feuillyadeux:

jadziabear:

pinkdiamondprince:

Trying to figure out if you’re ace or aro can be so much harder than other
sexualities because it’s like, trying to find the absence of something. Imagine
you’re at a pond and you want to know if there are any turtles, or fish. Say
you find a turtle and you’re like “great! Now I know there are turtles.” Or a
fish, now you know for sure there are fish. Or you find both, and now you know
for a fact there are both turtles and fish in the pond.

But like, if you don’t find any turtles it might be that there are no
turtles or maybe you’re just really shitty at looking for turtles and maybe you
THINK you saw a turtle over there or maybe it was just a stick. Maybe there are
only a few turtles. Maybe you need to do something special to find the turtles. Maybe a bunch of these rocks are actually turtles but you couldn’t tell them apart.
Maybe there are no turtles. You have no idea. Meanwhile some people are saying “Oh
there have to be turtles! You’ll find them eventually ;)” or “How many turtles
have you found in your pond?” or “Try planting some vegetables at the shore to
attract the turtles.” Or “Oh no! What disaster happened to your pond that there
are no turtles?” And you’re just standing there wet with an empty net and a
tired expression.

But whatever because whether there are turtles or fish or not your pond’s
ecology works just fine without them because that’s what eco-communities do
they form a system around what they have. You aren’t missing anything if you
don’t have turtles you just have a pond system without turtles. If someone
tried to change you by pouring a bunch of turtles into your pond it would
probably fuck something up.

So you don’t have to be entirely sure. You don’t have to search every inch of the damn pond before you can decide there are probably no turtles. If you want to take the aro or ace label because you think it fits go for it. And if you do find your turtles you can rename the pond. That’s fine.

This is my new favourite post on this whole website

nice! and this is really helpful too in explaining internalized oppression, cause if you weren’t told you could also have fish in the pond, it might be hard to realize they’re there. or if you were told having one is bad and could only have another for fear of punishment, it might take a really long time to see them. or they might not be there because this pond is quiet and still and a nice place to read free of turtles or fish which is fine too, and if you don’t know whether your pond has turtles, fish (or frogs, ducks…) or none of the above, that’s okay too.

ponds are murky.

autismserenity:

fornaxed:

Good lord I’m not saying “you personally have to be violently harmed by cishets to be queer” I’m saying that the term is exclusively reserved for the communities who’ve historically experienced oppression centered around that slur and experienced the violence that it embodies (ie LGBT people)

You’re spouting some nonsense interpretation where you could say “some lesbians are queer but not all” when what I’m literally saying is “lesbians can call themselves queer because the lesbian community has been a target of this slur and experienced horrific violence as part of it”. Ace/aro people who lack same-gender attraction have no place trying to reclaim it because it was never aimed at their community.

Except that historically, people have absolutely been targeted as queer for asexual behavior.

Everybody feel free to grab a beverage and get comfortable, because I spent a lot of time on Google today. (Asexuals, listen up, because we actually have some situations where you are represented in history here.)

Historically, people got labelled queer, and/or queer-bashed, for two major things.

The first was deviating from strict gender norms.

The second was not having hetero sex.

There are tons of examples of white people literature from the 1800s and early 1900s that use terms like “confirmed bachelor” and “spinster aunt” to imply that somebody was queer.

(I was going to say something like European/American/Canadian literature, but let’s call a spade a spade.)

Sure, nowadays we look back at that and go, “everybody knew those people were gay, it was just code for gay, nobody thought anybody was asexual, that wasn’t a thing back then.” 

Of course, that still means that people who we would now call asexual would have been getting queer-bashed because people thought they were gay. So all those asexual people, already, have earned their queer stripes under the rubric above – that they are part of a community that got violently oppressed for being perceived as queer. 

It’s also worth pointing out that as far back as the 1890s, the LGBT movement – which did already exist, and was particularly active in Germany and New York – was already beginning to categorize and write about asexuality as part of its umbrella.

