Asexuality After 30
This post is for the August Carnival of Aces. A comment on ageism and some random thoughts about asexuals who don’t fit in the Tumblr community’s demographics.
In a recent discussion about acephobic views of asexuals, swankivy commented:
After all, if you portray us as a bunch of sulky privileged kids who don’t understand real pain, you get to a) assign thoughts and feelings and attitudes to those asexuals who DO happen to be white het cis female teenagers as if their ridiculousness is self-evident, and b) erase the rest of us who aren’t white het cis female teenagers.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but for the purposes of this post I want to focus on the assumption that most people who identify as asexual are teenagers. As the description “sulky privileged kids” illustrates, the assumption is intended negatively, as an ageist stereotype about teenagers.
Many other negative views about asexuality or about asexuals betray the same bias. “You’re confused and don’t know what you are yet.” “Maybe you’re a late bloomer.”
I always laugh when I see these claims. I’m 39 years old. It stopped being plausible a very long time ago that I could just be a “late bloomer”. Yes, there are asexuals in their 30s (swankivy is another one). We exist. Our asexuality exists.
My impression of Tumblr is that most people here are around 18-23 years old - not just the asexuals but most Tumblr users in general. Some teenagers but a lot of college-age folks. If you think there are a lot of asexuals who are not many years beyond their teens, it’s most likely because you’re looking at a social network with those demographics!
If 20 is old enough to know if you are gay, lesbian, or bisexual, it’s old enough to know if you are asexual. And of course no one ever asks a 20 year old, “Are you really sure you’re straight like you claim?” Arguments of this nature are attempts to invalidate asexuality. The use of ageist stereotypes should be a tip-off about this.
~*~
I like the Tumblr ace community a lot, but as someone who’s twice as old as some of the younger members, I would also like to see more spaces for older asexuals. The first time I heard of the concept of asexuality was in 2004 - when I was already 31 years old. By that point in my life, I had long since come to know I wasn’t sexually attracted to anybody at all or interested in sex, but I thought it was something unique to me, a weird way that I was. It opened up my mind a lot when I discovered that there were actually other people like me, and to understand asexuality in the framework of other sexual orientations.
How many other people are there my age or older who have not yet come across asexuality online? There aren’t any other resources out there, really. And, even now, unless you find the Tumblr community or the AVEN forums, you’re only likely to find scattered news articles online (as happened to me) or blogs. How can we increase visibility and reach out to older people who know what they are but don’t know it’s an actual sexual orientation and that there are other people who share it?
~*~
outlawroad recently posted a survey asking asexuals and aromantics about interest in having children. I’ve known for a long time that I’m not interested in having children. I’m comfortable with that and my parents are comfortable with that (their interest in grandchildren seems to have been satisfied by the birth of my niece in 2008). I’ve never had any sense of a “biological clock ticking down”. But I’m increasingly conscious that perimenopause is around the corner for me and that, if I did want to have children, that window is closing fast. No regrets or second thoughts, just something I’m more aware of now than I was a few years ago. I’d be interested to hear from other asexual women my age how they feel about and are dealing with questions like this. Or what about the experiences of post-menopausal asexual women? Some women report a decrease in their sex drive as their estrogen levels decrease after menopause; how does this affect asexuals? That seems like uncharted territory to me because there just aren’t women in that age range who identify as asexual and who are talking or writing about these topics.
And of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What’s it like navigating your senior years as an asexual? Are there issues or problems we should know about? Or maybe it’s a great time of life. We just don’t know. Also, I think our society tends to assume that people above a certain age become non-sexual. Does this change how asexual seniors view themselves or how others view their orientation and their choices?
I hope that as asexuality continues to become more visible, and as more asexual people come to discover there’s a name for how they are, that we’ll see asexuals of all ages sharing their experiences so that we can all benefit.
As an ace who am 43 and have largely neglected my tumblr for the past several weeks because my dash is so much younger than I, I am extremely happy to see this post and its many reblogs with comments. ^_______^
I spent the day covered in glitter and handing out condoms, flyers and dental dams. Everyone was lovely! I met some new people, saw some old ones (Akira, I am sorry I didn’t recognise you in that Mario suit, dude) and had fun with Grace and met David Jay who was there for the conference. I think I handed out enough flyers to make a stack as tall as me.
Yes, Pride was great. Especially for my first one! Even with the british weather. Next time I’d maybe like to go as a group of people for Pride, not as an ace rep? It was fun but also exhausting, haha. I got a free t shirt, though, so that’s fun.
