American Aces Weirdly Hostile Towards Australian Survey

The internet is very US-centric. Most of the popular social media platforms and search engines are US based so the US and its quirks are at times over represented in digital spaces. A side-effect of this is the bias that the US view is the dominant view or even the “right” view. Like-wise the ace community, which very heavily relies on digital spaces and communications, over represents US views, history and living memory when a more global understanding is called for. This is why I’m disappointed, but not surprised that the AACAU report was met with hostility from US-based aces.

“When I recently read the AACAU report on asexuality, discrimination, and violence, one of the things to stick out to me was a part that asks how come information on this subject is so hard to find. The reason this stuck out to me is because that information is out there, and work has already been undertaken in this area, and the report doesn’t talk about that. Whether or not this was an unintentional omission, this reflects (and contributes to) a gap in community memory.”

Coyote (2023, April 23). “Community Memory and the Search for Unassailable Abuse”. The Ace Theist. https://theacetheist.wordpress.com/2023/04/23/community-memory-unassailable-abuse/#more-30701

My first reaction to Coyote’s post was “OMG! I do remember Queenie! <3”. However, what I take issue with is Coyote is imposing our community memory onto the world and expecting the rest of the world to get our references with ease. It’s been a while since I’ve checked into the long-form communities, but I’m concerned that this is a bias that isn’t being addressed. One of the perks of a micro-blogging format is if you say something overtly bias it takes seconds for somebody to jump in and point it out. Without including non-US sources in Coyote’s blog post and reading list, I’m concerned that once again it is the US-centric bias that is winning in this debate rather than the credibility of the AACAU report itself.

Another example from living memory that I can recall was the drama around “Ace Day” where, if you’ll kindly remember, there was a disagreement among the global ace communities about what day we should coordinate our respective digital ace awareness campaigns. One of the suggested dates was a major European day of remembrance and therefore was not appropriate and the backlash about that simple fact was uncalled for, unnecessarily hostile at times, and perfectly illustrates the USness that is a legitimate problem if the ace community wants to truly be a global community.

Coyote says in reply to a comment:

“The group did not reply to my last email to them sent on April 16th, and I got the impression that they are uninterested in further correspondence with me…but I don’t have a reason to believe that my concerns are important to them.”

Coyote (2023, April 23). “Community Memory and the Search for Unassailable Abuse”. The Ace Theist.

And I have to wonder why??? What business do you have telling an ace organization on another continent, in another time-zone, in another hemisphere how to conduct their survey? I find it very confusing, especially since I also have talked to Kate Wood. The internet is magical like that and she’s lovely and a delight to talk to by the way (as seen here on The Ace Couple podcast) Kate said she would have loved and accepted “reasonable criticism” which strongly implied that the emails were probably not very tactful if not outright hostile. Kate also told me she is in the process make changes to the report based on community feedback. Coyote is welcome to approve her comments on the post whenever is convenient, so yes, the post has been seen by the relevant parties.

Time for a language tangent! It’s my favorite go-to. Let’s talk SAM (Split-attraction-model). By now, everyone’s read up on the history, checked the archived tumblr posts, and we’re all up to speed and all that good stuff. So, the last time I checked, I thought we had all agreed that it was personal choice whether or not somebody wanted to continue to use the term as a reclaimed term while the community explored other options. I believe “divergent attraction” was suggested but I don’t think it caught on because you can’t force language. Language is a very organic beast. Eventually, the younger crowd started just using “orientated”, especially with aroaces who felt strong non-sexual/non-romantic attractions. I recently saw “orientated” make the jump to older aces/late adopters and I was like “yes! it’s a thing now.” It’s kind of like how all my younger coworkers use the phrase, “say less” but it hasn’t made the jump to the 30-somethings yet, but once it does BAM- It has achieved thingness. Language defuses, it doesn’t magically change overnight (although it certainly feels like it does when your’re older). With that in mind, when I casually mentioned “orientated” in a moderately globally diverse space (twitter) I was reminded again that oops, US=/=World. There are still parts of the world where SAM is the preferred language. It’s on the way out because language marches on at top speed in minority spaces, but this happens at different rates in different places.

