HEY!

outlawroad:

tessaslifeandshit:

I  REALLY hate how people a saying things like “Asexuals don’t experience sexual attraction” THIS IS NOT A UNIVERSAL TRUTH! I hate it even MORE WHEN AN ACE SAYS IT. I know nothing will change by posting this, but CHOSE WHAT YOU SAY Carefully!  You will regret it if you don’t! Some of us are pro-sex, Some of us are anti-sex, Some of us enjoy it under certain specifications, Some of us don’t enjoy it but do it for there partner occasionally, Some of us never or rarely act on sexual tension because they don’t relate it to anything! etc. etc. PLEASE IGNORANCE IN OUR OWN COMMUNITY IS A PROBLEM! WE REALLY NEED TO WORK ON BECAUSE IF WE DON’T WE WILL HAVE A HELL OF A TIME BEING ACCEPTED OR RECOGNIZED!

edit:I understand the “Dictionary definition” just fine, and you can tell me whatever you want. I will not be mad at you, even if i disagree with what you said. I really do respect everyone’s opinion’s, but I do not have to like it. For example  sebastifan  said to me “Human sexuality isn’t a straightforward thing. But the overriding definition is a lack of sexual attraction. You can’t try to answer everything with one word, of course not. But that is the most basic, simplest way to define it. Graces and demisexuals are just as legitimate and experience sexual attraction but it’s very, very rare. I’m really confused as to why you think that shouldn’t be the definition of asexual. That is what it is.”   and I really respect people who can respond with such thoughtful and considerate responses like such. 

“Not experiencing sexual attraction” is the only definition of asexuality. If you do experience sexual attraction, you aren’t asexual. You may be gray-asexual, if you rarely experience sexual attraction, or you may be demisexual, if you experience sexual attraction as a result of romantic/emotional attraction/attachment (though not necessarily to every person you feel this emotional/romantic attachment for). That’s why those terms exist, to describe people who are not asexual and yet not entirely allosexual, in the sense of experiencing primary sexual attraction on a regular basis. 

Can you be asexual and still have a sex drive or masturbate or find people aesthetically attractive or consent to sex and physically enjoy it? Yeah. But if you don’t experience sexual attraction to other human beings, you’re still asexual even if you do any or all of those things. 

If you can look at another person and think or feel, “I want to fuck that person,” then you aren’t asexual. Simple as that. Even if it’s a rare occurrence. If it’s rare, then you’re gray. If you experience sexual attraction but you don’t really care about actual sex and don’t feel the need to pursue it, then you qualify as a a gray-a or maybe you don’t want to identify as anything and just say, “I don’t really care about sex enough to try having it regularly.” 

After having a conversation with a friend I’ve known for 20 years who recently came out as asexual, I’ve come to understand that there is a clear distinction between asexuality as an orientation, and asexuality as an identity, both equally valid, but not always coincidental in the same person. Here is what I mean.

My sexual orientation is asexual. Like outlawroad said, this means I don’t experience sexual attraction to anyone. I also identify as asexual, which might seem like a no-brainer and, in this case, you’d be right.

However, my friend has told me that he really is attracted to women sexually, but he has absolutely no desire to follow through. While he has had sex with women before, it never felt all that good and left him with a decidedly “meh” feeling. Instead, he prefers to take care of his libido with his hand and his fetishes (he has a leather fetish and some others I’m not sure about). He is in his 40s like me, and he doesn’t feel, after years of trying to change himself, that he is ever going to enjoy having sex with a partner. So while his sexual orientation is clearly heterosexual, he feels that for the purposes of relationships and dating, his identity is asexual.

Lastly, it can happen the other way around as well. There are people who enjoy the mechanics of sex with a partner, even if they don’t actually feel sexually attracted to anyone. In these cases, while their orientation is asexual, they might identify as lesbian, gay, straight, pansexual, or bisexual.

(Source: tacticalannoyance)

Free thought, unless you’re asexual, apparently

I know this was posted a while ago, but it’s so well written and I agree so hard, that I feel compelled to reblog it.

sidneyia:

So I decided this and this deserved a better takedown when I’m not so fuming. No, I won’t be going back to the original thread because I think it will probably make me throw up. Yeah, I’m chickenshit, whatever.

