Posts tagged asexuality

And you know, it really makes me feel exhausted, because I believe so firmly that there should be spaces for questioning people and people coming to terms with their sexuality to come to and work through their feelings with support and people who understand. I believe in trusting people to figure out what they are for themselves, and I believe in affirming what they have to say about what they want. I believe in trying to make a space to help people who have questions get the answers they need. And—it’s hard for me to look around and find those spaces for baby ace people.

AVEN has its consistent waves of infighting. Tumblr has its waves of attack by the anti-ace brigade which make it hard for us to protect ourselves, let alone take the emotional energy to do proper mentoring, because of the constant background level of defensiveness. The blogosphere is a lot of things, but it was never a place for questioning people to find support. And what else is there? We don’t have widespread offline groups, and you can’t assume that “LGBTQ-friendly” means “ace-friendly.” And whether or not most LGBTQ groups are friendly—and I actually firmly believe most of them probably are—it’s very scary to approach one when you’re not sure of the welcome you’ll get. Which means that baby questioning aces are less likely to seek them out than other questioning people, I think. 

After the panel last week, a girl came up to me and said “I’m glad you did this, I think I’m asexual. I told my sister and she didn’t really get it—she thinks it’s a phase and wants to help me fix it.” And I just—I said “Whatever you turn out to be, it’s okay, it’s normal” and “I’ve been like this for seven years, and I don’t think it’s a phase.” I worry I came on way too strong for someone she’d just met, but I have—I have so many feelings about trying to make a breathing space for people to figure themselves out, I have so many feelings about telling people that they’re okay when other people have said they aren’t. It’s important to me to be a source of support where I can. 

She’ll coming to our Lambda Alliance on Monday, she said. And that makes me feel better, because I think: whatever else, Lambda is a safe space. And they’re good people there, and now that she knows that they care about aces too, she at least knows that that resource is there. And maybe that’s one tiny thing I’ve managed to do to make the world a little better.

…it went off really, really well. :D There were cupcakes! And also pizza and soda, but those we didn’t bother to photograph because they weren’t anywhere near as cool as the cupcakes. Incidentally, the cupcakes are not so difficult to make—I’ve got to take a weekend to make a whole bunch of different flag cupcakes for different identities to give to people before I move, because that would be a pretty awesome party. I already have a request for genderqueer cupcakes. :) More under the cut. 

Read more …

I am so, so sick of seeing otherwise good asexuality articles define aromanticism as “not wanting to be touched.” The current one that set this off includes the line “[aromantics] often shirk away from physical touch,” for fuck’s sake. (Not linking because I’m opting to leave a polite comment at the source in an attempt to create dialogue and would rather not send them a lot of angry people.) 

But. But. But. Augh. I keep seeing this even from people who should know better! People like Mark Carrigan who’s been doing asexuality research for ages do it! 

And it makes no sense when you think about it. I mean, touch isn’t inherently limited to romantic relationships. I am not the only person I know who hugs and leans on her friends, okay? We’re not even going to go into touch that happens between family members like parents and children—or are they dating each other too? 

And besides, seriously, do you really think that the only difference between romantic relationships and friendships is physical intimacy? Because if that’s the huge boundary I’ve been trying to wrap my head around for the better part of two years now, I’m really freaking confused as to why people always go “bzuh?” when I ask them how to define the difference in feeling between romantic partners and friendships. 

Why is this so difficult a concept for people to wrap their head around? 

Okay, so a while ago I mentioned I got to play with the data from the Asexual Awareness Week and that I had some questions about general categorizations of gender! And I’m still working on the gender identity data and playing with the numbers, but I also wanted to start making up rough graphs for the romantic orientation data.

This is, if anything, possibly more intimidating a project than categorizing the gender data was. This is in part because most prefixes currently used for romantic/sexual orientation names reference the person’s gender and most of these are very binarist. Given that we have a very high proportion of people outside the gender binary (23% of respondents identified as neither male nor female or both equally; 37% of people used some nonbinary marker in their gender response), this makes using the usual terminology pretty difficult. At the same time, because cultural reactions to androromantic women are very different from cultural reactions to androromantic men, I do want to have a breakdown of romantic orientation as defined in relation to the gender of the person.