I love my ace community. This is the community that helped me figure out a very confusing time in my life and has helped me course correct so many times and helped make me who I am now as a person. All the kudos. I’m just really confused why some folks are getting uptight over another ace org’s business, especially if you forgot to leave the US-centric viewpoint at the door beforehand. It’s great that Coyote, who is a PhD student (presumably soon-to-graduate), is willing to advise people on how to conduct community surveys, BUT there’s additional nuance that comes with surveying minority groups that should probably be touched on- but that’s a whole other post for later because I have scholarly sources for that. Until then, check your biases please.

Post script: I’m genuinely concerned that people will get caught up in nitpicking that they overlook that community driven research is awesome. As an information science student being able to see in real time a minority group meeting it’s own information needs without needing academia for validation is a eureka moment. When we argue with acephobes in digital spaces we often rely on scholarly citations (not that the acephobes ever read them) but being able to point to community sources is awesome and I want more community driven research organized by and for the community.

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Carnival of Aces: Briefly Comparing My Communities Online

[This is my submission for the Carnival of Aces for February 2021 hosted this Month by Ace Film Reviews on the Topic of “Comparing Ace Spaces“]

My first introduction to the Ace Community was through the WordPress community in 2014. I was 25 and had just come back home to Texas after working out of state for two years and had finally ran out of excuses for why I had literally never dated. Well, obviously the answer is my interpersonal skills leave much to be desired BUT I had also come to the conclusion that if dating had been a priority in any way for me, I would have found a way to do it. So, the real question was, why wasn’t dating even on my list of of priorities? With that in mind I finally sat down and literally Googled “25 and never dated”. After skipping over a bunch of pop-psy articles that amounted to “don’t worry, your prince will come” I finally came to a wordpress blog by an asexual man.

I kick myself everyday for not bookmarking the page because I have never been able to find it again nor thank him. Part of the reason I keep this blog going is as a way to pay that moment forward. That man’s blog post means a lot to me because it set me on the right path to finding out that not only am I asexual, but I’m aromantic and agender too. Before that I was living and believing the lie that I was cis and straight “by default”. It’s scary to think it’s like I didn’t even know myself before that. Because of that the WordPress community will always have a special place in my heart as a place of learning and personal growth.

The next community that meant a lot to me was Tumblr. Specifically the chat created by The Asexuality Blog. I’m missing a huge chunk of history and discourse knowledge because I tended to avoid drama. I mostly used tumblr as a resource for writers. Every single job title you can think of was putting out lists of common bad tropes and mistakes writers make. Doctors, EMTs, MEs, nurses, lawyers, firefighters, *literally every professional* you might have as a background character had wishlists of tropes they wanted writers to stop using. Historians and scientists putting out debunk lists. Every minority group you could think of was putting out dos and donts and how to lists as well as answering plot specific asks. It was a magical time to be a would-be writer. I eventually left tumblr because the nsfw ban also nuked my *collection of writer’s resources*, but before that the ace chats gave me a chance to talk to real humans in real time and that was an important step in not only accepting that I was aromantic, but also an important step in figuring out I was agender.

One major difference that was kind of alienating between wordpress and the TAB chats was the age difference. Most of the aces in the chats were in their teens and I very much wasn’t. It just felt weird for most of the chat to be talking about figuring and setting into their ace identity on top of highschool problems (by which I mean absolutely zero judgment because high school problems are serious, serious business) and then I was off in the corner figuring and settling into my ace identity while complaining about paying rent, the ethicacy of tax returns, and debating the pros and cons of coming out to coworkers. Granted the chat mods were older and wiser, but they were there to moderate rather than counsel. I still owe a huge debt to the chats for helping me figure out I was nonbinary.