URGENT UPDATE ON WORLDPRIDE MARCH:
Due to a last minute change by the organizers of WorldPride that was announced today (Thursday 28th) for the first time, the start time for the parade parade has been moved up from 1:00pm to 11:00am.
As a result, we will now be meeting at 10:00am on the morning of July 7th, at the Baker Street station. Look for ace flags!
We will be leaving to walk to the start of the parade route as soon as people are get there, so please try to arrive a bit early if possible. We’ll be sending out mobile contact numbers closer to the day of the march.
We’re not entirely sure why they’ve done this, they claim money issues though how the two are linked isn’t clear. They’ve upset more than a few people but despite this it’s still important that we have a good, strong presence on the world stage for visibility.
We want to emphasise that this in no way alters plans for the Conference on Sunday.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact worldpride@asexuality.orgYes, we found out about this today and it’s exciting news for all [/sarcasm]. Seriously though, it’s important info so spread it about even if you aren’t going and lets all glare at the event organisers.
You can also send me or the AVEN PT tumblr an ask if you don’t want to use e-mail.
Hope plenty of people are still going to come, despite it all it’ll still be a great day out.
We’re advising that if people have to change travel times, only change the ones needed to get to London, leave the return arrangements the same. Probably they wont change times back to the original but if they do best not to close any doors.
Tempted to get her and name her ace XD
OMG she’s gorgeous! Never been on a pet site, and don’t have the attention for one, I’m sure, but this “pet” is very pretty. :)
My Experiences as an Ace and a Mixed POC
I like to link the two together, because coming to terms with both of them have had great similarities for me.
I am a mixed POC. I am 3/4 black and 1/4 white. My grandfather on my mother’s side was (was because he’s dead now and did the year I was born) a white Portuguese man, his wife a black Vincentian. My father’s parents are both black Vincentians. (Vincentians is the term for people who are from St. Vincent & the Grenadines).
With that out of the way, growing up mixed was hard for me. For someone who is 3/4 black, it only really shows up in my facial features. My skin is quite light due to my mother (who despite being mixed equally can pass as white 99.9% of the time, skin and features included. Accent not included, as she has one). In elementary school I always tried to be friends with other black children considering how my schools were a sea of white faces. Most of my friends, because of this, were white. People knew I was mixed. I knew I was mixed. But back then, I didn’t think about colour much. But I still felt a feeling of “not belonging.”
I hit high school and the feeling of not belonging got even worse. Again, I tried making friends with other black kids but I just could not fit in with them. And it hurt terribly. I was told by a girl that “[I] wasn’t black. [I] was red.” I was made fun of by other black kids at my church for “not being black enough” because of how I acted.
By then I had mostly white friends, with a few Asian friends and Indian friends. But probably 1 black friend. This didn’t make it any better, especially among my white friends. They knew I was black, but at the same time they didn’t. I was visible to them, but invisible at the same time (to quote Invisible Man by Ellison.) They would make racist comments around me. I hated it. One day we were all sitting at our usual table in the cafetorium. A group of black kids were behind us, playing dominos and being loud. One of my friends snarled in a disgusting tone
“I fucking hate black people.”
I was in such shock. I immediately shot back a “Oh thanks.” And I was given a “I wasn’t talking about you” response.It was at that point that I knew I could not fit in within that sphere either.
I went through a stage of being no where. “Not black enough to be black and not white enough to be white.” My parents behaved the same. “How can you be black and not like rap/hip-hop?” and “You act/dance/play with your hair like such a white girl.” I told my father I really wanted to go see my favourite metal band in concert one day. His reply was “You’d be the only black girl there.” I would tell them that I am mixed, and they would say “No you’re not. You’re black. You can only be one or the other.”
I hated being mixed. It took me a long time (in fact, just right before I went to university) to except the fact that it is okay to be mixed. It is something I cannot change, and it is apart of me. Yes, I am black. But I am also mixed as well. And that’s okay. By saying I am mixed, I do not reject my blackness. I embrace being both black and mixed. Both are important to me.
Realizing that I was asexual went through a sort-of similar path for me. I felt the same “out of place-ness” growing up that I did with being mixed. I couldn’t connect and relate to the same experiences when it came to sex and dating and attraction. I felt awkward. I felt wrong and broken.
