sexandsensibilities.com

by Ana Santos

2010. This will go down as the year that I finally decided to take The Leap. I left my corporate job and set off to do what I had long been planning to do – write.

In the tradition of TIME, NEWSWEEK, PEOPLE and everyone else who will be  doing the same thing, I thought I’d do a review of the year when I started to wake up every day, doing what I had once only dreamed about.

2010 was the year that was sexy, SASsy and fun

I attended the International Conference of AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP9) in 2009 as a media scholar and it left me with a sense of joyful obligation to share the knowledge, replicate the experience back home — anything to make something more out of that scholarship.

I came back from Bali, just spilling over with ideas about how to market sexual health. And when I say “market”, I mean making it sexy, funny and smart all at the same time. My years in Marketing told me that this would be a good way to make ho-hum concepts like self-esteem, healthy, respectful relationships and sexual health stick to my chosen demographic – the young Filipina. It was the young, middle-class Filipina who I felt was denying herself the right to accurate knowledge on how to take care of her body because of society’s dictates about being chaste and pure.

I had no idea how to do it, but such is serendipity and the power of intense desire. Taking a thought from Coelho, when you want something badly enough, all the forces in the universe will conspire to give it to you.

I got another scholarship, this time to Maven Secrets where Anton Diaz  of Our Awesome Planet taught the principles of professional blogging and internet marketing.  And there, over the period of 90 days, the answers to my questions came.

I consulted Anton countless times on how to talk about sex in an engaging, intelligent and compassionate way, sans the prurient and titillating connotations and came up with Sex and Sensibilities or SAS.

There were many moments of self-doubt and I dilly dallied quite a bit. I was forced to launch the website because of an invitation to guest on the morning TV show She-ka. I distinctly remember that the host  asked me three times if the title of my website was really “sex” and sensibilities. She was clearly incredulous that the word “sex”  was right up there in the title.

That was way back in January 2010. Since then, we haven’t stopped dishin’ out the SAS, as I like to say.

Through SAS, I launched promos and contests to de-stigmatize condoms; gave interactive sexual health workshops to universities and offices and selected communities like the transgender groups; and spoke at various events about informed choice and sexual health rights as a basic human right.

The best compliment that I ever got was from Sam Winter, a visiting professor from the University of Hong Kong who came up to me to say that it was the first time that he had seen a sexual health workshop conducted in a way that was “fun and educational” at the same time.

And that, in a nutshell was what I exactly had set out to do.

It wasn’t just about the sex — billboards and magazine ads leave barely enough to our imagination as it is. It also wasn’t just about the health part, either. It was about the coming together of “sexual health” as one word to encapsulate the power of informed choice needed to take control of our lives.

During the latter part of the year, the accolades came. I named one of the 8 most admired Filipina bloggers by Anton Diaz  and SAS was listed as one of the 25 blogs you should be reading by Jayvee Fernandez of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

In the November 2010 issue of Cosmo Philippines, SAS was included in a list of “Women Warriors” and honored to be alongside Mae Paner a.k.a Juana Change, Reese Fernandez of Rags2Riches, among others.

One of the greatest affirmations was from fellow journalists at the Probe Media Foundation who awarded Sex and Sensibilities a media grant to do a report on population and development. For this, I did a multi-media report combining social media, photo and video documentaries  comparing and contrasting the reproductive health policies of Quezon City and Manila.

It certainly was a kick-SASs year and it’ll be hard to top that in 2011, but you can be sure that I’ll have a blast trying to give young Filipinas every where another 365 days of all things sexy, SASsy and fun!