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I'm tempted to propose a "Gender and Sexuality Studies" site. However it says...

If you do not yet have a community organized, ready and eager to build your site, please do not submit this proposal.

So I'm asking here to see if it would be perceived as useful.

Question: Would a "Gender and Sexuality Studies" site be useful?

I'm thinking of "Who is this site for?" as:

This site is for studying gender and sexuality, along with their interdisciplinary connections with society, feminism, race, queer studies, politics, religion, history, etc., not for personal sexual advice.

(Consider this a first draft.)


There's two Sexuality sites here and here which did not get out of beta. While I'm not completely clear on why they didn't succeed, my impression is that their questions that don't inspire expert answers:

  • What is the best way to remove body hair?
  • Are condoms a necessity in trusting relationships with a partner already on effective birth control?
  • If you get a penile fracture, what should you do?
  • How to wake up before ejaculating in a wet dream?

These seem to be "personal sexual advice" questions, rather than academic. I thus feel like "rule 1" has to be: no personal sexual advice questions! (Hence I add "studies" to the title, and "not for personal sexual advice" in the tagline.)

I'm aiming for a site geared towards topics one ordinarily encounters in a Gender and Sexuality Studies course at university. I'm motivated by descriptions such as these:

The Gender and Sexuality Studies Department provides you with a solid grounding in the interconnected, interdisciplinary fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies, and engage these fields from a variety of perspectives – religious, economic, political, social, biological, psychological, historical, anthropological, artistic, and literary.
Davidson College

The program emphasizes the interrelationships among gender and sexuality, race, class, nation, and ability and connects such inquiry to local and global politics. Gender and Sexuality Studies brings feminist and queer theory in conversation with research in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences through courses offered across the three academic divisions of the College.
Swarthmore


To give an idea of the ballpark I have in mind, here are some off-the-top-of-my-head questions that I would think are suitable at such a site (with the usual caveats of showing research effort):

  • What theories have been proposed for the prevalence of lesbianism among transgender women?
  • Are there established genetic contributions to homosexuality?
  • What are the religious factors encouraging female circumcision (or female genital mutilation)?
  • In the USA, what early legislature was proposed to "combat" homosexuality?
  • What are considered the contributing factors to the prevalence of males among dentists?
  • In Uganda, how do gay people avoid criminal charges?
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    This would be almost surely a duplicate of Psychology/Cognitive Sciences, Biology, Health, Politics, Law, and others with smaller overlap.
    – Nij
    Nov 14, 2019 at 6:45

1 Answer 1

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We launched a site in this subject space twice with little sign that it could work well in our format. The latest attempt was more of a personal-advice site, as you noted, but the first site was focused entirely on an academic perspective ("educators and professionals to discuss human sexuality"). The interest was low; the content was abysmally uninspiring, and even the most avid participants expressed no desire to continue pursuing this Q&A.

Without a large organization rallying to create this site from a fresh perspective, a proposal would not likely be considered.

Unfortunately, we would not be interested in restarting this site at this time.

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