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.
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??
Misquote
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
Calling all Central European Aces!
The Slovak TV Station JOJ is looking for ace individuals in Central Europe who would be willing to speak in front of a camera. If anyone would be willing, it would be a great help!
For more information, if you are interested, or if you know of someone else who might be, please email us at aven.pt@gmail.com.
Also, please reblog and pass this along!
Greetings,
my name is Daniel Levicky Archleb, I work as an editor for the Slovak TV station TV JOJ (www.joj.sk).Currently I am working on a report about asexuality and as of yet I was unable to track down any Slovak asexual willing to speak. I contacted a Czech web forum for asexuals, but I got no reply.Would you happen to have contacts to Central European asexual organizations or individuals who would be willing to speak out infront of a camera?Thank you,Daniel
aversive asexual erasure: maybe it’s just me?
I’ve been extremely indecisive over writing this post because I feel like maybe I’m just paranoid or imagining all this. It seems like, whenever I see a definition or a discussion of asexuality, there is a lot of effort to point out that “many asexuals enjoy sex!” or “many asexuals compromise and agree to have sex to please their partners!” or even “many asexuals identify as sex-positive!” And of course, all these things are true and need to be said. But there doesn’t seem to be an equal amount of effort in pointing out that “many asexuals are deeply uncomfortable with sex and want nothing to do with it” or “many asexuals are not willing to have sex, even if they’re in a romantic partnership”. Am I imagining this, or does it seem like people don’t talk about aversive asexuals?
Does it seem to anyone else like the asexual movement doesn’t want aversive asexuals to be part of its public face? Like, there seems to be a focus on showing how asexuals really aren’t that different from *sexual people after all? Like there’s a subconscious attempt to “normalize” asexuality by showing off aces who seem “more human” and “less weird” to the *sexual majority?
Or if there are prominent aversive asexuals in the ace community, they don’t talk openly about aversiveness as much as sexually active aces talk about being sexually active and sex-positive aces talk about being sex-positive?
This is actually one of the main reasons I left AVEN. While I never experienced any direct bullying or shaming for being aversive, I also felt like there was a pervasive attitude that indifferent asexuals are the “real” asexuals and aversives are somehow pathological, or are actually sex-phobic rather than asexual as an orientation.
I don’t know. This could all be in my head. I just thought I’d put it out there and see if anyone else has gotten a similar impression.
Overall, I agree with GreenChestnuts that the reason why I have to say more often “some asexuals have sex” is because the assumption is always that we don’t. I’ve written before about being the stereotype but being sure to mention that the ace community is diverse, and I agree with you that sometimes the effect can be that the people who are the stereotype can feel erased. You’re not being paranoid, the conversation is unbalanced.
That said, I personally don’t feel like aversive (I like that :D) aces are being thrown under the bus the way the aromantics often are, or completely forgotten like the demis and graces often are. I only live on tumblr, so my view may be biased, but when someone turns up from the anti-ace brigade to say we’re afraid/repressed/broken/ill/slut-shamers/in a conspiracy to destroy the human race, people stand up for us. They don’t say, “hey, some of us have sex, don’t lump us all together,” they say, “that’s not true of our community.” I don’t think that’s because the attack is always directed at the whole community, but rather that they don’t want to leave us behind.
On the occasion when I’ve spoken about being aversive, or been attacked for being aversive, or objected to something as not including aversive people, I’ve had support from indifferent, and even poikkisexual people. Occasionally I feel tumblr folk actually go out of their way to make sure aversive aces aren’t forgotten.
Now, AVEN or other forums might be different. I don’t know, I never really participated on AVEN seriously, and the sex-negative/asexual elitist rhetoric made me deeply uncomfortable. But if you’re feeling down about being aversive and looking for peeps to be on your side, I highly recommend the peeps on my dash :D
Throwing my two cents in for once. As someone who manages to mostly lurk in the online communities but is surprisingly (to myself at least) active in raising awareness offline, I agree with aceadmiral and GreenChestnuts in their observations about why aversive asexuals are kind of talked about very quietly in relation to the rest.
