Hey y’all, with Asexual Awareness Week coming up (Oct 21-27th this year) here are a few things to remember!
• Asexuals are part of the LGBTQ+ community
• Asexuality is real
• Aces can choose not to celebrate/participate in any way
• Aces have every right to be proud of their identity
• Aces are lgbt+ regardless of their romantic orientation.
• Aces aren’t “basically straight” or any other complaint exclusionists have
• Asexuality is an orientation just like any other as well as a spectrum
• Greysexuals, Demisexuals, Cupiosexual, etc are all valid and also have a right to celebrate this week
• Ace Men exist
• Nonbinary Aces exist
• Not every Ace is Cis
• Exclusionists/Gatekeepers/etc are not welcome here
• AroAces exist
• Ace WLW exist
• Ace MLM exist
• Ace nblnb / nblm / nblw exist
• Poc Aces exist
• Disabled Aces exist
• Mentally ill Aces exist
• There are Aces of many different races/genders/ages/religions/etc
• Whether you’re an Ace still struggling with their orientation or an Ace who’s proud, or any other type of Ace, Asexual Awareness Week is for you and you’re valid regardless.
Feel free to add on!
Tag: aro ace
so uh
this is my contribution for asexual awareness week
attraction confusion – when you compare yourself to allos
so here’s the thing, as i understand it – most alloromantic and allosexual people have an easier time figuring out what they’re feeling for another person than aro and ace people, because the various attractions that can exist separately are usually all present and directed at one person at the same time. a standard allo person will say “i’m in love with them” and they’ll mean that they want to be in a romantic relationship (a sign of romantic attraction), kiss them and hold their hand (a sign of sensual attraction), be able to be emotionally intimate (a sign of emotional attraction), desire to have sex (usually a sign of sexual attraction) and that they find the looks of the person captivating (a sign of aesthetic attraction). and that usually comes as a full set!! which is fine, cool and absolutely no problem with that. it just can become confusing when it’s presented as Attraction that doesn’t consist of several different parts, but as a monolith. it’s clear that it does feel like one big thing and so it’s intuitively understandable for allos, but for a lot of a-spec people, those types of attractions don’t typically all appear together. and it’s the majority experience – the allo experience – that we’re comparing our experiences to.
what does it translate to functionally?? this depends!! say you’re allo ace and experience romantic + emotional + sensual attraction to a person – you can form a romantic relationship that can mostly follow the allo relationship model, but maybe without sex. say you’re aroace and you experience sensual + emotional attraction and it may feel like “tfw you want to kiss but no romo. what do??”. what do indeed, when you’ve been hearing that usually wanting to kiss someone and be emotionally intimate with them means infatuation, but you don’t feel you want that romo. and the feelings may be very intense, you just can’t stop thinking about this person and you’d love to talk to them so much and then make out. and you may wonder what does it all mean, maybe you’re just afraid of commitment, because wanting to kiss someone sure is romantic, right??
as many people come to realize, no, a lot of actions considered romantic don’t have to have romantic intentions behind them, it’s just that for the majority they do and when that majority talks about their experiences, we assume that it’s universal and it’s not. the Attraction that is a monolith for them doesn’t have to be that way for us – we may feel a mix of different kinds of attraction towards different people. allo’s Attraction is perceived as a powerful force and our attractions can also be powerful, just different. it can also vary from one a-spec to another – we can personally have a certain mix that we usually feel towards friends, a certain mix that makes us want to ask another person to be our qpp and other a-specs may feel completely different mixes that are connected to friendships for them.
what i want to emphasize at the end though is that – if you’re a-spec or questioning being a-spec, remember that you’re comparing yourself to the majority for who attraction can really work differently from yours and not only because you experience little to no sexual or romantic attraction and they do – it’s also that a lot of them can’t make distinctions between other kinds of attraction (hell, sometimes not even romantic and sexual attraction) and the guidelines they lay out (for example: “if you want to kiss, that’s a crush”) may just not fit your experiences. they also may describe their Attraction as the most intense feeling, but that doesn’t mean that all intense attractions are romantic and/or sexual. so question what the attraction actually means for you, don’t worry about the implications intensity has, and hopefully understand yourself a bit better
Asexual? Never Heard of it.
What does Asexual mean?
Asexual is a term to describe the experience of feeling little to no sexual attraction.
Other commonly asked questions:
What’s the difference between asexual and aromantic?
What identities are on the ace-spectrum?
But how can you date someone and be asexual?
Resources for ace-spec folks
Online resources:
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network
Dating and social sites/apps:
Tumblrs:
Youtubers:
Since telling my Mum that I considered myself ace, I already noticed that she was a bit… too interested, if you want to say it like that. Asking for “signs”, or how being ace feels like… I tried to answer her to the best of my ability, giving her links to websites that would explain better as I ever could.
