thomas (Lotus Workshop, R Sex), a great guy who creates and produces workshops that enrich the sex lives of singles and couples -- from his email to me
“Well it just so happens that facebook gave me the boot, my personal and both fan pages, gone, kaput!!! It happened on August 5th.
“No explanation, no answering my email.
“So when I do go to get back up and running I will need lots of help fro my fans and friends like you to get my fan base back up.
“Seems like allot of work down the drain.”
Deborah Sundahl, Sex Educator, Video Producer, Isis Media, and author of Female Ejaculation and the G Spot—work that is admired by other sex educators—from one of her emails to me yesterday
“FYI, this is exactly what happened to me, as this man describes it here: Deborah”
In Jihad, Facebook style, anyone clicking on to your page is warned away with a message saying that the material was found objectionable or incendiary and viewing it could hurt their computer.
Reid Mihalko, sex educator extraordinaire, is going through a similar Jihad problem, tearing his hair out as he tries to straighten out his attacked website.
HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO--
- Please visit the websites of these four people, learn more about what happened to them—and express your support. Stand up for them as they have stood up for you.
- Please post your comments here, send emails with your suggestions—and let me know about other sex educators who may have been targeted and victimized by Facebook. Raise awareness.
- Finally, please pass this link along to your friends and associates.
I’m not letting my friends go down in silence.
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