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I keep writing out responses to posts on tumblr, making them a draft while I think about it, then never posting anything. So I'm going to make more of an effort to post this stuff to dreamwidth instead.
From this tumblr post:
ok this is a bit of a half-formed thought but it just occurred to me to compare this to my experiences when I identified as a wlw, and some general thoughts I've been having about how people treat bisexuality as "gay mixed with straight" rather than it's own experience.
Wlw solidarity is great. But even ignoring the "what even is a woman" question, sometimes it leads to lumping all wlw together, whether acting like wlw=not caring about gender (erasing those for whom not being into men is a defining part of their orientation) or acting like wlw=not being into men (erasing those for whom being into all genders is a defining part of their orientation). And from what I've seen, attempts to go "Well then let's just focus on our shared attraction to women without getting distracted by our differences" can leave both groups feeling frustrated and unable to discuss those parts of their orientation/life which are insufficiently part of the Universal WLW Experience. Which is one reason why lesbians and bi women sometimes like their own spaces.
Similarly: it's not just that all ways of being asexual are valid. It's that there are distinct and mutually contradictory forms of "being asexual", where the traits that are a defining part of "what it means for me to be asexual" for one person are actively opposed to "what it means for me to be asexual" for another.
For example: I am "only" grey asexual, in that I experience the occasional moment of sexual attraction. But it doesn't feel like I'm "mostly asexual plus a bit allosexual", it feels like I have a very specific experience which is fundamentally different to that of completely allosexual people and people who never experience any sexual attraction. And this experience sits under the "asexual" umbrella, so for me, it is What It Means To Be Asexual. Yet for many other asexuals, "I absolutely never experience sexual attraction" is a personally significant and defining part of their (a)sexuality. The same thing applies to aversion or enthusiasm when it comes to stuff like porn or nudity, and so on. You can't cut all those differences away to get at some Core Defining Experience all asexuals have in common without removing important parts of our individual (a)sexualities.
Which doesn't mean there's no such thing as An Asexual, or that we can't connect and have solidarity via our shared experiences. And while I know spaces for like... Just Grey Asexuals etc exist I feel no personal desire to seek them out. For whatever reason, while it's important to me that I am bi rather than just same sex attracted and genderfluid rather than just non-binary I feel no particularly strong identity as fluidflux or any of the other subcategories of asexual that more narrowly describe my specific experience. But that doesn't make those specific experiences any less real or personal or significant.
It's important not to think of there being some like... Default Experience Of Asexuality that everything else is a variant of. And that applies to all other sorts of queerness too, and even more to Queerness as a whole.
From this tumblr post:
the ideas that “libido and attraction can be separate and for many aces they are”, “aces who have and enjoy sex are still ace” and “aces who do not have sex and don’t want to shouldn’t be pressured” and “you should accept aces regardless of their sexual behavior” can and should coexist
ok this is a bit of a half-formed thought but it just occurred to me to compare this to my experiences when I identified as a wlw, and some general thoughts I've been having about how people treat bisexuality as "gay mixed with straight" rather than it's own experience.
Wlw solidarity is great. But even ignoring the "what even is a woman" question, sometimes it leads to lumping all wlw together, whether acting like wlw=not caring about gender (erasing those for whom not being into men is a defining part of their orientation) or acting like wlw=not being into men (erasing those for whom being into all genders is a defining part of their orientation). And from what I've seen, attempts to go "Well then let's just focus on our shared attraction to women without getting distracted by our differences" can leave both groups feeling frustrated and unable to discuss those parts of their orientation/life which are insufficiently part of the Universal WLW Experience. Which is one reason why lesbians and bi women sometimes like their own spaces.
Similarly: it's not just that all ways of being asexual are valid. It's that there are distinct and mutually contradictory forms of "being asexual", where the traits that are a defining part of "what it means for me to be asexual" for one person are actively opposed to "what it means for me to be asexual" for another.
For example: I am "only" grey asexual, in that I experience the occasional moment of sexual attraction. But it doesn't feel like I'm "mostly asexual plus a bit allosexual", it feels like I have a very specific experience which is fundamentally different to that of completely allosexual people and people who never experience any sexual attraction. And this experience sits under the "asexual" umbrella, so for me, it is What It Means To Be Asexual. Yet for many other asexuals, "I absolutely never experience sexual attraction" is a personally significant and defining part of their (a)sexuality. The same thing applies to aversion or enthusiasm when it comes to stuff like porn or nudity, and so on. You can't cut all those differences away to get at some Core Defining Experience all asexuals have in common without removing important parts of our individual (a)sexualities.
Which doesn't mean there's no such thing as An Asexual, or that we can't connect and have solidarity via our shared experiences. And while I know spaces for like... Just Grey Asexuals etc exist I feel no personal desire to seek them out. For whatever reason, while it's important to me that I am bi rather than just same sex attracted and genderfluid rather than just non-binary I feel no particularly strong identity as fluidflux or any of the other subcategories of asexual that more narrowly describe my specific experience. But that doesn't make those specific experiences any less real or personal or significant.
It's important not to think of there being some like... Default Experience Of Asexuality that everything else is a variant of. And that applies to all other sorts of queerness too, and even more to Queerness as a whole.
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