#carnival of aces
You may have heard that Boris Johnson has recently become the leader of the Conservative Party in the UK, and, as such, the Prime Minister. This wasn’t an election open to the general public; party leaders are elected by the members of that party, and it’s no real surprise that the Conservative Party members like conservative candidates.
This isn’t a post about that, per se; there are plenty of other people detailing all of his failings and horrifying attitudes and behaviours. It’s just an illustration of how the political situation in this country is devolving faster and faster. I started talking about this in 2014, just a couple of years after I first got on tumblr at all, and I’ve been talking about it ever since, whenever I have the mental fortitude to do so - which, right now, isn’t often.
But, hey, what’s another list of my deepest fears?
I wrote a post a year or two ago with some of the things that we’re facing here, in the UK. I’ll link the entire post, but here is the most important paragraph:
‘But. I have been saying this. I said it when reports came out of the huge number of people dying within a few weeks of their disability claims being denied or revoked. I said it when a coroner went so far as to name the DWP as the cause of death on a death certificate for a disabled person. I said it when we started seeing stats of the huge proportion of cases of denied benefits that were winning at appeal or tribunal (and the huge barriers to even getting to appeal or tribunal in the first place). I said it when we heard about the suicide baiting in disability assessments. I said it when we heard that, even if you could get them, disability benefits were leaving people cold and hungry.’
These aren’t stopping.
The Carnival of Aces doesn’t have a host this month yet. Would anyone like to volunteer? Message me.
*My computer quit as I was three-quarters of the way through this post, so please excuse any remaining bitterness that slips through. It’s my computer being an asshole and making me completely restart even though I had the post copied on my clipboard, not any of the wonderful participants.I hosted the July 2017 Carnival of Aces (hosted by @asexualagendablog) with the theme Then & Now.
For anyone who missed it, a blogging carnival is a blogging event where bloggers chime in and all blog about the same subject. The Carnival of Aces is a monthly blogging carnival with topics revolving around asexuality. If anyone wants to host, it’s pretty easy and doesn’t take up much time! It’s easier to come up with a theme than you may think. You can sign up over at asexualagenda on wordpress! Just leave your name/blog link and the month you want to host in the comments! Volunteers always welcome.
Without any further ado, let’s see what people blogged about this November for “Then and Now”!
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@mobydickbutt wrote about their personal journey and relationship with asexuality and coming out, as well as asexuality in media.
@demiandproud poignantly talked about their own sense of pride, coming out, and representation.
@thenoteswhichdonotfit shared their growth into ace seniority, what this means, and if it should really be a tangible concept.
@the-wandering-avarian discussed their personal perspective in watching the ace community change over time due to both inside and outside impacts.
Coyote on @theacetheist noted the change in online platforms for the ace community over the years and personal reasons for these changes.
@historicallyace expertly detailed the language of discourse over time and the conversations and events that would be healthier to give more attention to.
@acubedblog told of how time could personally make a difference in sense of identity and coming out.TW: ableist language
@Satsuma gave a nice breakdown of the history of asexual visibility/platforming and representation in media.
Perfect Number on @tellmewhytheworldisweird conveyed her story on how Christianity can impact one’s view of asexuality and inhibit self-acceptance.
@thearoacesafespace reported how asexual visibility, representation, and platforms have grown over the years.
Isaac on @heterogen imparted their view on how the ace community in Spain has grown.
@controlledabandon recounted their journey of questioning, doubting, and identifying their sexuality in timeline fashion.
@rotten-zucchinis relayed the discursive language of asexuality and how things change, the more they stay the same.
And, finally, I posted about exclusionism over the years from an unnamed attack to a named front, as well as the difficulty of coming out after so many years of pride.
Thank you everyone so much for participating! It was sad to see so many similar themes of “same old, same old” but great to be reminded of the positive steps forward we have managed to take.
So this piece is something a little different for this blog: rather than a sourced, detailed, fairly-academic-except-for-the-swearing article, this is my own, personal history as an aroace person (but don’t worry, I’ve kept the swearing). My hope is that this will both give you all some context for the stuff I write and the personal opinions I include, and potentially also serve as an example of what it looks like, for me, to be an aroace adult.
This is my entry for the July 2018 Carnival of Aces. Here’s a link that will take you to the explanation post by the host of this month’s carnival. When the carnival wraps up, I’ll post a link to the roundup of responses. I’ll also be adding that link to this post under the Read More, so watch that space.
