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thinking about how i used to identify as ace and how my mother accompanied me to two very big doctors appts (ASD diagnosis and first pap smear) and chimed in at each to ask the doctor "my daughter says she's asexual can you do anything to fix her?" and boy was that something
not to bring the specter of ace discourse onto my tl but i wish i saw nuance in the conversation. identifying as asexual comes with its own challenges in a society that considers a person's relationship with sex to be an indicator of the status of one's mental and physical health
that being said i know within the community specifically, asexuality (which wasn't invented on tumblr btw it's been a thing) kept a lot of people who had repressed their sexuality due to their relationship with their orientation or gender in the closet. i went through that lol
i do feel like the push to categorize orientations based on their relationship with sex can be problematic especially when lgbp people are already hypersexualized and fetishized. like you can't just ignore that. but i don't see enough good discussion about that idk
the "sex positivity" movement really fucked a lot of us up i think. instead of teaching everyone that we all have different drives and everyone's relationship with sex is v personal, we're hit from every angle with "SEX MAKES YOU HUMAN" and it really sucks
and none of this invalidates asexuality in any way. like i know a lot of people identify as ace alongside other identities and it helps them explain their relationship with sex and find community and support and i think that's a good thing!
not to get into the split attraction model but in my experience it's useful within the ace community and doesn't really do any good applied outside of it. but in general wrt discussing these kinds of things i wish there was less yelling and more actual talking and understanding
anyway i just wish sex education wasn't so terrible because then maybe people would stop judging each other based on whether or not they're fucking. like can we all decide to stop doing that in general it's....really weird
ok I'm getting off my soapbox now. might delete this thread later because i got a little personal or i might leave it up who knows!!
