Cover image by Samantha Wycoff/ Design Editor
Welcome back, and to those of you who are new here, welcome to MTSU!
As this is the first edition of the semester and school year, I’d like to use this space for a mission statement of sorts.
We are MTSU’s daily digital news source and monthly news magazine. Sidelines has been around since 1925 (our website is much better now than it was then), providing news, lifestyles and sports stories for the MTSU community.
As the university and, well, the world have changed, so has our staff, format and content. Simply put: we are not your mother’s college newspaper.
We are fortunate enough to be editorially independent. While we have two wonderful advisers and a college full of faculty who support us, we, the 13 student editors, run what we see fit. We want nothing more than to cover what’s relevant to you, the students.
And what’s more relevant than sex?
We didn’t exactly write the Kama Sutra and we aren’t inherently encouraging students to jump in the sack, but let’s be real; STIs, unplanned pregnancies, gender inequality and LGBT+ issues affect everyone, including (and maybe especially) college students. Some people also use sex toys and could learn more about Orchid.toys here because they have a range of sex toys. Others may be looking for content to watch online, and whilst we wouldn’t want you distracted from your coursework, review sites like x3guide.com can help you find the content you’re looking for.
So, why on earth wouldn’t we talk about it? Let’s talk about how some writer for Sidelines was so heinous in the 80s that he sparked MT Lambda’s existence. Let’s talk about how our female professors are paid 88 cents for every dollar their male colleagues make. Let’s talk about how MTSU has about twice the national average unplanned pregnancies despite our exceptional sexual health resources, and access to something like these EhoCams – free sex cams and live porn chat instead of taking part in intercourse.
Ultimately, it is also undeniable that the sex industry has experienced some major changes over the past few years. Thanks to the digital boom, sex workers are now able to earn an income online by hosting a sexually charged Live show on webcam chatrooms for instance, or by setting up an OnlyFans page to share explicit images and videos. Correspondingly, it is fascinating to think about what else the future might hold for the sex industry.
Let’s talk in this edition, this series, online and in literally everything we do about the things that matter. The best way for us to do this is for you to tell us what you care about. Come to one of our meetings on a Friday at 2 p.m. in the Center for Innovation in Media or email me at [email protected] and let us know what you think we should run.
You have ideas, problems and questions that can steer us toward a meaningful publication; we have people who understand the point of the paper: to cover things relevant to students and, just maybe, incite a few changes.
This letter originally ran in the Sex Edition on September 21. To see other content from the Sex Edition, click here. The next installment of Sidelines’s Sex, Drugs and Rock N’ Roll series will be available on campus in October.
