On 2017, No-Platforming, and This Blog

As some (or many!) of you may have heard already, as of today, there is a push starting to no-platform people who hold the ahistorical and insulting opinion that aces and aros should not be included in the LGBT+/MOGAI/other acronym of choice community.

This does not mean that we will stop debunking the harmful rhetoric they use, or the misinformation they try to spread. It does mean that we are not going to spread their posts, and give a wider platform to their nonsense.

With that in mind, I fully intend to keep running this blog as usual (which, unfortunately, has to mean something like “sporadically, when I have both time and energy”). However, it means that I will not be reblogging from people who feel they get to decide who to exclude from our community.

Which means I have a request for all of you.

As of today, please do not reblog exclusionist rhetoric or hateful, inaccurate posts (whether these posts were originally made by exclusionists or are add-ons to another post) to tag me into a discussion. Instead, please send me links, or simply topics that you want me to address, and I will continue to make original posts about them.

You can do this via ask (by saying, for example, “hey, can you look at post/155251105407 on historicallyace’s blog and do a historical accuracy check?”), via Tumblr IM, or via fanmail (if that’s even still a thing? I haven’t gotten any fanmail in a long time and tbh I need to check the settings for it on this blog). If I’m not responding quickly enough, because like I said, I’m only here sporadically, feel free to message me on my main, which is currently @snowenby (but if you’re finding an empty blog there, check back to the original version of this post because I will update it as my URL changes).

Let’s all have a wonderful, peaceful, and historically accurate new year!

As a side-note: this absolutely includes addressing additions made to my own posts, whether as replies or reblogs. You want to tell me I’m wrong? Go for it. I’ll listen.

But?

If you’ve got the gall to come here and tell me I’m wrong about my lived experience, or that other aces are wrong about their lived experience, I don’t have time to deal with your bullshit. I have a life to get back to.

There is no conversation to be had about this. If you were not paying enough attention, or simply weren’t there to know where aces were, what we were doing, and who was including us, and you’re not going to listen to us telling you that you were wrong, that we were there, and that we were included, I’m not going to take time out of my day to hold your hand and walk you through my life story again.

What Kind Of Attraction? A History Of The Split Attraction Model

The split attraction model, or SAM, has been viciously attacked over the course of the past couple years, based on claims that it is homophobic, sexualizing, etc. In order to understand where these claims break down, it’s important to consider the history of split attraction as a model for orientation.

Disjunctive Identities: The Original SAM

Long before the split attraction model was conceived, before even the popularization of gay and lesbian as identity words, there was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. By 1879, Ulrichs had published twelve books on the subject of non-heterosexual attraction. Though the language he used is not modern sexuality language, the various classifications of orientations that he eventually came up with are fairly similar to modern LGB+ identities, with some exceptions.

Most notable among those exceptions (at least for the purposes of this post) is the fact that he identified two distinct categories of people who would today be considered bisexual (which he then called uranodioning in men and uranodioningin in women): konjunktiver and disjunktiver. (In English, conjunctive and disjunctive bisexuality.) The first described a person with both “tender” and “passionate” feelings for both men and women. The second, however, described a person who had “tender” feelings for men, but “passionate” feelings for women (if the person was a man - the inverse if the person was a woman).

Though Ulrichs’s model was never widely popularized, due to its complexity (he also recognized “man who has sex with men in prison but is otherwise straight” and “man who has been through conversion therapy” as distinct sexualities, among others), it remains the first historical model of orientation to account for split attraction.

Limerance: Separating Love From Sex

The next instance of a model accounting for split attraction was published almost exactly a century after Ulrichs’s works. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov’s studies of attraction and love in the 1960′s led to the publication of her book “Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love” in 1979.

Limerance encompassed what would now be termed a crush, or infatuation with someone - the kind of attraction that would lead to the formation of a relationship, and which could lead to a longer-term, stable experience of love. Although Tennov viewed limerance as essentially including sexual attraction, she acknowledged that sex was not the focus of limerant attraction.

In and of itself, therefore, limerance would not be considered a split attraction model. However, it is worth mentioning because of later use of “non-limerant” as a precursor to today’s “aromantic.”

