The thing is, asexuality isn't just "I don't want to have sex", it's very blatantly trying to project a persecution complex by force-teaming with the LGBT movements and appropriating their imagery, except they're like, the most uncontroversial thing imaginable. At least things like kinks or trans garner some negative reaction. Meanwhile plenty of people don't have sex and go through periods of low libidos, and ofc we all lived through our childhoods without concrete sexual urges. Celibacy is also celebrated and encouraged in many societies for various reasons, and sexuality is generally seen as a private thing. Point being, people don't find the very notion of lacking a sex drive to be some incomprehensible, bad thing that should be violently opposed (except, as Iota Aurigae mentioned, in the context of women not being men's breeding stock, which is just misogyny)
The worst thing asexuals experience according to them is people not talking about them enough, or not believing that they're asexual, which is 1. Not oppression in and of itself 2. Perfectly justifiable given the amount of asexuals who "actually totally have sex, but are still ace, deal with it 💅" and the overwhelming amount of women in the movement within the larger context of a liberal movement that is notorious for encouraging horrific misogynistic sex acts, in turn within the larger context of it being presented as the only alternative to even more overtly violent patriarchy.
Erasure and people questioning your self-identity are not bigotry unless it's a part of a wider history of actual oppression, i.e. danger to your health and safety on a solely supremacist basis. Gay people were subject to actual violence and conversion therapies, they weren't just ignored to death, or annoyed to death by people not accepting their sexuality at face value. But liberalism relies either on putting the cart before the horse like that or just vague general idea that anyone criticising anyone else is trying to ruin their fun and make them feel bad about themselves, which is oppression.
Quote:A lack of sexual interest is a very common and very clearly linked result of sexual trauma. Most if not all people I see identifying as asexual are women. I'd much rather women avoid sex (especially with men) if they've been traumatized than do the opposite also-common response of become hypersexual but I also don't think it's a good idea to treat the negative aftermath of abuse as both a good thing and a permanent part of who you are.
I will say that, in a society that treats you like a sex object for male depravity since childhood, it doesn't even take overt physical sexual trauma to feel disgusted by that. Our society already accepts that most women will feel grossed out by sex and need to be pestered, manipulated and blackmailed into it, get slutshamed for enjoying it and that men are the ones who get to control the narrative around what sex is. Most women already have "trauma" regarding sex, just as they do over the feminine gender role (i.e. feeling like an unloveable troll without makeup and the fawn response, and also all the resulting mental illnesses like anorexia, body dysmorphia, TIFs etc.)
I do think that if asexual women could stay asexual and be happy that way, that's a net positive given what a traumatising minefield sexuality (especially heterosexuality) is for women. But treating that as some kind of uniquely oppressed identity that no-one (including you) is allowed to critically examine lest that be "conversion therapy" and "internalised acephobia" is where you end up with unhealthy coping mechanisms, as well as an inability to critically consider the larger societal systems making you feel that way.
Like, no, you don't feel like shit about your body because society is "acephobic" and "transphobic" and if only they accepted you deserve special treatment compared to those other normie women who enjoy their oppression, everything would be fine. You feel like shit because society hates you for being a woman, and keeps drilling that into you all your life. But it's easier to just advocate for the lamest human rights movement imaginable where the only goal is getting everyone to talk about how special you are and how much you deserve special treatment, than actually push back on all the "normal" genderist attitudes that are EVERYWHERE and unavoidable.
And the way that asexuality has turned into a spectrum shows both that asexuality is not an "out" for women like it's portrayed to be, and also that most women in the movement still have libidos, but are desperately looking for a way to express it that isn't triggering.
Quote:Also all the criticism is very much the same vein of "why do you CARE how does it AFFECT you it costs nothing to #bekind" which rubs me the wrong way.
I think, while the #bekind socialisation obviously plays a big part in all of us, for a lot of women who have watched GenderCritical and Ovarit go down in flames as a result of conservative takeover, there's a justifiable weariness of the same thing happening again, where conservatives manipulate genuine feminist grievances and women's safety concerns into brainless knee-jerk hatred of any other group that straight white men are mocking atm, which makes them acceptable targets.
Quote:Especially since, like I said, this is one of many tumblr-borne facets of at best mild homophobia via tokenism ("being oppressed gets me attention, I wish I were gay, I'll make up an identity and say it's part of the gay rights movement!") and at worst outright "gays are gross" homophobia
Personally the worst part of it for me is the misogyny, or rather how it encourages patriarchal conformity by putting blinders on obviously traumatised women. I've seen many women talk about how degrading and traumatising sex is and get told they might be asexual if they don't like it. And ofc the notion that not wanting to engage in hookup culture (something that by design favours men) is some kind of special, oppressed sexuality, instead of just what's expected of women in a society that knows heterosexuality is a shit deal for them, and exists solely for male pleasure (and if you internalise that women themselves do, you get TIFs).
I think asexuality, much like trans, was a way to give women under liberal oppression an "out" to keep it from imploding in on itself. The status quo under liberals profits off of a few token individuals being used as evidence of how accepting liberals are, and the corrolary to that is "You should be tolerant and accepting of our depravity, too (aka the patriarchy). We're all so tolerant and accepting of yours, after all!" It's a social contract where you agree to not make a stink over the patriarchy by being so generously allowed to carve out a special by-design limited niche for yourself (which, surprise surprise, doesn't actually make you immune to patriarchal damage, but hey at least you got a cool identity pin for it).
Like, there was a recent case of a TIF who got raped and murdered and the trans community kept portraying it as "transphobia", because acknowledging how blatantly misogynistic the crime was would be "invalidating". So you had people saying she was targeted and "humiliated using her natal anatomy" like, dude, she was raped because she's a woman, and no amount of what she thought about it or how she felt about it or how gender-invalidating that misogynistic act of violence was mattered BECAUSE SHE WAS A WOMAN!
And that's how the larger liberal movement functions. You don't like all the sexual empowerment in the form of patriarchal violence that prioritises male pleasure? Oh well, you must be asexual. Don't even think about saying there might be a problem with said sex acts, that's kink shaming. And if you don't like the YASS QUEEN objectifying femininity, well you must be a boy. Again, don't you dare take issue with femininity itself and make it "political" because that means you're suffering from internalised misogyny and are being a pickme. You are given this "out" that they know most people are not going to go for so they could say "See? Everyone else freely chose the status quo!"
Quote:see the quite popular tumblr comic about how pride being about celebrating same-sex relationships makes a poor asexual girl feel alienated and forces her to look at asexual-triggering icky kissing. wish I had a link, I'll look for it.
Oh god, the asexuals whose only claim to oppression is rolling their eyes and being grossed out at the very notion that people have sex lives. Reminds me of my cringy asexual phase, though I was at least self-aware enough to understand that the concept of asexuals who have sex is bs.
Quote:So great! Be asexual! Don’t have sex! It’s quite freeing! Just … why do they need to announce their specialness to the world?
It's not attention seeking to want to organise a community if they're seeking like-minded people. It's the unfounded persecution complex I have an issue with. If this was just a random community of people wanting to gather around a specific preference, that'd be different. But it mostly seems to be prudeish people complaining about other people having, gasp, sex lives, and being so gross and asexuals are so much more enlightened.
Also the amount of asexuals who can't even stick to their guns reminds me a lot of trans people. The "ace spectrum" where all the normies with libidos want to feel special even though they don't match the definition in any way, so they just bend the definition to the point of meaninglessness where it includes most people.
I refuse to debate two obvious facts: 1. the patriarchy exists 2. and that's a bad thing