Running The Numbers
Seems like a good place to start, right? I like numbers.
I first encountered the concept of asexuality at the tail end of 2010 when one of my favorite webcomic artists at the time first posted about demisexuality. I stuck my toes into the waters of coming out by first publicly identifying as grey-asexual in 2012, though I think I first stuck that information on my blog without posting about it in late 2011.
I knew a long time before that, however, that there was something about me that was different. I think that the first time I admitted to myself that I was probably Not Straight was in middle school - so, circa 2002. I was in high school, probably around 2005 when I started identifying as bisexual, operating under the theory that I found the girls around me to be about as aesthetically pleasing as the boys, so that had to mean I was attracted to both genders. (Yes, I know this is a Bad definition of bisexuality. Yes, I have learned better since then. But also yes, I was an incredibly unaware teenager.) I was a freshman in college in 2007 when I learned about pansexuality, and decided that thatmust be what I was, because I didn’t really care about the genders of the people I hypothetically dated.
This is all without going into my complicated history of “what the fuck is a gender”. That’s fuel for a different post.
So in short, I have been identifying as some variety of queer for more than half my life (and don’t even start: by any metric you care to put forth, I’ve earned my place here and my right to identify however I damned well please). In that time, I have Seen Some Shit, kids.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
I’ve talked about this before, on other posts, most notably the “could you all maybe stop with your vilifying of innocent language” allosexual post. But I see, functionally, no change between the climate I came out into six years ago and the current climate on Tumblr.
Which is to say this:
Far and away, the vast, vast majority of people I have met, interacted with, or seen in passing on Tumblr are lovely, supportive, willing to listen and take my experiences at face value, and generally decent human beings.
A vocal minority of people are the personification of the feeling of stepping on a Lego. They are acutely invested in the idea that my experiences are not queer enough to count - in fact, they’re so invested that they frequently don’t even care what those experiences are,and they’ll go to great lengths to invalidate absolutely everything regardless.
The problem is that this vocal minority, because of how loud they are and how invested they are in their arguments and their vitriol, are enough to actively impede progress. Because there can be no progress without the ability to massively fuck things up occasionally. Like, lets just cite one example: the concept of (allo)sexual privilege. It’s a concept that was being discussed and debated when I started learning about asexuality. By the time I came across the conversation, it was a pretty widely held opinion among people whose opinions I came to respect that it was a pretty shitty concept, that a privilege/disprivilege model really didn’t fit the allosexual/asexual dynamic, and that we could and should be talking about negative things that asexual people experience because of our asexuality without implying that being allosexual was a privileged identity, since the real position of privilege was (heteroromantic) heterosexuality.
Just to be blatantly clear: this means that we put that issue pretty much to bed somewhere around seven years ago.
And yet, you will still see people arguing today, in the year 2018, that aces are trying to say that we’re more oppressed than other sexualities and therefore that other orientations have more privilege than we do.
It’s frustrating. I spend a lot of time wondering where we might be as a community if we didn’t have to spend so much time reacting to nonsense in order to feel safe, if we could collectively give ourselves permission to grow and change and make mistakes and learn from them.
I think that the current climate on Tumblr is preventing the kind of growth that I saw back when I came out. We keep feeling that we have to react to these people, and it’s keeping us stuck in one place.
But We Can Keep Growing
(Or, alternately, this section could have been titled “I’m ending this post on a positive note because fuck it I want to have nice things”.)
Here’s the thing.
Yeah, I’ve seen some shit. And it hurts, particularly because I know, intellectually, that there are spaces that are free of this shit, but this is the space I have access to, and I just have to keep putting in the work to try to clean it up.
But I’ve seen some really good things in the past six years too, and I can’t end this post on a sour note. I refuse. I am cleaning out the cobwebs and the dust bunnies and the fucking Legos and building a better house for us all here, goddammit. I refuse to give up on what could be a beautiful thing, because the bones of this house are strong, and the foundation is deep, and we have been living in it all along.
So let’s talk about how mainstream LGBT+ orgs are getting better all the time at talking about asexual issues and providing the kind of support that aces need, and how much of that is because we’re putting in the work to say “this is what we need from you.”
