Welcome to Ask SFPC: Sex Ed, a peer-to-peer sex advice column that intends to distribute the production of knowledge around sex by inviting us to learn about sex from a network of our peers and friends. This is a diversion from some of our previous experiences with sex advice columns, which often privilege the production of knowledge around sex to singular voices of authority.

“Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.” ⁽¹⁾ By applying this structure to our sex advice column, we intend to collapse the boundaries between forms of knowledge production and exchange.

This collaborative project is a living archive for the Summer 2022 program, SFPC: Sex Ed, at the School for Poetic Computation. We asked participants, teachers and special guests to respond to the following:

• What is a question you have about sex that you would like to learn about from your peers?
• What has been your experience of sex education? (Did you have any formal sexual education in school? What was your experience like? Is there a memory you'd like to share? If you have not had formal sex education before, what has sex education meant to you in your life?)
• What does a safer learning environment for learning about sex look like for you?
• Why are you interested in studying at SFPC: Sex Ed? Why now?

About our networked study

Throughout the course of the program, participants, teachers and special guests will ask questions and respond to each other's questions, creating an intimate network of distributed knowledge sharing and study around topics such as gender, sexuality, consent, power play, feminist theory, sexual health, pregnancy, and sex work.

Our guest columnists include SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Gabriella Garcia, Daemonum X and Elizabeth Perez. This column is edited by SFPC: Sex Ed’s organizers, Zainab Aliyu, Neta Bomani and Melanie Hoff. More...

About SFPC: Sex Ed

SFPC: Sex Ed is a pleasure and queer centered experiment in shared study and epistemic empowerment. This program is a direct response to creating the kinds of educational spaces we never had, but always sought. Everyone deserves platonic and friendly spaces to learn and explore sexuality and pleasure informed by cultural understandings of sex, gender, class and race and how our identities relate to sexual desires, practices and kink. More...

About the School for Poetic Computation

The School for Poetic Computation is an experimental school in New York that was founded in 2013. Our school supports interdisciplinary study in art, code, hardware and critical theory. It is a place for unlearning and learning. More...

This project was designed and built by Zainab Aliyu, with graphics by Nahee Kim, content management support from Todd Anderson, and overall support and content editing from Melanie Hoff and Neta Bomani. It was created with and for SFPC: Sex Ed, a program organized by Melanie Hoff, Neta Bomani and Zainab Aliyu at the School for Poetic Computation.