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So… this is going live at the start of Ace Week. And as an aroace who can only really be vocal about my identity online for a whole litany of reasons, I feel obligated to offer some thoughts. But if you know me, you’ll know that I’m not about to be all “rah-rah, dragons, cake, Heartstopper, wheee” like is basically demanded online by anyone under the umbrella.
Last warning. If anything other than “ace joy” bothers you, leave. NOW. You have a thousand other venues for that. I’m an adult ace, with adult concerns, and no, that’s not referring to “enjoying smut like ~normal~”.
Four years ago, for the first International Ace Day, I wrote about how the online ace community is a hot mess. Casually racist, ageist & unwilling to acknowledge that aces over 30 exist, no offline/real world options outside of schools, lower-than-low standards for both visibility & problems affecting the community, desperate attempts to assimilate at the expense of those that can’t, and “advocates” obsessed with validation & building their social media presences over anything actually meaningful. And lemme tell you, since I wrote that… not a single bit of that has changed. If anything, it’s gotten WORSE.
I will be breaking down the biggest concerns with the sorry state of the community topic by topic, as I did in the OG piece.
The pick-me aces now dominate ALL conversations around asexuality: When I wrote my original essay, there was at least a speck of pushback to the assimilationist rhetoric of “aces can still love/fuck/be freaks like ~normal~”, even if the marginalization of aroaces specifically kept happening. It was heartening to see, to know that others had grown tired of the same continued erosion of what defines asexuality (not attracted to anyone or anything) to the point it basically has no meaning.
Sadly, this has done a SHARP u-turn. And recent events have only made it worse.
Now, there’s been “little to” added to the beginning of the definition, and those two words have been used as a damn bludgeon if you’re still “no attraction felt”. I see more people, usually Zoomers, declaring they’re ace but then proceeding to obsess over the most gooner-brained bullshit (including some really vile stuff) and denouncing anyone who doesn’t want to see it or hear it for any reason (not even “I will get fired if you don’t tag your NSFW”, which is the most basic thing). Worse, all of this is couched in “like ~normal~” language. Thus, if you’re an oriented aro or ace but also sex-neutral or just like to have a border between “daily life” & “sexy times”, you’re seen as just as inhuman and shun-worthy as us aroace weirdos.
This has amped up infinitely thanks to the recent payment processor censorship of anything far-right activist groups perceive as “naughty”. Now, to be clear, I am firmly against this. If a game designer knows there’s a market for “risque game where you romance an anthropomorphic washing machine”, they’re completely welcome to making it for that market. This censorship doesn’t just target them but also people who have any romance options in a game or are discussing heavier topics like surviving sexual assault or suicide. Under these stupid rules, not even Stardew Valley is considered “clean” enough. It’s wrong, it’s shameful that it got as far as it has, and it should be fought. But one way NOT to fight that is to blame it on aces who don’t tow the “like ~normal~” line, which is what I’ve seen a TON of people doing, ace or otherwise. Thanks to these pick-me kids, you can’t address your own personal experiences or tendencies without strangers accusing you of being a prude or supporting censorship. Cuz if you were ~normal~ like those aces, you’d want the sexy stuff for yourself, not for creator freedom reasons.
I’d be remiss if I said there hasn’t been ANY pushback to this, but it’s pretty rare.
And that’s before we get into the frankly cartoonish amount of microlabels that have been attached to a-spec identities in particular. I’m not talking about gray- or demi- folks; I’m talking about people who decided that their label has to assure everyone that they do indeed pleasure themselves or that they only get attracted to fictional characters or that they only feel attraction to someone until that person reciprocates or that they only experience attraction by meeting an “intellectual” connection (usually expressed via… a shared nerdy past time and not, y’know, something more academic or philosophical). Those are the ones that make any stripe of sense, and two of those just sound like psychological hangups that just don’t want to be addressed. One of those sounds like taking an extremely common way for allos of any kind to meet & bond with a partner and pretending it’s somehow more unique & rare than it actually is. At least I can kinda see the first one, since eventually you do get sick of being asked by strangers if you masturbate, but I’m not gonna make “HEY EVERYONE I JORK IT SOMETIMES” a keystone to my identity. I don’t see anyone over 30 using these identities unless they’re all kinds of messed up, and that these are given more respect than “I am both aro & ace, and I am not interested in romance or sex” anymore is infuriating. Do you know how alienating it is for “your” community to see you as less worthy of basic human respect than Otakukin by any other name?!