Let’s talk about representation, and the visceral feeling of relief even when you don’t consume that particular piece of media when you discover that someone is talking about people like you.
Let’s talk about how an entire generation of ace people is learning how to stand up and say ‘no, you’re wrong and you can’t do this any more’ to bullies.
Let’s talk about solidarity, about aces seeing the arguments that have been used against us are just reflections and reworkings of those that hurt our siblings in other identities, and learning to stand together because that is how we’re strongest.
Let’s talk about finding family, finding community, and holding on to those things with all your might, and not letting go just because someone else said to.
Let’s all resolve, here and now, to stop having the same fight over and over again with people who don’t want to listen. It feels like we’ve been on pause for years, in this space, and it’s time to start moving again. There is growth happening out there. I think it’s time to bring it here again.
If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy reading some of the other pieces of writing from the July 2018 Carnival of Aces. Here’s a handy link to the round-up post!
AKA How Things Change
Welcome to July 2018′s Carnival of Aces! I’ll briefly get this out here, then I’ll explain what this is, then I’ll come back and reiterate the topic, but this month’s topic is: Then and Now.
So, never heard of a blog carnival? A blog carnival is a blogging event where bloggers all write about a similar topic and the host collects all these posts for everyone’s reading consumption. This particular carnival is a recurring monthly asexual carnival originally started by Sciatrix and now overseen by The Asexual Agenda. Each month, a new blogger hosts and comes up with a new theme. You can find asexualagenda’s masterpost of what this carnival is and all the past events here: https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/a-carnival-of-aces-masterpost/ If you’re interested in this Carnival, you should think about signing up to host! It’s easier than it seems and a whole lot of fun and connection to the community.
But let’s get onto this month.
I just realized the other month that around a decade ago when I came out as a panro ace. A decade ago and yet I was subject to so much gatekeeping and harassment that since then I’ve never personally identified with the LGBT community (instead finding a home with my fellow queer folk). We didn’t have the terms exclusionist and inclusionist back then. For a while, I wasn’t really part of any wider circles of social media, so the incident felt isolated. Maybe just something I went through. Then exclusionism suddenly became this big, named Thing™ on tumblr. Years later, and it’s still the same thing, the same recycled rhetoric.
So I’m interested in some nostalgia from other aces! Absolutely anything that you think of comparing Then and Now is welcome! What’s changed? Has it gotten worse or better or just different? What’s stayed the same? Why do you think that is? If you need some inspiration, here’s some things to think about (please note that when I say asexual, it means asexual and asexual spectrum):
- How have things changed since you realized you were asexual/that asexual was an identity? This can be personally, in the community, visibility, representation, recognition, etc.
- How have things changed since you first identified as asexual and now? For you or from a wider perspective.
- Do you feel differently about your identity now than you used to?
- Do you relate to asexuality in a different way now than you used to?
- Do you feel there’s a larger community to connect with? Do you feel the community grew but is now smaller?
- Is the community addressing real issues or being held back by gatekeeping rhetoric and infighting? Is the community making any broader outreach now?
- Where do you hope to see the community go in the future?
- Do people respond to you coming out differently? Do you come out in a different manner?
- How do people react to asexuality versus how did they?
- Do more people know asexuality is an option to identify with now than when you were figuring things out?
- Is there more asexuality in media? Has coverage and understanding of it gotten better?
- What are your hopes and dreams for asexuality and its visibility/recognition in the future?
Then and Now can be any amount of time that matters to you! A week, a month, a year, a couple years, a decade or more!
Participating is simple! Whatever your blogging platform, simply make a post for your response to the topic Then and Now and then submit your post link to mebyJuly 31st (or let me know that you have a post idea or in the works but will need some extra time to finish it)! You do not have to have a tumblr account to submit to me! If you are not on any blogging platform, you can also write up your response in my submit box. Just make sure you put in whatever name you want to be referred to by in the Name box, and I will post it for you here on my blog with credits to you!
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask (anon is turned on). At the end of the month, I will release a post with links to everyone’s responses so you can all read each other’s thoughts and experiences. I hope that this will allow some of us to find some common ground, air some grievances, heal a bit, and even find some positivity and hope. <3
Looking forward to hearing from you,
~Sock#actuallyasexual
Relevant both to my interests and to the theme of this blog. Maybe doing something for this will snap me out of my lack of writing streak.