Affectional Attraction: The First Modern SAM

It is unclear when, precisely, the term “affectional orientation/attraction” first came into popular use. I have seen its coining attributed to Curt Pavola, a gay rights activist from Washington, and to Lisa Diamond, a psychologist. However, the term seems to predate both of these individuals, with the earliest use I can find being from a 1989 paper on education about gay and lesbian identities, wherein the authors use affectional attraction as a term which they do not feel the need to define, indicating to me that its origin must be earlier than that.

Affectional attraction/orientation was used, as a term, to indicate that simply using sexual attraction/orientation was reductive - that it implied that a relationship or feeling of attraction was entirely or mostly about sex. A large body of writing about orientation from the 90′s and early 2000′s uses “affectional/sexual orientation” or similar phrasing for exactly this reason.

Haven For The Human Amoeba: Today’s Split Attraction

Finally, we trace split attraction to a form that is familiar to all of us today.

An attempt on AVEN to trace the origins of romantic orientations as we know them leads to the Yahoo email group Haven For The Human Amoeba (the name of which was derived from the article “My Life As A Human Amoeba”). In that group, in 2001, there were a series of posts about the term "hetero-asexual”.

The idea of split attraction as used today, however, was developed about four years later, in 2005, on AVEN. Terms were hashed out, and the structure of the language that we use today was born. By 2007, the modern language of split attraction was in common use in asexual circles, and was also tentatively suggested to non-asexual people who were questioning their identities.

Conclusions

What can we conclude from this information? I would summarize what I’ve found with the following points:

1) That split attraction, or the potential for split attraction, is not a modern concept, but has been something we have been aware of for centuries.

2) That split attraction is not an exclusively asexual concept, but up until very recently was an integral part of orientation studies in general.

3) That the modern language of split attraction originated within the asexual community.

4) That anyone who blames asexual people for any perceived horribleness of the split-attraction model is flat wrong.

Further Reading & Sources

On Ulrichs’s Uranian model of orientation: one, two, three, four, five

On Limerence: one, two, three

On Affectional Attraction: one, two, three

On The Modern SAM: one, two, three

I know of an earlier example! In 1977, Shively and De Cecco propose a model of sexual orientation that is split into “physical” and “affectional” aspects in their paper “Components of Sexual Identity” - I’ve pulled out the relevant excerpts here: https://nextstepcake.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/models-of-sexuality-in-shively-and-de-ceccos-components-of-sexual-identity-1977/

I don’t know if this is the first - they propose their specific model as if it is the formal model to include this split aspect, but they discuss the concept having separate “physical” and “affectional” in a way that suggests that the concepts have been around previously, if not in a formalized way. Combing through the bibliography here may be an interesting endeavor for someone with more time than me.

Ahh, bless you. Papers that actually include bibliographies are my lifeblood.

So based on this info, I did some more digging. What I’m finding is that prior to about 1977, affectional was used exclusively to describe a platonic or familial emotional connection. (Examples: one, two, three) I would theorize based on this that the paper you found is the first to put the pre-existing term into a model of human sexuality.

Some evolution about these (a brief in LatAm context): the asexual community in Brazil has various affectional suffixed orientations to replace romantic ones, known as -afetive(a/o), such as heteroafetive, androafetive/gineafetive, homoafetive, biafetive, panafetive, lesboafetive/lesbiafetive, oniafetive/omniafetive and poliafetive (could be either ply (polysexual, polyromantic…) or polyaffective/polyaffectionate/polyamorous). It’s usually affinitive but could be amative (demiafetive) and nullitive (nulafetive/nonafetive).

All this results from our juridical word homoafetividade, firstly used in recognition of foresight for homoaffectional civil unions, used at least since 2006.

Nowadays it’s used to include equaric relationships (sapphic/vincian/enbian/etc.). There’s an NGO that uses transafetiva to connote trans partnership(s), similar to transamorous. This can cause erasure and is criticized by trans/bi activists.

Recently, feminists use homoafetiva to talk about homosociality and homoeroticism in heterosexual men. Which banalized the word into homoplatonic.