The ace community will NEVER be respected at this point. Not if you erase everything that shaped what defined it.
What little inclusion & progress had been made is reversing at rapid speed, and it’s not solely because of rising conservatism: Sometimes, inclusion is in the little things. It might be a mass market Pride item making sure to include an ace flag on a bunting with other flags; it might be offering items in colors that mimic that flag but in their own style.
We don’t get that anymore, not for at least 2 or 3 years. The last example of “intentionally modeled on the ace flag” mass market merchandise I had seen was one of Joann’s Big Twist Living yarn colors, and… look, a subset of Michaels isn’t gonna fill that void. You KNOW they’re not gonna revive any of those flag colors for their new initiative, and if they do, the ace one (amusingly named “Community”) will not be among them. Even before people were wilding out over places like Target limiting their Pride merch (cuz apparently death threats to employees don’t matter to them), they were excising any kind of ace presence. If you want anything with an ace flag, to say nothing of aro or aroace flags, you’ll need to look at the indie creator space. Which is fine, I’ve definitely done it, but the simple act of mass markets going “you exist and we appreciate your money… and you, but mostly your money” means a surprising lot when your very existence is constantly being debated by vocal & often hostile strangers.
One of the factors in me leaving Bluesky recently was the return of The Discourse. It’s come roaring back, from “you’re not ace, you’re just (insert medical thing here)” to “aces only count if they’re another ~real~ queer identity”. Because so much of the site is built around fandom, of course that casual aphobia and weaponization of the “like ~normal~” talking points against us/our media presence is common & inescapable. I don’t think I can fully state just how much the original round of The Discourse hurt; when you’re getting death threats from a bunch of random teens/20somethings with Catra icons sending you videos on how to hang yourself during a work trip, with no one you can talk to about what’s upsetting you & why cuz you know you can’t really be “out” except online… it leaves a mark. Seeing the buildup to that happening again in another place, one you were once hoping would be a place where you could be honest about yourself again, is a terrible thing.
Even our terminology & symbology that has been in place since the damn USENet days gets taken from us. “Don’t say a-spec, it’s unfair to autistics!” Never seen it used for ASD discussions in any way except for this kind of call-out, but everyone happily started parroting it cuz it targeted people they already didn’t really think “counted”. Same with the almost overnight decision to paint anyone using an Ace of Spades emoji (a common ace symbol going alllllll the way back to the Unicode days) as a racist fetishist, which people didn’t even try to question or challenge. And even our well-defined in-community language is being undermined almost as much as the definition of asexuality itself.
Pictured: an online-prominent oriented ace (who has a casually aphobic spouse) insisting that we stop using our long-time terminology for pseudo-inclusive reasons. Basically a wordier, more social justice language heavy way of saying “omg just say normal”. (Name not obscured due to recommendations to block on social media.)
Basically, even the little ways of showing our existence or explaining our experiences is being deliberately taken from us. Someone considered in some “greater need” didn’t like it. What tiny morsels of presence we were allowed are constantly being snatched away from people who don’t want to say that we’re not welcome, but they’ll make us so alienated & uncomfortable with ourselves that we’ll just leave on our own. Well, good job, it’s working.
Now, I want to make this vividly clear - this is not limited to conservatives finding out asexuals exist and enjoying the chance to target someone new. Yes, this happens, both small (bad “jokes” on Fox News about fringe cases being stupid, like the “automonogamy” girl on Insta) and large (TERF groups painting us all as secret p*dos, which we’ll talk more about below). But the majority of the worst exclusionism is coming, once again, from the wider queer community. It already escaped its containment to Tumblr once, and a whole generation of kids discovering themselves have to in-group/out-group at all costs, cuz that’s the only way they know how to operate. And since both the wider culture and the internet encourage people to never mature past that high school mindset, it keeps coming back like social herpes. Hell, I’ve seen another ace person go all in on this self-erasure, “like ~normal~” dialogue and supporting people who openly loathe us, making me wonder if they’re just unaware cuz of their autism or genuinely hate themselves & the rest of us. At this point, I’m waiting for Bluesky to have a slew of “ace genocide hunting lists” for users to make it easier to send death threats, since it’s basically speedrunning everything that made Xwitter awful.
