Asexual Awareness Week 2019
Oct. 25th, 2019 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meridian_roseIt's annual asexual awareness week. I've written a lot in previous years about the awareness weeks, about my asexual identity, and I write and continue to write fiction exploring and/or including asexuality.
You can find all those posts under the theme: asexuality spectrum tag, the non sexual intimacy and the sexuality tag
This post is going to talk about asexuality and fiction, along with some deeply personal stories, and a fair bit of talk about the anti/fandom policing currently doing the rounds. Because these things are interlinked, where
1) what you ship, read or write/draw now determines if you're a good person or a filthy p*do/n*zi and harassing people over fiction has become activism
2) exclusionism in the queer community leads to attacking people over their own sexual orientation/labels and makes for tight-knit circles where you have to conform to their beliefs, with a similar insulating effect in fandom anti-shipping circles
3) Your sexual orientation, sex, and gender, are often considered to be indicators of what you are allowed to like in fiction (you can't be a lesbian and ship a m/f ship, you can't write m/m ships unless you're a gay man, women reading m/m fic are "gross Fujoshis", etc)
There's also been a huge rise in ageism and it's mostly misogynistic (fandom mom used as an insult, calling people hags, telling women they should be doing their taxes and looking after their children instead of being in fandom spaces) but that's a slightly separate, if related issue from the sexual orientation one.
This year, despite the discourse/drama/wank over Neil Gaiman refusing to call Aziraphale and Crowley "gay men in a sexual relationship" and daring to acknowledge nonbinary people and asexuality exist, there's been a lovely amount of Good Omens fic and art that is non sexual in nature, some romantic, some queerplatonic. People have been good at tagging their work so it's easy to find/exclude things you don't want to read.
I've been writing h/c fic, I even wrote fluff (very rare for me), and I explored the idea of non-binary Crowley which was something new for me. I've been enjoying looking at exploring intimacy with care and respect for boundaries, and showing deep devotion that isn't rooted in sex.
However there's also been a lot of ace hate and exclusion on Tumblr and Twitter as a whole leading me to block many accounts. I wrote a bit about exclusionism in the queer community for one of this month's writingwednesday posts. I have to say, aside from one upsetting exchange with a family member and one online straight female who was proud of saying "zucchini*! Because asexuals are emotional vegetables!", most of the ace hate and marginalisation I have seen and experienced has come from other queer people.
*zucchini is a term sometimes used within queer platonic relationships, especially for an aroace person to describe their partner "They're my zucchini."
You can play Exclusionist Bingo on Tumblr by looking at a profile which has
1) lesbian / nb lesbian / trans lesbian / trans man
2) strong opinion on trans people eg transmeds don't interact/no tucutes
3) she/they or they/them pronouns
4) NO TERFS (despite using TERF rhetoric)
5) cishets aren't lgbt / bi-hets & cis-aces aren't gay / exclusionist (at least sometimes they admit it)
6) queer is a slur / don't use the q-slur – any attempts to show that queer is a reclaimed slur and a far better umbrella term than gay (or that gay is also used a slur so arguably just as 'bad') is ignored along with fully referenced articles from the annals of the queer/gay rights movement
6) blog has a hateful name like cis-phobe or aphobic cat mom (real twitter handle I had to block this week)
7) blog is named for their fandom policing (eg anti-reylo-blog, i-hate-reylo, i-hate-ao3, x-shippers-can-choke) and/or the ship is mentioned in the profile, "reylos can choke/no sheith shippers allowed/klance shippers DNI"
8) no incest shippers/pedos don't interact The Fandom policers badge of honour, conflating fiction with reality and assuming everyone visiting their blog might be an actual paedophile who will politely follow their wishes.
Obviously 5 is an exclusionist but there's a huge correlation between all of those other things and hating on ace people.
For item 1, I saw a tweet the other day from someone saying the most hate they got as a transwoman was from lesbians. There's been a lot of discussion on Tumblr about how TERFs invaded the queer spaces and started this division which is now showing up frequently. The stereotype of lesbians as man-hating transphobes is rearing its head again because of the deliberate attempt by radfems to posit lesbians, especially the nasty term "gold star lesbians" as better than anyone else.
On a personal note, I've had three once close friendships go sour with sexuality being a part of that.
