Godless asexual

I'm Siggy.  I've officially left Tumblr but will occasionally post links. Find me on A Trivial Knot, The Asexual Agenda, The Ace Community Survey, or my pillowfort.

[godlessace]

I was peeking at Ace Community Survey data and had a revelatory moment.  As of the end of 2020, Tumblr is no longer the largest source of re

Reposting this one for the Tumblr folks.

[aroaceconfessions]

M0ses sumny has an album called Aromanticism and has been included on aspec musician lists but today has said he isn't ace, aro or queer at all and doesn't like that people try to put him in a box, despite previously alluding to it all the time, and that his identity is to complex to be marketable (unlike aromanticism?) and that minoritized (?) Identities are limiting, I'm frustrated he's benefited from our label but now says he's above all that and he's never been explicit about is identity (...see album name) and it's frustrating people would assume he's aromantic, also instead of calling him out for anything everyone is congratulating him on being so deep, it feels like the kind of thing that only happens with aspec identities

[slightlystars]

@geoduckdude sorry idk how to reply pics, his Twitter is deleted now, I think something to do with fka twigs disclosing her abuse recently but I'm not sure what he said about that

The original thread was longer but I guess it's gone now

[enbees-and-aros]

[ID: Two tweets by Moses Sumney that read:

“I’m not aromantic. I've never explicitly said anywhere that I was. What I did was release a complex record about lovelessness that is pretty romantic, lyrically and sonically. And followed it up with a long album about how my identity is too complex for catch-all terms. Lol

The fact is if I had come out as anything, played the game as much as I've been told to, I would have a million more opportunities available to me. I've said no to queer brand looks $$ and magazine covers because I didn't want to take up that space. I haven't gained anything.” END ID]

[godlessace]

Hey, so I’m a fan of Moses Sumney, and I wrote an essay about his album Grae.  These tweets are consistent with stuff that he’s said in the past.  For example:

I have never identified, publicly or privately, as queer.  But I don’t correct people when they say that. I try not to correct people too much these days, because the desire to do so stems from ego. And I realised at some point that proclamations of identification are largely for other people, not for the self.

(source at link)

As I argued, a major theme in Grae is the dangers of expressing yourself, because people think what you’re expressing is your whole self.  Sing about aromanticism, and people assume it’s your whole identity, or that you “hate love” (his words).  Personal experiences are often more complicated, with different parts in dialectic.

This is very resonant with gray experience.  Moses Sumney has never identified with gray-romanticism, but our interpretation neither assumes nor relies on his identity.

And FWIW, the desire to avoid labels is kinda gray in itself.  People in the gray areas feel ambivalent towards labels all the time.  If a person express affinity with a label one day, and they disidentify with it another day, that’s not bait and switch, sometimes that’s just the gray life.

[escapetheantiacebrigade]

This is your chance to Escape the Anti-Ace Brigade: an October 2020 giveaway event. Read more about the project or sign up today to request a free Pillowfort invite.

[godlessace]

An expression of support

cn: drama, in relation to FYA and the aro community

Recently I’ve seen a bunch of aro bloggers get angry at a recent post by mod Rose of Fuck Yeah Asexual (FYA).  The post has been deleted, but you can see reblogs such as this one.

I thought the original post was extremely muddled and offensively ignorant.  There were at least three separate instances of Rose “advising” aro people, completely disconnected from what people in the aro community are already doing, and why they do it.  And it’s worth mentioning FYA already had a terrible reputation in the aro community so it’s not like that “advice” was ever going to turn out well.

This wouldn’t be noteworthy, except that FYA is one of the most popular ace tumblrs.  As an ace activist I find their behavior embarrassing.  If Rose really needed to work through some half-baked reflections on aro people, they should have chosen a less public forum, with editing capabilities.

I’ve criticized Rose very harshly lately, first in relation to Ace Day, and then implicitly in a post about disidentification.  That’s kind of the tip of the iceberg.  I do not follow FYA, but every time I incidentally see what they’re up to I find myself shaking my head.  I usually don’t bring it up, because at this point it is literally impossible for me to publicly express my honest opinion without it becoming a call-out.

I don’t want people harassing Rose or the other mods of FYA about this.  I don’t demand apologies, because I don’t think a single apology could ever solve the underlying problem. I just think people should stop following or collaborating with Rose.

