The following message was submitted anonymously to the baceofaces blog under the title “Why I need a REAL asexual community website.” My response follows. I’ve taken a lot of time composing it because I think it will set a precedent that will determine whether some people decide to support this project. I’ve also been inactive in responding to other messages while I work on it, so I’ll have to get back to some people who have graciously offered support.
PLEASE, yes with the new community site thing. Yes, a million times over.
One of the reasons I gave up on AVEN was that I was banned from the chat service for two weeks because I said I don’t really like small children. I mentioned this when someone asked why I didn’t plan on having/adopting kids- because children were being discussed (positive and negative points, might I add…) I was being “ageist,” as the moderator who came into the chat to kick me out said. No mind that people had
But it’s TOTALLY FINE for the chatters (at least at the time when I left) to be anti-male, anti-sexual people, etc. because it’s the majority opinion. Yanno, because it’s totally fine to justify your misandry, white hate, whatever with “I think I experienced…” or “These totally real statistics by some biased site say…"
I was also once threatened with a permanent ban from the chats for standing up for a male member of the site who was being harassed because “all men are X.” A moderator was summoned into the room and then pulled me into a private chat- where I was told that I was “invalidating the majority of people in this chat and making people feel threatened.” All I was doing was saying that the immediate bias towards a gender (identity) was just as toxic as the apparent hate/ownership men apparently feel over women, and was only going to cause more problems.
Various other instances made me never go into that chatroom again. One being that, moderators AGREED with women saying awful things about men- but one man made a tiny rebuttal and was kicked immediately for aggressive chat behavior. Another was during that whole Ferguson trial where some really nasty anti-cop and anti-white things were being said. Someone brought up a factual statistic about crime and was attacked, and then booted from the chatroom. Also, every non-SJW type opinion is either controversial, ableist, sexist (but, yanno, only men can be sexist!), racist, etc.
I haven’t delved too much in the forums, aside from the meetup mart in hope of meeting people IRL. Some of the trending topics I had seen in those days actually kind of made me cringe. “Why do men rape?” is one of them that I remember. It implies that only men rape and can be attackers- which we all know is untrue. “POC CANNOT be racist!” or something along those lines is one that I made the mistake of clicking on- I had hoped that someone would correct the OP, but… Nope. Turned into an apparently justifiable anti-white thread. Maybe it’s been deleted. Maybe not.
I dare say that AVEN is rivaling the obsessive SJW side of Tumblr from what I’d seen when I was there. I haven’t been back since, and the only reason I haven’t deleted my account is that I want to ensure no one takes the username and whatever person might gets associated with me.
We need a less toxic community site who has moderators who are REALLY neutral and nonbiased. I would so join an ace site that doesn’t have the “everything is a trigger and everyone but me/people like me is bad” mentality. I want an open, safe community.
But I’m against what some people have said about “alloromantic allosexuals not being allowed.” Allies are important and if people want to learn and understand, we shouldn’t exclude them. With how invisible our community is, the more education put out there, the better. We can leave the “Ace only” and “Aro only” restrictions/designations to the current Chatzy rooms and some blogs we have here. A general community site should allow all- especially since AVEN does. A community site should actually BE a community that is accepting, not an anti-majority, anti-sexual, whatever place that I’d seen AVEN turn into.
First off, I should maybe acknowledge that I don’t know all the specifics of the situations you’re talking about, not having seen the exact exchanges in question. If people are making violent threats against each other in a forum, I think that will require some kind of intervention on the part of its moderators. If violent threats have been made toward you on AVEN and those were allowed to persist, I would say that’s a problem.
That said, I think my idea of what constitutes a safe space for aces and aros might fundamentally conflict with yours. I’m worried that I didn’t make my intentions clear when I started talking about this project. Here’s the thing: there’s a difference between safety and comfort. I value both the safety and the comfort of other people, but sometimes, making a lot of people safe means making some people uncomfortable.
I’m not very good at taking in generalities, so I’ll elaborate on a specific topic you mentioned. In a discussion about events in Ferguson, Missouri, valuing safety over comfort means taking quick action against any posts containing flippant jokes about the violent deaths of black people (something that AVEN mods have at certain times failed to do for whatever reason). It also means giving black people room to express their completely justified fear, anger, and frustration regarding U.S. police forces and white people. Black people, who factually and verifiably face pervasive life-threatening danger in their everyday lives, need to be allowed to say that cops don’t treat them as human and white people don’t care, because it’s true. That might make you uncomfortable as a white person, but at the end of the conversation you can step away and be at a demonstrably lower risk of being killed during a traffic stop or some other minor encounter with the police. (So can I, by the way.)
Any sufficiently broad and honest study of world history or current events should make us uncomfortable as white men. White men are and long have been over-represented amongst people who show a blatant disregard for basic human decency. (And you don’t have to worry so much about the cops either; turns out 2015 was, statistically speaking, the safest year for American police in decades. I’d give you a list of sources but you can just Google “safest year police” and take your pick.)
It’s very important to keep in mind the real factual context of the world we live in. It’s true that not only men rape. But it’s also true that men are very disproportionately likely to rape, and we need to know why so we can do something about it. It’s true that people of color can be hostile toward white people in general, but that happens in the context of a world where violent domination by white people is still built into so many institutions of governance and authority.
I should also say that, if I were running an AVEN chat and somebody began to talk at length about not liking children, I would have to consider banning that person for a while. I think it’s perfectly valid that not everybody feels comfortable around children or understands how to interact with them. I think that’s a perfectly good reason to decide not to become a parent. In fact, I don’t think you should have to justify not wanting to be a parent at all. But the AVEN chat is often unsurprisingly full of youth who are looking for a place to relax and socialize with other people who understand them. Many of them lack the independence and resources to find that offline precisely because they’re still considered children by the authorities in their lives. We can’t blame them for that. I don’t know if you remember this from being a child yourself, but the only way to stop being a child is to grow up, and most children are doing that all the time.
What I think we need is a safe space for all sorts of aces and aros, but I want to make it clear that such a space can not be a community that ignores or brushes aside the proven reality of these massive ongoing problems in the world. I’m only interested in participating in the foundation of that community if the other people on board agree with this basic principle of prioritizing the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of people in a “majority”.
I would like to reiterate that I’m not in favor of barring anyone from the community on the basis of non-ace, non-aro identity, and affirm that shaming people for sexual attraction or for engaging in respectful, fully consensual sex would present a problem where moderators may have to intervene, because that can hurt a lot of aces and aros for a number of reasons. I’m not so worried about making allies, though. There are already a number of groups working on outreach and education. I want this space to be specifically centered on aces and aros. We don’t have to ban that kind of activity or anything, but I’m not interested in prioritizing it.