I recommend taking care translating -afetivo to -affective, it could allude schizoaffective.

Read The Article Here 

This is an interesting read. Can’t confirm personally as I restricted my participation in the DA fandom to the things the friends who got me into the games shared with me, and this article doesn’t provide sources except for a screenshot of a tweet, so consider this added to my nebulous to-do list. (You all know how I am about loving to have sources.) Some day, we’ll see if I can’t pull up some corroborating info, because this feels right, but I’d love to be able to confirm this progression.

Hello! I wrote this based on my interactions with the fandom. You might be able to find receipts easily on @asexualsolas. However I might have made that my “discourse free” blog from the start. If not, I know I have them somewhere since tumblr saves everything reblogged. If I stumble across posts I feel are related I’ll try to add them, but otherwise I don’t want to constantly relive those times too much, especially during 2020. But if you ever want help finding them I could help more with that. Other places you can check is, back then we used “ace solas” and “asexual solas” as a tag to find each other so that might help with a more exact timeframe. If I can think of anything else I’ll try to also add it here in case you or others want to hunt down those digits breadcrumbs.

Oh P.S., that’s not a screencap of a Twitter. It’s a screencap of a tumblr post. That post is here and includes not only AC’s tumblr reply but the emails that the biphobe sent to Ubisoft staff. As you can see OP was an allo Solas fan.

And while they weren’t the one doing the other racist or aggressively acephobic things it was the connecting point this article mentions at the start.

In the “asexual solas” tag I found this

This post for example helps summarize how sexually aggressive yet sex negative nature of “allo Solas” fans. And other points talk about how the ace tags for Solas were often more full of diversity of behavoir.

Thanks for the correction and additional info! (I think I was following you back in the day, but it would have been post-discourse.)

And please don’t go out of your way looking for things, especially if it’s distressing! (And double especially in the current state of everything is awful.) I enjoy doing tag deep dives, so when I actually have the energy to sit down and do that it’ll be a good distraction for me.

Read The Article Here 

This is an interesting read. Can’t confirm personally as I restricted my participation in the DA fandom to the things the friends who got me into the games shared with me, and this article doesn’t provide sources except for a screenshot of a tweet, so consider this added to my nebulous to-do list. (You all know how I am about loving to have sources.) Some day, we’ll see if I can’t pull up some corroborating info, because this feels right, but I’d love to be able to confirm this progression.

asexuality is not an ‘internet identity’, a fad, or fake.

as an asexual person myself, it’s difficult to deal with feeling both under-represented and excluded, both in cishet society AND lgbtq+ circles. the general conception regarding asexuality, in my experience, is that it’s a new identity, specifically a ‘tumblr snowflake’ identity, it’s not real, it’s a medical condition, etc etc. not only is this perspective genuinely hurtful and damaging, it’s just plain wrong. 

asexuality’s history can be hard to pin down, exactly, outside of writings specifically about it because it’s difficult to write about an absence of something (in this case sexual encounters/attraction) rather than the presence of it. however, the concept has existed longer than our modern terms for it, as is the case with all other lgbtq+ identities. 

unfortunately, I’m going to be speaking from an especially western standpoint, because I myself was born and raised in the western hemisphere and the sources I’m currently privy to are western. 

before any terminology was coined, 17th century author and poet Catherine Bernard wrote various works that have since been read as relating to asexuality. her views of love, sex, marriage, and personal affairs (or lack thereof) speak to the asexual experience. here’s an article about her and her works for more information. 

‘monosexual’ was a term coined in 1869 by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, the same man who coined the terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ (all 3 in the same pamphlet, actually!). ‘monosexual’ refers to people who only masturbate, rather than have sexual encounters, the implication there being that monosexuals have no interest in sex/feel no need for it. (it’s a myth that asexual people don’t masturbate–some do, some don’t. asexual people have fully functioning equipment, and are perfectly capable of having and even enjoying orgasms. remember that stimulation of sexual organs is not the same thing as feeling attraction). 