They were all self-identified female bisexuals from countries outside the UK, who claimed to be pro-equality. Oddly all three stanned a female character I don't like which seemed a surprising connection, and two of them shipped a ship I disliked, which would be fine except for how they treated that ship compared to others. They kept yelling "abuse! Abusive relationship!" at things I didn't think were abusive or were no worse than a major nasty thing the male did to the female in their fave ship which turned me off from it.
One of them I lost contact with when she dumped LJ for the reblog culture of Tumblr. Prior to that however we'd clashed a bit over sexual education. I'm pro early teaching of sex ed. My sister and I were given age appropriate books from a young age that talked about the human body and reproduction. I'm pro encouraging safe sex. However I'm not pro 'have sex all the time no matter what' attitude which we'll come back to. And I'm pro all sexualities, so if you're going to say "it's good be straight it's good to be gay, it's good to be bi/pan" than you also have to say "it's good to be asexual" and to say to everyone "you should never be coerced into sex". This wasn't a good thing according to her because MUST TEACH SEX and conflating acknowledging asexuality with full blown abstinence education, while making bisexuality 'normal' but asexuality 'abnormal'.
We also clashed over my being childfree and my desire for that be acknowledged in fiction and as a Thing Women Are because she was mostly just Babies!
Outside of that she was the least puritan of the three, despite being American - a high level of fandom policers are American -and was pro-ship and let ship, possibly because she was older and this was in the good days of LJ and not the cesspit of tumblr activism.
The next marched for gay rights in her country when they brought in regressive laws. However she was crazily Puritan about masturbation and alcohol (kept trying when beta reading to stop my adult characters drinking like they always do in canon and insisted any alcohol drank by an adult would cause their future children to be disabled) and was obsessed with the idea of sex as vital to a relationship. She admitted needed sex to feel loved which is a pretty screwed up state of affairs for her especially since she wasn't anywhere near a relationship at this point. Which blew up, when talking about my original works, about But People Have to Have Sex.
She freaked out over this consensual het kiss from one of my fantasy WiPs, claiming it was abusive (there's far more potentially abusive scenes taken out of context but this was written to be 100% consensual, and she had plenty of dubious fictional content she liked)
When they reached the gate, Ames dismounted and helped her down. He didn't release her immediately, one thumb stroking the back of her hand. "I haven't seen you laugh like that before. It was good to see you happy."
"I had a lovely time."
He put his free hand under her chin, his fingers warm against her skin. His thumb was near her lips. To her own amazement, Juliet leaned into him, pressing her lips to his thumb. Ames reacted swiftly. He let go of her chin and pulled her close, tipping his head and kissing her.
His grip was tighter than the night he'd comforted her after her nightmare though he was still holding back so he wouldn't hurt her. There was urgency in his grasp that hadn't been there before, his fingers twisting in her cloak. There was genuine passion in the kiss. This wasn't like the chaste caresses he'd given her before. It was warm and full of longing.
Juliet returned the kiss. She could smell cigar smoke and jasmine, and taste firewater. She was aware of his body, his fingers clutching at hers with one hand, the other at her back, his torso pressed against her. She lifted her free hand to entwine it in his hair, but as suddenly as he'd grabbed her, he released her.
She leans in, she returns the kiss, there is no coercion here. But sure, abuse according to her.
Third person was the most recent, youngest of the bunch but still well into adulthood, who dumped me for being too sad, for too long, about things I have every right to be upset about, and for writing dark fiction. She'd become increasingly anti in her behaviour. She was also single yet obsessed with the notion of sex in relationships, and was increasingly puritanical about all manner of things from coffee to hair dye.
What was odd was how she was the one seemingly unable to separate fiction from reality given she was obsessed with giving her characters dozens of babies as if no-one ever dies from that (especially in historical settings) and was therefore unable to care about my concerns for my pregnant sister's wellbeing. I mean who gives a shit about sisters anyway, she disliked hers, and babies and pregnancy is so cute!!! (I should have ended the friendship then but more fool me to give her more chances.)
We'd had more than one run-in about my asexuality where she'd get snippy about me writing asexual characters or bang on about how people had sex. She kept telling me "but people like sex!" as if liking something is the same as it being vital to a relationship – you don’t get to demand anal sex just because you like it, or to tie someone up if they don't want to be, and plenty of people get along fine without those things.
