Happy Ace Awareness Week!

[capri0mni]

Here's one of my favorite YouTube videos (from Way-ay-ay back in 2013) where an allosexual sex educator person talks about how she was educated about ace-ness: 5 Asexuality Experiences. And she has another good one, from just three years ago, about Demisexuality. Both of these are properly closed captioned in English, BTW.

You know, since most of my queer identity is defined by what I don't feel, I don't really feel very Queer at all (just a little bit queer, if I bother to stop and think about it).

But then, last March (2020), in her video "Artists and Fandoms,"* Abigail Thorn (writer and presenter of Philosophy Tube) said:

"Also, it is fun, and I enjoy being desired."

And my brain went: "Nope! nope-nope-nope! Nope! Do not Want! You can have mine, if you want seconds." I was surprised by the strength of my reaction, and I thought: "Gee! I guess I really am Not Straight. Huh. Whatcha know?"

Do I want to be loved? Absolutely! Do I want to be desired? No. Unfortunately, in most philosophical and aesthetic discussions, desire and love are almost synonymous. So it's hard to talk about.

Anyway -- happy Ace Week!

*This was before she came out as trans, and she was still using her deadname in public. So that may make it an uncomfortable watch. But it's still a good video, if you're up for it.

Comments

[harpers_child]

Thank you for sharing.

[capri0mni]

Your welcome!

Thank you for being there to share with@

allosexual

[rafiwinters]

Thank you for introducing me to this word. It seems like it would be pretty useful.

Re: allosexual

[capri0mni]

You're welcome!

"allo-" is actually a prefix that means "other." So "allosexual" means those who are sexually attracted to others (of whatever gender). And a scientific word for adopting or fostering a child/baby (especially among nonhuman animals) is "alloparenting."

I find it a little bit confusing, though, because "allosexual" sounds close to "asexual," even though their meanings are opposite.

Re: allosexual

[rafiwinters]

I love words. I am a word nerd. :)

Re: allosexual

[capri0mni]

Yeah, me too. ;-)

Re: allosexual

[rafiwinters]

Love your "Beware the Words' icon. May I snab it?

Re: allosexual

[capri0mni]

Sure! Spread the PSA!

Re: allosexual

[rafiwinters]

Another excellent word, relatively new to me: kyriarchy. (Look it up and have some fun.)

Re: allosexual

[capri0mni]

I did do an Internet search for "Kyriarchy," and my first hit was the Wikipedia, which was in the highlighted color of a link already clicked.


Mind like a steel sieve, I tells ya! 😉

Do you also know the word Amatonormativity

Re: allosexual

[rafiwinters]

I did not know that word, either! Excellent word, and much needed. I wonder about that myself sometimes.

My mind works like that sometimes... or doesn't work... depends on your definition of "work."

Re: allosexual

[capri0mni]

Elizabeth Brake (who coined "amatonormativity") has got an interesting website in general. As I understand it, she coined the term with polyamorous people in mind, but it's also been embraced by the aro-ace community, as you can imagine.

[susanreads]

Happy Ace Week!

For decades I called myself celibate, although I knew it was the wrong word, because I didn't have a right one. Since getting the internet at home a dozen years ago, I've found all sorts of words; ace is the best.

I remember, though I don't remember when, seeing the word allosexual and knowing from context what it meant. I believe it was taken up because of allosexual people objecting to being called sexual (as an opposite of asexual) because it emphasises sex too much, which is fair, so you've got a good word there.

[capri0mni]

It is a good word. It would be easier if more people knew what it meant. I think the two terms are easier to distinguish if we stick to their abbreviations: Allo and Ace.

I saw a post on Tumblr going around where aces were mocking the exclusionists for saying that "allosexuality is not real, either and neither allosexuals nor asexuals belong at Pride." With:

Okay, folks! everyone go home. Pride is cancelled, and no one is valid!

But that just highlights the exclusionist mindset: looking for wedges to divide the community, even when there are no wedges, and latching on to new words they don't know are already "wrong," without even bothering to find out what they actually mean.

[feast_of_regrets]

Celibate is the word I used to use too. I use aroace now.

[capri0mni]

Yeah. "Celibate" means "choosing not to give in to sexual desires (usually as an act of religious devotion)."

