This is a post for the August 2020 Carnival of Aces. It is cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
What am I hoping to get out of the ace community?
In a word, accessibility. I mean that in a broad sense: accessibility in terms of consideration for physical disabilities, accessibility of information, and accessibility in terms of creating an environment that doesn’t feel hostile, where I feel safe and welcome to share the truth of my experience. Continue reading
This post is for the July 2019 Carnival of Aces, on the topic of “Home.”
CW: contains references to domestic abuse, alcoholism, and sexual assault.
I have never lived in a place where I felt truly safe, comfortable, welcome, and like I really belong, all at the same time.
Layers upon layers of casual tragedy weigh down the air in the house I live in now, the legacy of traumas not my own lingering, and the floorboards creak as I step delicately through them. Cracked and patched again countless times, the walls of this house still stand, sinking slowly into the ground, shielding me from the worst of the sun’s rage.
I’ve always understood this as a temporary arrangement, a less-than-ideal choice among several other unhappy options. Something is always broken, and usually several somethings, but even so, I’m lucky to have this. Continue reading
This post was written for the Carnival of Aces & Aros. The Carnival of Aros is a new sister project that will be separate from the long-running Carnival of Aces, but just to kick off its first round, The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project and The Asexual Agenda are hosting it jointly on the topic of “The Relationship Between the Aro and Ace Communities.” For further details, check out this introductory post. This post is cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
Content note: This post has some discussion of trauma in relation to romantic orientation. Continue reading
This blog is now ten years old!
When I originally started this blog as Shades of Gray in 2008, I really didn’t think it’d go anywhere. Asexuality was such a niche topic and people had been telling me, over and over again, that they didn’t care. I didn’t have anyone around me who was interested in listening. So I decided to just make a new space where I could write down my thoughts about it, anonymously. I started this at a time when I was going through a lot of processing, and I would have normally written all this stuff out in a private journal, but I decided to make it public instead, so that maybe one day my words would reach people.
I was surprised to see a handful of people engage with me from the very beginning. A bunch of other ace blogs started up around the same time, and then there was a second wave of new blogs, and then a third, and now there are so many I have no idea how you’d even figure out what constitutes a wave anymore.
This is what we’ve built together.
And we’ll keep building. Continue reading
An old screenshot of a tumblr argument that visually represents why tumblr’s design is the worst. Who can follow this kind of conversation?
I hate Tumblr. I’m sure that many of you who have been reading my blog for a long time already know this. I think the site is designed in such a way that it creates confusion and friction rather than facilitating good discussions.
To the right, you can see an example of exactly why the site’s design is so awful. This is an old screenshot from 2015 that I found on my computer again recently. I made this image and shared it with a few people privately, but I didn’t post it anywhere because I didn’t want anyone to feel like I was picking on them or talking about whatever the actual content of the discussion underneath these usernames was, which I no longer remember at all. It isn’t important. But notice how it looks. It doesn’t look like a conversation, it looks like a labeled bar graph. In order to really follow this conversation, to know who exactly is saying what, you’d have to scroll up and down with your mouse on each of the lines to match up the username with the text. And trust me, it was a veeeery loooooong conversation, with each post being pretty substantive, so that was a lot of scrolling.
That isn’t the only problem, of course. With conversations decentralized, it’s difficult to even see other parts of the same conversation topic going on, so you have to click through a lot of notes—sometimes many thousands, most of which are just likes and reblogs—in order to actually see the full range of responses that a post spawned. I don’t have an answer for that problem, other than to wish that a better site would come along that could actually compete with tumblr, and spark a mass migration to the new platform instead. It will happen eventually, I’m sure. It’s happened many times before. (Hardly anybody still uses MySpace or LiveJournal, and AIM is about to be shut down for lack of use too.) It will take someone coming up with something better, and then lots of time and dissatisfied users. Until then, I’m going to be stuck reading a lot of things posted on tumblr, because such a huge portion of the asexual community resides there.
So for now, I’m just going to share a little trick that I eventually learned to help manage reading these blogs as someone who has vision problems.
This post is for the July 2017 Carnival of Aces, the topic of which is “Ace-ing it up offline.” It has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
I live in an area with very little (visible) ace presence. Although I have met other ace people around me, and I know there must be more I haven’t met yet, there is no real local community here, so my opportunities for meeting other aces have mostly been limited to a few short periods of searching online sites like Acebook and OKCupid, and pure coincidence. So far, the handful of meetings I have managed have only ever yielded shallow connections, as most of the aces I’ve met in person have ended up moving away less than a year after I met them (or after they came out to me as ace), as younger people in my area tend to do.