Another alienating thing about the chats is how amatonormative they were. Even the aro chats! I now know that I’m a romance-repulsed aro trying to figure out life and stuff, but people are constantly wanting to talk about how cute/amazing their partner/gf/bf is. I’m not anti-romance; absolutely gush about your five year anniversary, but sometimes I *just want a break* that doesn’t involve isolating myself from other humans.

Last, but not least, I’m now mostly involved with the Twitter community. It’s kind of a mix of both info dump and real time interaction. I’ve tried discord, but that gets too overwhelming. Twitter offers a lot of control over what content you want to interact with because you can save searches and mute words as well as accounts. Since the pandemic started I haven’t actually been doing the most “healthy” of searches since most of the time I’m snooping for content for @AphobeHottakes like a sleezy mag reporter. There ain’t no drama like Twitter drama. If you missed the tumblr discourse era, don’t worry, it plays out every week like it’s on syndicate in the Twitter stream.

I can’t attest much to the conversation about RL meet ups because the only other ace I’ve met in RL is my high school friend who stopped talking to me for other (and I’m prerry sure are perfectly valid) reasons. Even at 25 I still had a LOT of growing to do as a person and while I mourn the loss of a friendship even after five years, the only thing I can control is trying to maintain what I only hope an upward trend of personal growth. For now RL meetups are on hold because of Covid, but I maintain the hope that they’ll happen some day in the future.

Carnival of Aces August 2020 Round Up: What are you Hoping to get out of the Ace Community?

[If I’m missing anyone’s submission please post a link or a note in the comments or send me an email at lettredemarque(at)outlook(dot)com. I’ve been checking my spam box but life happens. Speaking of life happens if anyone has a late submission they want me to retroactively add I’m okay doing that too]

Greetings! This takes us to the end of this month’s Carnival of Aces and I’m happy to present our five fabulous submissions based on this month’s topic of “What are you hoping to get out of the Ace community?”

First of up we have Coyote, the author behind The Ace Theist here on WordPress, with “Directions for Ace Community Advocacy”; It’s a quick read that brings up several advocacy points the community needs to be thinking more about and individuals should probably be incorporating into their advocacy plans:

…I see mental healthcare as a key issue for the ace community for a number of reasons — because it can be psychologically damaging to be trapped in a sexnormative culture, because it can be difficult to access treatment for other mental health issues when anti-ace narratives stand in the way, and because “low sexual desire” is officially pathologized as a disorder in the DSM. For all these reasons and more, I think ace advocacy should be prioritizing therapy as an important area of concern…

Up next we have redbeardace’s post “Get Out Of It” about wanting to step back as an activist but not willing to leave the community floundering to repeat past mistakes or without a clear direction forward:

…For years, the primary drive has been visibility.  Shouting “WE EXIST!” as loud as we can until someone hears us. Okay.  They’ve heard us. What now? How about fighting singlism, pushing for better mental and physical healthcare, tearing down compulsory sexuality, inclusion in anti-discrimination policies, more and better media representation, sociological research that’s not mind-numbingly out of touch…more and stronger advocacy groups and closer ties/direct involvement with general queer groups, reaching all the people who are long past high school and feel lost and broken and confused because they haven’t heard of asexuality yet, and that’s just the beginning…

Moving right along Henry sent me a submission via email; “A Disconnected Past, and A Curious Present” brings the perspective of feeling unwelcome and disconnected to the ace community. This post actually reminded me of when Vivek Shraya (a Canadian trans activist) visited my college and mentioned that community spaces were some of the loneliest places she had ever been in and it was in the art community that she found love and acceptance. Henry had a similar experience and reminds that while there’s a lot of shared experience among aces, not everyone’s asexual journey is going to look the same:

…I had instead followed my fantastic side to a very different community. This other community is all about self-discovery and self-expression, and both is very open about sexuality and extremely non-heteronormative. Their art was the perfect thing to feed my imagination and my fiction writer’s pen. The friends I made were just who I needed. Not only could I talk to them about my imagination, but I could write very NSFW stories from it they would eagerly lap up…

lokiofjotunheim’s post simply titled “Carnival of Aces – August 2020” talks about being relatively new to the ace community, how they discovered asexuality, learning community history and what they’re hoping for in the future:

…I want other 15, 16-year-olds, 40, 70, 90-year-olds who’ve never quite had a word that fit to find that for themselves. I want people to not have to be resigned to (and I was resigned, heavily) living life as “straight by default.” I’m not active in the sense that I’ve done activism. I have my Tumblr, sure, where I reblog ace posts and sometimes add a comment or two on the occasional post. I’m in several ace discords, and I have my ring, and my flag but…that’s about it…

Lastly we have my own submission for this topic, “I am not an Activist” which is basically just me venting about acephobia for three paragraphs and listing things I appreciate about the ace community; namely it’s nice not to feel alone in my experiences as an asexual even if I don’t have the skills to necessary to carry the community forward.

Edit: Not your professor, I accept late submissions! Drop a link below and I’ll add it to the round up. Here are the posts that were added after Aug 31st:

Elisabeth talks about “Virtual Meetups” (click here to read part one of “Increasingly Accessibility” series). Your asexual movement isn’t inclusive unless it’s accessible. With the world in the middle of a global pandemic the logical thing seems to move meetups online, but that doesn’t automatically mean online meetups are fully accessible to everyone:

My biggest problem with the state of virtual meetups in asexual communities right now, though, is just the sheer amount of effort it takes to even find out about them. Most groups are set to private, so you have to already be a member to know what they’re up to

The Call for Submissions for September is already up with the exciting topic of “Manifestos”

Please help us keep the conversation going by volunteering to become a future host!

I am Not an Activist

[This is my own submission for the Carnival of Aces hosted this month by me, for the prompt “What are you hoping to get out of the ace community?“ I will be posting the Roundup on Monday night, Aug 31st, so if you’ve submitted something and have not received a like on the comment or a “thank you” acknowledgement let me know because that probably means that I missed it. If you sent me something via email and didn’t get a response please resend it and let me know in the comments here or the Call for Submissions post so I can be on the look out for it. Thank you!]

As the title says, I am not an activist. I don’t think of myself as an activist, I don’t call myself an activist, and I try not present myself as an activist because I am not an activist. I merely exist as an asexual (and aromantic and agender) person and I infrequently ramble on my personal blog (and admin a Twitter account that posts screenshots of aphobes being assholes on the internet, which is also definitely not activism).

The thing is just existing as an asexual person comes with caveats. For instance if an acephobic troll shit-post goes viral on Twitter (or tumblr or Facebook or any mainstream online media) you literally have hundreds of armchair pharmacists, evolutionary biologists, and psychologists swarming the comments trying to pick apart your existence based on what they probably remember from their high school biology textbook. LGBTQ exclusionists demand “proof” of your existence and “oppression” in the form of peer reviewed journal articles and hard science while hypocritically using PowerPoint slides that they’ve clobbered together based off of a preliminary study/article they either obviously didn’t actually read or obviously didn’t understand how the data was being interpreted because the orginal source overtly contradicts their claim. Then there are “well meaning” family members and friends who instead of listening to you as you share a deeply personal, core aspect of your very self and personal identity, they brush you off or offer irrelivant/harmful advice because what you are saying contradicts the status quo they’ve been conditioned to believe without question their entire lives. What I’m hoping to get out of the ace community is just a goddamn break.

It is completely and utterly exhausting to go through life feeling isolated, disconnected, and othered by every emotional support system you’ve build up, especially if you can’t fully trust the medical systems in place because of heteronormative bias on top of cost/availability. It’s almost like life decided to push out of a plane with just a spool of thread instead of a parachute and you just have to find a way to deal with it. Okay, the parachute thing might be just a bit over dramatic (again, personal blog, I can vent if I want), but just because I’m “complaining” it doesn’t automatically make my perception untrue or “out of turn” and it’s really nice to know that there’s a group of people who understand that. Day-to-day I’m really just hoping for bare bones, basic dictionary definition of “community”.

