asexuality

I hate to post anything negative on Valentine's Day. I mostly don't even think about it. Valentine's Day is just my closest cousin's birthday and therefore a reason to celebrate regardless of being single. But I was at work today when I was pulled into my coworkers' conversation.
Girl 1 to me: Looks like you and me are the only single ones here.
Girl 2 to me: Yeah, I'm sorry for you.
Me: Don't feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for you.
Girl 2: Why?
Girl 1: Because you have a boyfriend.
Girl 2 looks offended because of course everyone knows about her recent boyfriend problems.

In my head I'm thinking, don't give me that look. You were being rude first. I've never actually come out at work about being asexual... at least to these specific girls. But they all know about me wanting to stay single. The first girl at least has maybe guessed, because they all talk about sex a lot so I've hinted about it.

I'm curious about how other asexuals experience crushes? I recently met someone and had a much stronger emotional reaction to them than I am used to, and I'm feeling kind of adrift about how to understand the experience. I kind of want to talk to my best friend, but she's sexual and also, well. Not that interested in talking about asexy stuff.

So I'd like to hear other people's stories, if anyone wants to share?

( my own storyCollapse )

I'm signal-boosting this. Taken from the author's Tumblr.

We invite everyone to the 2013 Asexy Valentines Fest! Valentine's Day is about affection, not sex; asexual and/or aromantic folks can enjoy the holiday too.  In Finland they call it Ystävänpäivä  (Friends Day). This is an opportunity to celebrate love and romance for their own sake, outside the expectation of sexual consummation. All types of material are welcome -- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, artwork, music, etc. All fandoms (along with original content or crossovers) are welcome.

Posting is open from February 7-February 21 on . Read full details here. Visit the Asexy Valentines collection on AO3; there are subcollections for fanworks from 2012 and 2013. Special thanks to for the banner, collection, and Tumblr post.

So here’s my writeup for what went down when I went to Atlanta with several other asexual people and spoke on the Asexual Voices Panel at Creating Change 2013.

The Panel

Our panel was called “Asexual Voices.” Four of us—me, Tristan, Rin, and M.—gave personal speeches and took questions and answers in front of a group of about eighty people. And considering how many panels there were to choose from, it was awfully flattering that so many people decided ours was the most interesting or the most important.

My speech focused on my aromantic identity, my realization that I was asexual and my invention of the orientation for myself in the vacuum where there was no community as a teen in the early 1990s, and my decision to start trying to reach out and support the community when it grew. Tristan discussed his experience as a gay gray-asexual person and his journey toward discovering asexuality. Rin discussed their gender identity, asexual identity, and relationship experiences. And M. talked about their understanding of asexuality from a young age, their mature understanding of it, and their gender experience.

Our questions and answers from the audience were submitted in writing (so we wouldn’t have to embarrass anyone or wait for them to find the right words), and they were all pretty common questions. Someone actually asked about what allies shouldn’t ask, which was nice. We got to discuss privilege and the queer community, our relationships, the difference between sex drive and sexual attraction, and tons of other things.

The Caucus

( Read more...Collapse )

Members of the asexual community very often engage in relationships that are non-traditional, including but not limited to sexless romantic relationships (with other asexuals or with non-aces), (queer)platonic relationships, and nonsexual polyamorous relationships. I am running this month's asexual blog carnival at my Wordpress, and for a topic, I've chosen non-traditional relationship.

For information on the topic and how to submit (and to find out what a blog carnival is), please visit the call for submissions post and Asexual Agenda's Carnival of Aces masterpost.

(So far, I've received three submissions. Anyone with an interest in the topic should consider submitting!)

*breathes*

I am not going to yell.

I am NOT going to yell.

…

Ahem. Now that I have that out of the way…

We can argue until the cows come home about whether or not asexuals have a right to claim part of queer space or should be welcome there or however the hell you want to word it.  I've seen queer spaces welcome aces and queer spaces be confused by aces and queer spaces reject aces, so let's not say that there's one hard and fast way that the queer community reacts.

However, it's seriously becoming a dead horse.

If people MUST continue to debate this, I ask you to be CIVIL, to use I-statements, and to think before you post.

If I get reports of personal attacks, viciousness, or too much more bullshit rather than polite and constructive conversation, I will freeze threads. If anyone in particular is becoming a specific problem, there is a darn good possibility you will be warned or even banned.

Please don't make me do this. I don't want to be the mean mod. I like to think this community is mature enough that we can know when to step back and let go and breathe and accept differences of opinions without me coming down and dictating how we should all behave.