I complained about a historical show where we were supposed to cheer for a man breaking his vows by sleeping with his best friend's wife, where the best friend was the king and the wife was in trouble when she got pregnant because her adultery would be discovered. I hated the protagonist, I hated the relationship, and I said the wife might have considered not committing adultery especially when she didn't have access to birth control. Her response "That's slut shaming!"
It's not slut shaming to promote responsibility. It's not slut shaming to say that while consensual sex between adults is fine that there are responsibilities you have – for example taking precautions and/or abstaining from sex due to a sexually transmittable disease.
Having been through almost the exact same scenario three times I'm getting wary of making new friends.
And thanks to all the kickback from bisexuals and ace hate from lesbians, I'm getting wary of any blog mentioning a queer identity until I can be sure they're not run by a fandom police/exclusionist.
Good job promoting tolerance, guys. You're as bad as those asexuals giving the rest of us a bad name by being highly puritanical and trying to stop any public displays of affection or insisting that hand-holding is sexual.
Anyway, I can, and have, and do, read and write fiction that includes sexual content and masturbation and kinks, depending on the fandom/original fic genre, and I'm not part of the anti-shipping (antis, now more broadly fandom policers, "Fandom Frollos", or as I like to think of them the Modern Mary Whitehouses) culture.
The more I look at my ships, old and new, the more ~problematic ones I have, according to the current crop of fandom policers.
People should use the AO3 warnings and tags correctly and let others ship. Don't call m/m ships fetishising, don't call nonsexual ships desexualising/cowardly, don't call m/f ships 'dull' on the basis of gender alone, and most of all do not harass artists and authors. Do not tell them to choke or threaten to report them to the FBI ffs.
I honestly expected things to get better over the years. And while in some respects they have, the pushback against asexuality and bisexuality has been unexpected and unwelcome, along with the return of "gay ships are bad because I say so" and the rise of "the shipper of anything I don't like is evil and probably a pedophile".
You can find all those posts under the theme: asexuality spectrum tag, the non sexual intimacy and the sexuality tag
This post is going to talk about asexuality and fiction, along with some deeply personal stories, and a fair bit of talk about the anti/fandom policing currently doing the rounds. Because these things are interlinked, where
1) what you ship, read or write/draw now determines if you're a good person or a filthy p*do/n*zi and harassing people over fiction has become activism
2) exclusionism in the queer community leads to attacking people over their own sexual orientation/labels and makes for tight-knit circles where you have to conform to their beliefs, with a similar insulating effect in fandom anti-shipping circles
3) Your sexual orientation, sex, and gender, are often considered to be indicators of what you are allowed to like in fiction (you can't be a lesbian and ship a m/f ship, you can't write m/m ships unless you're a gay man, women reading m/m fic are "gross Fujoshis", etc)
There's also been a huge rise in ageism and it's mostly misogynistic (fandom mom used as an insult, calling people hags, telling women they should be doing their taxes and looking after their children instead of being in fandom spaces) but that's a slightly separate, if related issue from the sexual orientation one.
This year, despite the discourse/drama/wank over Neil Gaiman refusing to call Aziraphale and Crowley "gay men in a sexual relationship" and daring to acknowledge nonbinary people and asexuality exist, there's been a lovely amount of Good Omens fic and art that is non sexual in nature, some romantic, some queerplatonic. People have been good at tagging their work so it's easy to find/exclude things you don't want to read.
I've been writing h/c fic, I even wrote fluff (very rare for me), and I explored the idea of non-binary Crowley which was something new for me. I've been enjoying looking at exploring intimacy with care and respect for boundaries, and showing deep devotion that isn't rooted in sex.
However there's also been a lot of ace hate and exclusion on Tumblr and Twitter as a whole leading me to block many accounts. I wrote a bit about exclusionism in the queer community for one of this month's writingwednesday posts. I have to say, aside from one upsetting exchange with a family member and one online straight female who was proud of saying "zucchini*! Because asexuals are emotional vegetables!", most of the ace hate and marginalisation I have seen and experienced has come from other queer people.
*zucchini is a term sometimes used within queer platonic relationships, especially for an aroace person to describe their partner "They're my zucchini."