Keep reading

— The Asexual Manifesto, Lisa Orlando and Barbara Getz, 1972

Note the date, people:

That’s 1972

29 years before AVEN was started online,

and 47 years before the present.

And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.

So, no: we are not just Tumblr trenders. Get out of here with that.

Okay so here’s the thing about “ace discourse”

There is literally no point debating people who think it’s no big deal if you “just” have to hide your orientation in fear of negative reactions, if you “just” have to deal with psychologists and institutions declaring your orientation non-existent and pathologizing you at every turn, if your orientation is “just” not taught about in school and college and if you “just” go a big part of or all your life thinking there is something wrong with you as a result.

It is simply a waste of time and energy to try and hold conversations with people who think being pathologized and dehumanized and declared to not exist at every turn is not in itself indicative of any big problem or form of marginalization - because don’t we know everything is fine as long as society doesn’t actively want us dead (just gone).

There is no talking with people who feel comfortable trivializing, mocking and adding on to these experiences because they hate aces and they hate aros and would we just shut up if we can’t produce very specific studies they would still do their best to pick apart and be fully prepared to ignore or make up lies about if they can’t (remember “asexuality is a white orientation based on this US website poll where participants, from the US, were mostly white” - this is what that crowd will do with data).

There is no “ace discourse” on this website if you understand discourse as a productive conversation. There are people who hate aces and aros a whole lot who feel picking apart and tearing into our minority orientations is a good way to strengthen their arguments, and more people who largely go along with that, who are hurting so many aces and aros belonging to so many oppressed groups, and now it just goes on and on and people who are not deeply familiar with it - or who are desperate to make the worst of it stop - mistake it for something that can be productive. But it’s not. It’s been going on for years and years and all that changes is the degree of horrible-ness, which goes up and down but never far down.

And if I don’t include any proof of how bad this shit is then people are likely to come flocking to this post to paint me as hysterical at best so I’m doing it even though I’d rather not

There are all kinds of discussions you can have about asexuality and aromanticism and discussions that are important to have but “ace discourse” as a thing that is largely focused on criticising and picking apart the ace and aro communities is toxic beyond belief

And people need to understand that

I could write a whole essay on this in addition, but short version because I don’t have the processing power for that post today:

Not only is this not discourse, the thing that we’ve named “ace discourse” is actively preventing discourse. I know I’ve said this before, but there are intracommunity conversations we could be having that cannot happen because those conversations are always going to either come from a place of exclusion or be used by exclusionists even when they’re in good faith as a sign that all aces are bad.

I just want to drive home a little bit more the point that such “ace discourse” is deliberate. It does not propagate itself due to people’s confusion or whatever, it propagates itself as a way to derail every conversation about ace people and as a way of pushing us out of every single space we carve for ourselves.

Not everyone here remembers this, precisely because this tactic was so successful, but tumblr and twitter and whatnot were once full of positive and productive conversations, and then this monster calling itself discourse invaded our tags and flooded our inboxes with harassment. Most could not keep up with it and left those communities to avoid further direct violence.

Thank you for articulating this, because this was the idea I was trying to get at.

I remember that ace community, and I miss it dreadfully.

Okay so here’s the thing about “ace discourse”

There is literally no point debating people who think it’s no big deal if you “just” have to hide your orientation in fear of negative reactions, if you “just” have to deal with psychologists and institutions declaring your orientation non-existent and pathologizing you at every turn, if your orientation is “just” not taught about in school and college and if you “just” go a big part of or all your life thinking there is something wrong with you as a result.

It is simply a waste of time and energy to try and hold conversations with people who think being pathologized and dehumanized and declared to not exist at every turn is not in itself indicative of any big problem or form of marginalization - because don’t we know everything is fine as long as society doesn’t actively want us dead (just gone).

There is no talking with people who feel comfortable trivializing, mocking and adding on to these experiences because they hate aces and they hate aros and would we just shut up if we can’t produce very specific studies they would still do their best to pick apart and be fully prepared to ignore or make up lies about if they can’t (remember “asexuality is a white orientation based on this US website poll where participants, from the US, were mostly white” - this is what that crowd will do with data).

