Rights for Sex Ed for Bi Guys
I publish the Sex Ed for Bi Guys series itself (including the glossary) under a Creative Commons license with the following terms: Attribution—Non-Commercial—Share Alike. Feel free to copy articles from the series, distribute them, adapt them to your local context or translate them to a different language. I will gladly promote versions of the series in new languages too. All I ask is that you credit me as the author of the original series and provide a link to this website.
All images are borrowed from the Internet, and they’re in the series because I like them. In more recent articles, I’ve used Creative Commons images whenever possible, but many images (from the older content especially) are likely under copyright from a photographer or an artist who’s unknown to me. The original source of most smutty images in the explicit version of the series are unknown to me as well, as are the people featured in them. If you are the copyright owner or an image or a person appearing in a photo, contact me. I’ll be happy to credit you and link to your work, or to remove the image at your request—no questions asked.
Why do I use images that way?
The ethics of using sexual images are challenging when you can’t track down who appears in them to confirm they consent to their image appearing like this. It’s the case of most sexual images that circulate around the Internet. In an ideal situation, I would be able to ask these people permission, or work with people to produce sexual images specifically for the series. In an even more ideal world, I would even be able to compensate these people financially—and I hope someday I’ll be able to. There’s also a lack of sexually explicit images that are available under a licence like Creative Commons that I could use for a project like Sex Ed for Bi Guys. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind someday building a library of sexual images that are available under a Creative Commons licence, for people who like to have some smut mixed in with their various productions.
So here’s my rationale for using the photos anyway. I’m working other the assumption that most sexual content on the Internet was put there by people who wanted to appear sexy to a wide audience, and that malicious distribution (for example, revenge porn) is the exception. The series serves a social purpose—to provide information that addresses the specific needs of bi+ men, and to celebrate our sexualities—and I’m convinced something precious would be lost if the sexual images weren’t in it. Making the series is time-consuming and I do it with limited financial resources. Producing my own visual sexual content for the series presents challenges in terms of time and logistics I can’t realistically take on unless I end up making a living out of producing content for bi+ men. I also lack for the foreseeable future the money to compensate anyone who would model for the content. I do contribute to artists’ Patreons and ask permission to use their work though when I can track them down, which is easier for art other than photos.
I hope that the series doing some good makes up for these issues—and I know it has. Also, it’s always been my policy to remove images on request, no questions asked. I chose these images because I love them, and I believe they deserve to be seen by people; it’s not my intention to make anyone’s life more difficult by doing so. I hope though that one day, I’ll be able to present a Sex Ed for Bi Guys with visual content that is either Creative Commons or that people have contributed specifically for the series.
Contributing sexual images to Sex Ed for Bi Guys
If you believe in the work the series does and you’d like to contribute sexual images you have produced yourself—with the consent of people who appear in them—please contact me. As I’m curating a particular aesthetic for the series, I won’t just use whatever image gets sent my way. To give would-be contributors an idea of what I would use, here’s how I select images that make it into articles.
Theme: I select images that match the topic and the tone of the article. More specifically, I try to make connections between images and the paragraph next to which they appear.
Diversity: I try to avoid images that feature only white people when there’s more than one person in it, and to have images of folks who are trans or nonbinary. I try to include bodies of different sizes, ages, or that reflect that not everyone is abled the same way. The Internet tends to give me less choice in that matter when it comes to sexy content, so I haven’t been very successful on that front.
Quality: Images need to have a certain level of photo quality in terms of lighting and composition. A pic of someone’s genitals that’s poorly lit and poorly framed won’t make the cut, unless that’s specifically what I’m going for to complement a specific bit in a post.
The rest of the site
The rest of the site deals more with my professional activities as life coach, and eventually as a trainer on the realities of bi+ men. These are all rights reserved, Hugo Vaillancourt, 2022.
