I'm Sciatrix! I'm 24, female, and working on a graduate degree in evolutionary biology. I tend to be a bit wordy. I'm also ace. I focus a lot on that subject here. I used to run Writing From Factor X, and now I'm part of the Asexual Agenda team. You can contact me here or there. Or just ask me something.
so I dunno if you guys have heard about Imzy, that social media platform what is still in beta? I got an invite from a friend and am currently poking around, and guys it’s awesome esp. if you are a text loving curmudgeon such as myself or if you yearn for the days of livejournal. (It actually also handles graphics and a tumblr-style dash very well, has a very large and quickly growing fandom presence, and wonder of wonders it has nested comments. but you know, I’m a curmudgeon.)
This is definitely a site which is aiming to be something like tumblr and appeal to tumblr’s users, but which is also trying to do things better and structure a community which isn’t as prone to harassment and toxic dynamics as Tumblr is. It is real good for discussions and for community building. I am delighted. There’s even aspects that make moderating communities easier there. Default is that communities are only visible to Imzy members.
Anyway, I set up Asexuality Imzy over there on the principle that if you build it, the people will often come. If you’re interested in chatting ace stuff with me or even if you want to just check stuff out, DM me an email address and I’ll send you an invite. I have three left!
so I dunno if you guys have heard about Imzy, that social media platform what is still in beta? I got an invite from a friend and am currently poking around, and guys it’s awesome esp. if you are a text loving curmudgeon such as myself or if you yearn for the days of livejournal. (It actually also handles graphics and a tumblr-style dash very well, has a very large and quickly growing fandom presence, and wonder of wonders it has nested comments. but you know, I’m a curmudgeon.)
This is definitely a site which is aiming to be something like tumblr and appeal to tumblr’s users, but which is also trying to do things better and structure a community which isn’t as prone to harassment and toxic dynamics as Tumblr is. It is real good for discussions and for community building. I am delighted. There’s even aspects that make moderating communities easier there. Default is that communities are only visible to Imzy members.
Anyway, I set up Asexuality Imzy over there on the principle that if you build it, the people will often come. If you’re interested in chatting ace stuff with me or even if you want to just check stuff out, DM me an email address and I’ll send you an invite. I have three left!
so I dunno if you guys have heard about Imzy, that social media platform what is still in beta? I got an invite from a friend and am currently poking around, and guys it’s awesome esp. if you are a text loving curmudgeon such as myself or if you yearn for the days of livejournal. (It actually also handles graphics and a tumblr-style dash very well, has a very large and quickly growing fandom presence, and wonder of wonders it has nested comments. but you know, I’m a curmudgeon.)
This is definitely a site which is aiming to be something like tumblr and appeal to tumblr’s users, but which is also trying to do things better and structure a community which isn’t as prone to harassment and toxic dynamics as Tumblr is. It is real good for discussions and for community building. I am delighted. There’s even aspects that make moderating communities easier there. Default is that communities are only visible to Imzy members.
Anyway, I set up Asexuality Imzy over there on the principle that if you build it, the people will often come. If you’re interested in chatting ace stuff with me or even if you want to just check stuff out, DM me an email address and I’ll send you an invite. I have three left!
hi! this isn't a really substantive post, but i used to follow you years ago and i did a bit of a double-take thinking, "wow, sciatrix is back on tumblr?" even if tumblr's not your main space, it's kinda nice to see some "historical" input from people who were there, even for history that's only ~4-6 years old. i feel like it gets buried very quickly. anyway... <3.
Hi back! I realized that all of that happened to me 5 years ago, and I suddenly felt very, very old. :)
Hey, do you have any books you reccomend for looking up ace and aro history? I can't find jack shit and I'm so desperate to find anything, really. I really want to know more about our community but it's so hard
Oh man, I can absolutely help you here.
So like. As a beginning disclaimer, I have not read everything that’s on this list. Some of it is on my to-read list. Some of it, I will likely never read myself, for a variety of reasons (most related to how much effort I have to put in to focus on academic text).
As a secondary disclaimer: a lot of Ace History simply hasn’t made it into published works yet. People have only just started to pay attention to us, and while I expect a lot more writing about our stories to come in the future, it just isn’t there yet. (I know of a few upcoming studies that I’ve contributed to, that I’m very excited to be able to share with the people here when they finally come out!) And the writing that is out there tends to be more of the Ace 101 variety: who we are, what we feel, and dispelling misconceptions. I have scraped the barrel as much as I could, and have included quite a few books that are really less dedicated history, and more personal journey.
So if you want the best info out there, you’re likely going to have to turn to alternate sources - personal blogs, forums, and the like. People tend to deride those as sources of information, but really, you’re getting the info direct from the people who were there, not second or third hand.
I also encourage other people to add on their Recommended Asexual Reading! I’ll update this post every once in a while, so I’m putting my reading list itself under the cut.
Very belatedly, working through your back catalog: Andrew’s writing on the published academic literature is great, but if your anons want more on ace opinions on the published lit… well, the Agenda did a journal club for a while with attached commentary. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of a journal club, but they’re a common thing in academia where you read a peer reviewed paper or a book chapter and then convene to discuss them together, like a book club.
In this case, a lot of the people commenting are grad students in other fields and/or very long-term ace activists (frequently both at once). The commenters in the journal club discussions aren’t always Asexual Agenda bloggers, either. There’s a lot of interesting historical and cultural information in those discussions, and I think they’re a good annotation to the papers they focused on. Selfishly, I am particularly proud of the Freestyle discussion, which didn’t focus on any specific paper but which does contain a lot of discussion about how sexuality might work on a neurobiochemical level and how aces conceptualize sexuality as compared to how human sexuality researchers conceptualize it.
I’d like to say that Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians is really not about asexual people (people who don’t experience sexual attraction). I know the book is on all the ace book lists but I wonder if anyone has actually read it. In almost every chapter it discusses sexual attraction as a natural thing, sex as something that definitely happens when people love each other, and asexuality as an orientation is not something the writers know of or ever mention. For an asexual person looking for positivity or narratives not centered around sex, I would not recommend it.
This is good to know! I haven’t read it, although it’s on my list. For me, although Boston marriages are an important concept for me as a way of seeing myself reflected in history, I don’t find most of the writing about them particularly gratifying or welcoming to read as an ace woman in nonsexual but firmly important, primary relationships with another ace woman and an ace nonbinary person. (Actually, one of these is now very literally a Boston marriage, since we had to travel to get married anyway at the time and the pun made me exceedingly happy when I noticed that Boston was on the list of viable locations.)
This is because, well…. lesbian women find them important too, and I think also bi women, and so they tend to get painted as Definitely The Same As Modern Lesbians. This is especially the case in my experience for work that falls under ‘pop history’, which isn’t necessarily written for an academic audience but is aimed at a more gene audience (often an audience imagined to be composed mostly of queer lay people.) Which. There were definitely Boston marriages with sexual components, and there were definitely women who used them to legitimize sexual and romantic relationships with their female partners.
But there were also women in these relationships for whom the evidence is considerably more ambiguous, where we know that a given woman had enormously important female partners who she built her life around, but we don’t really know whether their relationship was sexual because there isn’t any existing evidence one way or another. So writing on Boston marriages from a mainstream queer-friendly perspective, which is often framed as “they were defs gay, look, historical lesbians!” generally just makes me feel completely erased when I’m not deliberately reading between the lines of the authors’ framing to construct a vision of the past that lets me fit someone like myself into it. I don’t fault lesbian and bi/pan women for looking into the past and replacing the places where our knowledge has fragmented with framework that is built to let them step through that imaginary door, but I wish that there was more care in writing taken to leave space for someone like me to see myself too.