Today she said, very quietly, “Do you think I could be ace, too?”
And I said very carefully “If you think it suits you, I don’t see why not”
And my Mum, my strong, self-confident Mum, who never once has ever felt uncomfortable in her own skin as far as I know, beamed in relief. Relief.
Because she never knew. Because getting married young and bearing children for her husband (meaning sex) was expected of her. Because everyone gave her the feeling as if something would be wrong or broken about her if she didn’t want, didn’t do that.
Because her whole life long, she thought there was something wrong with her.
I’m honestly torn between feeling happy and relieved for her, and angry that humanity has such trouble with showing some understanding to those who don’t fit in the boxes society has designed for all of us.
Update: My
Mum was getting ready for bed when I noticed her humming loudly around her
toothbrush and I asked her what the good mood was about.
She beamed
around a mouth-full of toothpaste and said, very proudly and deliberately, “I
think I like that, being ace.”And continued
on with her brushing, humming a bit louder.
(Or in
other words, I’m more than a little bit teary eyed.)I had almost the exact same conversation with my Mom. We were talking about the LGBT acronym and explained that it’s LGBTQ and that some people add the PIA at the end as well. And she asked me “What’s the a?” So when I explained it she said immediately “Me. That’s like me.”
This is why I get so mad at people who think this is all just trendy bs, people just don’t have the vocabulary or permission to describe their lived experience.
This is the most wholesome thing I’ve ever read, bless this post 🙌🏼
Aromanticism is often more difficult for me to discuss because it is less tangible for me than my asexuality, and yet more emotionally intense than any other part of my identity. Romance is a very abstract concept, but in order to justify myself as aromantic I am often asked to examine what romance is or isn’t.
Romance is so much an accepted part of every day life for a large number of people, that they probably don’t spend hours of their day trying to quantify it or qualify it. It is already done for them by our romance obsessed culture. When this is challenged by aromantic people, we’re asked to defend ourselves.
Romance is something that I’m equally hyper-aware of and emotionally distant from. I am both extremely familiar with the culture of romance and extremely unfamiliar with romantic feelings. I know romance without knowing romance, because I’m often required to just to exist.
The great irony is that while I am often asked to quantify and qualify romance in order to prove that I am aromantic, my familiarity with it as a concept can call into question the validity of my aromanticism to those adamant about disproving it. This can certainly be frustrating.
However, what people who are not aromantic don’t seem to realize is that being aromantic in a largely romantic culture can be very challenging mentally and emotionally outside of these identity debates. My aromanticism comes with a lot of paranoia and a preoccupation with analyzing my social interactions.
My inability to understand and feel romantic feelings firsthand not only leads to awkward uncomfortable interactions with peers, but it can also cause a strain in my working relationships and it can actually impede my ability to succeed in a work environment.
For me, a paranoia over how my own feelings and behavior will be read by my peers has led to an identifiable strain or distance between myself and my peers. I am emotionally distant from many people, and it is very difficult for people to truly know and understand me without knowing my aromanticism.
My peers often don’t know about my aromanticism, because 1) we live in a culture where aromanticism “shouldn’t” exist, 2) I spent the majority of my child and teenage years fighting against my peers forcibly misinterpreting my feelings, and 3) my lack of romantic feelings has been treated as a threat.
I have been set up and pushed into relationships that I did not want and/or that I refused, with resentment and blame shifted onto me because of an inability on my part to return romantic feelings. My awkwardness re: romance can be misinterpreted as attraction or jealousy, straining professional relationships.
This isn’t the way with all aromantic people, but my feelings towards romance as directed at me is literally met with a panicked stress response in which my social interactions will play on loop in my head and every word and every action I make will be analyzed to ensure that I am safe.
I have been put into romantic situations where I do not feel safe, because they have involved me feeling as if I need to change who I am for the happiness of other people or else receive negative consequences in the way of abandonment, isolation, humiliation, guilt-tripping, and even physical violence.
This is what it means to be aromantic, for me, in a romantic culture. It means stress, obsession, paranoia, panic, frustration, anger, and an incredible amount of sadness that I cannot be who I am and be accepted for who I am without others insisting they have control of me emotionally or physically.
When you’re asexual and in a pit, your an ace in the hole.
i just found a text file from early 2016, the same day i created this blog, called “growing up aro.txt” that had some of my early ideas for posts here. here’s what was in it!
(with some commentary in italics cuz these were just my own notes and some of it makes no sense. also a self-reflection at the bottom that ended up way longer than i intended ahh sorry)
hey, by the way, being proud that you’re aro isn’t the same as saying no one else should ever be in love and people who get defensive over it when you say you’re proud to be aro are not your problem
same goes for people proud of their asexuality as well. being proud of who you are, isn’t saying nobody should ever be sexually attracted to other people.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 