But is that all that was happening? Were straight people actually cool with people who they thought just weren’t having any sex at all?

Let’s see! (This is code for “hell no.”)

My favorite example that I came across was the Spinster Movement.

The Spinster Movement was really long-lived, from around the 1880s through the 1930s. It was a group of women who either felt no sexual attraction, or felt some sexual attraction but didn’t want to have sex. (I will be the first to say that I’m sure that there were also members who nowadays would identify as lesbian, bi, and trans. But it wasn’t the focus.)

The movement particularly focused on opposing sex work, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. It was deeply tied up in the suffrage movement, which fought for the vote specifically so that women could oppose these things in the political arena.

It spanned a wide range of countries. Norwegian researcher Tone Hellund talks about how first the group was considered queer because they were breaking gender norms. And then:

“[in Norway], in
the 1920s and 1930s, female sexuality was suddenly discovered and all
women were supposed to have and enjoy their sexuality. At this point,
frigidity and asexuality also became a topic, a very problematic topic.

“You could say that the spinsters became queer because they didn’t have
sex or didn’t take part in sexual activities, and also because they
started to be perceived as potentially homosexual.

“Thus, the romantic
spinster friendships of the earlier phase that were not seen as
problematic in a sexual way became highly problematic in the 1920s and
1930s. Suddenly, all female relationships were seen as suspicious, they
were seen in a new sexual light.“

Notice the “and also” – they were queer for not having sex, AND they were queer for starting to be perceived as possibly lesbians. 

In fact, “spinsters” were routinely slammed this way. In Britain, for example, the teachers’ union was attacked over and over with the double spectre of asexuality and lesbianism.

One example from Women’s History:  “…The fear of spinsters and lesbians affected women teachers in Britain between the wars. A 1935 report in a newspaper of an educational conference expressed the threat in extreme terms: ‘The women who have the responsibility of teaching these girls are many of them themselves embittered, sexless or homosexual hoydens who try to mould the girls into their own pattern.’” It was very explicit.

And the whole thing is a common accusation that queer people still face today. That what we are is bad because it is going to destroy children and society. 

People at the time felt very strongly about how unnatural it was for people not to have sex. Women, in particular, were often divided into “natural” and “unnatural” – i.e. queer – spinsters.  Natural ones were widows; unnatural ones were those we have seen here.

In her book “Family Ties in Victorian England,” Claudia Nelson quotes writer Eliza Linton’s description of “unnatural and alien” spinsters: “Painted and wrinkled, padded and bedizened, with her coarse thoughts, bold words, and leering eyes, [the wrong kind of spinster] has in herself all the disgust which lies around a Bacchante and a Hecate in one…. Such an old maid as this stands as a warning to men and women alike of what and whom to avoid.”

We can see some of the hatred of the Spinsters in the way suffragists were treated when arrested for picketing the White House. They were tortured, beaten, hung by their hands all night, fed rotten food, and subjected to attempted psychiatric abuse.

Earlier, during the Victorian era, there was a popular but unsuccessful movement, for decades, pushing to evict spinsters over 30 from Britain, and send them to Canada, Australia, or the United States instead. They were perceived, at best, as “surplus females”, in part because there were many more women than men in the population there at that time.

There was some overlap between the different kinds of queer. Straight people, as a group, had even less understanding and interest then than they do now of what the different flavors of queer might be.

Shannon Jackson’s essay, “Toward a Queer Social Welfare Studies,” gives a good example of how describes how critics of Jane Addams’ Hull-House “called the settlement ‘unnatural,’ worrying that its women were ‘spinsters’ or that its men were ‘mollycoddles’.” In that case, I would guess that they meant “women who have sex with women”.

It’s a good example of how much they conflated the different kinds of queer – that some straight people could use the term to slam people for being asexual, and others could use it to slam people for the opposite. And it’s also a good example of how little they cared which of us they were attacking. The important thing, to them, was that we weren’t having solely hetero sex and living our lives centered around being hetero. Everything else was just details.

