#acepilotlombardi

 So I want to address courteousmingler’s claims that catandkitty and missvoltairine started talking about their abuse at an inappropriate time, specifically in her words that “what i don’t support is pretending that saying “no” to sex is ever capable of being abuse on its own. i especially do not support using your trauma story as a means of spreading this sentiment, in the chronological middle of a conversation about asexuals being pressured into sex aka raped.“

I’ve already addressed the fact that neither catandkitty or missvoltairine ever said that saying no to sex was inherently abusive on its own, and that the links courteousmingler provides as “evidence” that they did actually tell an entirely different story if you care to read them. This isn’t just a matter of interpretation. In the above linked post, courteousmingler links to a post where catandkitty corrects someone who states that she said saying no to sex is abusive on its own. The person asserting that catandkitty said this - without citations of his own - is acepilotlombardi. It’s strange that courteousmingler would use acepilotlombardi’s (debunked) accusation as evidence of catandkitty saying these things in her own words, given that acepilotlombardi had this to say about missvoltairine’s account of her own abuse:

Saying you can withhold sex from a person is like saying you can withhold pets from a dog. Look, if animal rights groups suddenly started saying that if you are ever not petting your dog, you’re abusing them, that would be absurd. This is basically the same situation.

Seems to contradict courteousmingler’s assertions that “no one” on the “inclusionist” side of this debacle has tried to shut down victims speaking about their own experiences, but that’s neither here nor there.

But let’s talk about the oft-repeated idea that catandkitty and missvoltairine entered into a simple discussion about rape and started talking about their abuse in ways that would imply that they thought rape was fine if the targets were asexual. Because that’s such a vast misrepresentation of what really happened as to basically be a lie.

The conversation in question was not, in fact, a single thread of conversation. It was a series of discussions that spanned several different threads and included multiple people on either “side” of “the discourse”. I spent a long time trying to figure out the chronology of the discussion, but tumblr’s format makes it nearly impossible, which already casts doubts on courteousmingler’s claim that catandkitty and missvoltairine’s accounts of their abuse came into play in the “chronological middle” of the discussion. 

To kick things off, let’s have a look at this thread. It begins with lgbtkhaleesi saying: 

it’s also shitty to deny your partner sex and shame them for even trying to communicate their feelings to you about it

This is obviously a complete statement - it’s shitty to do both of these things in tandem, because it creates a dynamic where one person can’t talk about something that is bothering them in the relationship. Not having sex with your partner is one thing; not having sex with your partner and making them feel ashamed and shutting down any attempts at having an honest discussion about the fact that you’re not having sex is another. The first is not abusive, the second is. However, throughout the resulting thread, people take the first part of this statement and repeat it over and over again without the added context of the second part of the statement. Then there’s this:

Why would you ever tell your sex repulsed partner that “it sucks you can’t have sex and that it hurts your self esteem”? Like what do you think would happen? It’s either

1. They still don’t have sex with you but now they feel guilty and insecure over something they can’t help.

or

2. They are guilted into having sex with you, which is rape by coercion.

This is a big part of what many people, including catandkitty and missvoltairine, took issue with - the idea that if a partner is shutting down discussions of sex in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself, simply attempting to address that verbally makes you a rapist because you’re “guilting” someone into having sex with you. 

This theme was repeated not just in that thread, but elsewhere as well:

People were so hostile to the idea of a couple simply talking about having sexual needs that were incompatible that at some point some presented nonmonogamy as a natural solution to feeling sexually unsatisfied in your relationship:

Nonmonogamy is a relationship style that requires a LOT of communication and honesty - if you’re entering into a nonmonogamous relationship because you feel like you CAN’T communicate about sex with your partner, there’s something wrong; this isn’t a healthy basis for a nonmonogamous relationship, and saying that it “is a consensual option that doesn’t involve manipulating people” is pretty loaded.

I think it’s clear by now that at least parts of this discussion had taken a turn away from “it’s not cool to coerce your partner into sex” and into characterizing any kind of attempt at communication, specifically from a non-asexual person towards an asexual person, as rape or advocating rape. It was this trend that catandkitty and missvoltairine objected to. Catandkitty in particular, who is the one who’s been most villified for her participation in this discussion, never actually engaged in any of these discussion threads. Her commentary was confined solely to original posts on her own blog, where she reflects on what is being said in posts like this one:

sex and/or physical intimacy IS human need and you WILL need to be able to have a healthy conversation about it at some point in your adult life. telling people that expressing that need is inherently abusive is intensely harmful and i wish ace tumblr would stop it

This post has been spun as evidence that catandkitty is a rape apologist so many times that I couldn’t possibly link to them all, but you can see some of it in the notes on the post. But the fact is, catandkitty did not say this in response to any one specific person; it’s not a reblog, it’s an original post on her personal blog, a place where she has in the past posted other personal reflections on trends in tumblr discourse, that is an individual reaction to multiple people saying things like the statements I discussed above. It is NOT a response to a statement as simple as “don’t rape asexual people”, and frankly, would make no sense as such. 

This discussion was an ugly one in which multiple rape and abuse survivors, including but not limited to catandkitty and missvoltairine, were told that their abuse wasn’t that bad or was irrelevant, were told to stop talking about their abuse, and were called rape apologists and, yes, even rapists. Here’s asexualnataliaromanova calling catandkitty an “abuser posing as a victim” and saying that it sounds like she raped her abusive ex:

First of all, you called them your abusive ex. Forgive me if the rest of us victims out here who went through shit (me included) aren’t too keen to assume you’re not the abuser when you can still swallow to call them your ex first instead of your rapist. That was red flag number 1.

Number 2, withholding sex is still a lovely way of saying that they didn’t consent. THEY AREN’T WITHHOLDING BC YOU DO NOT OWN OR HAVE A RIGHT TO THEIR BODY. Them having sex with you is not a right you have. Being in a relationship does not give you that right (see marital rape). The only thing that gives you that right is their informed, ENTHUSIASTIC consent. If they weren’t feeling it, tell me, you’d rather rape them than them continue to “Withhold sex”?

Here’s queergengar implying that missvoltairine’s abuser did not consent to sex with her:

How the fuck do you “withhold consensual sex” wtf?? If you don’t want to do it, it’s not consensual jfc. If you change your mind halfway through or right before or whenever and decide you don’t want to do the do anymore, /that means it’s no longer consensual!/

Here’s courteousmingler herself doing what she does best - asking leading questions that are loaded with innuendo and implication, so that she can effectively call an abuse survivor a rapist and then deny it because she never said it outright later:

anyone curious as to why catandkitty is so deeply obsessed with believing sex is a human need, after being told by multiple survivors that the rhetoric is used to get rapists off the hook?

like. why is clinging to rhetoric that silences rape victims something so deeply, deeply important to her? because she considers not having sex with her to be one of her abusers’ offences?

By now it should be clear that presenting this conflict as a simple case of innocent asexuals saying “please don’t rape us” and big mean rape apologists coming out of the woodwork to harass them about it is completely disingenuous and false. I really hope people take the time to read this post - I know it’s a lot, and there’s a lot of further evidence that I refrained from posting because I didn’t want to make this longer. But this is important, because a big part of courteousmingler and her friends - including wetwareproblem and vaspider, etc - smear campaign against these survivors relies on their radically dishonest reinterpretation of what actually happened.