Sex, Advertising, and the East Bay Express

By Jody Colley and Jay Youngdahl

From time to time we are asked about our paper's attitude toward sex and advertisements in our paper. This is a good question that deserves an answer in our Sex Issue.

Our paper is a local one. We respond to, try to serve, and sometimes hope to lead our community. We do this with hard-hitting local journalism, political commentary, long-form stories of interest, and the best reviews of culture and music. As to sex, we believe that the East Bay is a sex-positive community. We believe that people have the right to pursue their sexuality in any manner that is not exploitative of others. As an alternative paper we can discuss certain matters that may make others blanch or shy away. Recently we wrote a cover story on polyamory, one interesting sexual culture in our community. One of our most popular regular features is Dan Savage's syndicated sex column. Dan gets very graphic.

Sex is complicated. We all think about it and most of us hope to regularly participate in it, in ways that make us feel comfortable and alive. It is an understatement to say that our society is weird about sex. Much mainstream entertainment succeeds because of the titillation that comes from sexual jokes and innuendo. In fact, we are surrounded by sexual imagery while we fervently want our kids to approach sex in the right manner at the right time, even if we did not. And, maybe the most problematic, sex sometimes involves power, complicating it even further.

We accept all manner of advertisements that support our twenty employees and scores of freelancers and delivery folks. We accept mainstream as well as alternative types of ads. Some of these have to do with dating and relationships, and with sex. Our standards about which advertisers we accept are consistent with our beliefs as a progressive alternative paper. We do not accept ads that we believe are exploitative. And, in all our advertisements, we work to insure that minors are not involved in activity that is illegal or immoral.

We hope this is helpful. Feel free to send us any comments or questions you have. And thank you very much for reading our paper.

Jody Colley, Publisher