You can play Exclusionist Bingo on Tumblr by looking at a profile which has
1) lesbian / nb lesbian / trans lesbian / trans man
2) strong opinion on trans people eg transmeds don't interact/no tucutes
3) she/they or they/them pronouns
4) NO TERFS (despite using TERF rhetoric)
5) cishets aren't lgbt / bi-hets & cis-aces aren't gay / exclusionist (at least sometimes they admit it)
6) queer is a slur / don't use the q-slur – any attempts to show that queer is a reclaimed slur and a far better umbrella term than gay (or that gay is also used a slur so arguably just as 'bad') is ignored along with fully referenced articles from the annals of the queer/gay rights movement
6) blog has a hateful name like cis-phobe or aphobic cat mom (real twitter handle I had to block this week)
7) blog is named for their fandom policing (eg anti-reylo-blog, i-hate-reylo, i-hate-ao3, x-shippers-can-choke) and/or the ship is mentioned in the profile, "reylos can choke/no sheith shippers allowed/klance shippers DNI"
8) no incest shippers/pedos don't interact The Fandom policers badge of honour, conflating fiction with reality and assuming everyone visiting their blog might be an actual paedophile who will politely follow their wishes.
Obviously 5 is an exclusionist but there's a huge correlation between all of those other things and hating on ace people.
For item 1, I saw a tweet the other day from someone saying the most hate they got as a transwoman was from lesbians. There's been a lot of discussion on Tumblr about how TERFs invaded the queer spaces and started this division which is now showing up frequently. The stereotype of lesbians as man-hating transphobes is rearing its head again because of the deliberate attempt by radfems to posit lesbians, especially the nasty term "gold star lesbians" as better than anyone else.
On a personal note, I've had three once close friendships go sour with sexuality being a part of that.
They were all self-identified female bisexuals from countries outside the UK, who claimed to be pro-equality. Oddly all three stanned a female character I don't like which seemed a surprising connection, and two of them shipped a ship I disliked, which would be fine except for how they treated that ship compared to others. They kept yelling "abuse! Abusive relationship!" at things I didn't think were abusive or were no worse than a major nasty thing the male did to the female in their fave ship which turned me off from it.
One of them I lost contact with when she dumped LJ for the reblog culture of Tumblr. Prior to that however we'd clashed a bit over sexual education. I'm pro early teaching of sex ed. My sister and I were given age appropriate books from a young age that talked about the human body and reproduction. I'm pro encouraging safe sex. However I'm not pro 'have sex all the time no matter what' attitude which we'll come back to. And I'm pro all sexualities, so if you're going to say "it's good be straight it's good to be gay, it's good to be bi/pan" than you also have to say "it's good to be asexual" and to say to everyone "you should never be coerced into sex". This wasn't a good thing according to her because MUST TEACH SEX and conflating acknowledging asexuality with full blown abstinence education, while making bisexuality 'normal' but asexuality 'abnormal'.
We also clashed over my being childfree and my desire for that be acknowledged in fiction and as a Thing Women Are because she was mostly just Babies!
Outside of that she was the least puritan of the three, despite being American - a high level of fandom policers are American -and was pro-ship and let ship, possibly because she was older and this was in the good days of LJ and not the cesspit of tumblr activism.
The next marched for gay rights in her country when they brought in regressive laws. However she was crazily Puritan about masturbation and alcohol (kept trying when beta reading to stop my adult characters drinking like they always do in canon and insisted any alcohol drank by an adult would cause their future children to be disabled) and was obsessed with the idea of sex as vital to a relationship. She admitted needed sex to feel loved which is a pretty screwed up state of affairs for her especially since she wasn't anywhere near a relationship at this point. Which blew up, when talking about my original works, about But People Have to Have Sex.
She freaked out over this consensual het kiss from one of my fantasy WiPs, claiming it was abusive (there's far more potentially abusive scenes taken out of context but this was written to be 100% consensual, and she had plenty of dubious fictional content she liked)
When they reached the gate, Ames dismounted and helped her down. He didn't release her immediately, one thumb stroking the back of her hand. "I haven't seen you laugh like that before. It was good to see you happy."
"I had a lovely time."
He put his free hand under her chin, his fingers warm against her skin. His thumb was near her lips. To her own amazement, Juliet leaned into him, pressing her lips to his thumb. Ames reacted swiftly. He let go of her chin and pulled her close, tipping his head and kissing her.