What we have is a helpful third-party informing me that I’ve missed the point - and am apparently physically incapable of grasping the point - of what the anti-ace commenter was saying. Except I didn’t, and I’m not. I know full well what she said: that asexuals are pathological, and that we refuse to accept it because we’re ~special snowflakes~ and, what’s worse, we coerce sexual people with low libidos into forgoing important medical treatment in order to validate our own special-snowflake-ness. That’s a hefty accusation, so excuse me if I take exception to it. 

She then goes off on a tangent describing situations in which sexual people in a relationship might lose interest in each other sexually. Asexuals, she says, would jump at the chance to pull someone in any of those situations into our hivemind community. The thing is? Nope, we wouldn’t. When I used to hang out on AVEN there were a ton of threads that began that way: “I’ve been married for a number of years, and then [x] happened/changed, and now I’m not sexually interested in my spouse anymore. Am I asexual?” And the majority of commenters would say no, probably not, you should look into other factors. Why? Because asexuals can tell the difference between losing interest in something and never having any in the first damn place. Something that people who make strawmen of us really, really don’t want to understand. 

And really, so what if someone who’s struggling with low libido/lack of interest wants to claim an asexual identity for the time being while they sort their shit out? Why is that any of your damn business, Daisy? Are you really so concerned with losing a member of the sexual people’s club? Because I’ll let you in on another secret that we only discuss in private in the huge fucking asexual blog community at our top-secret cell meetings in our hollowed-out volcano lair: if someone in our midst decides to take on a new label, to re-evaluate their identity, to stop calling themselves ace and switch to demi or grace or even just plain sexual? We’re completely fine with that. We’re not Scientologists. We don’t thwart people’s attempts to leave the fold. We understand that that person who was asexual last week who now identifies as sexual is the same fucking person who was and is our friend. We understand that labels shift and that people explore. You apparently don’t. You want to police people’s label usage in order to protect them from us predatory special snowflakes, and I don’t understand. 

Likewise, we’re okay with people getting themselves checked out medically for underlying conditions that might cause low libido. Seriously. We might gripe about how we don’t think anyone should have to assume a medical basis for something we view as a natural variation, but we’re not going to kick someone out of the asexual cabal for having their fucking hormones checked. I’ve jumped through all the medical hoops myself and never once met an asexual person who was anything but supportive. 

Lastly, helpful third-party commentator: “Aha! I’ve caught you saying the same things in more than one place and now I have proof that you have an agenda!” is a really weaksauce derailment attempt. Nevertheless, though: fine. You got me. I have an agenda. You want to know what it is? (No, but I’m going to tell you.) I want to see the skeptical and atheist communities stop writing off asexuality and asexual experiences, and to demonstrate some of that precious critical thinking when it comes to the social attitudes that dictate asexuality can’t exist, or is a sickness. We tend to be a fairly skeptical, science-minded bunch (for instance, over 50% of us ID as some form of nonreligious), and I feel like the two groups are natural allies. And it makes absolutely no sense for a group who’s as concerned with fostering tolerance and diversity, and mixing newfangled social justice in with their stodgy old-school skepticism, as the Freethought bloggers are, to continue shutting us out. 

Misquote

avenpt:

asexylove:

I’v been getting a bunch of e-mail recently about a quote that was attributed to me on Tumblr. As most of you have surmised, the quote is fake (I won’t bother linking to it), someone’s idea of a way to attack the AVEN admods. Since this is an issue that’s on people’s minds, I want to make it clear what I DO think.

I think the admods are awesome. I also think that, like all elected governing bodies, the admods are far from perfect. They’re a bunch of people who have volunteered to take time out of their busy lives to do hard, generally thankless work because they believe that there should be a safe place out there for asexuals, grey-a’s, demisexuals and our allies to understand ourselves and our relationships. That’s why I’m doing this work, as far as I can tell it’s a vision (along with our visibility work) that everyone in the community shares. Because they’ve put hard work into this vision they have earned my gratitude and respect.