Now, on the other hand, I also find myself really unhappy with the other way I see Boston marriages written about, which is to deny the possibility that any sex happened, or to sort of downplay the relationships between these women as being primarily about financial and social independence and to emphasize that they were at least officially nonsexual at every turn. I get pretty skeeved at how hard historical works often work to de-emphasize queerness and tuck it out of the way when prominent historical figures are discussed. For example, we have already had a gay President–and a bisexual First Lady, for that matter*–but that’s not something I ever found in my own history classes mentioned, even in passing.
Straight people can get incredibly, grossly uncomfortable with the possibility of a past historical figure not being considered totally straight in retrospect. And often this manifests itself in talking about the beautiful purity of same-sex friendship throughout the ages, because at least that way the straight person can happily insist that the historical figure could have been straight or at least unmarked, too–we just don’t know! (Never mind that it’s often very clear that the historical person in question was outside the norm of sexuality or gender within their own cultural context, whatever they were doing with their genitals–both by their own written accounts and that of their peers!)
For example, a while back I opened a discussion about Jane Addams, who is perhaps the most famously ambiguous historical figure in a Boston marriage, on a general interest site I hang out on. If you read that discussion, you’ll note that the very first comment has this kind of tone that these days, if you love someone you have sex with them (gross!) and bemoaning some past time when Shakespeare’s poem to a male Fair Youth could be viewed as the ode to pure masculine beauty that it was. And, uh, that person? That person has in other contexts been pretty nasty about things like same-sex marriage to me, and has displayed visible discomfort with open queerness in the past. There’s a theme of, of celebrating same-sex relationships only as long as a person can pretend that everyone is totally straight and heterosexual even as they’re reading about two people of the same gender who are absolutely emotionally committed to each other, who view themselves as married, and who live and move and are seen by their society as a family unit.
It bothers me to see that erasure. It bothers me to not see historians point out that those are not the behaviors of a straight person. And it bothers me to see that people like me have to work to find examples of ourselves in history, when straight people can see themselves reflected in history without having to think twice, because of course everyone before Stonewall was straight, right? Of course the pushback to that smug heteronormativity is the same thing that leaves me and people in my particular situation out in the cold, but I rather prefer that. After all, I don’t think I’m straight either, and nor do the straight people around me. I stick out like a sore thumb, sex life or no. And the thought that if I was well known for something by history a century in the future, smug assholes like that might take the chance to insist that really I was totally normal and basically an everyday straight person is…. fucking uncomfortable and pretty awful. Erasure, writ long.
I just wish that more work would use ambiguous terms like ‘queer’ or ‘not straight’ for people who were pretty clearly some stripe of what today we’d classify as queer but for whom no more specific evidence pointing to a particular identity now exists. Or that more work would contextualize people against the background of their time and place and discuss the evidence for and against queer interpretations of historical people rather than either forcibly assigning it to a very specific modern identity and experience or else sweeping it under the rug unless forced to address it. Both of those approaches do a disservice to history in all its glorious messy complexity; surely there’s got to be a third way to approach history.
I’m going to wrap up this comment with a link to a 1992 article from the book’s author further complicating things: “Boston marriages among lesbians: Are we a couple if we’re not having sex?” Because you know what? The ambiguity that people use to classify their socially significant relationships didn’t start today or stop when Victoria died. We’ve always been here, and classifying people without recourse to a stated, specific identity has never been easy. Nor has drawing lines around identity boundaries. We, queer women, have always been messier than the neat and tidy narratives of history would like to think.
*I am being extremely deliberate about this, because Roosevelt and other almost-certainly-bisexual historical figures are frequently discussed as being ‘really gay’ when the possibility of anything but straightness is considered. This is an aspect of biphobia and bisexual erasure. There’s been no historical doubt that Roosevelt was attracted to men, both in terms of her marriage and in terms of other Washington gossip about her and the possibility of her having affairs, and so she couldn’t have been a lesbian. This is a related but not identical phenomenon to the one I was discussing above. You also see similar issues with the way that historical people that today we’d call trans are depicted, especially trans men like Charley Parkhurst being classified under lists of historical lesbians.
Hey, do you have any books you reccomend for looking up ace and aro history? I can't find jack shit and I'm so desperate to find anything, really. I really want to know more about our community but it's so hard
Oh man, I can absolutely help you here.
So like. As a beginning disclaimer, I have not read everything that’s on this list. Some of it is on my to-read list. Some of it, I will likely never read myself, for a variety of reasons (most related to how much effort I have to put in to focus on academic text).
As a secondary disclaimer: a lot of Ace History simply hasn’t made it into published works yet. People have only just started to pay attention to us, and while I expect a lot more writing about our stories to come in the future, it just isn’t there yet. (I know of a few upcoming studies that I’ve contributed to, that I’m very excited to be able to share with the people here when they finally come out!) And the writing that is out there tends to be more of the Ace 101 variety: who we are, what we feel, and dispelling misconceptions. I have scraped the barrel as much as I could, and have included quite a few books that are really less dedicated history, and more personal journey.
So if you want the best info out there, you’re likely going to have to turn to alternate sources - personal blogs, forums, and the like. People tend to deride those as sources of information, but really, you’re getting the info direct from the people who were there, not second or third hand.
I also encourage other people to add on their Recommended Asexual Reading! I’ll update this post every once in a while, so I’m putting my reading list itself under the cut.
Very belatedly, working through your back catalog: Andrew’s writing on the published academic literature is great, but if your anons want more on ace opinions on the published lit... well, the Agenda did a journal club for a while with attached commentary. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of a journal club, but they’re a common thing in academia where you read a peer reviewed paper or a book chapter and then convene to discuss them together, like a book club.
In this case, a lot of the people commenting are grad students in other fields and/or very long-term ace activists (frequently both at once). The commenters in the journal club discussions aren’t always Asexual Agenda bloggers, either. There’s a lot of interesting historical and cultural information in those discussions, and I think they’re a good annotation to the papers they focused on. Selfishly, I am particularly proud of the Freestyle discussion, which didn’t focus on any specific paper but which does contain a lot of discussion about how sexuality might work on a neurobiochemical level and how aces conceptualize sexuality as compared to how human sexuality researchers conceptualize it.
A History Of Words Used To Describe People That Are Not Asexual
Alternate title: “Allosexual is homophobic!” and other lies people tell about ace community language
I want to say, first of all, that this is probably not going to be the most eloquent post I ever write, or the most eloquent on the subject. It’s probably not going to be the least confrontational post I ever write either. I’d apologize for that, but I really try not to give insincere apologies, and I’m really not sorry for being a little snappish at all the misinformation people like to spread.
It is, however, likely going to be one of the longest posts I write. Hence the cut.
Second, I want to note that, every once in a while, the primary source I’m drawing on for this post is my own experience, and the experiences of other aces who were there. We lived this history. I’ll back up everything I can with as many sources as I can, but every once in a while? You’re just going to have to trust me, because relying on Tumblr for sources is a messy business.
Definitions
This post is specifically going to discuss words that have been used to mean “people that are not asexual,” starting with the original “sexual” and proceeding on through time.
While various attempts have been made to define a privilege/disprivilege dynamic with this kind of terminology, this post is not going to get into my personal stance on that kind of dynamic, whether that kind of dynamic is inherent in pairs of words, or whether any word to describe people that are not asexual is inherently problematic. This is not the post for that conversation.
Terminology Before The Controversy
We didn’t always have the word allosexual, of course.
“Sexual” seemed to arise organically as an obvious inverse to “asexual,” evolving from discussions of people engaging in sexual behavior. While there didn’t seem to be any coherent definition of what was meant by “sexual” people when its use first emerged (circa 2002), and its intended meaning varied from conversation to conversation, by about 2005 there was a wide-spread understanding that “sexual” referred to anyone who was not asexual or ace-spectrum.
