A heads-up to you: this post is a specific call to action. It is an action we can all take now, and may not be able to in the future. As most of you know, I am not an alarmist. But I feel I need to call attention to some issues and make you aware that there are low-key but vital actions you can take now. Please do.
I taught a SAR this past weekend. It was planned before we knew it would be a No Kings rally day, and I want to thank those of you who were marching, because I was abruptly confronted with the latest in overreach from our government here in these not so United States.
I use a lot of documentary Sexually Explicit Media, and only a little pornography to teach this class, which is to help clinicians and educators to confront biases about sexual behaviors, identities and orientations. The sexually explicit media (SEM) used is there to help people to see authentic experiences of sexual behavior, as in some cases (especially for less mainstream activities) there is no substitute.
When I did go to use my usual links for a few segments, I was blocked. Porn Hub is no longer available at all in Arizona. They decided not to allow access to Arizonans, due to the new law that demands an age check verification when you try to watch porn. I want to be clear that I am in favor of blocking children from pornography. I am not in favor of having to let the US government know who I am and what I am watching. I had a hard time shaking the sense of foreboding that this gave me, and I reflected that I was extremely grateful that I have been downloading as much SEM as I feel I need for many years, for just such an emergency.
Am I shocked? Absolutely not. I talk about this quite a bit in my History of Sexology class. I am writing this post, however, because I wanted to share something that was shared with me in 2006 when I began my doctoral degree.
One of my professors at that time said to me : "Start your library NOW. Buy all of the books and keep all of the material you can, because history repeats itself, and when they start to burn our books again, you will still have access. You can save some of that knowledge for when the pendulum swings back again, and it will not be lost."
Being a student of history, I took it to heart. I have a library of books, some of them historical. But I also have saved as many PDFs as I can of articles, I have bought good old fashioned DVDs/BluRay videos, and I have external hard drives to keep these safe for if --when?--censorship becomes more virulent and widespread and this information is no longer available. We can literally lose decades of research as a field unless we begin to save these resources offline.
I ask that you consider taking maybe 15 minutes a day to download off of NIH, CDC, academic databases or anywhere that you normally access academic data or research. Put them on an external hard drive with a passcode and keep it safe. We all don't have to save everything. But if you save what is the most important material to you, chances are good that in all of our expertise we will save a broad swath of content that may be able to be reconstituted in the event it is censored and deleted. If we all do this, we are safeguarding against tremendous loss.
It happened in Berlin almost 100 years ago. It has been happening in Texas and other states for the past 20 years. It can certainly happen where you are. I hope I don't sound alarmist or negative. I hope I am wrong, but there is an awful lot of writing on the wall.
I am going to be saving a ton of stuff and sending one drive to a friend in Canada, and one in Europe. I hope you can join me in this effort in whatever way that you can.