I know that most of you out there share this sense of respect, and a few of your out there don’t. That’s cool. I’ve been frustrated at authority plenty of times in my life, and I know that me arguing with you won’t change that. As an experience activist, let me offer you a few words of advice:

Systems accept disruption, but only in the service of optimization. The most powerful thing that you can do to change a system is to hold up a way to make it better. That won’t look like insults, attacks, or reactions, it’ll look like a better way to create a safe space for asexuals, grey-a’s, demisexuals and our allies to understand ourselves and our relationships. If you’ve got that, you can prove that it works, and you can prove your integrity by avoiding petty fights, then you’re in a great position to change things. Before long the admods will probably join you, and I will too.

-from David Jay

Why I’m okay with “born this way”

sidneyia:

There has been some pushback lately against the concept of “born this way” as a rallying cry for queer people. I’d like to go on the record as a queer person who finds the idea of “born this way” very useful, even empowering. There are a couple of reasons for this; one is highly personal, and the other has to do with the way science is understood and discussed in the public sphere. 

Read More

This blog entry is well written and worth the read. I completely agree that we need to embrace science, rather than ignoring it for fear that people would use it to misconstrue queerness of any kind as a “disease”. That would be like saying “hey, we found the gene for green eyes, so now we can ‘cure’ them!” Asexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality, and pansexuality are all part of the spectrum of normal sexuality.

Granted, just as many people are born in bodies that misrepresent their gender, people can also be born in bodies that misrepresent who they are in other ways. In sidneyia’s case, it seems that being in an aversive asexual body misrepresents who sidneyia is sexually and they would be much happier socially if they could at least stop being aversive. I get this. I feel trapped being stuck in an autistic body. It’s not that I feel a value judgement against being autistic, nor that sidneyia feels that all aversive aces would be better off being “cured”, it’s that these aren’t comfortable fits for us, respectively.

However, denying the genetic (and epigenetic) causes of sexual orientation in favor of pretending that we’ve each simply made a choice to be this way doesn’t further our goals to be accepted. Yes, I do agree with the sentiment, “even if it were a choice, it’s my choice, Fundies, so back the fuck off, since it’s none of your business what I do (or don’t do) in my bedroom with a consenting partner!”. But that doesn’t negate the role that science can play in explaining that, yes, there is a range of normal sexual orientations which includes some more common orientations (heterosexuality and homosexuality) and some less common (asexuality, bisexuality, and pansexuality, etc.), but they are all okay, all healthy, just as green eyes aren’t any less healthy than brown eyes.

Anonymous asked: Sometimes, I find a lot of negativity thrown at gray-asexuals and demisexuals from people who identify as asexual, claiming that we aren’t “real asexuals” or that our sexualities are lifestyle choices. Can you offer any advice to the demis and graces out there on deflecting this attitude? I hate to say it, but I hear this opinions from aces quite a lot more often than I expected to.

asexualeducation:

Demis and graces on still on the asexual spectrum, as far as I’m concerned you’re every bit of asexual as somebody who identifies exclusively as asexual. It doesn’t matter if you sometimes experience sexual attraction or whenever you’re only sexually attracted to your partner, you deserve the same respect and you’re entitled to the same help and resources as everyone else!

Asexuality should never ever be an elitist thing, everyone experiences sexuality differently and we should all embrace that, instead of judging others. Keep strong anon!

It’s sad when this kind of thing happens in any minority community. We all need to stick together and support one another, rather than pull elitist bullshit.

However sometimes I’m afraid some (though not all) of it may be the result of miscommunication. For example, there are aces who identify as aversive asexual, people who aren’t even a little grace or demisexual, and who would only ever consider dating people who are either very asexual or only a tiny bit gray, but generally wouldn’t date a demisexual since they wouldn’t want to be in a romance with someone who might eventually find them sexually attractive and want to have sex. That isn’t to deny that demisexuals are ace, it’s just that some asexuals wouldn’t want to be in a position of having to negotiate having sex with anyone, regardless of how that person identifies.

I can see how this could lead to a misperception on the part of demisexuals and some graces that these aversive aces are being elitist, but in this particular case, they really aren’t. It’s just a matter of dating compatibility. Functionally speaking, aversive aces just aren’t usually romantically compatible with demisexuals.