This was also when the debate over “sexual privilege”/“sexual supremacy,” components of which have morphed into various forms, or been partially adopted into other ideologies, including models of (cis)heterosexism, allosexism, allosexual privilege, amatonormativity, etc, began. Again, not getting into the validity of the original concept, or what it has become. That’s another post, for another blogger to make.
Context Of The Controversy
Around late 2011, the so-called ace discourse looked frighteningly like it does now.
-I recall a potential con of ‘allosexual’ being that it sounded very similar to ‘allosexual’, which is a term independently invented and used in Quebecois to mean, effectively, ‘queer.’ I don’t personally give a shit about this–it’s an entirely different language and an independent derivation!–but here’s a couple of primary sources discussing it at the time. and a primary-source extra-community criticism for good measure (tw: person heavily involved in ace community harassment at least as of 2011-2012).
…..after drafting this and sourcing it, I see that you have already gone on to discuss that, but I’ve left in the links and sources anyway in case they’re helpful and not listed under existing sources. Oops.
More germanely to the actual post: the reason I eventually switched to allosexual despite being I think one of the people most prominently critical of the effort invested in finding an alternate term to ‘sexual’ is that enough ace people were using it and I hated it least. I’m a descriptivist when I consider linguistics, and I had at the time watched enough ace terminology rise and fall (consider here zucchini, queerplatonic, wtfromantic, Rabger’s model, and the ‘ase’ spelling for ‘ace’, among others) that I wasn’t going to commit to a new word unless there was some kind of consensus in usage building and I figured it might stick around. When I did switch, I didn’t draw attention to it–I just threw it in and assumed it would be obvious from context. I find that using terms with confidence in conversation is the thing that’s most likely to get it picked up and used by other people, effective reifying the definition of the term and its place in dialogue.
I am unlikely to switch to any other terminology at this point. My primary ace community isn’t tumblr based at this point, it’s offline–and I avoid this website for reasons of trauma and mental health almost all of the time unless I’m commenting on a specific conversation. This isn’t even my primary online queer community; these days, I’m mostly hanging out on Metafilter or a couple of group Slacks, which are private and which foster more of a sense of intra-community respect. In no other space I hang out do people care about this terminology. In fact, allo people of all orientations in other online spaces I’m comfortable enough to hang out in tend to be very motivated to ask me what terms I prefer and then use them, as (often) one of very few ace spectrum people in the room.
I’ve also completely lost patience with constantly changing terminology and of the focus on etymology, word choice, and language overthinking within both ace and more general online communities. I feel very strongly that the focus on word choice is a barrier to accessibility and functions more as an in-group signal than it helps to convey meaning and accomplish actual activism in service of either asexual communities or general queer communities. I’m unwilling to devote mental energy to it that I could be conserving for other things or devoting to a more productive activism agenda.
I cannot emphasize enough how much I think the word nitpicking is bullshit or how unimpressed I am that this platform for ace community organizing is still dealing with this level of harassment five years later with almost no change. I cannot articulate my level of side-eye or my disgust without recourse to profanity and irritation. I’m here commenting because there are people here I feel an obligation to support, but I am very impatient about the level of abuse that tumblr as a platform enables and tumblr’s broader community shelters. I see the current waves of criticisms as part and parcel of the same, and I think initiatives like this to summarize the history of this dialogue are important to give perspective to people who are new to it as to why people like me are completely out of fucks to give about it.
This response is a beautiful illustration of one of the major reasons I made this post. Hell, it’s one of the reasons I made this blog:
I’m so goddamn sick of this conversation.
People complaining, today, about allosexual are not doing anything innovative. They think that if they shout loudly enough, and refuse to listen for long enough, they will force us into silence. Into taking a step back and re-configuring how we talk about our identities, instead of moving forward to address real issues both within and faced by our community.
And they think this because it has worked before. It’s not a new tactic. It’s the same old invalidation, wearing a bowler hat and one of those fake press-on mustaches to try to convince us that it’s something new.
I absolutely, flat out refuse to let it work again. Refuse.
I’ve spent my entire existence since learning that ‘asexual’ was a thing in the middle of this battle. I’m tired of having a battleground where other people get to have an orientation.
I’m officially declaring the fight over. If allo people want to keep digging the same dirt, fine. But for me, these arguments are now history. I am done. I am going to move on, and plant some flowers, maybe.
I just want to throw out there that queerplatonic is definitely still in use. In fact it has been a target of this most recent round of diskhorsing (in between two different rounds of allosexal hate and mockery of the aro term aplatonic) with all the same objections but also with a new layer: I have seen some people claim that queerplatonic was coined by allo LGBT+ people and a-spec people stole it from them.
(One of the very few things to change about the arguments from five years ago on tumblr and now is the acceptability of the word queer as both an umbrella term and as a self-identifier. If you look back through old sources you’ll see very few people, even those calling it a slur that a-spec people can’t use, censoring it.)
There has been some attempts to change the word to quoiplatonic but I haven’t seen it gain much traction. Same with attempts to always abbreviate it to QPR or qplatonic.
(Sorry for the slight derail, I just really wanted to mention this while we were talking about words + old arguments!)
(And as a fellow ace who has also been in the middle of this battle from very shortly after they started IDing as ace, I concur with all of the above.)
Last I heard, it had fallen out of favor. Good to know it’s still around, I guess?
Also, I was there when ‘queerplatonic’ was coined, I played a heavy role in popularizing it initially because I blogged in ace communities more than the original coiner (s.e. smith), I can cite the exact conversation where it happened, and I’d like to address this:
I have seen some people claim that queerplatonic was coined by allo LGBT+ people and a-spec people stole it from them.
This is grade-a bullshit. I’m spitting mad. You see those fuckwits advancing that argument, you can goddamn well point them at me and I will tear strips out of their hide and send them yelping home. There weren’t even any allo folks in that damn conversation, as I recall, who hadn’t spent a long time identifying as ace-spectrum and hanging out in ace communities. The coiner is nonbinary and asexual; I can’t recall ou’s romantic orientation but I don’t suppose it matters now. The conversation happened on my ex’s blog, for fuck’s sake.
Seriously, you tell me where they are and I swear to god I will light into them. I haven’t been this mad since I saw allo aro folk claim that aces were appropriating that suite of terms from “the aro community”, which didn’t fucking exist at the time.
aceadmiral said: Sorry, I didn’t mean to put this in front of you and pull you in D:
Nah, you’re honestly fine. I ALSO got the excuse to nerd out about queer history and, uh, spam the asexual-history google group with an extended bibliography of my favorite reads, so that was an overall positive outcome. Plus: a kick in the ass to grow ASPeN some!
Anyway, I like this baseball-bat-to-the-knees feeling way more than the feeling I had when 2013 broke me. It’s good to know that in the intervening five years that I’ve stopped being convinced by these fuckwads and that I’ve learned to spot bullying and marginalization even when it cloaks itself falsely in the language of inclusivity.
adventures-in-asexuality said: Angry science is good science. But ugh, yeah, I feel you - and for what it’s worth, I’m glad you commented
<3 Thanks, that means a lot to me. The thing that is constantly frustrating me is that I lost touch with a lot of good people when I decided that I couldn’t make Tumblr my online home anymore, you guys included... but I just couldn’t deal with site culture. I really wish there was a popular alternative with a format that didn’t deliberately inflame misunderstandings and conflict by fragmenting conversation, obliterating context, and constantly mixing audiences such that speakers can’t predict who is listening. I hear good things about Imzy, but until there’s actually widespread adoption.... meh.
A History Of Words Used To Describe People That Are Not Asexual
Alternate title: “Allosexual is homophobic!” and other lies people tell about ace community language
I want to say, first of all, that this is probably not going to be the most eloquent post I ever write, or the most eloquent on the subject. It’s probably not going to be the least confrontational post I ever write either. I’d apologize for that, but I really try not to give insincere apologies, and I’m really not sorry for being a little snappish at all the misinformation people like to spread.
