When the online ace community was young and mostly on AVEN, we had an isolation problem. A lot of ace people grow up feeling isolated and broken, and while finding out that other people are like you and you're not broken is a massive relief, it's still very isolating to never see people like you in the real world. At the time, there were NO asexual people in media or discussed in general health or psychology education; most of us had reached adulthood without ever hearing the word. If someone on TV wasn't sexually attracted to people, it meant they were extremely ill and needed medical attention. If someone on TV wasn't romantically attracted to people, they were Incapable Of Human Feeling and probably going to kill people. Ace people have always been in the queer community, but many of us didn't have local queer communities and some aces didn't consider themselves queer, and unlike isolated gay people, there was no common knowledge (approving or disapproving) of our existence in society beyond 'this person is broken and should be in an asylum'.
We were inventing our own culture at the time. The cake, the violet colour-coding that was later adopted by the flag (I think the colour coding came from the AVEN website's colour scheme which was one of the available phpbb colour schemes, which I find endlessly amusing -- AVEN was the purple forum we went to, so asexuality was purple), all that good stuff. But we wanted a public 'tell', something we could wear in public and see each other and know that other aces existed, without having to randomly interrogate strangers about their sexuality.
The ring orientation was decided on here:
You can read the whole archived thread, if 18-year-old rambling forum discussions interest you. I'm not sure why we moved to the right middle finger instead of the left but that was the agreed-upon hand. There's a bit more public visibility these days but I'm still pretty sad that the good ole ace ring is less popular than it used to be.
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