(Also FWIW, I want to note that I meant no disrespect to any of the previous commenters or the OP in cutting the previous posts from queerdemons lesbiandoe @punkrcgers and sushi-moss. Tumblr wouldn’t let me post my long-ass reply without trimming; it mysteriously “lost” the whole thing like it always does when I reply at length to a long thread, and I had to rewrite it.)

autismserenity:

“Many bisexual respondents described bisexuality as a potential or as an essential quality that many people possess, but that only some people express through actual feelings of attraction or sexual behavior.

“According to this definition, people can be – and are – bisexual without ever experiencing an attraction to one sex or the other and without ever having sexual relations with one sex or the other.

“In contrast to lesbian respondents, most of whom define a bisexual as a person who feels attracted to or has sexual relations with both sexes, very few bisexual women define bisexuals as people who necessarily have these actual emotional and physical experiences.”
– Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, by Paula Rust, in 1995

[Note that yes, she and her respondents are using cissexist mid-90s wording that isn’t inclusive of nonbinary/genderqueer people. We spent much less time educating cis people about gender-inclusive language in the mid-90s. In modern terms, they are saying “to any gender” and “with any gender”.]

“[A]s a bi trans woman who was there and actually saw
aroaces being part of the bi community and putting in the work and
dealing with the oppression…  The bi community was actively rejecting
definitions beyond ‘not gay, not straight’ into the mid-90s, because every definition offered excluded some of its members.”
– @wetwareproblem, from this post

“"[In a 1992 issue of The Advocate], Nona Hendryx’s interviewer
used the word ‘bisexual,’ and Hendryx did not reject the word but said,
‘I try to think of myself as asexual.’“
– Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, by Paula Rust, again

“When I grew up, heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual were explicitly not specifically sexual. “It’s not about sex!” was a battlecry. This was emphasized frequently as
people would sit there trying to come up with some gotcha that meant
that you couldn’t be gay and a virgin at the same time. Or — and this is
important: that you couldn’t be queer if you weren’t interested in sex. While it’s not necessarily the same as explicitly affirming
asexuality, this was a way in which the asexual experience was made
intelligible under the mainstream organization of sexuality.

“There was a lot of rhetoric that emphasized this point. In particular, that the fixation on the sexual part
of homo/bi-sexuality was actually a form of heterocentrism in which
hets would try to strip queers of the capability for romantic
attraction.

“Yes, there are problems there. Yes, there’s the privileging of romantic attraction as better and more pure than sexual. And it’s worth talking about.

“But that’s not what I’m getting at right now.What I am getting at, is that in the models I grew up with, among the queers I grew up around, both aro and ace people could qualify as not just bi, but bisexual….

“During a time in which being aro or ace (or aroace) was even less intelligible to the mainstream — or even the mainstream queer community — than it is now, where were
the ace and aro bi people? Where did they organize under when trying to
deal with monosexism? Where did they vent their frustrations over LG
exclusion? Where did they openly talk about their attractions? Who were
they fighting alongside?

“Bisexuals.

“They were with the bisexuals.

“They were bisexuals.”
– @atomicbubblegum, from this post

“Lord amighty. Some of us did just live through this. Not every Tumblr person is a teenager. Some of us were there.

“Urgh.

One
of the oldest queer people I personally know is ace, and hung out in
the ‘not gay or straight’ section for ages, but she’s been with us
forever….

“I’m pretty much done with sga people who are too young to have been there talking over bi people who were there.

“Aces were bi only 20 years ago. ’Bi’ was the umbrella diagnosis if you weren’t a gold star gay.

“You kids get off my lawn.“
– @vaspider, both here and right over here

“Was there; can confirm.”
– @persephonesidekick​ here

bonus links:
in which a 1917 essayist explains how aces and other non-heteronormative women are going to destroy feminism, and ultimately, all of human society

in which people have been targeted as queer for asexual behavior for like 150 years 

if you like all this, you might like the asexual history interest group