This doesn’t just affect aces, either - biphobia and panphobia have also come roaring back thanks to this trend resurfacing. It’s one of the reasons I was so disgusted with people defending Gretchen, cuz aces, bis, & pans are also among her list of people it’s apparently okay for HER to hate. If you don’t care about challenging this reversal for us, maybe do it for them.
Respected “progressive” voices in various fields still use the ace identity as a punchline, and we’re expected to just roll with it: I have a super fun game I play with anyone even slightly adjacent to Breadtube called the Super Eyepatch Rule. You watch or read something they made, and when the first instance of dismissive-to-outright-insulting aphobia slips in, you drink & keep drinking every time anyone continues to simp for them for being so very smart & inclusive. I don’t recommend actually doing this, because if I did it with liquor or energy drinks or even water, I’d be dead.
There’s a tendency in “progressive” circles to sling around references to asexuality in the most insulting ways and literally no other way. It’s well documented that Contra thinks our existence is a punchline, the height of “fake” identities despite all documentation, and her loyal stans will happily reinforce that attitude. Abigail put an extremely random dig at asexuality in her coming-out-as-trans notice, and since then, even though her pre-transition video on depression was one of the best I’ve seen, I cannot be bothered to support her. My rule got its name from Super Eyepatch Wolf and his tendency to refer to aces as “ugh, THOSE people” whenever it’s relevant to the topic (in this case, criticism of a show he liked “ironically”).
This isn’t limited to online creators, either. Tony Cervone is forever on my shit list for his whole “greed made the villain asexual” comments on Mystery Incorporated (a show that, in hindsight, had a lot of weird stuff that rubbed at me, especially the “weight/fitness as morality indicator” character designs), and him getting to hide forever behind Velma from any criticism bothers me almost as much as him dumping on the much-better-than-anything-he’s-ever-made 90s OVAs. James Gunn got praise from the pick-mes for making Vigilante ace in the Peacemaker show, but it was VERY clearly done (along with the character’s autistic coding) to show him as “creepy” or “wrong” in comparison to the rest of the… unique cast. There’s an even bigger example of a creator going “I neither know or care what ‘asexual’ means, but if it means you’ll praise me again, I’ll roll with it” to fan questions, but this guy turned out to be a legit scumbag after cosplaying as a “progressive” creator for decades, so fuck him.
It’s clear that we’re still seen as an acceptable target, even by people who loudly & proudly declare themselves to be progressive thinkers, who call that very internet-friendly interpretation of “kindness” (which borders on toxic positivity at best) “the new punk rock”, and who have themselves dealt with the exact kind of treatment that they’ve decided to give back to us. I don’t know if it’s because they long for the days when “lol ur gay” was a slam-dunk insult or if it’s a way to feel “empowered” or if it’s just not being able to fathom someone might not be governed by their lower brain unless they’re “broken” in some way (thus failing to show that “empathy” for us that they insist they have for everyone) or if it’s to make their own identities feel more legitimate at the expense of someone else. But it keeps happening. And no one, ace or otherwise, seems to care enough to combat it.
Abject scumbags like p*dos & incels have latched onto the ace label as a “get out of criticism free” card, and no one is challenging it: Quick, what do the following people have in common - Shmorky, Pamperchu, Bathtub Ross, & FallenChungus/Dats Mojo? Besides being creeps, that is.
That’s right, they’ve ALL tried to mask their p*dophilia behind “ACKSHULLY, I’m asexual”, and no one has even thought about trying to counter them. And they’re just the examples that I could recall off the top of my head, cuz I know there have been others.