That does not apply if you don't have the sexual desire in the first place. And I think that may be why some Aces get grief from (usually Christian Conservative) family members (the same ones who hate gays and lesbians). After all, God said to "Be fruitful and multiply."
🤦🏻‍♀️

[feast_of_regrets]

It's hard for me to comment on grief from conservative Christians, because I was in a very conservative Christian environment when I started using celibate, and I never got any of the be fruitful garbage. (My mom was a different story, but she just wanted grandkids, and she didn't push it too hard.) I do wish I'd known my real words back then, because I think I could have had some good conversations with some people. It was a different world in the 90s though. It would be hard to run comparisons against today's hyper vocal resistance to any kind of difference, and I've been out of those spaces and that religion for quite a while.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yeah, as a person who got abuse paradoxically for both not having enough experience AND supposed hypersexuality, I cringe every time I'm told I should self-describe as "sexual" (ironically now by non-ace people who hate allosexual.)

[capri0mni]

I'm sorry you've gotten abuse both coming and going.

At least the people who are the most ass-holey are making themselves easy to identify, so you can keep away from them? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Yeah, that abuse was years ago. But it's a dealbreaker for me regarding certain spaces that insist on "sexual" as the antonym for "asexual." Curiously, my current bi/ace partner is the only person to fully grok my boundaries as a bi celibate person.

[capri0mni]

Anybody who demands how you self-identify, and insist that their discomfort should be more important to you than your discomfort is to them, should be kept at arm's length, at least, if you are unable to cut them out of your life altogether.

[viceversus]

This is a really interesting post that resonated a lot with me, thank you so much for sharing!
I've been questioning whether or not I'm ace for a long time and I've always framed the question to myself as "Do I desire things, and if so, what kind of things?" but until now I've never looked at it from the angle of "do I want others to desire me?" and when I do, like you, the answer is "holy hell no, absolutely not, please don't."

I'm still not sure if I'm ready for a label but your post made me feel very very ace. Happy Ace Week!!

[capri0mni]

Happy Ace Week!
🖤🤍💜

I don't know if you've read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but there's a bit of dialog where the alien guide warns the human protagonist that traveling through hyperspace is "Unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"Ask a glass of water."

And that's how I feel about being desired.

I don't know that I want to feel Desire for anyone else, either. What I want instead is connection. And I'm not sure how to put that into words.

[feast_of_regrets]

I remember the moment I first realized I wasn't straight because straight people actually want each other. It was an almost physical realization. I immediately started a Tumblr to blog about it (after having managed to only lurk for nearly a decade) and ran face first into aphobia. Because of the aphobes, I wasn't sure I got to be queer for a long time either, but I did eventually get there, and it has been slowly becoming more important since. I think even if those of us on the aspec spectrum don't necessarily identify with wanting a love that goes against social mores, we do identify with wanting a society that isn't so defined by heteronormative demands. The desire for a differently structured civilization, in which the worth of a person isn't measured by how attractive they are or who they may be attracted to, and where one is free to make the life one wants to make (for instance being able to afford to live without having a two income household, or without suffering from social disdain if one creates a shared household with several people) is where we have a lot of common cause with the other members of the queer community. Anyway, that was a lot of blather sparked by the memory sparked by your post! Thanks for the videos. I will have to watch them later but I am looking forward to it.

[capri0mni]

I was really late in recognizing my asexuality for, I think, two reasons:

1) I'm physically disabled and grew up between the 1960s and '80s, right at the beginning of the Disability Rights movement -- when I was born, the general assumption was that I wouldn't go to school at all, and the first civil rights protections for disabled people weren't ratified in the U.S. until I was 13. So expectations that I'd have to worry about being in an intimate relationship with anyone (either emotionally or physically) was basically nil. I was the only (visibly) disabled student in any of my classes from kindergarten all the way through high school. So none of my peers asked me who I had a crush on, or (out of politeness, maybe) talked about their relationships in my presence. So I had no point of comparison to realize that my feelings about relationships were anything other than the norm.

2) Both my parents had already died by the time I even encountered the words "asexual," and "demisexual." But once I looked up the definitions, and the series of "oh!" began falling in my brain, like a line of dominoes, and started thinking back on my memories of them, and what their relationship was like, I suspect they were each somewhere on the aro- and ace spectra themselves -- and they were my models for heterosexuality(!).

The desire for a differently structured civilization, in which the worth of a person isn't measured by how attractive they are or who they may be attracted to.

Absolutely! So much of this culture's social infrastructure, from health care to employment, to grief counseling, are all built on the assumption that all adults of a certain age will have a (single) "significant other" (whether official with a legal marriage certificate, or not), and the automatic social network of de facto "in-laws" that come along with that.