So I have some vague ideas about how to handle it already. As Aydan suggested earlier with the gender data, I will be doing multiple graphs to sensitively present this data, including graphs of the percentages of people ticking each individual box. I also plan to do a separate breakdown for each of the five “rough” gender categorizations and smaller breakdowns for all polyromantic markings. (That is, I’ll be examining how many people who checked romantic attraction to multiple gender categories are interested in men + women, women + nonbinaries, nonbinaries + men + women, etc.)

I am tentatively hoping to come up with a very general summary graph listing at least numbers for heteroromantics, homoromantics, poly/bi/panromantics, aromantics, wtfromantics/not easily categorized, and potentially one or more other categories (see below comments asking for input on handling nonbinaries). Under this graph will be more detailed breakdowns of the data. 

I will also probably be providing lists of some of the things people wrote in for “Other” for both romantic orientation and gender, because some of them are really interesting.

However, I am unsure on how to handle some aspects of the data. For example, I’m not quite sure how to handle respondents who checked “I am romantically attracted to people of non-binary gender identification” only, as a single monoromantic identity. I’m also trying to figure out how to most accurately categorize monoromantic answers for people who identify as nonbinary. The 2008 AVEN poll included this group as “unable to be sensitively categorized,” but if anyone has better ideas, that would be greatly appreciated. In general I would rather not tack on “attracted to non-binary people” as an ad hoc addition to other categorizations as that poll did, particularly since far, far more people fall into these categories during this poll than during that one.   

Does anyone have any other suggestions about how to sensitively categorize different romantic orientations in a general summary graph? Or how to categorize people who check, say, a distinct gender preference in terms of romantic orientation and aromantic? 

The options that people could choose to check off for this included any and all of the following: 

I am romantically attracted to men.

I am romantically attracted to women.

I am romantically attracted to non-binary gender identified people. 

My romantic orientation is fluid.

There is no difference between romantic and non-romantic attraction for me.

I am romantically attracted to no one (aromantic).

I am demiromantic.

I am gray-romantic.

I am unsure at this time.

Other; please specify.

I’m currently playing with the Asexual Awareness Week data in an effort to determine how many aces are actually cisgender and heteroromantic in this massive dataset I get to play with, because it came up again on the Feministe post and I really would like to have numbers to show people on this question. 

So far, we have a massive proportion of trans* folk, especially nonbinaries, which should surprise absolutely no one who actually interacts with the ace community in any way. (Many people who did not identify as either male or female also did not identify themselves as transgender, which means that the numbers presented in the results page for this survey are actually skewed in the direction of obscuring the level of gender diversity in the ace community.) 

One of the problems I’m currently having is how to present the numbers re: gender identity most helpfully. Many, many people checked multiple gender (and romantic orientation!) boxes, which means that the survey captured a lot of the ambiguity people feel about these questions (yay!) but also means that, well, it’s hard to present the data in a non-ambiguous, more cut-and-dried manner (not yay). 

I rather want to do a graph charting the proportions of people who identify as male, female, and outside the gender binary, but the difficulty is that many people checked male or female and some other option, such as “androgynous” or “genderqueer/gender variant.” 

Does anyone have suggestions for how I should categorize people who answered that way? My main problem is that some of these options are sometimes used as gender identities and sometimes used as gender presentation descriptors, and I’m having a hard time figuring out which direction to go in. I also don’t want to offend or upset anyone with a gender identity outside the binary, since my gender identity is well within it. So suggestions on how to deal with this in terms of presenting these numbers would be very welcome!

The full list of identities people could tick on this question is below. People could tick as many boxes as they wanted, and a blank space was made available for people who answered “Other” to clarify in.

Androgynous

Bigender

Female

Genderfluid

Gender neutral

Genderqueer or gender variant

Male

Pangender

Trigender

Two-Spirit

Questioning

Unsure/confused

I don’t have a gender identity

Other - please specify

The round-up can be found here. This month’s subject was attraction. 

Next month’s round is at Confessions of an Ist! 

…I finally got around to writing a post for the Carnival of Aces. Uh, I’m the worst carnival promotor ever, sorry about that, and the deadline is approaching fast. If you’ve got the ability to write a post about attraction by Thursday, though, you totally should!