It is, however, likely going to be one of the longest posts I write. Hence the cut.
Second, I want to note that, every once in a while, the primary source I’m drawing on for this post is my own experience, and the experiences of other aces who were there. We lived this history. I’ll back up everything I can with as many sources as I can, but every once in a while? You’re just going to have to trust me, because relying on Tumblr for sources is a messy business.
Definitions
This post is specifically going to discuss words that have been used to mean “people that are not asexual,” starting with the original “sexual” and proceeding on through time.
While various attempts have been made to define a privilege/disprivilege dynamic with this kind of terminology, this post is not going to get into my personal stance on that kind of dynamic, whether that kind of dynamic is inherent in pairs of words, or whether any word to describe people that are not asexual is inherently problematic. This is not the post for that conversation.
Terminology Before The Controversy
We didn’t always have the word allosexual, of course.
“Sexual” seemed to arise organically as an obvious inverse to “asexual,” evolving from discussions of people engaging in sexual behavior. While there didn’t seem to be any coherent definition of what was meant by “sexual” people when its use first emerged (circa 2002), and its intended meaning varied from conversation to conversation, by about 2005 there was a wide-spread understanding that “sexual” referred to anyone who was not asexual or ace-spectrum.
This was also when the debate over “sexual privilege”/“sexual supremacy,” components of which have morphed into various forms, or been partially adopted into other ideologies, including models of (cis)heterosexism, allosexism, allosexual privilege, amatonormativity, etc, began. Again, not getting into the validity of the original concept, or what it has become. That’s another post, for another blogger to make.
Context Of The Controversy
Around late 2011, the so-called ace discourse looked frighteningly like it does now.
-I recall a potential con of ‘allosexual’ being that it sounded very similar to ‘allosexual’, which is a term independently invented and used in Quebecois to mean, effectively, ‘queer.’ I don’t personally give a shit about this–it’s an entirely different language and an independent derivation!–but here’s a couple of primary sources discussing it at the time. and a primary-source extra-community criticism for good measure (tw: person heavily involved in ace community harassment at least as of 2011-2012).
…..after drafting this and sourcing it, I see that you have already gone on to discuss that, but I’ve left in the links and sources anyway in case they’re helpful and not listed under existing sources. Oops.
More germanely to the actual post: the reason I eventually switched to allosexual despite being I think one of the people most prominently critical of the effort invested in finding an alternate term to ‘sexual’ is that enough ace people were using it and I hated it least. I’m a descriptivist when I consider linguistics, and I had at the time watched enough ace terminology rise and fall (consider here zucchini, queerplatonic, wtfromantic, Rabger’s model, and the ‘ase’ spelling for ‘ace’, among others) that I wasn’t going to commit to a new word unless there was some kind of consensus in usage building and I figured it might stick around. When I did switch, I didn’t draw attention to it–I just threw it in and assumed it would be obvious from context. I find that using terms with confidence in conversation is the thing that’s most likely to get it picked up and used by other people, effective reifying the definition of the term and its place in dialogue.
I am unlikely to switch to any other terminology at this point. My primary ace community isn’t tumblr based at this point, it’s offline–and I avoid this website for reasons of trauma and mental health almost all of the time unless I’m commenting on a specific conversation. This isn’t even my primary online queer community; these days, I’m mostly hanging out on Metafilter or a couple of group Slacks, which are private and which foster more of a sense of intra-community respect. In no other space I hang out do people care about this terminology. In fact, allo people of all orientations in other online spaces I’m comfortable enough to hang out in tend to be very motivated to ask me what terms I prefer and then use them, as (often) one of very few ace spectrum people in the room.
I’ve also completely lost patience with constantly changing terminology and of the focus on etymology, word choice, and language overthinking within both ace and more general online communities. I feel very strongly that the focus on word choice is a barrier to accessibility and functions more as an in-group signal than it helps to convey meaning and accomplish actual activism in service of either asexual communities or general queer communities. I’m unwilling to devote mental energy to it that I could be conserving for other things or devoting to a more productive activism agenda.
I cannot emphasize enough how much I think the word nitpicking is bullshit or how unimpressed I am that this platform for ace community organizing is still dealing with this level of harassment five years later with almost no change. I cannot articulate my level of side-eye or my disgust without recourse to profanity and irritation. I’m here commenting because there are people here I feel an obligation to support, but I am very impatient about the level of abuse that tumblr as a platform enables and tumblr’s broader community shelters. I see the current waves of criticisms as part and parcel of the same, and I think initiatives like this to summarize the history of this dialogue are important to give perspective to people who are new to it as to why people like me are completely out of fucks to give about it.
This response is a beautiful illustration of one of the major reasons I made this post. Hell, it’s one of the reasons I made this blog:
I’m so goddamn sick of this conversation.
People complaining, today, about allosexual are not doing anything innovative. They think that if they shout loudly enough, and refuse to listen for long enough, they will force us into silence. Into taking a step back and re-configuring how we talk about our identities, instead of moving forward to address real issues both within and faced by our community.
And they think this because it has worked before. It’s not a new tactic. It’s the same old invalidation, wearing a bowler hat and one of those fake press-on mustaches to try to convince us that it’s something new.
I absolutely, flat out refuse to let it work again. Refuse.
I’ve spent my entire existence since learning that ‘asexual’ was a thing in the middle of this battle. I’m tired of having a battleground where other people get to have an orientation.
I’m officially declaring the fight over. If allo people want to keep digging the same dirt, fine. But for me, these arguments are now history. I am done. I am going to move on, and plant some flowers, maybe.
Amen. I’ll just... take this as a reason to check my org’s meetup for new people, and maybe start a discussion on the Asexual Spectrum Professional Network I help run with @aceadmiral. (We have a LinkedIn! It doesn’t appear on anyone’s profile! It’s great for career discussion and advice!)
Because, y’know, those metaphorical seeds might bloom into a vegetable I can actually eat, instead of more thistles and weeds. I’m tired of trying to eat thistle sandwiches, dammit.
Time to go back to tackling the paper I’m writing up for publication, I guess, because I’m sufficiently angry that I keep wanting to metaphorically take a baseball bat to the knees of these fucking arguments aaaand I do need to actually do some science today.
A History Of Words Used To Describe People That Are Not Asexual
Alternate title: “Allosexual is homophobic!” and other lies people tell about ace community language
I want to say, first of all, that this is probably not going to be the most eloquent post I ever write, or the most eloquent on the subject. It’s probably not going to be the least confrontational post I ever write either. I’d apologize for that, but I really try not to give insincere apologies, and I’m really not sorry for being a little snappish at all the misinformation people like to spread.
It is, however, likely going to be one of the longest posts I write. Hence the cut.
Second, I want to note that, every once in a while, the primary source I’m drawing on for this post is my own experience, and the experiences of other aces who were there. We lived this history. I’ll back up everything I can with as many sources as I can, but every once in a while? You’re just going to have to trust me, because relying on Tumblr for sources is a messy business.
Definitions
This post is specifically going to discuss words that have been used to mean “people that are not asexual,” starting with the original “sexual” and proceeding on through time.
While various attempts have been made to define a privilege/disprivilege dynamic with this kind of terminology, this post is not going to get into my personal stance on that kind of dynamic, whether that kind of dynamic is inherent in pairs of words, or whether any word to describe people that are not asexual is inherently problematic. This is not the post for that conversation.
Terminology Before The Controversy
We didn’t always have the word allosexual, of course.