[aroacearborvitae]

did you ever publish any results for your surveys on romance repulsion ?? i wanna know why i'm like this ::(

oof dude I forgot what you were talking abt and had to go back and look and that was 2 yrs ago,, no I did not ever publish anything bc the survey was shared among a lot of alloro aces who answered the first question “do you experience both repulsions” (bc the survey was abt both) with yes, which massively skewed the results. someone in a server I was in was kind enough to correct the results accounting for that, but I still was too uncomfortable with the whole thing at that point to post it. but it also it was just recording the signs/symptoms of repulsions, not anything abt why, so it’s probably not what you’re looking for.

however, about a year ago, I did make this edgy vent post which had a lot of thoughtful, insightful responses I highly recommend reading, and this post abt my experiences with romance repulsion as a kid.

but as for knowing why you have repulsion... it’s possible none of us will ever know, and I’m not sure smth like that could be captured in survey form bc the “reason” will vary so much from person to person and a lot of ppl w repulsion may not have any idea themselves. it’s tricky! and does it even matter? does identifying a source have any potential of lessening or preventing repulsion? is that even the end goal?

searching “romance repulsion” on my blog will get you some good posts abt it, but that’s abt all I can give you, sorry. you’re welcome to send more asks if you’d like tho bc it’s a rly interesting topic and I like talking abt it

[godlessace]

You might be interested in another survey by @arosnowflake​ that reported on romance and sex repulsion.

I know about that one because last year I wrote a review of extant aro community surveys, and I included a paragraph about it.  It’s the only survey I know of which addressed romance repulsion and produced a report.

[godlessace]

The full album just released.

[redbeardace]

People online used to long for IRL ace gatherings and now that there are IRL ace gatherings, they’re all trying to figure out how to meet online.

On the plus side, if you typically don’t/can’t/won’t go to your local IRL ace meetup group, but you’d like to connect with them, check them out this month! Many of them are going to be holding (/attempting…) online events, because all the in person events have been canceled.

[redbeardace]

How do people ask for help on projects and things?

Because it seems like whenever I ask for help on things, I get some interest and absolutely zero follow-through.  It takes a lot of energy out of me to ask for help.  It takes a lot of energy out of me to try to explain what needs to be done.  It takes a lot of energy out of me to simply deal with the thought of managing collaboration.

And I do I with the hope that it will make things easier overall, because there will be more hands carrying the weight and I won’t be doing it all alone.

But then.  Nothing.  No one actually joins in to help out.

So I’m left with no energy, trying to carry the whole weight of the thing, wondering what the point of bothering even is, if no one else cares.  This is the second project in just a few months where this has happened.  At least in the last one, I got a few lookee-loos.  This one didn’t even get that.

I know I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t know what.

[godlessace]

The Ace Community Survey gets a lot of new volunteers, but only a small fraction of those make any contribution. The strategy is to cast a wide net, make sure everyone has a clear idea of how they could help, and work to keep the active contributors for a long time.

Your approach seems to be based around more one-off projects, and asking for volunteers separately each time. But maybe it would help to grow a list of people who you could contact for any project?

[godlessace]

“Ace and Arrow”, original design, based on model by Robert Lang

[godlessace]

So, this is out now.

[godlessace]

Selected lyrics/quotations:

Cuz I've held you in place Of a wife, in the space A spouse would hold Only with you I'm safe

And the most significant thing that any person can do but especially black women and men is to think about who gave them their definitions and rewrite those definitions for themselves

(She had that) masculine thing down Shoulders and back straight Never slumping, never round 

I, I really do insist that others recognize my inherent multiplicity What I no longer do is take pains to explain it or defend it

I'm not at peace with dying alone But I'm not at war either

[godlessace]

So, this is out now.

[godlessace]

Any nominations for articles or essays from ASAW to be included in the Asexual Agenda linkspam tomorrow?

[redbeardace]

B&W Pride Flag Representations

I was looking at the proposal for the inclusion of the trans flag in the emoji standard and the thing that jumped out at me was that they had to include a monochrome, pure black and white substitute for the flag.  They proposed a flag with the transgender symbol on it.  Makes sense.

But… How can you do that for other flags?

Ace Flag, sure: ♠️ Lesbian Flag, probably: ⚢ Aro Flag, maybe: 🏹?

But, like, how do you represent the bi flag or non-binary flag or pan flag in an unambiguous way?

[redbeardace]

sennkestra

Wait,  how  did the germany  and  france  and  austria  and  armenia  and  belgium  and  bulgaria  etc.  do  their  flag  emojis?

Trickery and magic, mostly.

And by that, I mean I think their monochrome representation is just something like “DE” and “FR”, etc.

Or rather, “🇩🇪” or “🇫🇷” to be a bit more specific.

Unicode has a huge space for characters and symbols and emoji, but instead of actually using that all for each individual pictogram, many emoji are actually composites of two or more characters.  This provides a natural fallback:  If software hasn’t been updated to show a new emoji, it will often show these other characters.

In the case of country flags, there are a special set of characters known as “Regional Indicator Symbols”.  These look like the capital letters A-Z, but because they’re these “Regional Indicator Symbols”, if two of them are combined into an ISO country code, it can be turned into that country’s flag.  But if your display doesn’t support emoji, it will just display “🇫🇷“ or whatever the country code is.  I would imagine that’s what the fallback for monochrome displays would be, too.