To date, past attempts to start ace meetup groups in this area have all ultimately fizzled out. Meetups in general just don’t tend to work out too well here, because the people who might attend are so spread out that any attempt to make a group is definitely going to inconvenience someone. Some of the people who want to attend live several hours away. There just isn’t a large enough, or connected enough, population to support a regular ace meetup group here. Continue reading
This past weekend the world lost Niki Massey, who was an asexual “Social Justice Daemon” (as she put it); abortion clinic escort; reproductive rights, disability, and Black Lives Matter activist; and scathingly snarky atheist blogger at Seriously?!?
Olivia wrote a beautiful commemoration, as have many others.
Those of you who don’t follow the progressive side of the atheist blogosphere closely may never have heard of her, as she was not very closely involved with the asexual community, despite being unabashedly ace. She cited racial stereotypes and prejudice as a major barrier to her participation in August, on the Bi Any Means podcast. It makes me sad to know that. It makes me feel like on that level, we failed her. I can only hope that we do better in the future to make the ace community feel more welcoming to everyone, especially multiply marginalized people like her.
To that end, I don’t want to let her go unrecognized among the wider asexual community. Her life mattered. She made a difference. Her influence was much more widely felt than she ever knew. She will be remembered even among people whose lives she never knew she touched, myself among them.
I am only someone who followed her blog, and now any other possibility has been cut short, but still I feel her absence. My feed will never be graced by her vivacious, DGAF personality, her keen insight, and her biting wit again. She was much too young for this.
I want to highlight for posterity some of Niki’s writing that sticks with me the most:
I will always appreciate her candor and bravery in sharing these posts, and aspire to make even half of the difference she did.
My condolences to all of her colleagues, friends, and chosen family.
on RFAS’s “Asexuality & Mental Health” page (not linked because c’mon) that says PLEASE DO NOT LINK THIS PAGE DURING AN ARGUMENT and yet people are still doing it.
If you link to us in order to argue on tumblr about whether aces count as “oppressed enough” to be included in any LGBTQ spaces (or acephobia or anything else), you will cause a wave of hostile traffic to a website specifically set up to support ace survivors. If you reblog an argument that contains such a link, the effect is the same.
Our bandwidth is NOT FREE. And there is an emotional cost to survivors when you decide to use our stories to win political points.
Ace survivors are not rhetorical devices. Mentally ill aces are not “receipts of oppression.” We are not sad puppies or oppressed lamps, and we are not your ultimate trump card. We are people. We have agency. And we are right here. We’re part of your community. We see what you are doing.
If you are going to engage with detractors, or “Discoursers” or whatever they’re being called by the time you read this, you DO NOT have permission to pull someone else into your argument. If you want to use someone else’s story as an example, YOU NEED TO GET PERMISSION FIRST. That is how consent works. If you circulate someone’s story without asking, you are non-consensually exposing them to a serious risk of harassment. Even if no direct harassment occurs (or can occur, because the person may have shared anonymously), just being exposed to the argument, especially when those involved have shown a disregard for your consent and your safety, is INCREDIBLY triggering and anxiety-provoking.
And there is splash damage to other survivors and mentally ill aces, including those of us who volunteer at Resources for Ace Survivors to help fellow survivors. You tax our emotional resources, and make it so that we are less able to help each other, because we have less energy to engage. And you make other survivors & mentally ill aces witnessing the argument feel LESS SAFE sharing their stories.
These kinds of arguments may make survivors and mentally ill aces feel too unsafe to even participate in the community at all. I have personally already withdrawn from the ace community for a few years because I did not feel safe enough to keep participating!
So if you do this, or if you reblog someone else who has done this, you are directly contributing to further harm of ace survivors and mentally ill aces.
Please, please STOP.
And look, I realize that a lot of you doing this are young and have never thought about this before. I get that. I’m sure you didn’t intend to harm anyone. But that still doesn’t erase the fact that it does harm people.
And I’m exasperated, because gentle reminders haven’t had much of an effect. I don’t know what will reach people. Please feel free to circulate the full text of this post on tumblr, because I am not connected enough there to make a dent myself.
This is part two of a series of posts dedicated to breaking down components of resilience. The series is an elaboration on a post I made in 2015, continued now as part of the June 2016 Carnival of Aces on Resiliency. In part one, I introduced the series and covered tenacity. In this post, I will cover affect management and positive frameworks. Continue reading
This post will talk a lot about video games, but even if you’re not into that, you might still appreciate this. I’ve tried to make it accessible to non-gamers as much as possible, and my thoughts here are less about gaming itself than about using games as a lens for real life activism, and applying lessons learned from games. This relates majorly to PTSD and recovery, and I can’t avoid discussing sexism or alluding to harassment and abuse, but nothing here will be graphic.
I like to play healers. Continue reading
Prismatic Entanglements 