idk can we stop…treating a.ce disc.ourse like it’s some haha funney cringe compilation or whatever the fuck because it fucking destroyed the entire ace and aro communities. there is no solid aspec community on tumblr anymore (which was by far the biggest number of aspec ppl). exclusionists took our community and fucking smashed it to pieces and y'all treat it as this fucking stupid joke when they traumatized, gaslit, and abused an entire group of queer people back into the closet. fuck every single person who doesn’t take that seriously.
My personal experience is just that, but it’s really indicative that I have watched almost every single ace and aro person I know, irl and online, actively recloset themselves as a direct result of the consequences of The Disc Horse™
I watched irl queer groups disintegrate bc a few ppl who got into leadership positions used that to make the space hostile towards ace ppl (among others as well), saw friends go from being loud and proud aces n aros to actively avoiding any mention of it and letting ppl assume their sexuality. I myself, having been IDing as ace for 10 years at least, have in the past couple since this whole “"discourse”“ came into being, actively and intentionally stopped telling anyone at all that I’m ace. To put that in some kind of perspective, I am incredibly out as trans and will actively out myself pretty constantly except to total strangers I will never see again. I feel safer telling ppl I’m trans than ace. Especially in queer spaces. It’s fucked me up so much I didn’t even quite grasp how much but today my therapist asked me for the first time about like romantic relationships and I physically could not say I am aro and ace. Completely incapable, utterly frozen, and I just kinda let her believe what she will. Ironically the fact that I’ve gone from being willing and ready to tell ppl I’m ace as just another facet of myself to entirely unable and unsolicited to tell anyone, is probably a thing one might want to talk w one’s therapist about.
This has really fucked not just the community at large but fucked up individual ace ppl in so many ways. It’s not something “funny” or remotely harmless, it’s absolutely devastated us.
for people in the notes looking for “elder” aces, i just wanna say that i’m 28 years old and am also desperately searching for that representation. i first found out about asexuality through tumblr when i was 21 and started identifying as asexual when i was 21-22 (around 2012). i’ve sought other online ace communities but nothing compared to tumblr. i mean, props to aven for existing as a repository of resources but in terms of just chatting with other aces “in the wild” as it were, tumblr was the perfect place.
but then this fucking shit happened. around 2015 is when it really kicked into high gear. “discoursers” or exclusionists or aphobes or however you want to refer to them consider asexuality to be a joke and that everyone who identifies as ace is a cringey cishet college-aged white girl who loves dr who. recycled biphobia, homophobia, and even terf rhetoric made its way into the mainstream tumblr conscious by reframing the arguments to target ace people (you’re only X because you’re ugly/can’t get laid; you aren’t part of the community if your partner is of a different gender; maybe something happened to you to make you this way; have you had your hormones checked?; by accepting this identity you are allowing the oppressor to infiltrate our spaces; etc.). you know, in case you think this is just about “snick snack” memes.
this has alienated ace people of color, who already struggle with desexualization/hypersexualization, disabled aces, ace survivors, trans aces, mentally ill aces, neurodiverse/AUTISTIC ACES (you guys get REAL fuckin nervous when i highlight that the majority of your jeering about aces’ perceived awkwardness, missed social cues, infantilization/dehumanization, or “unfuckability”/“cringey-ness” are repackaged ableism, especially considering that a good percentage of the ace community is also autistic), and both young AND older aces.
younger people are being discouraged from exploring the possibility of being asexual by exclusionists for reasons that vary from internalized homophobia to asexuality being a side effect of SSRIs. they are being told that they are “actually” something other than what they say they are, or that they are broken, or that they’re too young to know, or that our ace identity is simultaneously something that must be excruciatingly examined to determine its “cause” yet so irrelevant that it’s unworthy of discussion or representation—”nobody cares that you don’t want to have sex”. i WISH i had known about asexuality as a teenager, as a kid. I wish i had saved myself from so much grief, abuse, pain, and corrective rape by not subjecting myself to experiences that i hoped would “fix” me.
and older people like me, who in the grand scheme of things is uhhh really not that much older than the majority of tumblr, are ridiculed for having a presence on tumblr in general, let alone as an asexual person. aces over 30? 40? 50? unicorns. conjured rhetoric. people straight-up don’t believe they exist. people ten years my junior attempt to deny and erase the lived history of aces by saying asexuality was “invented” only ten years ago. i have been terrified of attempting to enter Q* spaces irl because i have heard from even my IRL gay friends that aces do not belong, that “it’s not important enough to form an identity around”, that we are not oppressed enough or we just desperately want to be oppressed.
i have only heard in passing of people much older than i am who are ace. i have absolutely zero examples to turn to of people like me continuing to live a long life or any evidence that i am worth loving unless i become a parent, which i don’t want to do. when you’re a teenager there’s more discussion about sexual boundaries, but what about dating in my 30s? what adult is going to be satisfied knowing i can never validate their sexual attraction, unless they were ace like me (less than 1% of the population)? am i forced to be alone forever? you can imagine how bleak my future feels.
it pisses me off that i’m seen as a curmudgeon who “just doesn’t get the young people’s humor” when i have to beg people that i consider friends, for the eight billionth time, to stop making/reblogging jokes about how “cringey” aces are or are tongue-in-cheek declaring themselves to be aphobes, and then those people try to assuage me with respectability politics about how it’s about “THOSE” aces on tumblr and not, yknow, me, who is “one of the good ones”. and since the jokes themselves are so juvenile, it further compounds on the poor social graces and stoicism assumed of asexual people if I’m getting upset over ace war criminal moodboards or whatever the fuck. EVERY time i post about asexual ANYTHING on tumblr, to this day, i lose followers. without fail. people dont bat a lash when i spam 20 untagged posts in a row about a fandom they dont care about but i post two positive words about asexuality and theyre gone.
the environment promoted on tumblr condemns asexuality as a social deficit, as an attack on other Q* identities, as a subject of derision and embarrassment, as an identity lacking in “woke” capital, and makes every effort to expunge us from communities we have already belonged to in favor of making our own while also actively seeking out and dismantling those communities. if tumblr really is in its last days, i sincerely hope that these awful practices will die with it.
this picture was taken in 1973, asexuality has been part of the lgbt+ community longer than you’ve been alive.
