Asexual Census 2011

[swankivy]

I thought some of you guys might be interested to see the results of the Asexual Census (I posted a link back when it was going on). I should reiterate that I didn't design this or help administer it, though I was one of the respondents. (They had thousands of respondents! This data is cool, despite the fact that of course it was a survey that

Comments

[swankivy]

Glad you like.

I actually don't own the "My Sexual Preference Is Not You" shirt--I just saw it online--but the "gay robot" shirt is a reference to Red vs. Blue, a funny web show I got into years ago, and they put some of the characters' funniest lines on shirts. I got it on their website. I don't know where the "different" one came from because it was a holiday gift a couple years ago.

Regarding point 1: I remember you mentioning this phenomenon in another discussion and it's pretty interesting. I figure my intersex friend Natalie gets that reaction often because people "expect" her to be asexual and (wrongly) consider it entirely like a medical symptom. Yes, you're right that it's beyond the scope of the overview, though . . . and there were a TON of things like that, like I didn't get to even launch into discussions of social awkwardness like I wanted to. (I was once told by an annoying guy that I was probably "stuck on this asexual thing" because I must have been a nerd in high school, so I decided to pretend I didn't want male attention anyway, and that after I "grew up" and "became an attractive woman"--instead of just a nerd, I guess?--I still hadn't shed the delusion that I wasn't sexual, which was a guard I put up to protect myself. I wanted to go into this one, but even as it was I ended up having to cut, sadly.) A couple other comments discussed what else I could have done with it, like discussing not just high-functioning autism but other non-neurotypical conditions, or discussing other kinds of abuse besides sexual abuse, etc. I'm thinking most people will be able to extrapolate analogous situations in those cases. What you're describing sounds like it'd almost be an "unassailable" point for people in non-normative gender situations . . . a little bonus there, even though it'd be misleading and not do any good for the overall impression.

On point 2, I felt like "ugliness" might be too sensitive an issue to talk about anyone else's beauty or ugliness to compare and contrast, which is probably why I mostly talked about myself and only used an "ugly asexuals" illustrative picture of an AVEN post where someone was describing herself as ugly. I was mostly trying to present myself in an almost caricature way (probably partially because I find this argument SO DAMN SILLY) . . . though as an aside, in practice, I think my height helps people think I'm just sort of cute instead of "hot." (Which I'm glad for.) Anyway, I didn't really feel comfortable using anyone else as an example of physical attractiveness (or lack thereof), and mostly just felt safer sort of making fun of myself and the narrative that frames me as "attractive."

Interestingly, non-white asexuals are much less present in the online discussions about asexuality (and there are some obvious reasons and some not-so-obvious reasons for that), but one of my black friends pointed out to me that in the (A)sexual movie everybody they interviewed was white, until the VERY end there was a black asexual who got to say a few lines, and she wasn't a main subject.

I was really thrown, by the way, when the article about me started that way. I had no idea it was going to do that. (But when people write about you, you never know how they'll present you. I've turned down two TV shows and a documentary because of doubts about their intentions.)

[spacehawk]

OK, I understand your intent better now.

I'm not trying to dismiss your intent. It just sort of struck me as slightly off the note when you pointed out in red that the beginning of the article shows how you're "not ugly." It also shows that you're white... I think what he was doing plays on both race and looks privilege, and I find both equally creepy.

I think of "unassailable asexual" in terms of a bundle of privileges within a dis-privileged subgroup. This sort of thing happens in any dis-privileged group -- there are individuals in it who are more privileged than others on different axes, and this leads to complex internal dynamics. Sometimes when you combine two dis-privileges it leads to a privilege in that context (i.e. when someone is both intersex and asexual, or both genderqueer/agender and asexual, it has constructive interference for the moment. But not overall.)

So I'm thinking big picture. Rather than just say "this attack is stupid, it doesn't apply to me!" you're going OK, but it can be used against others, too, who don't have that relative privilege, and that's not OK, either. I think that other, possibly less explicit factors also play into who is "unassailable", not just the ones that people say aloud to dismiss someone's asexuality in those exact words.

For example, race privilege, which I saw that article author announcing in his first sentence.

You mentioned disability (mental and physical), you mentioned hetero-normativity (not being homo-romantic), but I also think race and class play a role as well. Your point that asexuals of color are under-represented in online discussions about asexuality (which I have also seen) is interesting... There certainly are asexuals of color; PoC are no less likely to be asexual than white people.

Your point about who ended up in the asexuality movie is also interesting. I don't know how that happened, who volunteered, how decisions were made about who got featured, etc., but it does confirm what I otherwise see that the public "presentation" of asexuals is very white and that the community as a whole could be doing more to reach out to asexuals of color.

In line with what you were saying about who is getting erased etc.

[swankivy]

Yes, the red text is my "translation" of what the author of the article was apparently trying to tell the audience through an otherwise irrelevant physical description of me. (Further illustrating the point, that is: the article author apparently thought the audience would be more likely to take me seriously if she could make sure they wouldn't assume I was ugly.)

And yeah, the so-called gold-star asexual is basically the most privileged among us. (Especially since a lot of the things that privilege us are overall privileges too.) Regarding race among asexuals, I haven't seen race actually brought up in the whole unassailable phenomenon, so I didn't directly address it, but as an aside my little smorgasbord of asexual "examples" did include both an asexual of color and a rather international group. Interestingly, the director and concept-creator of (A)sexual is a black woman. She has a whole other series that focuses on race-related matters, so I wonder if she considered this.