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@aroacejokes
Tried baking a cake and I think I aced it
you gonna bac up your claim that cisgender straight people who lack sexual attraction have always been queer? or is speaking out your ass all you can do
Sure! Let's go! I'm always up to stretch both my lgbt history muscles. Sorry if it took awhile but I am passionate about this stuff and wanted to do some good writing and find some really great sources for you! 😊
In 1869 a humanitarian and journalist named Karl-Maria Kertbeny published pamphlets to oppose the sodomy law in Prussia. In these pamphlet he is widely regarded as beginning the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" in the academic mainstream; though, it is likely these were lgbt terms used long before that time. In this same pamphlet advocating explicitly for gay rights, Kertbeny refers to those who engage only in masturbation and not in sex with others as seperate from straight people, coining an entirely different term: "monosexual." Now, this term is outdated and widely used the m-spec sub community to refer to straight, gay, and lesbian folks lacking multi-gender attraction, but he states very explicitly in all his work that this term is meant to refer to people we would now understand to be asexual.
A little later, in the 1890's we have sexologist, founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and an openly gay man himself, Magnus Hirschfeld. He published his work "Sappho and Sokrates": a pamphlet he wrote with the task of explaining the lgbt community to straight people. He makes multiple references to and defences of what he called "anesthesia sexuals." Again, an outdated term, but as you can see, both gay advocates and straight allies referenced us as being part of the community like it was nothing.
Meanwhile, we have the lovely Emma Trosse, an academic peer to Hirschfeld. She discussed gay rights—especially the rights of lesbians and non-binary people—very openly and wrote multiple papers on the subject. But at her heart, Trosse was a researcher, and so her most famous work, naturally, was an indepth study of what she referred to as "counter-sexualities" as stand in for what we now know as the broader lgbt community. In this work she coins the phrase Asensuality, stating "the author has the courage to admit to this category" officially coming out in her own study! Damn lady! We love her. The Schwules Museum (literally the Gay Museum), a famous German LGBTQ+ museum dedicated to collections focusing on the history of lgbt research, features her work prominently. She also holds the distinction of having been banned as a "degenerate" author in Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, and Russia for that very work. On top of that, she was the first woman on record to have a treatise in defense of lgbt people and our community published in 1895, even before her colleague Hirschfeld had his first works published.
As you can see 19th century Germany was a hub of lgbt theory, research, and activism still studied by lgbt historians today. It is widely credited as being a period of time that brought our history into print and the mainstream. And ace people, as I noted before, have been involved both in mention and in activism from the beginning according to both prominent allies, gay folks, and ace folks who were scholars during this period.
But, now lets move over with a bigger hop to the sexual revolution in America; which mirrored the German one in many ways! This is the period of time a lot of people, especially americans, think of as the start of our mainstream history—which as you can see a very americancentric idea, but I digress. Even here we have asexuals represented among the community by diverse members of the community.
You've probably heard of the Asexual Manifesto, written by Lisa Orlando and published by the New York Radical Feminists. A very important document to ace-spec people, it defines us as a sexuality seperate and distinct from straight; but you aren't interested in what we have to say about ourselves and our experiences so lets move on to other lgbt people validating us.
Kinsey—himself an m-spec or multisexual person—recognized us in his research, which he picked up from at the point our lovely Hirschfeld left off, basically. This was later expanded on by Michael D Storm, author of Theories of Sexual Orientation. He reimagined the Kinsey Scale as a two dimensional map, which became the beginnings of the modern Kinsey Scale used in the lgbt community today. He posited it was better able to distinguish asexuals from m-spec people as it defined them less based on sexual preferences, or lack their of, based in gender (which would put both sexualities squarely in the centre of the 1D scale), and more on their self described experiences of attraction. So that's right, you read correctly; the latest rendition of the Kinsey Scale was created in response to a piece that was published after Kinsey's original studies specifically to better include asexuals who were already featured in the study and scale.
Then we move to the "The Sexually Oppressed." Published in 1977, it was a book that did exactly what it set out to do: describe people who were oppressed by heteronormative society and their struggles. It was published by social worker, Harvey L. Gochros and featured the work of Myra T. Johnson in a piece describing the way in which mainstream culture affected asexual women specifically, and how straight feminists often shamed and gatekept them from liberating movements, while straight men continued to be an omnipresent threat via corrective assault and forced institutionalization. It was actually a text book in my college, very good read—goes into the ableism present in sexual oppression as well. I highly recommend it.