There was already a problem with incels trying to use the online ace community as “cover” for their hate campaign, mostly on either imageboards or Xwitter, and nothing was being done about THAT, but now the diddlers have found the handle. Get caught doing graphic ERP about changing a child’s diaper? Be a violent safety hazard with a scat fascination? Proudly declare that you “crave” children in the worst possible way? Well, now you can’t say anything bad about them cuz they’ve declared themselves to be asexual despite all of the evidence screaming otherwise (sometimes literally screaming). So now we have both a violent hate movement AND actual scumbags using us as meat shields for their various crimes. But have any “advocates” acknowledged this problem? Nope. Have any queer orgs tried to fight this in their stead, since it’s literally recycled homophobia? Nope. It’s just being ignored, cuz it’s clearly less of a problem than, say, pestering Apple for a flag emoji. Never mind that actual hate groups, TERF groups who know that aphobia is an easy entry point to people amenable to their ideas, have been using “asexuals are just p*dos in disguise” as an actual attack; let’s just ignore the guys taking that and using it as their “defense” instead of actually challenging it. What could conceivably go wrong?
This feels like the result of two horrible trends. First, as said before, are the pick-me kids who’ve stretched the definition of asexuality to the point that it has lost all meaning. After all, if they insist that aces can, will, & should do everything that’s expected of allos, they’ll also allow an in-road for people who take that to its worst extremes. The second is the tendency of online queer circles to unquestioningly welcome in people and try to paint anyone pointing out that some folks are not great examples of humanity as inherently bigoted. This happens a LOT with reactions to lolcows (which all of these creeps are to some degree), where they try to repaint them as “harmless neurodivergent & queer folks picked on by imageboard guys” regardless of their often very well documented histories. So you get a crowd of people who are a little too “radically accepting” for their own good (except of many of their own kind, as documented above) and a term whose definition has been warped into meaninglessness.
None of these sterling people are stupid; even if it takes some of them a while longer, they’ll see the patterns at play eventually & learn how to work with them. It’s not helping the wider public view of asexuality in the slightest, and like so much aphobia, it feels like comments & accusations once thrown at gay people recycled towards a more “acceptable” target. And like every other thing affecting us negatively, there is no attempt to counter it.
There is still no offline asexual community for anyone outside of college, and as such, the “important” topics are perpetually limited to stuff that only affects college kids: Hey, have you seen the many discussions about how asexuality isn’t respected by medical professionals in the slightest? That even “LGBTQ+ friendly” therapists will instantly start talking about “fixing” you even though your asexuality isn’t even why you’re there? Where, even if you’re an ace woman who isn’t doing anything or about to do anything, you’ll be expected to take & pay for pregnancy tests (which may or may not be covered by insurance) because you haven’t hit menopause yet? How about the ones about ace elders, as in senior citizens, who lack the social connections expected such as partners or children to help them as they run into aging care issues? How about tax codes that essentially punish you for not marrying or having children, ace or no?
Of course not. There’s a reason for that.
Maybe it’s a matter of free time, maybe it’s a matter of priorities, but the majority of the ace community is governed by the concerns & accessibility of college students. There are still no ace-unique meetups outside of college campuses, and those are usually limited to weeks like this. Aces older than college age are expected to either limit their socialization to online, in which they have to adopt the same priorities & attitudes as the college kids to find any real connection, or to go to the more typical “adult” social spaces that are allowed to remain. Given that most of those are also kinda awkward for someone who works full time and/or generally tries to avoid recreational drinking for health reasons, that’s not really a good alternative. There’s no “meetup at the local diner after work” or age-varied offline ace craft groups, just college clubs & the last few general third spaces left.
The lack of an adult space with adult discussions, offline or on, leads to the ace community having extremely skewed priorities. There’s a monofocus on visibility & rehashing the definitions: articles addressing the same 101 talking points over & over again, media presence largely limited to YA-targeted and/or “geek culture” subjects, and showing off a little paper from your dean saying “yes, Ace Week sure exists”. And I think it’s cuz these are easy fights with easy wins. None of these require the wider society to question things like the over-valuation of romantic relationships at the expense of all other social connections, or the assumption of caregivers being available for everyone as they age due the expectation that everyone will have a partner and/or a child, or just not constantly being told that your orientation is a medical ailment to be “cured” or being subject to unnecessary medical tests (which aren’t always covered by insurance). None of these except maybe the medical issues affect these kids, and most of them probably don’t know anything about what is or isn’t insured (I sure didn’t at that age). As such, discussions of these topics are stymied or deflected into something more “winnable”, usually involving the “like ~normal~” talking points in some way.
