Sex commons

What we think of as the sex commons is a collection of independent spaces where people can talk openly about sexuality in ways that they can't in ordinary public spaces. On the Internet, the commons includes blogs, forums, chat rooms, and publicly-accessible virtual spaces of all kinds where information about sexuality can be collected, archived, exchanged and expressed. We see this commons as continually growing, and forever changing the way that we see our sexualities both online and off.

Today, the Internet is a huge virtual space that, despite being very public, is also private. Those thousands of miles of fiber optic cable are all owned by private corporations whose primary responsibility is to their stockholders, not the public who depend on the Internet for their everyday lives. But despite that private ownership, the Internet has been very useful for creating public spaces for people to talk about their lives. And many of the most important ways that people have used the Internet to create new dialogues have to do with sexuality, because there are so few places in the real world that we can speak openly about who we are and who we want to be sexually.

History
The term "commons" originated as an agricultural one. It referred to land which, although owned by a single person, had rights that were implicitly granted to the public at large. Commons rights included the right to pasture animals, to collect wood for fires, and to fish.