When I stumbled upon the term asexual, at first I thought “This is me! I found me!” but I then had a second thought that perhaps it wasn’t. The term still floated in my mind, but I was very unsure. Leaving high school, I adopted the term. I was asexual.
But I hated it. I had broken up with a boyfriend in grade 11, and during the summer before university I explained to him how I believed that I was asexual during out relationship. Things started to click with how I had behaved and how I felt. I was never sexually attracted to him. Things started to make sense.
But despite making sense, I hated being asexual. I hated how it made me feel so different. Again, as if I didn’t belong. I would tell others that I was asexual and they would tell me you could only be either gay, straight, or bi. Nothing more, nothing less. Friends called me some horrible names and told me some horrible things. It hurt and only made me hate myself more. With my newer boyfriend, I felt as though I could not love him how he wanted because I was asexual. I felt horrible. I took out my anger and pain on my artwork, and channeled all those feelings into it.
I believe that accepting that it is okay to be mixed and there is nothing wrong with it helped me to quickly accept that it was okay to be asexual. Despite people telling me otherwise, I learned that there was nothing wrong with me. That I was okay. That I was “normal” despite believing for so long and being told that I was “abnormal.” And it felt so good.
I was at peace. With being black and mixed and being asexual. I was finally happy with me.
Do I still deal with racist shit in the racist society I live in? Yes. I do. But I feel that by accepting myself, I am in a better place in deal with how society feels about me. I am able to defend myself and my heritage and speak out against racism. I am no longer afraid to call out my friends on the harmful things they say, whereas before I would never do so because of how much I hated myself.
Accepting my asexuality has helped me too. I now have some clarity on the issues I face, and I can face them without hating myself over it. Again, I’m in a better position to face those problems.
Accepting that I am black and mixed and how it is okay greatly helped me accept my asexuality. All three are apart of who I am as a person. Despite what society feels about me, I am okay with myself. It is okay to be black and be mixed at the same time. It is okay to be a gray-romantic asexual. I am normal.
-Fiish
is wrong and has no understanding of the way asexuality intersects with other marginalized statuses.
Voltafiish wrote a brilliant post (which I reblogged earlier) about the exclusion of asexual POC from media representations of asexual people. Voltafiish and others report that the experience…
Well said! Everyone, read this post if you haven’t already.
New Movie Trailer About ‘Asexual’ Character — The Olivia Experiment
Am I the only person who thinks the premise of the movie would be incredibly offensive if the main character was Gay or Lesbian?
Nope, you’re not the only person.
The asexual support group struck me as being really odd, for being called an “asexual” support group. I can see such a support group as in the trailer existing, but it would be called an HSDD support group, not an asexual support group.
Not that asexual support groups can’t exist, but they would be much different than a bunch of people sitting in a room talking about how much they dislike masturbation. They’d more likely be talking about incidents of anti-asexual bias they encounter.
The Psychology Today article they link to on the film’s page has generally accurate information about asexuality on it, including emphasizing that attraction is not behavior and that some aces masturbate, but the character in the film saying “{I don’t want to have sex with you} because that would derail my developing asexuality” makes me think that the filmmakers really have no idea what asexuality means. Or that asexual people in relationships with allosexual and demisexual people might have sex with their partners and even enjoy it.
What was that piece of crap I just witnessed.
Yeah, srsly! Wtf?!? I think I’ll put this movie on my “to be illegally downloaded”-list: I wouldn’t want the producers of such #$^&% to get any of my money.
Okay, having broken down and visited their website, I take back what I said ^ above. On the Gay, Bi, Ace? section of the website, they actually have links to a pretty good article from Psychology Today, and a link to AVEN. So now I’m mildly intrigued by this and won’t download it illegally.
Brief thought about The Olivia Experiment
Link to trailer of film (no subtitles available)
It seems as if the premise of the movie is this:
Main character: “I think I’m asexual. I’m going to have sex for the first time, and if I don’t like it, I’m definitely asexual, and if I do like it, I’m definitely not.”
No, main character and/or filmmakers: your argument is invalid. Attraction is not behavior.
Love,
an asexual person who has had and enjoyed sexual activity with other people
Just watched the trailer, and I have to say: so far I am not impressed…
This Olivia is definitely a repulsed asexual (she’s disgusted by holding a dildo - reacting probably the same way I would).
As a repulsed ace myself, I don’t want to be “fixed” by trying to have sex with someone to see if I like it, and I think it would be more harmful than helpful at any rate.
