Incident - why a disabled asexual would feel uncomfortable with desexualizing PWDs

[ocelotofdoom]

(This is mostly a personal, rather than a political, post, despite the title.  And yes, I do realize how ironic/WTF/whatever it is to have Tyrion for an icon in a post about asexuality, but I found it slightly more fitting than the Magneto icon, so yeah

Comments

[spacehawk]

First, I am sorry to hear you've had such a stressful and emotionally difficult week.

Internally, I'm going into "Am I skeeved out because this is actually sexist, or am I just being a sex-negative asexual hating on regular straight relationships and gender roles?"

I don't have the details, of course, but from what you've described here, it sounds sexist to me. Unless you expressed interest in hearing these things from him, it seems sketchy to do. The rest of what you have told us about him supports a finding of "sketchy" here.

The operative questions to ask yourself, in my opinion, are why he is choosing to tell you this, and what response he wants to get out of you. See below.

It's a similar deal with his "I want a girlfriend" rant -- why is he telling you, and what responses in particular is he looking for from you? Somewhere, in his mind, he is looking for a certain response. He may be saying these kinds of things just to you, or he may be saying them to everyone. I have no idea.

And then he responds with the following quote: "Your unusual mouth doesn't really do it for me but I respect you a great deal for having the courage to assert that your abnormal mouth is a part of who you are and that you wish to resist other people's advice to get it fixed." He goes on to talk about how we can't all be hot celebrities, and I have brains that I'm going to do stuff with, and it's just incredibly backhanded and unpleasant.

This is all kinds of demeaning, insulting, and wrong. So he's making excuses for how you "still get to be valuable" as a human being in spite of being who you are, and then framing being OK with who you are as something he needs to specially respect and applaud you for?

Very backhanded, yes.

But his way of thinking (and possibly most people's, if my extrapolation is that most people have pretty much the same view of me except don't come right out and say it is correct) is that I don't get to avoid being the object of misplaced sexual desire out of respect for my being asexual or because someone just doesn't think of people in a creepy, objectifying manner, but because people like me - that is to say, people with visible disabilities - are inherently and squarely in the Do Not Want category.

Sadly, this is one of the ways people suck, yes.

(Continued below)