About this Site
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In March 1995, Society for Human Sexuality (SHS) was founded as a registered student organization at University of Washington. From that time until its key organizers graduated in Fall 1998, as a student organization SHS hosted a wide variety of events both on and off campus, and in parallel began its work to improve the quality and scope of the peer sex education material available on the internet. [A list of all the events we hosted, and other documents from when we were a student organization, is available here.] Amongst all other sex-positive student organizations known to have existed up to that point, the inclusive nature of SHS was apparently a first.
Although SHS unfortunately did not continue to exist as a UW student organization following the graduation of the students who founded it, there was nevertheless a strong sentiment amongst those individuals that this kind of work should somehow continue. So, Society for Human Sexuality (now technically "Society for Human Sexuality, LLC", which is what the terms "Society for Human Sexuality" and/or "SHS" should now be taken to mean) was founded in late 1998 as an off-campus entity completely separate from the UW.
Society for Human Sexuality, as a fully off-campus entity, registered the domain name sexuality.org and began to build and maintain this web site. Obviously, this online side of its work continues to this day.
In parallel, from December 1998 to the first few months of 1999, the real-life side of SHS's work was expressed in a series of off-campus events, such as workshops on erotic dance, erotic talk, and even "erotic gift-giving for the holidays." However, beginning in the Spring of 1999, we were honored to have had the opportunity to participate in the formation of the non-profit Center for Sex-Positive Culture (then known as the Seattle Sex-Positive Community Center), a wonderful and unique organization that carries forward our values in real life better than we ever could. This is where all of our real-life volunteer time goes these days, and if you're someone who fondly remembers the real-life events which SHS sponsored as a UW student organization, it's probably where you want to be.
Suggestions concerning this web site may be sent to us at shs@sexuality.org. Please note that due to volume we are no longer able to answer general questions concerning sexuality and sexual health via e-mail, and instead recommend that you make use of one of the currently-available information hotlines to receive a timely and professional answer to your concerns. Each recommended hotline is free and confidential.
This web site collects no information for advertising purposes, sets no cookies, opens no pop-up windows, and engages in no browser trickery: in other words, it's simply a collection of text pages that you can browse when you like and leave when you're done. Furthermore it neither purchases nor sells advertising, nor does it engage in any form of strategic or reciprocal linking: in other words, when we recommend another web site, it's because we actually want to.
And finally, it is offered to you completely free of charge, as a public service.
Although running this web site is nobody's day job, and it has no "staff," it does have regular expenses. To meet these expenses, and to spare readers the experience of being nagged for donations, we've chosen to simply sign up for affiliate programs in cases where a particular service of relevance to sexuality that we would have recommended anyway happens to offer one. Fortunately for us, since almost any serious internet retailer these days offers an affiliate program, this has presented no conflicts of interest.
In the interest of full disclosure, the following are the affiliate programs we have joined. Basically, this just means that if you follow a text link to that service from this site, and buy something, we get a small credit.
The computer on which we do most of our serious writing uses Linux as its underlying operating system (currently the RedHat 7.3 distribution, though if we were to reinstall it today we'd probably use Debian). CVS is used for both version control and document backups. The outliner plugin for the Vim editor is used to sketch out the basic structure of new documents, after which the latex-suite plugin for the Vim editor (together with aspell) is used for the actual writing. Bibliographic references are maintained using BibTeX, and the ps2pdf utility is used to generate PDF versions of documents. Documents are converted from LaTeX to HTML using several custom Perl scripts that we wrote for this purpose. Moneydance for Linux is used to keep track of expenses.
Meanwhile, the computer that hosts this web site uses FreeBSD as its underlying operating system and Apache (with the mod_gzip module) as its web server. The site's scripts are written in Perl or PHP, and SWISH-E powers the search feature. The site's pages are served as static (and typically fully standards-compliant) HTML for speed, though the command-line version of PHP is used as needed to refresh the navigation elements at the top and bottom of each page.
In other words, this site is created, maintained, and hosted entirely using free and open-source software.
Happy Loving!
If you're new to this site, we recommend you visit its home page for a better sense of all it has to offer.