There is no “ace discourse” on this website if you understand discourse as a productive conversation. There are people who hate aces and aros a whole lot who feel picking apart and tearing into our minority orientations is a good way to strengthen their arguments, and more people who largely go along with that, who are hurting so many aces and aros belonging to so many oppressed groups, and now it just goes on and on and people who are not deeply familiar with it - or who are desperate to make the worst of it stop - mistake it for something that can be productive. But it’s not. It’s been going on for years and years and all that changes is the degree of horrible-ness, which goes up and down but never far down.

And if I don’t include any proof of how bad this shit is then people are likely to come flocking to this post to paint me as hysterical at best so I’m doing it even though I’d rather not

There are all kinds of discussions you can have about asexuality and aromanticism and discussions that are important to have but “ace discourse” as a thing that is largely focused on criticising and picking apart the ace and aro communities is toxic beyond belief

And people need to understand that

I could write a whole essay on this in addition, but short version because I don't have the processing power for that post today:

Not only is this not discourse, the thing that we've named "ace discourse" is actively preventing discourse. I know I've said this before, but there are intracommunity conversations we could be having that cannot happen because those conversations are always going to either come from a place of exclusion or be used by exclusionists even when they're in good faith as a sign that all aces are bad.

Stop trying to add more stripes to the ace flag.  The gray strip is for grey-ace and demisexuals

I don’t care if you are ace, it’s acephobic to think grey-aces and demisexuals were “new inventions” or “originally forgotten”

They were always a part and always reflected in ace symbols.

Asexual is an umbrella term. Stop listening to assholes who don’t believe in umbrella terms.

Collecting Resources for Black Aces

If anyone would care to help update it, I’ve set up a new google doc for Ace POC resources, since the other resource lists I”m aware of aren’t actively updating. We’re currently trying to work on the section for resources for Black aces first.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D-hEueVjziJoK9lIpbOQXzEJjmImRGGQXdzHFlFWf18/edit#

Three Essays by Black Asexual Women

“Romance Is Not the Only Type of Black Love that Matters” by Sherronda J. Brown

“As a Black Woman, Celebrating Pride This Year Has Been Hard” by Yasmin Benoit

“The Hardships of Being an Asexual Woman of Color” by Kimberly Steele

[ Image Description: A screenshot of a Facebook post by Asexual Alliance, posted May 20, 2013 at 9:43 PM. Their post consists of a screenshot of a Dear Abby column, with the comment “From 1995!”

The column has a header with the Dear Abby logo in a calligraphy font, and a black and white picture of the columnist inside of a heart. The poor quality of the image makes it difficult to see anything other than that she is wearing some kind of high-necked shirt and has a short bob with the ends flipped up.

Text of the column is below the cut. The image is formatted in the style of a newspaper column - formatting (such as all-caps first words and justified margins with dashes to break words) has not been preserved for ease of reading.

If you want to see this in an actual paper, @kgdragoon found one version here. (Of course, Dear Abby was a syndicated column, so this same letter would have appeared in a variety of papers.)

Historical references to asexuality (in concept) in the Independent Voices collection. See captions for citations; more under the cut.

“WE’RE HERE! WE’RE THERE! WE’RE EVERYWHERE! GET USED TO IT!“ indeed. While we can’t assume “asexual” as used here matches our modern definitions exactly (did any sexuality labels?) or evidences lasting pre-internet communities, these references show how this identity essentially fills a latent gap in theories of sexuality. Even in the hypothetical, it was something so coherent just waiting to be articulated.

Keep reading

@historicallyace @autismserenity @fuckyeahasexual

“Gay, Straight, Bisexual, Asexual—All God’s Children Need Love,” 1973; photograph by Crawford Barton, Crawford Barton Papers (1993-11), GLBT Historical Society.

Spotted in the “Labor of Love” online exhibition by the GLBT Historical Society, which I highly recommend everyone visit for virtual!Pride Month (by googling it because tumblr hates links)

Link is here. Kind of want these historical finds to spread so tagging @historicallyace @autismserenity @fuckyeahasexual

Read Full Article Here