Also, just as a bonus, I've included an extra link below to "On the Racialization of Asexuality" by Ianna Hawkins Owen. She goes into depths about how the allosexual vs asexual discourse we see starting in America in the 70's—which has turned into the modern global "ace discourse" of today—started with nationalist discussions that have their roots in white supremacy, the white construction of binary womanhood, and chattel slavery. An offering from my university days.
Anyways, I hope you and any other lovely readers who come across this enjoy and educate yourselves a bit. Knowledge is power!
P.S. I could not find "The Sexually Oppressed" available online for some reason (but mind you, I am very bad at computers) so I linked a website that should show you the nearest library in your area that carries it. It's a very popular social work read.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/asexuality-history-internet-identity-queer-archive.html
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/Asexual-Manifesto-Lisa-Orlando.pdf
https://books.google.ca/books?id=XbgTAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT113&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.ca/books?id=IH2GCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA122&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://www.worldcat.org/title/sexually-oppressed/oclc/925168401&referer=brief_results
sorry allos, this car park is for aspecs ONLY
Wait are we allowed to use cheating memes to make polyam positivity posts now because if so I’m down to go off
OK I’M GONNA GO AHEAD YALL
I MADE SUM
: D
More of ‘em!
Growing up aro was hating popular 2000s music about love and infatuation but then later realizing it SLAPS despite unfortunate lyrics
Apparently there's a superstition about tomatoes being the "love apple" cause when you eat them apparently they're supposed to make you fall in love and as an aroace who hates tomatoes this explains alot lmao
I’ve decided my new life goal is to live in a queer tiny house commune. Just a bunch of queers with our own little tiny houses living in intentional community together. Probably on the outskirts of a city. We can share cars cuz I’m sure as shit not gonna buy one. Maybe we can have a small vegetable farm or bee farm. I will also have a cat.
I’m literally dead serious, if anyone knows how to go about living in a tiny house or in a non-religious-affiliated commune, pass me the deets.
Finally!! A couple’s tent for me and my baby!!😍
I don’t think I ever realized how kind of socially isolated being aro/ace made me (before I knew I was) like so many games in childhood are about relationships. Who’s your crush, how many children will you have, do you have a list of your future kids names? School dances and celebrity crushes and my parents always asking when I was going to start dating. Me always saying I was focusing on school. Sleepovers and really wanting to gossip except it was always about boys (and girls, once friends came out) and I never had anything to add. “We’re too young to be dating seriously,” something I said from ages 12-21, when I realized. Celebrating marriage equality and realizing that I didn’t fit into the “now I’ll be able to get married” group either. My roommate telling me “once you’re in love, you’ll understand” when I told her that her boyfriend being over 24/7 was annoying. Trying to get into the bachelor/bachelorette but it never sticks. Every teen based tv show is about romance. Every adult show is about affairs. I’ve never seen one 20-something character say they didn’t want to date and have it not be treated like they’re emotionally unavailable or just stubborn. The age of women reclaiming their sexuality, my friends talking freely about how they had sex the other night and me in the corner going “yay you! Also gross” but not really because I want to support them but I never want it for myself. Realizing it’s going to be hard to buy a house on one salary. Realizing some of my questions about the future might stem from being aro/ace and some might be from mental illness. Hearing single female figures I look up to in my life being called uptight and “maybe if she’d just get some, she would loosen up”. Wondering if anyone’s ever said that about me. Wondering if my personality will be condensed into my romantic history. Thinking about how in high school, a gay guy offered to give me my first kiss because it wouldn’t mean anything and I said I wanted my first kiss to mean something and now I don’t want a first kiss at all. How every day at work, I see families and parents and kids and how I know I don’t want that, but they all seem so happy. There’s not anyone I know who’s older and single and happy with it, and I don’t know how to get there myself
CRIES
aroace on main hours, apparently
[ID: Three screenshots from Discord.
The first image shows a message by max that reads “wait. people are DATING?(nine question marks) i may be stupid(comma)”.
The second image shows two messages. The first message has a blacked out username and reads “[redacted] and i are dating. Have been for almost two months” and the second message is by max again and reads “(italicized) WHAT. THAT LONG?(seven question marks)”
The third image shows one more message from max that reads “ok tbh tho. I saw [redacted] and [redacted] refering to each other as bf and gf. and i was like “oh its just an inside joke or smth” :)” END ID]
I have a favour to ask, the canvas contest, if you other aces don't know what to vote for in romance, please vote for City Vamps. It has a ace rep who is really cool, and the friendships are really good. The characters are really well written so please vote for it!