Also, “Asexual Support Group”? That sounds like a group therapy session to fix something that’s wrong (ie Alcoholics Anonymous fixes people dealing with alcoholism). Plus, even though we are 1% of the population, I don’t think we would be able to get a group that large together on a regular basis…
(Note: I’m not saying that it’s impossible - it’s definitely not - for an asexual to enjoy sex, but personally I think this Olivia is a repulsed asexual)
All of the above.
Frances Shani Parker:
Clara Meadmore, an asexual older adult, was Britain’s oldest virgin at 105 years old. According to an article by Luke Salkeld in Mail Online, Clara credited not having sex as the secret of her longevity. Proud of her innate celibacy, she said she just wasn’t interested in all the “hassle” of having sex. Ironically, while many people wrongly stereotype older adults as being asexual simply because they are old, people like Clara intrinsically have never had any interest in sex or sexual attraction to others. Read more.
Yup, that is indeed what is happening, from what I heard from Henrik.
Update re: A Negative: Farewell to AVEN
I just talked with Henrik today and here’s the situation. Henrik posted this yesterday to Asexual News, but one of the editor has a problem with it being…
A personal opinion was mistaken for site editorial policy.
So this kind of “confusion” doesn’t happen again, how about if Asexual News creates a specific Op-Eds section? That way you would have a place for letters-to-the-editor, too.
Yes, but let’s not get it confused with discrimination and prejudice.
I just talked with Henrik today and here’s the situation. Henrik posted this yesterday to Asexual News, but one of the editor has a problem with it being posted ”especially not with the timing of everything”, whatever that means (sorry I’m not current with what’s been going on over on AVEN). Anyway, this is the reason why it keeps getting taken down. Shawn Landis, the site owner of Asexual News, keeps trying to put the column back up since it’s no different than an Op-Ed on any other news site, but this editor keeps taking it down.
A big thanks to hiddenjumprope for reposting this!
metapianycist replied to your link: A Negative: Farewell to AVEN
I would really like to read it, but I get an error whenever I try to go to the link from Asexualnews.com telling me I’m not authorized to view the resource.Crap was it deleted AGAIN!? *checks*
GOD DAMN The person who posts this stuff really doesn’t want it up. They already deleted it twice before this. Thankfully I still have it open in a tab, so I’ll post it here:
A Negative: Farewell to AVEN
A Negative
Published on Tuesday, 1 May
Written by T. Henrik Anttonen
Hits: 183 [ before it was taken down the first time ]I guess it’s been a long time in the making, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not pretty devastated by it. After all, AVEN was my gateway into the fabulous Asexual community, as it’s probably been to an overwhelming majority of us. But enough is enough and I’m probably not the only one who feels the same way about it.
I’ve been a champion for an Aromantic forum on the site for several years, only to be shot down for it. First I was downright attacked by my notion of starting a subforum to go along with the Aromantic Musings and Rantings thread but as time went on, other people started to feel the same way and brought up the topic periodically as well. I started to feel that the general attitude towards the idea started to shift. I am a patient person and I felt that we were making slow progress towards the adoption of the idea. Therefore I took a step back and bided my time for several years.
I was still very committed to the site, visiting almost daily and writing for AVENues. I even joined the Project Team and spent a lot of time drafting policies and making technical advances to the Wiki. I gained access to the backroom forum and even though I was a little concerned by the budding elitism that the Admod team was displaying in their interactions with each other and the general population of the users, I wrote it off as something that inevitably happens in closed communities that hold influence. I cannot say that I was immune to some of it, I don’t think anyone is.
But I’ve finally had enough of the bureaucracy that has clearly started to serve itself rather than the community. And the recent activities around the question of an Aromantic forum have really been the thing that finally put me over the edge. Yes, I admit that I have a vested interest in it, being Aromantic myself, but I do honestly think that this is a symptom of a much bigger problem in the management of the site.
The community has spoken. The question of the Aromantic forum wouldn’t be brought up regularly unless there was a genuine need for it. And the fact that the Admod team has decided to ignore it is a clear statement that they’re no longer there to serve the community. They are clearly more concerned with the minutae of running the site and made up concerns rather than developing the site. And the Admod forum reflects that. I will respect the rules and won’t mention anything specific I witnessed during my time as a Project Team.