“Sexual” seemed to arise organically as an obvious inverse to “asexual,” evolving from discussions of people engaging in sexual behavior. While there didn’t seem to be any coherent definition of what was meant by “sexual” people when its use first emerged (circa 2002), and its intended meaning varied from conversation to conversation, by about 2005 there was a wide-spread understanding that “sexual” referred to anyone who was not asexual or ace-spectrum.
This was also when the debate over “sexual privilege”/“sexual supremacy,” components of which have morphed into various forms, or been partially adopted into other ideologies, including models of (cis)heterosexism, allosexism, allosexual privilege, amatonormativity, etc, began. Again, not getting into the validity of the original concept, or what it has become. That’s another post, for another blogger to make.
Context Of The Controversy
Around late 2011, the so-called ace discourse looked frighteningly like it does now.
-I recall a potential con of ‘allosexual’ being that it sounded very similar to ‘allosexual’, which is a term independently invented and used in Quebecois to mean, effectively, ‘queer.’ I don’t personally give a shit about this--it’s an entirely different language and an independent derivation!--but here’s a couple of primary sources discussing it at the time. and a primary-source extra-community criticism for good measure (tw: person heavily involved in ace community harassment at least as of 2011-2012).
.....after drafting this and sourcing it, I see that you have already gone on to discuss that, but I’ve left in the links and sources anyway in case they’re helpful and not listed under existing sources. Oops.
More germanely to the actual post: the reason I eventually switched to allosexual despite being I think one of the people most prominently critical of the effort invested in finding an alternate term to ‘sexual’ is that enough ace people were using it and I hated it least. I’m a descriptivist when I consider linguistics, and I had at the time watched enough ace terminology rise and fall (consider here zucchini, queerplatonic, wtfromantic, Rabger’s model, and the ‘ase’ spelling for ‘ace’, among others) that I wasn’t going to commit to a new word unless there was some kind of consensus in usage building and I figured it might stick around. When I did switch, I didn’t draw attention to it--I just threw it in and assumed it would be obvious from context. I find that using terms with confidence in conversation is the thing that’s most likely to get it picked up and used by other people, effective reifying the definition of the term and its place in dialogue.
I am unlikely to switch to any other terminology at this point. My primary ace community isn’t tumblr based at this point, it’s offline--and I avoid this website for reasons of trauma and mental health almost all of the time unless I’m commenting on a specific conversation. This isn’t even my primary online queer community; these days, I’m mostly hanging out on Metafilter or a couple of group Slacks, which are private and which foster more of a sense of intra-community respect. In no other space I hang out do people care about this terminology. In fact, allo people of all orientations in other online spaces I’m comfortable enough to hang out in tend to be very motivated to ask me what terms I prefer and then use them, as (often) one of very few ace spectrum people in the room.
I’ve also completely lost patience with constantly changing terminology and of the focus on etymology, word choice, and language overthinking within both ace and more general online communities. I feel very strongly that the focus on word choice is a barrier to accessibility and functions more as an in-group signal than it helps to convey meaning and accomplish actual activism in service of either asexual communities or general queer communities. I’m unwilling to devote mental energy to it that I could be conserving for other things or devoting to a more productive activism agenda.
I cannot emphasize enough how much I think the word nitpicking is bullshit or how unimpressed I am that this platform for ace community organizing is still dealing with this level of harassment five years later with almost no change. I cannot articulate my level of side-eye or my disgust without recourse to profanity and irritation. I’m here commenting because there are people here I feel an obligation to support, but I am very impatient about the level of abuse that tumblr as a platform enables and tumblr’s broader community shelters. I see the current waves of criticisms as part and parcel of the same, and I think initiatives like this to summarize the history of this dialogue are important to give perspective to people who are new to it as to why people like me are completely out of fucks to give about it.
The post I’m working on: The frankly ridiculous, novel-esque masterpost of everything that lead up to coining the word “allosexual” and all the variations thereof. Too many of you have asked me for more info. It’s time.
What I have covered fairly well: Posts about proposed terminology. Those, I’ve had saved in my back pocket for years. If it was mentioned as a potential replacement for “sexuals” there’s a good chance I’ve got the post where it was proposed, and a variety of pro/con posts. I also have plenty of posts that talk about the kinds of invalidation that were commonly passed around during The Great Allo/Sexual Debate Of 2011-12. And I’ve got a few examples of various ways we used “sexuals” in context, including a proposed theory of how that terminology evolved. (However, I’ll always take more sources, it’s always possible you’ll have something I missed!)
What I need: I know it exists somewhere. I thought I remembered who I’d seen reblog it, when it didn’t turn up in my collection of links. Apparently I was mistaken, because for the life of me, I cannot find the post(s) where people brought up their legitimate (ie: not rooted in “asexuality isn’t real!” or posted by known harassers of ace people) problems with the term “sexual” being used to describe people who are not aces.
So. If you have a post like that, or know where I can find a post like that, please shoot me a message? I am absolutely goddamn positive that I used to have a link to the exact post I need, but I’ve lost it, and it’s bugging me. (Ideally, I need posts that were written during the 2011-2012 ace discourse when this language was first being discussed. Later posts explaining what happened are less helpful, although I’ll take them if they’re explaining the issues in plain language.)
I’ll update this post when/if I find the post I’m looking for.
Fwiw, from what I remember at the time when the coining was happening there weren’t necessarily many (any)? tumblr posts where people explicitly spelled out the reasons why they (as non-aces) didn’t like the term sexual and thought an alternative was necessarily, especially from outside the ace community -those came later. What I remember seeing was largely ace people making posts like “I’ve been told [elsewhere] that some people are uncomfortable with this term, and I’m also uncomfortable with it, so if we had a new one that would be nice”, or “I can see situations where this term could hypothetically cause problems for non-aces or “sexual” grey-aces or sexually active aces etc.”
The original push definitely felt (to me) driven by concerns from within the community, not pressure from outside - that came later.
From what I remember seeing (in my corner of the community) the tumblr dialogs were something like:
>ace person mentions an off-tumblr or unsourced conversation where someone expressed discomfort with “sexual”
>ace agrees that it’s not an ideal term
>ace suggests alternative
>then tumblr non-ace comes in to critique said term for whatever reason, and discussions about why sexual and/or other terms are bad ensues
OR
>ace person mentions an off-tumblr or unsourced conversation where a non-ace expressed discomfort with “sexual”
>ace agrees that it’s not an ideal term
>ace suggests alternative
>another ace and or non-ace asks why we need a new term
>potential reasons for discomfort are detailed retroactively
That said, there were occasional posts with oblique references that might still be relevant…I will let you know if I remember any and can still find them.
Also, my memory is definitely fallible so this may be way off base. So signal boost!
I’ve had conflicting reports on that. There are accounts like yours (initial push from inside the community, with backlash later), and accounts that say the initial push was from outside the community, by people who were frequently also involved with the ace invalidation flavor of the day.
And I swear, I can picture the post in my mind that I really want to find.
It involved an initial poster questioning why we needed to replace “sexual,” the gist of which was “I don’t want to change this term on the say-so of people that aren’t ace.” This could have happened on one of the lists of proposed terminology that were floating around, but I don’t remember if there was context.
And there were several (two or three, at minimum) replies along the lines of “actually, I’m ace and I actually don’t like “sexuals” because… So not all of this is coming from outside the community.”
I know this post exists, or existed. I have read this post. It is driving me absolutely around the bend that I cannot find this post. I would swear, until I am blue in the face, that this conversation involved one of the bloggers whose names I remember from this time period, but I can find nothing to suggest that I did not simply hallucinate this post.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that I hallucinated this post. My brainweirds would totally do that to me.
Gah. This is why I don’t like making posts that rely on my own personal memory of events. I like sources. Sources make things concrete.