For other emoji, they may be composites of two other emoji, plus a few special glue characters in the middle.  For instance, the “Mx. Claus” emoji I mentioned earlier today is actually a combination of “Gender Neutral Adult” and “Christmas Tree”:  🧑🎄  The Trans Flag is “Blank Flag”, “Transgender Symbol”:  🏳⚧  This allows for some kinda complicated combinations, which is how they build the different skin tone, gender, hair color, and age combinations for people emoji.

But, for something like “Elderly Black Woman Playing Water Polo”, even though it’s made up of “Person Playing Water Polo” + “Venus Symbol” + “Age Modifier 4″ + “Skin Tone 3″ or whatever, you can make a B&W drawing that depicts it.  So those components don’t have to be the fallback.

Which brings us back to pride flags.  They don’t have those regional country codes, and they’re not all easily described in terms of other characters, so I have no idea what the various fallbacks would be.  In some cases, there may be a set of characters that makes sense for a composition, but that would look terrible for a B&W rendition of a flag.

[redbeardace]

🏳🚲

🏳🍳

🏳💻🚫

🏳🐻

[redbeardace]

BTW, this is the B&W Rainbow flag in Notepad:

[nextstepcake]

Well, if it just needs to have approximately the right number of stripes…

I suspect using actual letters is probably breaking the rules, but if not…..

[redbeardace]

The submission guidelines also ask that you provide an 18x18 pixel image to “provide immediate feedback (to you and the committee) as to whether the image is distinctive enough“…

So that’s a bit of a problem.

[godlessace]

[godlessace]

In sex-positive feminism, people who don’t like to give oral sex are frequently the object of derision, and moral approbation.

@epochryphal this might interest you.

[godlessace]

Sex-favorable aces have a terrible case of “you’re valid”s

I have long observed (since 2013!) that aces are fond of validating the existence of sex-favorable aces,* but there is a curious lack of personal narratives or really any explanation of what that entails.  It’s all “You’re valid!” and “Shout out to sex-favorable aces” and “Solidarity with sex-favorable aces”.

This is understandable, since most sex-favorable aces want validation (whatever that means) and do not want to share deeply personal details.  But it's a problem, because it leaves in place a lot of common assumptions.  For example, people often seem to think that being sex-favorable means being enthusiastic about sex, and proceed to apply compulsory sexuality to sex-favorable people.

It’s also bad rhetorical strategy.  When you talk about sex-favorable aces, that presents an apparent paradox to people, which you’re asserting isn’t a paradox (and it isn’t), but not saying why.  Why do sex-favorable aces identify as ace (either asexual or gray/demi)?  What experiences set us apart from allo people?

The lack of personal narratives of sex-favorable aces is the reason I wrote up an article briefly describing 20 different narratives.  I wrote that in 2016, and I am still linking to it, and other people are still linking to it.  But I feel it is ridiculous that this is still the authoritative article.  I want more people to talk about specific narratives.  Depersonalize them, if you must (as I did).

The other day I saw a sexually active asexual person being interviewed in Vice. It was fine, although a bit limited to just one person’s experience.  But thinking back on it, I realized: tumblr is officially being outdone by mainstream news sources!

-----------------------

[cross-posted to Pillowfort]

*At the link I talk about aces who like sex, which isn’t quite the same as sex-favorable aces, but close enough that the commentary extends to both groups.

[godlessace]

Aros: I can promote your commentary

I run a prominent group blog, The Asexual Agenda, and one of our goals is to promote insightful commentary.  Although we are an ace blog, we regularly promote and discuss content from the aro community as well–including allo aro stuff.  If you have some commentary, and would like people to see it and talk about it, I’m here for you, so let me know.

This is an especially great opportunity if for some reason you want the attention of people in the ace community.  For example, we recently hosted a collection of aro complaints about ace communities.

If this offer interests you, then I have another post with further details and caveats.  The most important detail is that I can promote you in two ways: link to your content, or host it.  Message me and we can discuss our approach.

And although I’m emphasizing that this offer is open to aros, naturally it is open to aces as well.

[godlessace]

Does the aro community care?

cn: ace & aro community politicking

I’ve been pointed to a thread on arocalypse, on the subject of QPR revisionism—in which people claim, counterfactually and unnecessarily, that the term “queerplatonic relationship” originated in aro communities.  Although a lot of the thread consists of established community members making it pretty clear they don’t actually care about the problem.

That’s fair, you care about the problems you care about.  But it’s strange coming from a community that wants the ace community to care about their problems.

I run a popular ace blog, and I have a standing offer to promote content from the aro community.  I was also part of precisely the community that actually did coin “QPR”.  So it seems that we care about aro community problems, but established aro community members don’t care about our problems.  I can’t make any credible threats to stop promoting aro content, because the truth is, my offer doesn’t coming from a place of altruism.  I promote aro content because I know our readers want to see it--because they care.

But I will say this.  QPR revisionism is often incidental, a single sentence in a larger post about some other aro concern.  I will silently blacklist these posts.  My actions will have no impact whatsoever, but I must do it out of principle, same way I must blacklist posts that incidentally include antagonism towards grayros or alloaros.  So that’s that.