Hello :)
Unfortunately I have zero clue what this is referring to, but boosting it anyway for people who do!
My aro identity is sort of messy lately. I don't think I want (or am able to experience) romance but I do want tenderness and gay yearning and hips bumping in the kitchen.
Is this a thing?
Oh my god I just stumbled across your blog, and you’re wtfromantic too??? That’s so coollllllll I rarely see any of us!!!
Yes! I have zero clue what romance is nor do I understand it, lol.
what does an aroace future look like? i literally don’t know. none of us know.
the further i venture into adulthood, the more i realize just how much being aro(ace) sets me apart from my peers. i have friends who are married now. everyone else i know intends to get married except like one of my arospec friends. i have friends who are in long-term relationships who are buying things together, making financial investments into their future together. my single friends speak wistfully about the future they know they will have with their future partner.
me? i look into the future and see a huge question mark.
i’m grey/aroflux and ace. if i were to end up in an traditional long-term romantic relationship, how would that look for me? my romance favourability/repulsion fluctuates immensely alongside the flux of my orientation, so i can’t picture any romantic relationship i’m in being stable for more than a few months. maybe a qpr? maybe, but i can’t picture myself wanting to be tied to and dependent on a singular person anyway; idk if that’s cuz of aromanticism or mental illness or neurodivergence or what. a queerplatonic polycule? that seems unrealistic to even think about, since so few people want qprs and so few people are polyamorous.
or i could be single for life. it sounds deceptively simple, but what would that look like realistically? how would i get the support i need when all my friends are busy building their lives with their families (with or without children)? how would i avoid always feeling like a third wheel? what would i be building, if not a family of my own? how would i navigate an adult world that caters to married family units? i’m 22 and i don’t even have a ballpark idea of what i want to do with my life work-wise, so the idea of like, putting [the energy that would have gone into building a family] into my work seems doubtful. i think, personally, if i was single for life i would struggle hard.
i can’t picture what a happy aroace future looks like for me. that doesn’t mean i won’t have one - i fully intend to be happy and i do think it’s possible. i just don’t know how. and not being able to picture a future for yourself… if you know the feeling, you know how terrifying, empty, and hopeless it can be.
there’s no model for us aros. no destination. no roadmap. we don’t know where we’re going and we don’t know how to get there. it’s scary.
Y'know, whenever people want to talk about why aspec people 'count' as an oppressed identity, they tend to go for the big stuff like corrective rape and conversion therapy. And like, we should absolutely talk about that stuff. Obviously those things are terrible and important and we need to raise awareness and deal with them.
But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn't conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn't know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.
You're not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it's not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You're not going to get a 'normal' relationship, because you are not 'normal', and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that's bad.
You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete'.
You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren't comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects'.
You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it's totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you're attracted to because they can't imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.
And then you get older and realise that one day you're going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down' with a primary partner and you don't know what you're going to do after that because you straight up don't have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending' looks like for someone like you.
(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you're not oppressed at all. That you're like this because you don't want to have sex, and/or you don't want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)
Even if you're grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you're not experiencing them the 'normal' way and that that's going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.
If you're aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you're going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you've chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed' at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.
This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we've all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it's big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.
I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you're going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn't we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don't have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?
So you know what? If you're aspec and you relate to anything I've said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven't mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it's enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we're unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over' because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay' and something we should just be expected to 'put up with'.
No matter what anybody tells you, we have the right to demand more from life than this.
OP, I hope it's okay to expand on this, but I just wanna add how it's nearly impossible to be self sustaining while being single.
The fact that you get tax benefits for being married and having children as well as the dual-income household is something aspecs are barred from on an inherent basis because of our identities. Not to mention intersections like other queer identities, neurodivergency, disability, mental illness, chronic illness, and a host of other things I can't think of right now.
Your breakdown of the social impact of what we face and how deeply we've internalized all that was spot on, and everyone who still doesn't understand what aspecs experience needs to read it. I feel that it's also important to talk about how this system either guarantees we'll be working poor or that we force ourselves into unhappy normative relationships to avoid it.
And like. I wish aphobes would shut the fuck up about how our suffering and discrimination starts and ends with "someone was mean to me online uwu" because I'm tired of people suggesting aspecs need to have their identities raped out of them, and then turn right around and call us toxic perverts.
When the last day of ace week falls on Halloween and there’s a blue moon:
My love and appreciation for alloaro sapphics is vast and unending! They make my heart full and put a smile on my face whenever I see them. Alloaro sapphics are undeniably outstanding!!