It is not my recollection that the initial push came from inside the community, and that’s not how I summarized the situation at the time. However, I would also like to be clear that to the best of my recollection (and what I’ve seen going through my entire archive pre this discussion looking into this) is that “sexual” was an adjective and the noun was almost always “sexual people.” I even notice that some posts chose to use “non-asexuals” as the noun instead of “sexuals.” This was a purposeful choice, not coincidence IIRC. Other posts in this phase of the discussion: 1 2 3 4 (Note that OTJ comes from here)
The thing was, most people felt trapped that those were the words they had to use to be understood, I think. There were a lot of people, especially non- or casual tumblrites who reacted to changing the word with confusion or kneejerk rigidness. Even the spread of allosexual was very slow/has not taken hold in certain parts of community at all.
The discussion entered a second phase 5-6 weeks later. At the beginning of it, aces were discussing amongst ourselves what alternatives we might use, but then the conversation got derailed for a whole literal month because people outside the community continued to criticize the word, apparently unaware they were preempting the actual discussion to deal with their concerns, and often doing it in ways that either attacked or delegitimized the community. This was the place where aces started to vent their frustration with “sexual” and/or be convinced by arguments it should change. The person who most stands out in my mind is @writingfromfactorx, although the only post I seem to have on hand is this one. At the end of that month, we focused back up on actually finding an alternative.
And that takes the discussion through the end of 2011, at which point I had to gafiate so my archive stops being something approaching a complete record. So what I took three paragraphs to say is: I don’t know which post you’re talking about and find it doubtful such a post existed in 2011. Sorry ><
(Sorry that most of these links are to my own archive–a lot of people have changed usernames or deleted, so I only have my copy to link since I never delete anything)
Oh hey, I’ve been summoned! (I continue to be a massive burnout as far as ace activism is concerned, especially online, buuuut I also have Ace Admiral in my RSS feed so I was able to catch up with this. I ought to follow @historicallyace too, while I’m at it.)
My recollections, to be honest, are that the push to change the name was twofold and that there were both aces within the community who were uncomfortable with the implications--in particular I think I remember @apollyptica criticizing ‘sexuals’ on racial grounds as a black woman?--but also that there were a lot of people from outside the community complaining on grounds of “YOU CAN’T FORCIBLY APPLY A LABEL TO ME, I’M NORMAL.” I recall thinking it was very similar to the pushback I saw at the time over the word ‘cis,’ and I think I explicitly used that analogy at at least one point. I definitely was not the only one, either. I have no idea which push came first, although I suspect outside pushback happened first and most frequently but internal pushback actually drove people to change their language.
I also never ever delete anything, so let me see what I can pull out.... hm. I’m going to highlight this post that AA linked to a later comment within, which is something I apparently felt very strongly about at the time. (ETA: and I see @nextstepcake has already brought it up.)
Here’s another discussion from a specific pair of people (@feralprancinghomosexual and another person) discussing a criticism of the label of grey-asexuality which boils down to “you can’t apply labels to me without my consent.”
Here’s another expression of frustration about wording that I don’t believe has been linked yet.
Here’s an exchange where I sum up the arguments being made about why sexual isn’t the best word which I did agree with. I suspect I first saw these coming from ace-spectrum people, because I do not ever recall having a dialogue with an allo person that started with a wholly negative criticism of the asexual community on tumblr that resulted in me taking anything positive from the situation. (Other people did! But almost no one contacted me or approached me, and I did not have either the patience or inclination to try to find middle ground with people who were clearly not interested in approaching it themselves.)
Here is a discussion between me and @greenchestnuts, with greenchestnuts arguing that we should change language (internal pushback), and me arguing that hell will freeze over before I switch my language to “non-asexuals” vs. allosexuals. (This was also clearly in the context of external pushback motivating internal pushback.) And a separate but similar conversation between both of us is here. You can see me being willing to consider changing my language as a result of greenchestnuts’ internal pushback, but very against the idea because external criticism had left a foul taste in my mouth.
Here is a post by me complaining that the pushback I’m seeing is a) exclusively outside the community and b) uninterested in helping to find a workable solution besides “nonasexual” or “normal.”
Here is a post from @aceadmiral that she hasn’t yet linked about her bisexual friend saying that “sexual” gave her unpleasant memories but that most of the allo people who cared about the issue were ones that appeared to hate the ace community. It also suggests that internal pushback or pushback from friends was slowly filtering in but that outside pushback was actively hindering the acceptance of different terminology as well as a settling on a particular word.
(Also, have you seen this? duuuuuude. Makes establishing timelines SO MUCH EASIER I cannot believe I hadn’t seen it before!)
PS: responding here to @theowlisthelimit:
I believe the main in-community argument was that many asexual people feel that they are sexual - asexual describing their orientation and sexual describing (I don’t think describing is the right word here, but idk what is right)
I have no memory of any argument like this being a central argument at the time. I think I would have recalled it, because I’ve been paying attention to the dialogue between repulsed/averse/whatever we’re calling it now and sexually active aces/aces who enjoy sex for its own sake/etc for some years now, but obviously I cannot be sure. One of the links above does mention @redbeardace making that argument, but I don’t think it was a particularly widely held one or one that influenced me very much at all.
Today I saw this post. Summary: An ace asker worries that they are a flaw that evolution simply hasn’t weeded out yet. The responder says that variety is always beneficial. I disagree with this.
The important thing to remember is that if evolution were a person, that person is an asshole. That person is literally Hitler. Why should we want evolutionary adaptability? At best, evolutionary adaptability aligns with our interests, and at worst, it is cooperation with an evil and uncaring god.
It’s plausible that GLB traits come with some evolutionary adaptability, but there are plenty of conditions for which this is far less plausible. Lots of disabilities for instance. My boyfriend suffers from epilepsy. The evolutionary value of seizures is found wanting. Educated epileptics everywhere must find peace with the fact that they are not evolutionary winners. Which is fine, because evolution is an asshole.
And I am even skeptical of the evolutionary adaptability of GLB traits. You’d have to care for a lot of nephews to make up for not having children. I think it’s more likely that GLB traits are just not sufficiently maladaptive to overcome genetic drift. Probably because GLB people were strongly encouraged to have children regardless of their gender preferences. Alternatively, GLB traits are correlated with other adaptive traits. For instance, genes that cause men to find men attractive might also cause women with the same gene to find men attractive. (And you could come up with similar explanations for lack of sexual attraction.)
But all that discussion of possible adaptability is not relevant to me. I am not forced to have biological children, I am not caring for nephews, and I am not my own sister. I am an evolutionary dead end. Which is fine because evolution is an asshole. Evolution is like an old relative who is always pressuring me to have children even though I’m out to them.
There is also, of course, the possibility of pleiotropic effects doing something else that we haven’t properly linked to asexuality/some other form of GLB sexuality, something which does have some adaptational advantage that hauls GLB traits back into frequency. Or, hell, the possibility of bisexuality just being one other way that humans can use sex to cement social bonds or develop
Which is to say: if I had to commit, I’d say that it’s probably a big mashup of drift, selection not being particularly strong, mutation reintroducing variety faster than selection washes it out, and also selection getting pulled in lots of different kinds of directions all at once depending on other trade-offs and advantages.
Personally, I’m of the opinion that there are probably a variety of ways to get to “lgba” neurochemically and genetically, which increases the number of mutational targets you have and also weakens whatever force selection can really bring to bear. Especially when you consider how much reproduction for queer people is driven by cultural pressures as much as anything else. It’s just too complicated a story to be able to say “evolutionarily good” or “evolutionarily bad.”
Hey - under point one of your rebuttal to rotten-zucchinis, did the end of your sentence get erased? (It's of course fine if that's intentional and I'm just misreading, I just wanted to let you know if so)
Must have done. Thanks for letting me know; I’ve fixed it.
