Hi, I'm Maddy, I'm 24, and a Capricorn, and a sophomore in college, this blog is like 99% mobile, I am asexual panromantic and tbh I’ll respond to any pronouns, but I’m leaning towards they/she rn. I am Japanese and Jewish, I have no plan for life, if you’re gonna talk to me please don’t be a dick, but just remember I want to talk to and get to know people, I just am too anxious to start conversations myself 😊
I just overheard a guy at ihop say “how long would it take the world to realize that hiccups just disappeared forever” and honestly it’s fucking me up
Seeing rumors that US has now carried out airstrikes in hodeidah
The United States and Britain have started carrying out strikes against targets linked to Houthis in Yemen, four U.S. officials told Reuters on Thursday
11 Jan 24
becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys
longsightmyth
I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17
It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.
All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.
I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.
Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.
I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.
When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.
Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.
They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".
There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.
Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.
Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"
The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.
The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur
There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".
Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.
^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.
Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.
And these same people to this day are pretending like it's absurd to make that conncection.
This is why I block everyone with any variation of "discourse" in their URL on sight. Aphobes made "discourse" blogs specifically for the purpose of harassing aspec people, so that their main blog was kept nice and clean and none of their followers had to see them telling people to kill themselves because they didn't want to date anyone.
I very vividly remember a post from what I thought was a nice person, that read something along the lines of, "It's important to tell kids it's okay to be gay, but it's pedophilic to tell kids it's okay to be ace".
These people literally fucking thought that being ace meant you were a pedophile, because it meant you were sexualizing all other orientations, and therefore telling kids they could be aspec meant you were sexualizing kids.
Every single fucking argument these people leveled against aspec people was not only blatantly recycled homophobia, absurd ammounts of it relied entirely upon ableism and racism, because these people were pretending that only white people were aspec, and the identity was, and I fucking quote, "A white supremacist's wet dream". They literally went around saying that everyone who was aspec was white, completely speaking over the black and brown people who were proudly aspec whose existance proved that what they were claiming was absolute bullshit.
These aphobes would claim to support all other LGBT people, especially trans people...unless the aspec person they were targeting was trans. Then not being a transphobe flew out the fucking window. Aphobes would claim that if you were trans and ace, that meant you weren't really trans, you were just pretending to be so you could invade the LGBT community.
Aphobes equated ace and aro identities as all "asexy cringiness" but they attacked both communities with equal viciousness, just under the same words.
This is why I block blogs with any variaiton of the word "discourse" in their url on sight. This is why whenever I see a new blog I want to follow, or get a new follower, I search the word "ace" and "aro" along with "trans" and "nonbinary" and "pan" and whatever other specific fucking keywords apply at the moment.
And the worst part is?
The aphobes who spent years harassing and attacking and traumatizing aspec people on this site are still here, with friends and tons of followers, like nothing ever happened. They'll claim they're no longer "terminally online" about aspec identities, mocking themselves for "caring too much" instead of actually doing anything to make amends for the literal hate crimes they committed. They'll fucking downplay and make light of the Literal Hate Crimes they spent years committing because now it's no longer socially acceptable to stalk and sexually harass people over being aspec.
Anyways, block foulserpent, then known as snakegay. Do not let these fucking people get away with this shit and pretend it never happened.
Edit: Oh and how the fuck could I forget all their ableism towards autistic people???? These fuckers were claiming that "aspec" was a shortened version of "autistic spectrum" and that you were ableist if you used it to refer to the "disgustingly pedophilic fake identity" of being aspec.
Even though literally too many gods damned people to count, including me and my twin and literally too mnay people to count, who were aspec, who used the term aspec, were also literally autistic and told these people over and over again that that's literally not true, stop fucking speaking for autistic people (because, to be crystal fucking clear, no one making this aphobic claim was autistic. It was literally just allistic people infantilizing us and not only speaking for us, but beating us down when we contradicted them!).
Literally the most ableist fucking post I've ever seen on this site that claimed to support autistic people was written by an ableist as shit fucking aphobe who was. Gods even just remembering this fucking post is so fucking infuriating. Everything about it was so fucking infantilizing and ableist. They claimed that aspec people using the term aspec was, and I paraphrase from memory, "trapping autistic people in your posts like nets, unable to understand why everyone is hating on them".
Like. Literally. So much of this fucking hate spree was ableist it's fucking absurd. Allistic people really just fucking hate autistic people and try to use us as a bludgeon //against ourselves// whenever they think they can get away with it. And let's not forget that if you were openly autistic and proud to be aspec, they'd then come in and claim you were faking being autistic (the same way they'd claim you were faking being black or brown or trans or gay) to invade the community and "steal resources from real LGBT people".
And again. Cannot stress enough how these people screamed and cried about how the word queer is a slur and always has been and always will be, then immediately turned around to hurl the word kweer AS A SLUR. With no fucking irony. Literally using a slur they claim to hate as a slur and thinking they're the good guys. I guess they thought changing the spelling would make it okay for them to /literally use it as a slur/??? they literally just made it into a slur again and used it as such and then acted like they were the heroes for...calling queer people slurs that are apparenly unforgivable >.>
And lets not forget that these people regularly flooded aspec tags with gore and porn despite their own claims that only "misguided children" were identifying as asexual or aromantic...
Go through the notes of this post if you want to learn about the hellscape this was. There are so many people sharing their experiences.
There has been a lot that has struck me about this thread, especially as someone who has been active in this conversation since 2011.
But I reblogged this post last week
And two days later, I got a note directly from my personal blog that from my activity preview seems to have been from someone unfamiliar with this entire sphere of discourse.
I saw the note the day after they left it, and there were so many "this really happened?"-style comments that I couldn't easily find their note in my activity.
This has gone from normal, to unheard-of, and back to normal again, at least insofar as young aces coming into our community don't know what we all fought through to make a space for you to feel safe in.
If you'd like to learn more, please feel free to reach out--I've been here since 2007, and I'm glad to fill you in on what I've seen. If not, that's okay too--but please know that a lot of us have bled and hurt and died so that "ace" is something you can put in your bio without fear. I don't begrudge you that; you're the reason I did it. But there was a fight, and this post points to some of the pieces of what that fight looked like.