In the end maybe the worst thing is the insulting way they go about putting down the Aromantics of the forum. The fact is that Aromantics have concerns and issues they have to deal with that are vastly different from the romantics. Sure, there are a heck of a lot of things we share, but eventually being Aromantic often results in a completely different lifestyle. Therefore there’s plenty that we’d like to discuss amongst ourselves. Sure, we can do it in the existing threads, but often our discussions are swamped by the majority of the community that is romantic. If not in the thread itself (although that tends to happen as well) then by simply having the threads buried under the onslaught of new (and often redundant) romantic and general threads. That’s why discussion boards have separate forums, for goodness sake! I really can’t see how the Admod team has managed to make this into a made up problem.
I’m pretty sure that they know that Aromantics need their own forum, but they’ve made it a point of authority to hold the line that they’ve carved on the subject. And you can easily see that in their frankly asinine reasoning to not create an Aromantic forum.
They say that they don’t want to have the boards overrun with dozens of subforums. Well, why do they have asinine and redundant forums like “Tea and Sympathy” and “World Pride 2012”, then?
They say they don’t want to fence off a portion of the community. How on Earth do you even come up with that? You have plenty of subforums for subgroups like the Gray forum, Gender forum and Older Asexuals forum. Are those folks fenced off in any way? No, I didn’t think so.
They say that we can go to the relationship forum since not having a relationship is discussion about relationships as well. Really, folks? Are you kidding me? Who in their right mind would go to a forum about relationships to talk about Aromanticism? That’s like saying that sexual forums are about Asexuality as well and therefore we don’t need AVEN to begin with.
And final insult to injury is the way that they think they can lessen their bias by throwing us completely unnecessary and insufficient bones like “The Aromantic Thread” and the newest idiocy “The Aromantic Thread Index”. Aromanticism is way too colossal a subject to discuss in a single thread and since we can’t really have any meaningful discussions in it they can say that we wouldn’t have any traffic in the forum either.
I usually go with the assumption that these things happen because of stupidity instead of evil, but I can’t help but think that the Admod team has made a concerted effort to trump down the Aromantic portion of the community. Well, I’ve had it. I’m saying my goodbyes to AVEN and all of the recent insults that have gone with it.
The sad thing is that it leaves me with pretty much nothing. Sure, there are Aromantic discussion boards out there, but AVEN is like a black hole of the community. It is so humongous that it really sucks out all the air out of any other forums. It is a good thing in a sense because it really makes it possible for it to act as a community wide portal and there are a lot of benefits to that. But the downside is that if they decide to mismanage the community like they do, there’s nothing we can do about it. The fringe boards remain just that and there’s little hope of them gaining any traction.
Last night, I mistakenly said (see below) that this edition of A Negative was posted back in the fall since hiddenjumprope’s copy of it said it was from “29 November”. I just spoke with Henrik and he explained that he’d just posted this blog yesterday, May 1st. The reason it keeps getting taken down is that one of the editors disputes it being posted ”Especially not with the timing of everything”, whatever that means (sorry I’m not current with what’s been going on over on AVEN).
I would really like to read it, but I get an error whenever I try to go to the link from Asexualnews.com telling me I’m not authorized to view the resource.Crap was it deleted AGAIN!? *checks*
GOD DAMN The person who posts this stuff really doesn’t want it up. They already deleted it twice before this. Thankfully I still have it open in a tab, so I’ll post it here:
A Negative: Farewell to AVEN
A Negative
Published on Tuesday, 29 November, 19:00
Written by T. Henrik Anttonen
Hits: 183This is an old entry[ … ]
Henrik wrote after he had recently left the AVEN Project Team. I don’t have a good sense of this since I don’t hang out on AVEN except to use the Meetup Mart, but might things have changed around AVEN since then and it’s finally getting better? That would be the only reason I could think of for taking it down. But why repost it and delete it not once but twice more??
I would really like to read it, but I get an error whenever I try to go to the link from Asexualnews.com telling me I’m not authorized to view the resource.Crap was it deleted AGAIN!? *checks*
GOD DAMN The person who posts this stuff really doesn’t want it up. They already deleted it twice before this. Thankfully I still have it open in a tab, so I’ll post it here:
A Negative: Farewell to AVEN
A Negative
Published on Tuesday, 29 November, 19:00
Written by T. Henrik Anttonen
Hits: 183I guess it’s been a long time in the making, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not pretty devastated by it. After all, AVEN was my gateway into the fabulous Asexual community, as it’s probably been to an overwhelming majority of us. But enough is enough and I’m probably not the only one who feels the same way about it.