The post itself:

And then you get on to romantic attraction. This is about the point where I start to get confused. I’ve written a lot before about how frustrating I find the concept of romantic attraction.  It seems to me to be poorly defined, a lot of the time, and people have a hard time articulating the difference to me, and I’ve largely given up attempting to understand it. I’ve also largely given up trying to shoehorn myself into traditional categories of romantic orientation and have begun identifying as “wtfromantic.”

So let me talk about how my affectional patterns actually seem to work.

More here at the link.

On the other hand, my thoughts on nuance have made me think some more about my emotions and their reactions. You know the constant fucking “your community is evil and bad bad bad and everything you do is bad” stuff from Tumblr? It makes me emotionally want to cling to “sexual supremacy” as a concept. It makes me, on an emotional level, want to start defining things as us against them. It makes me want to band together and protect my community and talk only about our issues and not about about anyone else’s; it makes me not want to give an inch, ideologically. It makes me want to cling fast to everything I am saying, because I have seen people twisting the words of people I respect to make them seem horrifying. I see so many people who seem convinced that I and my entire community are evil and that nothing we can say or do will change their minds; why would I want to open myself up and make myself even slightly vulnerable to them in order to have a dialogue? Why would I want to engage with people who already think I’m an irredeemably bad person? Because from my perspective, that’s what these people who keep coming into my community are.

I don’t know. The debate over the word “sexual” is all over my dash again and honestly, my gut reaction is to snarl “look, fuck you” again, even though I don’t like “sexual” as a word, even though I think it’s problematic and I’d like a better term. I don’t want to engage with it. I don’t want to sit down and hash out something better, because I’m tired and I don’t want to give that ideological ground to people I feel will only use it to hurt me some more. 

This is because I am so used to people coming into my community and saying things like—“your identities are inherently oppressive,” or that fucking argument over the AVEN triangle (which, uh, has been pretty conclusively shown to be completely unrelated to the Holocaust triangle), or that every issue I talk about is making things up to feel *special* or that problematic things people say about asexuality necessarily represent my community even when aces stand up and say “not okay”. You know, the anti-ace things that I have been seeing in the tags for my sexuality on a weekly—if not daily—basis since I joined Tumblr in the first place. And okay, I have been dealing with six months of this shit, since it really blew up right after I got a Tumblr in the first place, and it’s actually causing me some fairly significant offline issues. And I’m not the only one—I know asexuals who won’t follow those tags any more, even, because the constant fucking hatred is so bad. 

(These issues are particularly related to things like the offline participation I’ve been doing in my campus LGBTQA group—the people there have been nothing but accepting! They are awesome! But I still get flinchy, sometimes, still expect people to lash out and hurt me for talking about my identity as a real thing that causes me problems, and that makes me sad—that I can’t trust people who have been nothing but friendly and welcoming.

And the thing is, me having that anxiety? It’s not causing me to avoid spaces that are meant to be safe from people like me—this group is explicitly meant to be open to everyone. What it’s doing instead is making me less likely to take part in activities like campaigning for our school to pull its head out of its ass and add gender identity and gender expression to its anti-discrimination clauses, because I feel anxious about putting myself forward at all, even to try to help people. That extra participation—even doing something I think is really really important, something I’m amazed isn’t already in place, I can’t do that because it’s not worth the social anxiety, the sudden panic that this is the time I say something wrong—something too uppity, too convinced that asexuality is important—and everyone will lay into me. That sucks, okay?)

So the thing is—right now, on Tumblr? I am primed to respond to anyone who strides in and starts shrieking about how awful my community is by putting my hackles up and snarling right back. Because that’s basically all I’ve been seeing since I joined Tumblr, is people who are not part of my community striding gleefully into it to snarl about how *bad* and *awful* we are, how appropriative we are as asexuals for discussing the issues we specifically face, how deluded we are, how our community is inherently full of slut-shaming, how our identities aren’t really real but instead we’re whatever our romantic orientations are, how we are this hotbed of—something bad.

And the thing is, half of that is contradictory and I’ve stood up and talked about it over and over and none of it changes and I’m just… exhausted. The same arguments about how awful we are come up, and I’ve seen people try to politely engage and ask for asexual identities to be respected in the process and I’ve seen them told that no, their identities will not be respected. I’ve seen people who are much better at being polite than I am bend over backwards to try to find common ground and get nowhere. So I feel like I can’t engage, that engaging and having fruitful discussion is pointless, because no one is trying and all I’m going to do is get hurt again.