Shutting down discussion of structures of violence (by claiming my words do things that they don’t)
Recently, @queenieofaces quoted some of my words in the 3rd instalment of her series about “Ace survivors of violence as rhetorical devices”, arguing that they were making up statistics and constructing corrective rape against sex-repulsed aces as the only ( or only legitimate ) kind of sexual violence that ace people might experience– as the One True Narrative of Sexual Violence Against Aces[1].
There’s a lot going on in that piece. This is a response specifically to the part where she discusses my words.
The problem with @queenieofaces‘s discussion of my words is that the words she quoted as example of certain things *are not* examples of what she claims they are: the words simply do not do what she says they do. And her claims about them are made with false and misleading ( of perhaps misguided? ) statements.
It bothers me when people accuse me ( or my words ) of things that are not true. In this particular case though, the problem is more than just a false accusation. The problem is that the false accusation actively serves to silence discussions about why violence happens by labelling them as inherently exploitative ( i.e., silence discussions about the structures of violence ). And in the long run, that will hurt a lot of people who aren’t me.[2]
I have not seen anyone express any kind of disagreement to anything in any of Queenie’s series. There are probably a number of reasons for that[3], but most of them likely boil down to the construction of Queenie’s “expert” discursive authority about ace survivors of sexual violence, because of which anyone who would express any disagreements would be automatically positioned as “against ace survivors of sexual violence”.
I don’t have the discursive power to resist that construction, which means that anything I say here will likely play out in the community as being against ace survivors of sexual violence, regardless of what I say. I have no doubt that there will be some kind of backlash. But that kind of power play isn’t going to stop me from naming the false and misleading statements that shut down discussions of structures of violence, because this is not just about me.
TLDR: The unsupported portrayal of my words as promoting One True Narrative of Sexual Violence Against Aces ( allegedly based on made-up statistics ) constructs any discussion about the structures of violence– or even the naming of any structure of violence that specifically targets sex-repulsion– as inherently exploitative of ace survivors of sexual violence. In the long-run, that’s going to do a lot of harm.
Below the read-more cut:
What I suspect to be the root of the problem ( the importance of distinguishing between who experiences violence, how that violence happens, and why it happens. )
Tediously detailed deconstruction of Queenie’s claims about my words, illustrating why they are inaccurate ( i.e., illustrating why my words aren’t what she says they are and don’t do what she says they do )
Discussion of a possible, unstated assumption ( that I don’t share ) which might explain this situation, namely the assumption that violence needs to be considered “ace-specific” for it to be “real” or worth discussing in ace spaces
Wow, this is impressive. As one of Queenie’s co-bloggers, I’m pretty comfortable wading in to respond to some of your points on this one. (Spoilers: you cannot simultaneously argue that:
1) you weren’t erasing some of the diversity and reality of ace experiences, so Queenie is full of it, and
2) constructing an ace narrative of the structure of sexual violence is a good and necessary thing that we need to do as ace activists, and corollary:
2a) in order to construct an ace narrative of the structure of sexual violence against aces, we need to focus on ace experiences of assault that specifically grow out of ace identities.
I mean, I know you are aware of intersectionality as a concept, Omnes, and I like to think you paid attention to the major failing of radical feminism. Let me refresh your memory. You know, the thing where constructing all the negative experiences of women to sexism leaves out the experiences of women who are dealing with racism or ableism or classism or transmisogyny, and winds up creating a theory of oppression that primarily applies to white upper-to-middle class cis women?
Yeah. Because that plan you’re advocating here? That’s the same old story, writ small; you’re only going to erase assaults and marginalizations that don’t fit under the narrative you’re specifically focusing on right now. You cannot create a cohesive theory of assaults against all ace people without temporarily ignoring the assaults that happen for other reasons or which are influenced by other things, because then it’s not a cohesive theory of assaults against ace people. Of course, then when you present this theory, ace survivors who deal with other experiences--say, aces who are assaulted by other ace partners, or who are survivors of CSA, or who experience other kinds of violence that doesn’t fall under corrective assault--those ace survivors see you talking about a “structural theory of why” and then go “this is irrelevant to me.” That is the problem with devising structural theories ahead of data. This level of defensiveness does not become you, and you are normally a better analyst than this. Rethink.)
Of course I have a fuller analysis below my own cut. I’m borrowing your own point by point organization here; statements in bold are direct quotes. Frequently but not always they’re your own bolded arguments. We’ll start with two broad themes in your post: “But I never said that! You must have misheard!” and “The parts of this post that included me were written in bad faith.”
“But I never said that!”
1. “There are no statistics in the piece of text she cited.”
Much is, frankly, an ambiguous word. I think it’s disingenuous to assume that people will read it as “a large minority” outside of further clarity. I agree that you weren’t necessarily fabricating statistics, but the text of that paragraph is certainly arguing that coercive assaults form a big, significant proportion of the assaults that ace survivors have dealt with. Queenie’s error here is one of misstating, and hey, maybe so is yours. Lexical ambiguity happens to all of us--but it doesn’t erase her broader point that the only significant narrative of sexual violence against aces which is getting discussed is much more narrow than the diversity of experiences that ace survivors have.
2. “That particular piece of text is not arguing that compulsory sexuality and sex-positivity has wrought harm in ace communities.”
It doesn’t, to be frank, have to. What it is doing is bringing up asexual survivors only in the context of compulsory sexuality and even then only in the context of sexual coercion towards sex repulsed people. That’s the entire thing Queenie is trying to get people to rethink doing. Consider that she may not have misread your passage as badly as you have misread hers in your effort to clear yourself of wrongdoing.
3. It’s not relevant to the piece of my text that she quoted above from the zine intro.
It totally is. She’s talking about how ace sexual assault survivors are discussed in the ace community and what narratives are emphasized. Your quote is emphasizing a particular narrative, which you yourself totally admit in the “much” paragraph. She’s then going on to point out that there are other ace experiences of assault that are much more common and explaining how she knows (from her extensive work which is directly involved with survivors in her capacity as head of RFAS).
4. The point is whether the proportion–whatever it turns out to be– is socially meaningful.
Yes. She knows. She thinks you should be more careful about which assault narratives get “socially meaningful” status and which don’t, because of the potential of harm to those survivors when they try to fit themselves into a narrative that may or may not be accurate.
5. Note that Queenie’s edit of my post to replace my “it” with “[sexual violence against aces]” is picking an inappropriate antecedent because I had clearly specified a couple lines above that “it” meant “the violence I was talking about in my post”.
You have a real problem with attributing miscommunication to the fault of the reader rather than the writer. More on that later.
6. Again, the problem with these claims is that they are simply is not true: acknowledging that some violence against aces “*does* specifically target the sex-repulsion of sex-repulsed aces”in no way “discounts the possibility of anti-asexual violence that isn’t directly lined to sex-aversion”.
But they’re totally true. Omnes, as someone else who is also very verbal, I think there’s a thing you are failing to understand here. When you are talking about one subject, that directs the conversation towards that subject. Mentioning as a disclaimer that other kinds of assault experiences exist does not mitigate the harm of only discussing one kind in detail. Imagine that people only discussed asexuality in the context of romantic aces. Sometimes they maybe go “well romance doesn’t apply to all aces,” but they never tell the stories of those kinds of aces. Don’t you think you’d be feeling a bit erased by the discourse? If we are never speaking about other experiences when we talk about ace survivors, then our disclaimers about “oh yeah those people exist” are like placing a band-aid on a gaping wound.
Queenie’s point, in case you missed it, was that we should maybe try and start stitching that wound up by acknowledging many kinds of experiences when we talk about ace survivors.
7. Saying that a system of violence is not ace-specific doesn’t mean that it’s not real or that it’s not important. What it means is that attempts to fight against this violence can’t be limited to ace community nor can they be primarily about ace community.