I am looking for a human connection that I literally cannot get in my regular life. It’s nice to have a conversation with a stranger who already knows what asexuality is. It’s nice to have someone who’s sympathetic to my crappy coming-out-to-my-parents story. It’s nice to know there’s other people who also didn’t realize until later in life that there’re more options than just “straight or gay”. It’s nice to know that even though I barely had the energy to put a new coat of gorilla tape on my car today, there are other people who are working really, really hard on the daily to make real, meaningful changes to laws, medical practices, and general awareness regarding asexuality. I’m not an activist, I can’t organize people, I don’t consider myself charismatic, I don’t know anybody important, but I do a pretty good impression of a warm body when the situation calls for it. It’s not much, but it’s also not nothing either.

[Carnival of Aces Guest Post] The Ace Community and Me: A Disconnected Past, and A Curious Present

This is a submission for the Carnival of Aces August for the topic of “What are you hoping to get out of the ace community” written by Henry:

I would like to thank Lib for posting this. Though you can find me in a couple places on the internet if you look for me, I didn’t feel any of them were a place to host this essay.

That fact is probably a pretty good introduction: you are about to read about my early struggles with asexuality, why I didn’t feel like the community spoke to me then, and why I am cautiously looking into it more now.

Capture the Flag (Why I’m Concerned about Flag Discourse on Twitter)

Before we get started we’re going to need some context. It began (to my knowledge) when the creator of the pan flag came out and said that they supported bi-lesbians and pan-lesbians. Bi/pan-lesbian discourse is THE divisive discourse right now. Basically two kinds of people might call themselves a bi lesbian or pan lesbian; a) someone describing their romantic and sexual orientation (like aces and aros do) or more commonly it’s b) a nonbinary person who doesn’t feel like either label by itself is an accurate enough label so they’ll use the double label in community spaces.

Nobody is ready for the conversation on how terms like “SGA” and “het” get really complicated really fast when you actually account for nonbinary gender diversity. Regardless a lot of people believe that double labeling is invalidating for lesbians and discussions tend to get heated.

In response to the pan flag creator supporting bi/pan lesbians, a lesbian (as the Twitter rumor mill claims) created a “new pan flag”

In what I would consider an impressive counter tactic, pan-lesbians reclaimed the new flag and dubbed it the pan-lesbian flag:

It was at this point that I had a good laugh at the situation and assumed the issue would be self-contained.

It was not self-contained.

Soon newflagitis started spreading to other communities:

screen shot: “new bi flag”

“New bi flag” with stripe meaning

The idea of creating a new flag for bisexuality after BiNet’s “copyright” stunt and the resulting backlash is purely nonsensical and I would have been willing to dismiss the trend as merely teen boredom from Covid restrictions-

But then it spread to the ace community:

Screenshot: “new ace flag”

What was alarming about “new ace flag” posts was the misinformation that proceeded it. Once the word got out established ace accounts mobilized quickly to target the misinformation, namely that David Jay didn’t create the ace flag (see my previous post about how acephobes can’t get over a forum post from 2003). The AVEN threads showing the flag’s creation and unveiling were shared and boosted and the countering short hand narrative became “the ace flag was a community project”. It was noted that changing the purple to a gradient made the flag unfriendly for commercial production and artists. The flag itself was deemed mostly harmless and a fad that would likely die out quickly.

Shortly there after infighting broke out between aroace activist Yasmin Benoit and Rose from FYA. The flag situation was set aside in favor of what was seen as a bigger crisis that needed to be dealt with.