I'd like to request that we place a moratorium on the conversation for now; it comes up in here every so often, so it's not like it won't be brought up ever again.

I would like you all to feel safe to express your opinions here, but that can only happen if tempers can remain cool and people can act respectfully towards one another.

If you have any questions for me, feel free to ask them here. :)

If there is only one thing we can agree on, it is that things got way out of hand in the recent 'Pride Parade' post. I want to apologise for my part in the ugliness; I would also like to apologise for some of the things I wrote, and especially the way I wrote them. I have never said, or meant to imply, that the past and continuing suffering of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transexual people is not deeply disturbing to any decent human, and I certainly did not mean to make light of or disrespect the struggles and triumphs of the glbt community.

What I did mean to say is that, completely apart from glbt struggles, asexual people also have to contend with the ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the majority. It may not be an active oppression, but we are still as a community struggling for the wider community to even accept that we exist, let alone accept us as we are.

And I think this is the crux of the issue: Epigones was complaining that asexuals “invading” the hard-won spaces that glbt people have carved out for themselves was disrespectful because of the idea that asexual people have no claim to something they have not themselves worked to achieve.

However. According to research (which is, as a symptom of the larger problem of ignorance/erasure that we are struggling against, disappointingly scarce), something like one person out of every hundred will identify as having no sexual orientation, or as asexual. Compared to the one in ten that is quoted for the glbt community, we simply do not have the numbers to organise the kinds of pride marches and communal change that was effected and is being effected by the brave fighters and martyrs who have given so much to make the world a better place. We don't have any spaces for ourselves. We are unable to carve out any social niches, except in the corners where nobody else is standing. The point I am trying to make is that the glbt community have largely won their place. They have extensive community support networks, media support, legislation banning or redefining discrimination, and are even mentioned alongside heterosexuality in many if not most school health classes. In short, they are a long way along the path toward finding a place in the world where they are accepted and welcomed by society as a whole. Asexual people? We are barely beginning to tread on that path. It is only in the last few years that asexuality has begun to have any sort of positive attention by the media, and even in interviews with respected news networks, the representatives of asexuality are mocked and ridiculed. We have only two main places where we are free to be ourselves: AVEN, and here. If we step outside of our little box, we are immediately pushed back in. We do not have a place yet. But we are trying.

From one minority group to another, won't you find it in your hearts to offer some moral support?

Sincerely yours, in the hope that one day we might have a world where everyone is accepted, regardless of whether or to whom they feel sexually attracted (with the exception, I hope you'll agree, of paedophiles),

Torylltales.


P.S: On a personal note, since some people both in this thread and over on sf_drama have made some assumptions about me: I am not a straight person, nor am I "straight  asexual". I personally do not believe that such a thing exists; straight people are straight, asexual people are asexual. Heteroromantic asexual people are still predominately asexual. But that is beside the point. I AM Caucasian, but I strive to be conscious of that fact as much as possible, and I am extremely thankful every day that  I happen to have been born into a fairly affluent country where things like food and water may be taken for granted by ungrateful people. Again, I strive to be conscious of that, especially when I know I am talking to people who do not have such a good life as mine. Because I am mildly disabled, I am doubly conscious of how fortunate I am not to have a much more life-affecting condition, although funnily enough my particular disability suffers from the same brand of erasure and ignorance as asexuality, as it is largely invisible (due in large part to the early-intervention speech therapists and technicians to whom I am eternally grateful for teaching me how to hear and speak). In short, I try to be as receptive to my privilege as possible, in order to try to at least minimise the effect of it.

I try to live my life by two guiding principles: the first is calmness and control in the face of contention; the second is compassion for all people, regardless of circumstances. I am deeply ashamed that in this particular thread I broke both of those principles, firstly by losing my temper, and secondly by allowing that loss of control to guide my words to a level of callousness and thoughtlessness of which I never thought I would be capable. For that, again I deeply and sincerely apologise. 

~TT

Hello!

I just joined this community but I confess to having been a lurker for two years. Actually, it was this community that started my exploration of asexuality. I wanted to let you know that I wrote a piece on my asexual experience and my road to claiming my asexuality for elephantjournal, which is an online magazine for which I am a writer and apprentice editor.

Here it is: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/01/claiming-my-asexuality-jayleigh-lewis/

I linked to some of swankivy's writings--I know she is a member here. I really, really appreciate the clarity with which she writes. It has helped me immensely.

~Jayleigh