Going off what I had written 4 years ago, it’s clear that the ageism issues attached to the ace community haven’t improved in the slightest, and it feels like very very few people want to acknowledge the more difficult concerns that would otherwise be common topics if it had.
Representation has become so dire that I’d rather it just not be there: Tell me if this sounds familiar - a young person (either high school or college aged) is having difficulty with dating & the sexuality of their peers; they feel oh so broken & awkward until a kindly Ace Elder (who is very rarely older than 30) helps point them in the right direction, and after a bit of research, they happily embrace their newly found ace identity; they are never seen or heard from again, even though they had previously been a recurring character.
This is THE Ace Story, the only one allowed by both the powers that be and by our “own voices”. It’s appeared in book series, in multiple awful teen dramas, and even in comics. (Just saying, if THE Ace Story was what Jeremy was wringing his hands on “getting right” for Nadia before recycling it for Gwenpool, then we didn’t miss anything except more reheated leftovers.) It’s only slightly better than the old “social media/stream reveal” baseline, but when you’ve seen it done once, you’re good. Unless you really, REALLY need that ~validation~. You know it’s bad when the most respectful example is from fucking Big Mouth, a largely unwatchable show, because (a) it acknowledged that they were basically strong-armed by its teenage fans to make an ace story at all & (b) it had an actually funny joke about Reddit. The nadir of it is in, where else, Heartstoppers, where the “elder” is a college freshman & the “helpful info” is a copy of Loveless. Yes, that’s right, Oseman recycled their own story in another series, then used said series to sell their own books as “helping you ~find yourself~”. And people wonder why I have no respect for them…
Sadly, THE Ace Story is still better than some representation out there. One series that I shall not name for my own safety has a very prominent ace character, one that the fanbase is determined to hyper sexualize & erase at every turn with every possible “aces can still (allo nonsense thing here)” excuse ever trotted out by shipping dolts. HBO’s critically acclaimed drugged-up teen sex simulator show had a whole episode that felt like the infamous House episode for Zoomers, spewing every actual factoid & talking point before going “Nah, that’s not real, I just like drugs!” A different shitty teen drama hired Yasmin Benoit (one of the very very few good advocates we have) to write a season-long arc for an ace character, only to deliberately excise everything about said character’s experiences with aphobia she had submitted to portray the character as an unreasonable bitch compared to the main male character. And as I mentioned above, there’s yet another “this person is aroace explicitly to underline their inhumanity” example with Vigilante.
Like so many other things wrong with this community, I blame the pick-mes. Unless the ace rep is as bland & toothless & textbook as possible, they will shriek that it’s “bad”, even if it’s someone’s own lived experiences being ace. I saw them doing this with Rebecca Burgess’s excellent GN, I’ve seen them do this to non-fiction instances of people talking about their own lives, and I’ve seen them do it to pretty much any “ace rep” that’s actually trying to be entertaining and/or have a character with a personality. They were mad about Todd Chavez. TODD. The character who is STILL the gold standard. Because he didn’t go through every “we can still (increasingly sexual allo thing) like normal” talking point like they demand. So really, it’s no wonder creators defer to THE Ace Story. It’s the only way they can safely do anything with an ace character that won’t get you yelled at by these clowns for weeks on end. That they also tend to defend examples like Gaim*n’s “I don’t know or care what that is, but I’ll agree if it means you’ll like me” attitude or “ace to show inhumanity” examples like Dexter or Vigilante while attacking anyone trying to be sincere, entertaining, & nuanced is just another reason to hate them.
I say this as someone who does creative work and has several characters who are ace or aroace - knowing that this is how a chunk of the audience will inevitably respond is as much of a deterrent to sharing my work as much as anything else. Why should I have a character who reflects my experiences even in part, when surely they’ll be met with hostility & demands to adhere to THE Ace Story yet again instead of it being something authentic to me?