I’ve been a champion for an Aromantic forum on the site for several years, only to be shot down for it. First I was downright attacked by my notion of starting a subforum to go along with the Aromantic Musings and Rantings thread but as time went on, other people started to feel the same way and brought up the topic periodically as well. I started to feel that the general attitude towards the idea started to shift. I am a patient person and I felt that we were making slow progress towards the adoption of the idea. Therefore I took a step back and bided my time for several years.
I was still very committed to the site, visiting almost daily and writing for AVENues. I even joined the Project Team and spent a lot of time drafting policies and making technical advances to the Wiki. I gained access to the backroom forum and even though I was a little concerned by the budding elitism that the Admod team was displaying in their interactions with each other and the general population of the users, I wrote it off as something that inevitably happens in closed communities that hold influence. I cannot say that I was immune to some of it, I don’t think anyone is.
But I’ve finally had enough of the bureaucracy that has clearly started to serve itself rather than the community. And the recent activities around the question of an Aromantic forum have really been the thing that finally put me over the edge. Yes, I admit that I have a vested interest in it, being Aromantic myself, but I do honestly think that this is a symptom of a much bigger problem in the management of the site.
The community has spoken. The question of the Aromantic forum wouldn’t be brought up regularly unless there was a genuine need for it. And the fact that the Admod team has decided to ignore it is a clear statement that they’re no longer there to serve the community. They are clearly more concerned with the minutae of running the site and made up concerns rather than developing the site. And the Admod forum reflects that. I will respect the rules and won’t mention anything specific I witnessed during my time as a Project Team.
In the end maybe the worst thing is the insulting way they go about putting down the Aromantics of the forum. The fact is that Aromantics have concerns and issues they have to deal with that are vastly different from the romantics. Sure, there are a heck of a lot of things we share, but eventually being Aromantic often results in a completely different lifestyle. Therefore there’s plenty that we’d like to discuss amongst ourselves. Sure, we can do it in the existing threads, but often our discussions are swamped by the majority of the community that is romantic. If not in the thread itself (although that tends to happen as well) then by simply having the threads buried under the onslaught of new (and often redundant) romantic and general threads. That’s why discussion boards have separate forums, for goodness sake! I really can’t see how the Admod team has managed to make this into a made up problem.
I’m pretty sure that they know that Aromantics need their own forum, but they’ve made it a point of authority to hold the line that they’ve carved on the subject. And you can easily see that in their frankly asinine reasoning to not create an Aromantic forum.
They say that they don’t want to have the boards overrun with dozens of subforums. Well, why do they have asinine and redundant forums like “Tea and Sympathy” and “World Pride 2012”, then?
They say they don’t want to fence off a portion of the community. How on Earth do you even come up with that? You have plenty of subforums for subgroups like the Gray forum, Gender forum and Older Asexuals forum. Are those folks fenced off in any way? No, I didn’t think so.
They say that we can go to the relationship forum since not having a relationship is discussion about relationships as well. Really, folks? Are you kidding me? Who in their right mind would go to a forum about relationships to talk about Aromanticism? That’s like saying that sexual forums are about Asexuality as well and therefore we don’t need AVEN to begin with.
And final insult to injury is the way that they think they can lessen their bias by throwing us completely unnecessary and insufficient bones like “The Aromantic Thread” and the newest idiocy “The Aromantic Thread Index”. Aromanticism is way too colossal a subject to discuss in a single thread and since we can’t really have any meaningful discussions in it they can say that we wouldn’t have any traffic in the forum either.
I usually go with the assumption that these things happen because of stupidity instead of evil, but I can’t help but think that the Admod team has made a concerted effort to trump down the Aromantic portion of the community. Well, I’ve had it. I’m saying my goodbyes to AVEN and all of the recent insults that have gone with it.
The sad thing is that it leaves me with pretty much nothing. Sure, there are Aromantic discussion boards out there, but AVEN is like a black hole of the community. It is so humongous that it really sucks out all the air out of any other forums. It is a good thing in a sense because it really makes it possible for it to act as a community wide portal and there are a lot of benefits to that. But the downside is that if they decide to mismanage the community like they do, there’s nothing we can do about it. The fringe boards remain just that and there’s little hope of them gaining any traction.
This is an old entry Henrik wrote after he had recently left the AVEN Project Team. I don’t have a good sense of this since I don’t hang out on AVEN except to use the Meetup Mart, but might things have changed around AVEN since then and it’s finally getting better? That would be the only reason I could think of for taking it down. But why repost it and delete it not once but twice more??