His grip was tighter than the night he'd comforted her after her nightmare though he was still holding back so he wouldn't hurt her. There was urgency in his grasp that hadn't been there before, his fingers twisting in her cloak. There was genuine passion in the kiss. This wasn't like the chaste caresses he'd given her before. It was warm and full of longing.
Juliet returned the kiss. She could smell cigar smoke and jasmine, and taste firewater. She was aware of his body, his fingers clutching at hers with one hand, the other at her back, his torso pressed against her. She lifted her free hand to entwine it in his hair, but as suddenly as he'd grabbed her, he released her.
She leans in, she returns the kiss, there is no coercion here. But sure, abuse according to her.
Third person was the most recent, youngest of the bunch but still well into adulthood, who dumped me for being too sad, for too long, about things I have every right to be upset about, and for writing dark fiction. She'd become increasingly anti in her behaviour. She was also single yet obsessed with the notion of sex in relationships, and was increasingly puritanical about all manner of things from coffee to hair dye.
What was odd was how she was the one seemingly unable to separate fiction from reality given she was obsessed with giving her characters dozens of babies as if no-one ever dies from that (especially in historical settings) and was therefore unable to care about my concerns for my pregnant sister's wellbeing. I mean who gives a shit about sisters anyway, she disliked hers, and babies and pregnancy is so cute!!! (I should have ended the friendship then but more fool me to give her more chances.)
We'd had more than one run-in about my asexuality where she'd get snippy about me writing asexual characters or bang on about how people had sex. She kept telling me "but people like sex!" as if liking something is the same as it being vital to a relationship – you don’t get to demand anal sex just because you like it, or to tie someone up if they don't want to be, and plenty of people get along fine without those things.
I complained about a historical show where we were supposed to cheer for a man breaking his vows by sleeping with his best friend's wife, where the best friend was the king and the wife was in trouble when she got pregnant because her adultery would be discovered. I hated the protagonist, I hated the relationship, and I said the wife might have considered not committing adultery especially when she didn't have access to birth control. Her response "That's slut shaming!"
It's not slut shaming to promote responsibility. It's not slut shaming to say that while consensual sex between adults is fine that there are responsibilities you have – for example taking precautions and/or abstaining from sex due to a sexually transmittable disease.
Having been through almost the exact same scenario three times I'm getting wary of making new friends.
And thanks to all the kickback from bisexuals and ace hate from lesbians, I'm getting wary of any blog mentioning a queer identity until I can be sure they're not run by a fandom police/exclusionist.
Good job promoting tolerance, guys. You're as bad as those asexuals giving the rest of us a bad name by being highly puritanical and trying to stop any public displays of affection or insisting that hand-holding is sexual.
Anyway, I can, and have, and do, read and write fiction that includes sexual content and masturbation and kinks, depending on the fandom/original fic genre, and I'm not part of the anti-shipping (antis, now more broadly fandom policers, "Fandom Frollos", or as I like to think of them the Modern Mary Whitehouses) culture.
The more I look at my ships, old and new, the more ~problematic ones I have, according to the current crop of fandom policers.
People should use the AO3 warnings and tags correctly and let others ship. Don't call m/m ships fetishising, don't call nonsexual ships desexualising/cowardly, don't call m/f ships 'dull' on the basis of gender alone, and most of all do not harass artists and authors. Do not tell them to choke or threaten to report them to the FBI ffs.
I honestly expected things to get better over the years. And while in some respects they have, the pushback against asexuality and bisexuality has been unexpected and unwelcome, along with the return of "gay ships are bad because I say so" and the rise of "the shipper of anything I don't like is evil and probably a pedophile".
no subject
Date: 2019-10-25 10:06 am (UTC)My best guess is that the more scared people get and feel out of control of the ever increasing global insanity, the more desperate they are to invent scapegoats or control something, anything... shrug.
So sorry that happened to you with friends. That’s rough.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 10:41 am (UTC)Thank you. I'm trying to learn from those lessons and look out for warning signs early on before I get deeply invested in a friendship.
no subject
Date: 2019-10-25 10:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 10:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-25 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-26 10:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-30 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-31 07:57 am (UTC)i'm sorry. tumblr just isn't good at fostering safe environments. i tend to stay away from open spaces like that.
thank you for the good analysis.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-04 12:11 pm (UTC)