Personally, as an aversive asexual who ends up doing (rather poorly planned) presentations on asexuality, I find myself doing exactly this, going ‘but some compromise to have sex’ and ‘but some do enjoy sex’ every other sentence, as I really ought to so that I cover every one of my bases. I have no argument there. Because I may personally be averse to sex, but I don’t want the people in my audience getting caught up in the stereotypes that I happen to very much embody. But in my experience, the members of the audience who aren’t interested in possibly identifying as ace themselves are still most interested in how an asexual’s sexuality will impact them, which often comes down to in a relationship, and in sex. Which means that I end up leaving aversive asexuals sort of at the side of the conversational road there, and I’m not sure if that’s because everyone in the room just accepted our existence so easily, or if it’s been entirely dismissed as irrelevant.
I am not 100% pleased with how I handle that either. I feel like I’m so scared to say ‘some asexuals flat out will never have sex, I’m sorry, I know that I almost definitely couldn’t make that compromise myself but oh wait you already know I’m kinda WTF/aromantic but ignore that part okay so if I was romantically involved with someone even then’ because. I’m so used to people considering asexuality a complete deal-breaker, a complete… I don’t know. I don’t know a good way to answer the question of ‘how does that relationship work’ because the only answer I have is ‘it entirely depends on the two people involved and the things that affect their compromises, and also I can’t give you a really good example because I’ve never been in a romantic relationship.’ Because that’s so inadequate, and it makes it seem like I, as an averse asexual, am just kinda being an asshole as opposed to a more flexible asexual, or like I’m bullshitting my way through the question because I’m a horrible I don’t even know what. Unprepared presenter.
And I do think that some of that is things that I accidentally picked up from the ace community at large over the years. Because there seems to be such this need to be accepted and treated as normal, and as that little stereotype over in the corner I feel like I’m dirty, wet, matted wool trying to sell the most beautifully spun, hand-dyed alpaca yarn in the world. And I don’t think that that is in any way the purposeful message being put forth by the ace community at large or even necessarily any particular individuals. I just think that it’s a very unfortunate byproduct of trying to package our community in as palatable a package as possible for the mass consumer. And I have no idea how to address it, either within the community, which I’ve never felt excluded from because of my undyed, matted wooliness, or my own presentations and conversations with *sexuals.
And here at the end goes my standard disclaimer of not knowing if I made any sense at all to anyone else, apologies if necessary, especially for piling on the metaphors.
Reblogging again for more excellent commentary. And so I can find all this again easily before the next A Life podcast recording session… or maybe the one after that…. Anyway, I think this topic is important.
![[Image description: a black and white cutout of David Jay overlaid on a purple monochrome background collage of other images of David Jay in various poses and the asexuality shaded triangle. The black and white cutout of David Jay shows him standing and holding a cake. White text of various quotes and paraphrases from Fight Club is superimposed on the image. Text: “we were finding something out; we were finding out more and more that we were NOT ALONE”, “it was right in everyone’s face: David Jay just made it visible”, “it was on the tip of everyone’s tongue; David Jay just gave it a name”, “welcome to AVEN”.]
linknevers:
“Welcome to AVEN” to all the aces out there this one is for you.
Fight Club is one of my favorite movies and I thought the quotes went well with David Jay, so I had to put them together.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvj5a5m70y1qbi2dyo1_500.jpg)
[Image description: a black and white cutout of David Jay overlaid on a purple monochrome background collage of other images of David Jay in various poses and the asexuality shaded triangle. The black and white cutout of David Jay shows him standing and holding a cake. White text of various quotes and paraphrases from Fight Club is superimposed on the image. Text: “we were finding something out; we were finding out more and more that we were NOT ALONE”, “it was right in everyone’s face: David Jay just made it visible”, “it was on the tip of everyone’s tongue; David Jay just gave it a name”, “welcome to AVEN”.]
“Welcome to AVEN” to all the aces out there this one is for you.
Fight Club is one of my favorite movies and I thought the quotes went well with David Jay, so I had to put them together.