The first mentions of asexuality as an orientation are from a leaflet published in 1896 and the X on the Kinsey Scale for non-sexual was added in 1948. It was not invented by white teenage old girls on Tumblr.
ASEXUALITY WAS NOT INVENTED BY TEENAGE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.
For more information on sexual history read this http://wiki.asexuality.org/Asexual_history
Before aromanticism was used as a term there was non-limerant. Limerance described romantic attraction and so a non-linemerant person didn’t experience romantic attraction. It has a lot of similarities to aromanticism and it’s first documented appearance was in a book called ‘love and limerance’ published in 1979.
Aromanticism was also not invented by white girls on tumblr.
AROMANTICISM WAS NOT INVENTED BY WHITE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.
Tumblr might be the first place you saw these terms and where they are most used but the orientations were not invented here maybe the words were first used by a lot of people on here but the orientations not.
(Image transcription: The sign behind them reads: “YEA - IT’S A HEAVY TRIP. BUT! This is a chance to CHOOSE YOUR OWN LABEL instead of having someone else do it for you: straight, asexual, lesbian, bisexual, anti-label, dyke separatist, ?, lesbian feminist, [something partially obscured but i think it might say anti-sexual], or whatever”)
When I saw the picture I just started crying and what came after it… I cant, is like someone put a hand on my shoulder and said “is okay to exist” and I’m sobbing right now.
I did know I needed this. But I never thought it would get me to tears. I never knew I needed it for me, to show to myself, to tell me it’s fine to be me.
I can’t stop crying, fuck.
💖💖💖💖💖💖💖
This is why representation is important. This is why visibility is important.
Sometimes I see exclusionists shooting their mouths off about how the way you can tell aces aren’t oppressed is that our main need is for representation, that our positivity posts are about being valid.
And I’m just like… you have maybe temporarily forgotten what it is like to not see yourself reflected anywhere?? You maybe have been lucky enough to find people like you in history and in media before you came out?? Perhaps you are blissfully unaware that if you don’t have that kind of representation, the only messages you get are that you are a shitty gross broken person that doesn’t have any worth????? Possibly you do not know the effect of hearing that from both the straight and the “LGBT” communities at once??
I don’t know if anybody has studied this (I’m gonna find out!) but I would bet a lot of money that that stuff has a huge impact on health, and that it’s a big part of the reason that m-spec and a-spec people (including aros) have such incredibly high rates of things like suicidality.
We’re valid. We have worth. We are incredible people, part of incredible communities and cultures and histories. We deserve to exist, and the world is much better off with us.
There were older aces on here. I watched 2 ace folx in their late 30s, one in her early 50s and one in her late 40s get chased off of here by constant harassment. I’m in contact with all 3 on other platforms and have been friends with all of them for 5+ years, so.
One of them specifically came to Tumblr to be a resource for younger aces (the one in her late 40s) and left in horrified disgust over the level of direct, awful harassment she received.
So, yeaaaaaaah, they’re out there, and Tumblr dis.course succeeded in making Tumblr so vile to them that they left.
I also want to point out the exclus also usually have sideblogs for this stuff, so they can choose when they engage in dis.course, but us Aces can’t choose to engage or not engage in it, because we are always Asexual.
We especially can’t escape when it’s purposefully flooded into our positivity tags.
So: I am asexual. I hate it when people are actively working to shove us back into the closet and fracture our community when we have been acknowledged as existing since ancient times, and when we have had a term to name ourselves since the 1900s.
This is our history, we have always been here, we will always be here.
-FemaleWarrior, She/They
“this has alienated ace people of color, who already struggle with desexualization/hypersexualization, disabled aces, ace survivors, trans aces, mentally ill aces, neurodiverse/AUTISTIC ACES (you guys get REAL fuckin nervous when i highlight that the majority of your jeering about aces’ perceived awkwardness, missed social cues, infantilization/dehumanization, or “unfuckability”/“cringey-ness” are repackaged ableism, especially considering that a good percentage of the ace community is also autistic), and both young AND older aces.”
YOOOOOOOO.
Young aroace here! I was not around for the “d!scourse” era, but after a long post of negatives, I want to add on a little positivity and hope for the future. I’m 18, and I learned about asexuality and aromanticism through tumblr. I’ve been IDing as such for a few years now, and I have never received hate. I started college this fall, and joined my school’s a-spec-tacular group, a club put on by the Queer Student Cultural Center that gives a-spec individuals a place to talk and meet each other in real life. The room we meet in has aro and ace flags hanging on the walls with all the other identities, and I have never felt like I can’t be free to be myself in that room. I am out and proud to pretty much everyone in my life, and the vast majority of them are supportive. I wear black and white rings, and earrings with ace of spades playing cards on them, and my space necklace, and last year during Asexual awareness week, I baked a cake with black, grey, white, and purple layers. I just want people to know that our culture is not lost, and being able to find that community and see people like ourselves is so valuable to younger aces and aros like me. I went through old posts, and I was able to see that I was not alone, not broken, and I learned to take pride in who I am. I think, if we can continue to spread ace positivity and information and help younger aces and questioning people, then the exclusionists haven’t won. And I think things are getting better.
