myjawislikeashovel-deactivated2 asked: Hello! I was wondering if you knew of any articles or the like that discuss the sex-positive movement (and the criticisms of it) from an ace perspective? Thanks!
theasexualityblog-deactivated20:
No, I don’t, and this kind of bothers me. I might write one….
Hello, theasexualityblog! Let me help you out there!
Fortunately, pretty much everybody and their step-sibling has written about asexuality and sex-positivity at this point, so there’s no shortage of reading material.
Here’s the Carnival of Aces on sex-positivity.
A Few Thoughts on Sex Positivity…
Sex-Positivity, Compulsory Sexuality and Intersecting Identities
A Sexual Positivity: Asexual Positivity as Sex Positivity
Sex isn’t always good (here on The Asexual Agenda)
The Two Meanings of « Sex-positivity »
An Asexual Map for Sex-Positive Feminism
Why I Identify as Sex-Positive, Despite Seeing Sex as Neutral
Why I No Longer Identify as a Sex-Positive Asexual
unpopular opinion time: asexuality & sex positivity
Not social justice from where I’m standing
…and there are certainly more that I haven’t included on this list, but this should be enough to get you started.
I’m honestly…kind of concerned that someone purporting to run an asexual resource blog is this disconnected from community discourse and apparently didn’t think to Google “asexuality and sex-positivity.” There’s a trend I’m seeing in a lot of asexual resource/advice blogs on tumblr recently, where the person running the blog never seems to be aware of or interacting with any discussion/resource-creation occurring elsewhere in the community. How can you claim to be a community center if you aren’t aware of what’s happening in the rest of the community? How can you offer resources if the only resources you have are the ones you make yourself? How can you be an expert on asexuality—and you are claiming to be an expert if you are running a resource/advice blog!—if you are unaware of a discussion that has been occurring in the community pretty much continuously since 2010 at the latest? People not being aware of community discourse is how the on-going debacle over whether or not to emphasize sexually active aces got started. People not being aware of community discourse is how the massive debacle over ace advice blogs in June got started. No man (or woman or non-binary person) is an island, and no ace resource/advice blog should be either, and yet I see so many of them trying to be.
Please do read some of the links above, and then follow some asexual bloggers. If you don’t know where to begin, I assembled a linkspam for people running advice blogs, which includes suggestions for further reading at the bottom. At the very least, being up to date on the discourse happening in the community will make you better equipped to direct your followers toward the resources they need, which can’t be a bad thing.
For the record, I do follow several Asexual advice and resource blogs on the site and spend an extensive amount of time in the tags. I also devote time to perusing the internet for asexuality-related articles and sites for further research as well as reading any books I can get my hands on. In fact, I’ve got an entire page on my blog dedicated to listing out all of the ace-related blogs that I follow.
I do not and will not “make my own resources” when it comes to assisting others through this blog. I would never be that presumptuous in my own experience. I base my answers on research that I’ve done and the stories of others that I’ve encountered as well as my own experience. I don’t take any of the responsibility that comes with running a resource blog lightly, and I’m not in this for the follower counts or the attention.
I don’t see anything wrong with not having 100% of the answers. It should be OK to say “I don’t know” every once in awhile, and in the case of this ask, I did do a search for “asexuality and sex positivity”. The results I found were Tumblr posts and articles for non-sex positive aces as well as articles claiming that asexuality was the opposite of sex-positivity, which seemed a bit contrary to what the asker was requesting.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been a member of the asexual community since 2010, so I don’t have the back-log of debate and community discussion topics that others might have. I have educated myself with the resources that I have found and am attempting to help others in any way I can.
While I can absolutely appreciate that you are trying to help out others in the community just like anyone else, I have to be honest and say that I’m a bit offended that you would assume that I would blindly start a blog with no background information, or would be so unsupportive of the community that I wouldn’t think to follow other asexual blogs. I understand that this may be a common problem within the community, and I can respect that you’d be wary of newcomers because of this, but I don’t think it’s completely fair to make assumptions or to punish/berate someone for not having a complete history of everything that’s ever been discussed in the community. I work very hard on this blog and I put a lot of time and effort into continuing my understanding of the asexuality community and the issues important to us.
Thank you for the article suggestions, however. I will read them as I did the others you brought to my attention last time you mentioned me in a post on one of my asks. I would ask that perhaps in the future, if you feel I need further direction on a topic that you would contact me directly instead of calling me out on a post for the world to see. I welcome the further guidance, of course, but would prefer a more respectful approach.
I would like to point out that literally the only blog I can see on your blog roll that frequently produces substantive discussion on the ace community is demigray (as opposed to being primarily a stream of cute image posts and maybe a link to longer discussion occasionally). Everything else is primarily a cute infographics and snappy text post echo chamber. If this is where you’re looking, it’s not surprising you haven’t seen any hint of the four years of asexual community discussion on this topic.
Respectfully, I would like submit that people running public blogs dedicated to promoting asexuality should also be people who are comfortable with their knowledge of asexuality community discussion. If you want to be a community leader, you need to be familiar with the complexities of your community.
I would also like to point out that if you’re going to answer text posts in public, you should be prepared for public criticism of those things. Out of curiosity, are you familiar with any of the discussions about 101 work currently raging? If not, I will be happy to provide relevant links. One of the biggest problems inherent to that discussion is that people who run blogs representing the ace community are not listening to people in the ace community discussing issues inherent to that representation.
Forgive me, but this response appears to be symptomatic of that problem and so I am picking on it here. If you want to represent this community, you need to listen to the people talking about it on a level beyond infographics of community symbols and soliciting terrified asks from the questioning.