erotics
Freedom of speech and its flipside, access to information, is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. However federally-funded libraries are required to prevent people under eighteen accessing “harmful” content. Kevicha Echols and Melissa Ditmore investigate the use of internet filters on public library computers and find that measures adopted by libraries range from installation of filtering software on all computers for child and adult use to no filters at all! The law...
Proposals to fight cybercrime have been floating around in Brazil for more than a decade but the backers – primarily banks and music companies worried about internet fraud and unauthorised music sharing – couldn’t find public or parliamentary support till they switched their focus to child pornography. Lula has refused to sanction online censorship and the government has opened a public consultation on what a civil law to regulate the internet should look like. EroTICs resea...
Two out of three gay South African respondents to an online survey said that going online had helped them accept their sexual orientation and many admitted to coming out online before they did so offline. But the voices of transgender people rarely appear in studies and surveys. To address the gap, APC EroTICs researcher Jeanne Prinsloo of the University of Grahamstown looks at the use of a tra...
“The gay rights movement in Lebanon would not be anywhere near where it is today if it weren’t for the internet”. In the midst of strongly censored neighbours, Lebanon enjoys online freedom that is hampered only by very slow and very expensive internet connections – but is that freedom there to stay? In a country where homosexuality is punishable by upto two years in prison, Nadine Moaw...
“And I can chat with you baby / Flirt a little, maybe / But does your mother know that you’re out ?” Twenty-something middle-class women in Mumbai, the city with the highest internet use in India, talk about how they explore their sexuality online, how they present themselves however they want and how they deal with risky situations. Photo: “Jef Harris”:http://www.flickr.com/p...
As sexual content and sex-related behaviour online is such a trigger for state and other intervention, APC is carrying out ground-breaking research on how different people in different parts of the world are really using the internet related to sex.
Put sex and new technology together and you’ll always get waves. Victorian societies were scandalised by the arrival of the telephone because women –who were chaperoned at all times– could potentially talk with suitors in private. Over the last decade, the internet has been censored and content regulated for a multitude of reasons and the principal reason cited by governments ...
This is the literature review produced as part of the APC WNSP EROTICS: Exploratory Research on Sexuality and the Internet project. It includes women’s rights and feminist approaches to the internet, theoretical frameworks on gender and technology, key themes in literature on sexuality, women and the internet, an assessment of current approaches and frameworks, recommendations of conceptual f...
This policy review includes a historical and contextual overview of international and regional policy documents on the area of internet governance as well as sexual rights, with a focus on pornography and sexuality in relation to policy and regulation.
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2022
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