Again, glad to know I’m not alone in having experienced this, but also, this is why I’m extremely reluctant to share any of my creative work that directly discusses any aroace characters. Unless you do the full 101 treatment & enforce the hard divide, the pick-mes WILL find you. (Name not obscure due to recommendations to follow on social media.)
Choke out our “own voices” enough, and pretty soon we won’t have any except for the most milquetoast ones. Which, unfortunately, seems to be their preference.
Our “advocates” remain self-aggrandizing jokes who don’t do anything of substance: So, I wound up looking up the dates for Ace Week to make sure that I got this posted in a timely manner. While I did confirm the dates, I saw something that neatly summed up why the ace community is Like That.
Mike Judge only wishes he could write something like this. Also… you’re in COLLEGE. Are you seriously saying you were active in “ace advocacy” when you were in middle school?!
Call me old, call me a filthy (insert political enemy of your choice here), but this doesn’t read like anything a normal person would write when asked “put where you live in your bio”. Yet, there it is, reading like a parody of 90s “political correctness gone mad”, only done in full sincerity. And that’s before we get to how this loops back to the previous talking point about the lack of practical adult concerns due to our “community” being run by kids.
This is not the bio of someone who I would trust to advocate for us in any meaningful, non-terminally-online way. That their board includes another person who is a good example of the existing “advocates” whose only concern is ~validation~ and whose friends attacked me for not making my address public is proof, at least to me, that this community is forever damned to be a joke.
Oh, but maybe this board actually DOES something, or else they wouldn't exist, right? Yeah, they do - they designate when Ace Week is and help “organizations” (read: colleges) determine how to celebrate it. They don’t actually advocate for ANYTHING, unless you count “getting state legislatures to acknowledge Ace Week exists”, which puts us on par with National Donut Day at best. And even then, the donuts still get more respect. But fighting the constant mockery, the resurgence of exclusionist rhetoric, the attempts by bad faith actors to usurp our identity, to address anything meaningful like health or housing issues… hell, the general anti-queer actions happening that don't strictly affect aces? Nah, that’s too hard, and you won’t get a nice little photo op paper to show off online.
And we’re STILL stuck being represented publicly by absolute embarrassments. The Sounds Fake girlies are still out there, skewing ever more pick-me every time I stumble upon them. AVEN & TAAPP are still out there, still making sure that the definitions are so broad as to be meaningless and that anyone who’s aroace & won't enforce the hard divide in their overlapped identities is shut down in all conversations. Oseman is still churning out unflavored oatmeal, recycling THE Ace Story between mediums to bafflingly high acclaim from their loyal audience of horrible kids willing to ignore their prudishness & casual racism. Other “own voices” creators are at best ignoring us in favor of more “market-friendly” identities and at worst enforcing the garbage stereotypes about being untrustworthy or “less human” in some way. And, as always, when these people decide to directly confront aphobia, it’s time to bust out their favorite magic words that don’t do squat.
How 99.9% of “advocates” responded to the late 2010s aphobia, also to now’s aphobia.
Right. That about covers it, so let’s wrap this up.
Despite it all, I am glad that I discovered that I’m aroace, that there’s a real identity & that it wasn’t just decades of feeling like I’m surrounded by aliens. But until the people who shape the image of asexuality in the public eye stop being so Goddamn embarrassing & treating the people who hate us with more basic human decency than they do anyone who isn’t a complete pick-me Zoomer, I can’t take any pride in it. At least now, I’m not entirely alone among other aroaces (or aces of other stripes) being sick of the constant college-level priorities, but there's still not enough of us to actually make a difference. So until others finally get sick of having Zoomers rush to “um AKSHULLY” your lived experiences while ignoring more serious issues & clapping like seals seeing THE Ace Story for the umpteenth time in large enough numbers to matter, I'll be over here. Don’t bug me.
