Hey, I’d really appreciate if you’d tag this as asexual since as an allosexual aromantic I would like to filter asexual content so I can decide if I feel comfortable seeing it. No hate towards asexuals I promise! It’s just that quite a bit of asexual content I see is very arophobic. Thanks so much!
I thought I was going to let this go, because I don’t want to start to drama and tumblr can have a disturbing habit of dogpiling that I don’t want to perpetuate…but the more I thought about it I just don’t want to let this go.
I also don’t want to privately message you about it, because you decided to take this to a public forum on my post where everyone has to read your words, so now we’re going to talk about it.
Please note that I am not basing this on your one reply to my post detailed above - I looked into why you might feel this way and noted this on your profile:
“Not all aro’s are ace, just like not all ace’s are aro. We aro’s already deal with so much erasure and hatred and we need solidarity from the ace community instead of hatred toward aro’s who aren’t also ace. The ace community is only recently gaining visibility and support from the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community. Don’t you remember when you were as erased as we are now? I’m not asking for a whole lot here. I’m simply asking people to tag asexual content as such.”
Okay. Do you not see the irony here? No? Let’s unpack.
In short: your response to my post literally asks asexual people to enable you to erase them, because you find us uncomfortable. You say it is because you do not want aromantic experiences to be erased but you are explicitly coding my identity as a trigger warning and asking it to be treated as such.
There are two key things here.
1) You are asking for a lot. It is not the responsibility of asexual people to make ourselves invisible for you. The mere existence of our identity does not deserve to be a trigger warning. You are responsible for your own consumption of content on the internet. You can ask for your needs to be met, but you don’t get to say that erasing ourselves for you is nothing. That is not and never will be your decision.
2) You went out of your way to post on a post made explicitly about asexuality, by an asexual person, about asexual representation in particular…to tell us that our experience, our existence, is something that should be filtered out and sanitised for you. Maybe you don’t mean that as hate, but it is not okay, and frankly reads rather a lot like ‘no offense, but can you go back to the closet. I don’t hate you, you just make me uncomfortable by virtue of existing.’
And that sounds horribly familiar in a way I feel like you should understand.
I believe you when you say you don’t mean any hate towards asexual people, but the implications of your words were hateful, and reading your reply felt like getting punched in the throat.
But let’s look some more at the post which you so object to.
It is very clear from the initial ask at the top of this post that this story/post is going to be dealing with asexuality and an asexual protagonist. Therefore, regardless of the issue of how it is tagged in my original post or any reblogged versions of my post, there is no version of it where the asexuality is going to sneak up on you. It is not hidden. This means that on the most basic level the post does allow you to decide whether to read it or not based solely on the fact it includes asexual content, and therefore you already have control of your experience and the ability and choice to not engage.
You cannot pretend you didn’t know it was about asexuality because you posted specifically about the fact it was about asexuality.
Therefore, you could have simply skipped and that would have been fine. You do you. Stay safe.
However, you didn’t do that.
Which means this is not about your boundaries anymore, it is about you wanting us to stop being there entirely. It is you wanting to erase us even if you are not fully conscious of that. It is you being spectacularly disrespectful to asexual people in the way that you want to avoid for yourself.
I don’t get to filter you out when you literally come onto my post and force me to get a notification about how much my existence makes you uncomfortable, and I’m not entirely convinced you paused to think or care if your response and requests made me or any asexual seeing it comfortable or not.
Did you read the story? I’m guessing you didn’t before you told us to be more invisible.
This post is about how many people try and reduce asexual needs, desires and representation to a joke. It is, despite the fantasy setting, me navigating my personal experiences with my identity that I do not see talked about or reflected a lot. It is me trying not to feel alone. Me trying not to feel invisible and erased. Me trying not to feel like everything I want in my life is wrong. Me still trying to feel like what I am is okay years after coming out, because people like you consistently remind me in quiet little ways that what I am is not ‘normal’ and not accepted in the way that other people get to be. And some days I can breathe past that and some days I can’t and I shouldn’t have to.
To put it bluntly, this post was not made for you. This was our safe space.
Finally, as the added kicker to all of this, if you had bothered to read the story before posting on it, you would have noted that my story explicitly states that regardless of if the romantic asexual protagonist wants love or not…that’s not what’s important. It wouldn’t be wrong even if they didn’t want that. E.g, if they were aromantic, they would still be just as worthy of respect, and they would still be enough.
I’m not aro, so maybe I’m misunderstanding or lacking some deeper nuance, but last I checked I didn’t think that was arophobic. I remember specifically thinking about aro people actually when I was writing that post and thinking ‘hey, I don’t want to act like aro people don’t exist and that romantic love is the end all of end alls because it is not’.
I didn’t want anyone to feel the way I feel now. The way that you made me feel.
TL;DR: Next time skip the obviously asexual post about asexuality. We deserve better than you coming into our space telling us to shrink.
vaporwave
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
yousharknotpass
dededos
areudirty
romaincrisis
