as small as a world and as large as alone

1:23pm July 15, 2014

clatterbane:

feliscorvus:

chavisory:

hotpotatohobbies:

chaosphaere:

sabatons-and-spectrums:

thentheysaidburnher:

helspawn:

ravefromthegrave:

like, i don’t think it’s a coincidence that 100% of demisexuals are straight people

I see no lies

I’m wondering if this, for some women, is a rebellion against compulsory heterosexuality. A way of being able to give a valid and…

I do too, having met people who fit the description to a tee. Also like why is the above person only focussing on women? I’ve known a few but they’ve all been cis male demisexuals but I’ve only ever seen cisfemale ones here on tumblr. The whole premise that demisexuality is just something cis women do to get out of sex is so creepy I don’t even know where to start.

I think it is definitely a thing. I think I am demisexual and strangely I get more and more demi with age. But having been in the dating world 20 years ago - it just wasn’t really necessary for me to insist upon it the way that I have to now. 

Secondly, tumblr is weird. 

Most people active in the asexual ‘community’* are cis females. I remember the cross-website polls have been pretty consistently showing this.

(in addition, most of tumblr is female)

And, man, thentheysaidburnher is definitely one to something. I can come up with more examples, but I did see in the asexual tag just this week someone writing they’re prob demi bc they are uncomfortable with explicit sexual talk and here is a link to a demi person who defined themselves as such because they ‘need to feel safe before having sex with anyone’. 

(the entire grey-ace category is a mess. How do people even reckon they’ve got low libidos/experience attraction less than other when there’s next to no information about the average range? Unless they’re talking five times a year, and they generally aren’t, what are they basing this on?)

I know tumblr user sidneiya has been arguing that the rise of demisexuality as an orientation has been the fault of the unhealthily aggressive sex-positive movement for a long time, though they’re not the first to have a problem with this aspect of the movement.

*sorry, I  just don’t believe it’s a spectrum and it’s not all that welcoming.

Um, I’m talking about more like five times in my life?

I’m basing this on the way that the vast majority of people talk about experiencing attraction and the way sexuality works for them, I have zero to extremely little idea what they’re talking about?

I mean people talk about their sexuality kind of a lot.  Romance and attraction are represented in popular culture kind of a lot.  You start to notice when the way that things work for you is consistently not the same at all.

FWIW as a data point, I’m also at roughly five times in my life, *if that*. Probably more like three. And even then it has only *once* gotten to the point of “yep, I actually want to get it on with this person”. This is MY normal but I’d be *way* off if I were to assume it was like that for everyone. 

I am not ace spectrum myself. But, my partner of 10 years is. (So was my best friend growing up, before people were talking about this much and we just didn’t have the tools to understand then. That was hard.)

This wasn’t easy for a good while, largely thanks to the common societal stories about how relationships and sex are supposed to work together or Ur Doin It Rong to the point of killing the relationship. Both of us were apparently going off into spirals of “Oh no, what the hell is wrong with me?! I just keep disappointing this person I love! I’m garbage and they’re probably going to leave me!!!” Me because obviously the whole problem was how hideous and unappealing I was, and him because of the messages that he ought to be up for it all the time when that doesn’t often happen in reality. Reinforcing the idea that, yep, people are going to notice when things are unusual here.

Guess what helped the situation immensely? Communication!

And for that to happen successfully, you need some kind of framework for looking at things that doesn’t automatically lay blame on everyone involved, because there’s obviously something wrong with them and they need to see a doctor to “fix” it. (Or, in my case, get ED relapses going, and start cutting again, and cry a lot—because the whole DIY attempts at “fixing” myself just didn’t make him magically more interested in sex.) For that, you need WORDS and CONCEPTS to try to make sense of what’s going on, and find approaches to that make everyone less miserable and broken.

And I am appalled that some of y’all obviously don’t want people to have these tools to make better sense of their own lives and experiences, and stop feeling broken as human beings. When it has absolutely nothing to do with you. That’s just not right, and it takes a lot of gall.

I am getting more and more pissed off the more I read people finding ways to object to asexuality.  

And honestly some of it seems to really resemble the ways that people object to genderless people.  (Who are also often accused of being “all cis women”, even though genderless is by definition not cis and not women, and even though the genderless people I know seem pretty well distributed between people raised as male and people raised as female, for whatever reason.)  

And all of this animosity towards people finding ways to describe ourselves, really, really pisses me off.  Because it’s not anyone’s fucking business in the first place to dictate these things to other people, and I can’t fathom why there is so much hostility towards the very existence of ace spectrum people or genderless people.

Although I do think there’s a connection between the prejudice against each one.  Because each one is, at the extreme end, a total lack of something that most people take for granted as being a universal human experience.  And yes, there are gradations of both.  And that shouldn’t surprise anyone.

Why do people get bothered when people come up with words for who we are?

Do people know what it’s like not to have words or concepts for who we are?

Also what’s up with the thing where saying something is 'all cis women’ makes it bad?  (And with the desire to make things 'all cis women’ that aren’t 'all cis women’ at all, from what I’ve observed.  Like… I actually have trouble thinking of an ace cis woman I know, any ace cis woman, can’t think of one.)

Do people know what it’s like to have no way of communicating certain things because there’s no word for it?  And no way of conceptualizing certain aspects of it because even for people who don’t think in words, words sometimes help to solidify concepts in our brains, and connect them to other concepts, and especially help us discuss these with like-minded people and learn things about ourselves in the process.

And anyone who would get in the way of that is just plain being an asshole, no matter what ideology they can spout in their defense.  And yes, it takes a lot of gall to want to take these things away from people.

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