But then it happened again:

Once again someone posted a “new ace flag” proceeded by misinformation. I’m not sure if this is becoming a thing yet since the “antisemitic roots” mentioned in regards to the original flag is that AVEN’s symbol IS A TRIANGLE. That’s one hell of a reach, but he went for it and doubled down. Once again ace twitter mobilized to tackle the misinformation and point out that the “new flag” was too similar to other flags like the demi boy flag and the freysexual/romantic flag. As BiNet showed us, if you’re going to start flag discourse you better be squeaky clean. Similarly, when this flag maker was confronted by community members he started spouting exclusionary rhetoric like “allo is a slur” and “cis het aces aren’t LGBT” and eventually deactivated.

Our concern in the ace twitter community isn’t that people are making new flags. New flags appear all the time. The aroace flag, for example, has grown on me despite my initial rejection when I first saw it and it’s now one of my favorites for merchandise and swag. What made the “new ace flag” posts different from the pan and bi flag posts is that the ace flag posts contained misinformation directly lifted from anti-ace tumblr blogs like “David Jay is a misogynist homophobe” and “the AVEN triangle is a nazi symbol” and when confronted they used tumblr screenshots as “evidence”.

We’re not worried, per say, but we are getting a little nervous because we don’t know if this is just the latest teen fad as a result of being lonely and stuck inside during the Covid pandemic or if this is a symptom of larger issue that could negatively impact the community. We don’t know yet, but we’re keeping an eye on it.

Call for Submissions Carnival of Aces April 2016

Calling for Submissions for The Carnival of Aces for April 2016! What is a blogging carnival? See the master post here! Last month’s topic of “Gender Norms and Asexuality” was hosted by valprehension and you can see the round up of submissions here!

For this month’s prompt I’ve decided on the topic “Be yourself (but stretch)”. What I want to know is how on a day-to-day basis you affirm and express your asexual identity while navigating though established social norms that are, unfortunately, unavoidable. The term “be yourself, but stretch” comes from authentic leadership techniques, where to be an effective supervisor you need to be authentic (be yourself), but also stretch to match the expected norms that come with leading others.

Growing up in the 90s I feel like a major moral of every kid’s show was “Be yourself”. The many episodes would start off with one of the main characters trying to blend in with the cool kids or try to reinvent themselves after an embarrassing mishap, but in the end they realized that all they needed to be happy was to be themselves. I wish a screenwriter or two had had the foresight to write and episode where “Be Yourself” didn’t work. You know, something for the rest of us who came out to our parents and it backfired, for those who came out to friends who still think we’re “basically straight” or just “gay and won’t admit it”, or maybe something for those of us who haven’t come out and have to fake chuckle at bad sex jokes at work or artfully dodge awkward questions about the significant others we don’t have.

I’m looking for posts, stories, comics, poems, art, videos, or a comfortable digital medium of your choice about how “Be yourself” doesn’t always work; About how you would love to be out and proud, but can’t because people just don’t get it or you can’t risk your livelihood or it’s just not worth the drama. How do you be your wonderful, asexual self and how do you “stretch” to fit in the roles you need to be to make a living or just make it through the day?

If you’re still not sure what to write about, here are some suggestions. These are not meant to be all-encompassing, only to provide possible ideas.

-Have you mastered the art of balancing your ace identity and your family, friend, and work relationships? Make the How-To guide you wish you had a year ago.

-Any advice for making it though that awkward family dinner that’s just around the corner? Parents/Grandparents are probably going to be asking some uncomfortable questions.

-Do any of your friends not accept your asexuality? How does that affect your friendship? What compromises are you willing to make between your identity and loyalty to friends?

-What do you do or who do you go to when you need a confidence boost or to reaffirm your ace identity?

-Show some support for your fellow aces who haven’t come out and don’t plan to because of some very good reasons.

-How do you be yourself when most of society says that isn’t good enough, that we’re “missing out” on what is considered part of human nature? If you wrote an article to your local news paper about being asexual in your community, what would you say?

To submit you can leave a link in the comments below, submit HERE tumblr, or shoot me an email at lettredemarque(at)outlook(dot)com with the link or submission.

I will be accepting submissions until midnight Eastern Standard Time Saturday April 30^th, so you’ll have plenty of time to whip something together.

Happy Blogging!