Bullshit. We need to talk about these kinds of violence within our own ace-centered communities as a way of community building and acknowledging intersectionality properly. To fail to do so is to fail ace survivors who will be ignored by those broader initiatives, because they’re ace. No one is going to acknowledge us as ace unless we do it for ourselves--how have you failed to notice this?
We talk about racism as it impacts the ace community, because this is the only way to make this community incrementally more welcoming to ace POC. We talk about ableism in the ace community because that is the only way to interrogate our activism and make it more accessible to our community members. We need to talk about sexual assault as it impacts all of our community members, not just a particular special subset of those community members who are most useful for our political agitation.
Again, that is literally Queenie’s point.
8. This isn’t an issue of “using ace survivors as rhetorical devices”… as Queenie claimed: it’s an issue of talking about structures sexual violence and tools in its service as a way of arguing how best to fight against sexual violence.
Sure. We’re doing that right now. Queenie disagrees with you: she thinks that the way you are discussing your structures is leaving massive holes that hurt ace survivors as a whole. Survivors aren’t a hive mind; they have different experiences, and you cannot construct a narrative of all experiences without leaving people out. We disagree, then, about whether the structures you are building are a) constructed on solid ground and also b) useful to fighting against sexual violence.
9. Queenie seems to be operating under the overarching ideal that only ace-specific violence is worth fighting in ace spaces– that the only violence worth talking about in ace spaces is violence that is limited in scope to aceness.
This is the exact opposite of her point, as witness the points she makes about CSA. She’s actually arguing that activists are making that particular error and that they should stop:
If you’ve seen a post about ace survivors, there’s a very good chance it was in the context of ace survivors being proof that asexuals are oppressed. In fact, ace survivors are often used as trump cards to win political arguments on everything from the oppression of asexuals to the oppression of sex-averse aces to the necessity of separating asexuality from LGBT movements. This sort of rhetoric is a huge issue for ace survivors, as it treats us not as complex individuals whose needs and desires matter to the community but as pawns to be used or discarded at the whim of the author.
“Queenie is acting in bad faith!”
Full disclosure: this one pissed me off. It pisses me off because you’re not exactly a wilting newbie to ace blogging, Omnes, and because you are not without your own allies and friend networks. You have the same community status that she has, and whining that she “picked on you unfairly” is frankly pretty hilarious. Especially since you’ve been trying to write specifically about aces and partner abuse since you started Rotten Zucchinis; that’s literally the title of your blog here! If you don’t have the support of other writers about sexual assault and asexuality, well, you frankly have only yourself to blame. You’ve certainly been writing on the subject for about as long as Queenie has, if not Elizabeth.
Moreover, Queenie’s work (and Elizabeth’s) over at RFAS has a hell of a lot more direct connection to and support for actual ace survivors than any kind of structural ideologizing I have ever been aware of you doing. If I’m wrong and you’re involved in another actual project reaching out to and listening to ace survivors outside of your own narratives--and RZ emphatically counts there, incidentally--please do enlighten me! I routinely pass out resources for aces in my offline groups, and it would certainly be helpful to have additional resources to point to.
It is also in and of itself an ad hominem: if you can demonstrate that Queenie’s motives in writing it were impure or more about some kind of ideological power grab than about genuinely addressing a concern that she has about how ace survivors are discussed in asexual activism circles, then you don’t have to actually self evaluate her criticisms or accept that you might possibly be wrong. Unfortunately, it’s an injection of bad faith into a conversation that was already fraught. If you’re going to talk about sensitive subjects, you need to be prepared for criticism of your work to exist in good faith. Omnes, I have repeatedly observed you struggle with this in the past, and I am not remotely the only one. I will say this bluntly: You need to work on this, because it is actively hurting your ability to ally with other activists.
So that you cannot writhe and insist that you never meant to imply or say this one and that I am misreading, I will just copy your words here below:
1. Queenie willfully ignores the conversational context of those words she quoted
2. If I take some distance and try to make sense out of how Queenie could have come to these bizarre and unfounded conclusions, I notice a missing piece
3. Queenie’s discussion has clearly taken sides as part of this controversy
4. First a significant portion of that post was dedicated to her writing about her own experience of sexual violence. ( And generally, people stay away from criticising anything that event gets near in proximity– i.e., in the same post– to that kind of writing for good reason. )
Second, the first part of the series makes a big point of not harassing the bloggers she quotes– presumably that point applies to leaving her alone too.
Third, given her discursive power within the community as an Expert of ace survivors of sexual violence, anyone who disagrees with her is automatically positioned as “against ace survivors of sexual violence”. This power is something she bolsters very deliberately: there’s a section in her first instalment explicitly justifying her “expert” subject position. This entire series’ credibility is largely based on this “expert” status.
Fourth, in her introductory pieces, she provided a list of high-profile blogger-supporters, creating a situation where challenging anything in the series would implicitly also be taking a stance against all of them.
There are a lot of people who can’t stand up to that without facing serious ( undeserved ) negative repercussions.
Drop the pity act. Omnes, if the bloggers at the Agenda frequently disagree with you based on clarity, stop and consider that you are either not as clear a communicator as you clearly believe or that we disagree with you on grounds that are not a matter of miscommunication but of ideology. If you want to discuss that further, you need to accept that perhaps people sometimes disagree with you because they sincerely believe that you are wrong.
General announcement for this (apparently not quite dead) tumblr blog
For the record, folk who know me from tumblr: I’m way more active over at Metafilter right now for a variety of reasons. I’m not a huge fan of tumblr’s focus on graphics or its aggravating way of channeling conversations, so I’m likely to keep effectively using this tumblr as a way to comment on other people’s posts when someone catches my attention with a post via some other channels. (I have Ace Admiral’s blog and a couple of others which are reliably text heavy and tailored to my interests on RSS, and I get links sometimes from people who chat with me about stuff I’m interested in.)
If you want to chat me up or get my attention, I do answer emails faaaairly quickly at [email protected] and again I’m over on Metafilter a lot. Cheers!
My god, this was an interesting enough post to haul me back to tumblr. I don’t really have a good answer to this one, but I’ve also run into very similar things with respect to wanting to see myself in figures from history. That tension is really strong when I look into the history of Boston marriages, which is absolutely something I would have wanted in the context of a century ago but, understandably, something that many wsw/wlw* see themselves in too.
And it’s hard! When I try to set up conversations about that in non-primarily-ace spaces, I run into this really frustrating dichotomy. One, non-ace-wlw get really defensive at the suggestion that not all of these people are like them.... but also, there is a weird gross tendency for some straight people to go “well they were just friends, nothing queer here no sir” when... that’s not really the whole story either, and “just” friends erases the reality of historical set-ups. There does not seem to be room for people to think about relationships like mine, which may or may not be normally romantic, are definitely sexless, but are also primary and very much outside heteronormative assumptions. (For example: no dudes, aimed-for permanency. No one here is just hanging on and waiting for the right man to show up.)
Sometimes there is room for people to accept that my relationships as I explain them exist, but not... necessarily for other people to have wanted similar things without coming from the same ideological tradition as me. Like, any relationships like mine would only spring up in the context of someone who identifies as ace and says so, not in the context of, say, a woman who has never heard of the ace community. I find that really weird, because I don’t think that I’ve invented anything new by identifying as ace--I just think I’m talking to other people who share similar feelings to me.
(Actually, have you seen this post? It is very related although it’s approaching a similar problem from a very different context. In that case, people who are deliberately writing fic about ace people assume that the statement “I’m asexual” tells other characters much more about what a character actually wants out of a relationship than it actually does. Here, we have people assuming that a character saying she wants a particular relationship/flavor of relationship with another character says more about her sexual identity than we may actually know.)
*not sure about preferred nomenclature here but phrasing “women who love women” as implicitly excluding ace women is, um, weird to me. For reasons.