I've made my peace with the aroace flag (kinda had to thanks to TERFs), and while I'll never like it on an aesthetic level, I have come to appreciate it as a hard-break symbol from a community that is more embarrassing & obnoxious than affirming. And if anything I've said bothers you cuz it’s not the mandatory “ace joy” that you think this week demands, well…
Art by sirompp on Tumblr. And lemme just say, if Tumblr's still like it was when I left, they're gutsy as fuck for posting anything like this. In my time there, this would have been treated like a bullseye.
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This week’s video recs are all suitably ace-themed and many from ace creators that I actually respect.
My biggest recommendation is for The Ace Couple. Also available as a podcast, they cover everything from slogging through every tedious reiteration of THE Ace Story (they were one of the few who saw the pattern) to reacting to cliche relationship advice & bad reality shows to important topics like politics & healthcare. My particular recommendations:
The Acephobia to Transphobia Pipeline After a not-insignificant chunk of the ace community who was there in the mid-to-late 2010s pointed out that JKR’s nasty comments about asexuality were par for the course with transphobes, and were promptly ignored by most of both the ace & the queer communities yet again, they did a deep dive into the well-documented TERF recruitment tactics built around appealing to aphobia. This is an often ignored or dismissed problem, so it getting a public platform is VERY welcome.
Ace in the UK: Research & Activism with Yasmin Benoit An interview with Yasmin, AKA the only advocate actually doing important offline things (and doing it while living in the middle of TERF Island, too). Covering everything from the constant harassment she’s received (including from Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson, who is loudly & proudly aphobic and has reflected as much in her work) to the shitty teen drama deliberately removing the aphobia from her storyline so as not to upset the fee-fees of their Zoomer audience.
Trevor Noah's podcast says asexual males "are the most dangerous men in the world" In another example of them talking about a serious problem that everyone else is ignoring, this is a discussion of a major figure deliberately mixing “asexual” with “incel”, since the online community has been letting that perception happen without pushback. Also a good example of a “progressive” voice being given a pass to attack us.
Rowen Ellis covers various topics, from beauty standards to disability to queer issues. While I’m a little bummed she enforces the hard aro/ace divide at times, the rest of her points are extremely salient.
The Chronically Online State of Asexual Discourse A good video on the difficulties we face online & off, and how/why discussions in or about the ace community never seemed to mature past Tumblr fandom bullshit.
The "Unbearable Loneliness" of Aromanticism Another good video, this time looking at how society makes being aromantic absolutely miserable, given the complete obsession with “one true love” at the expense of pretty much every other social bond (with the only-occassional exception of one’s children).
We Need to Talk About The "Queer Elder" Crisis Honestly, one of her best videos, because as the wider queer community skews increasingly online & thus youth-oriented, with online-aged focuses & priorities, the aging population & their concerns (healthcare, housing, general ability to maintain social connections) are being pretty much ignored. Not strictly about aces but still extremely important & worth a watch. It literally affects all of us aging queers regardless of our individual GSRM identities.
Crispy’s Tavern: Tales and Tea is an ace creator who’s mostly focused on online commentary, creative reviews, and tabletop gaming, but they did one video on Fandom's Weird HATRED of Asexuality. Honestly, the wider fandom scene (but especially the AO3/shipping branches) is extremely hostile to asexuals, real or fictional, and it’s refreshing to see someone actually call it out directly. They have lots of other good videos, too, especially if you’re into D&D/TTRPGs. If you’ve ever had to deal with a DM who should have just written some original fiction instead of steamrolling over everyone else at the table for their own choices/characters, you’ll find some relatable stuff here.
Finally, enjoy a grab bag of other channels talking about us and the nonsense we gotta take, even if most of them do feel compelled to include the “covering all possible basic definitions” talking points when they really shouldn’t:
Being Aroace (an unscripted ramble) by Michael In Lo-Fi (who normally talks TV & movies), talking about his own experiences, along with the unique challenges of living on TERF Island & realizing that the queer community in general but especially there hates your very existence. Also FINALLY found another person who agrees with me that RTD ruined The Doctor by making him allosexual. Been feeling this for DECADES now but knew that I couldn’t say it safely thanks to (ugh) Tumblr.
LGBT Exclusionists & Asexuality by The Queer Kiwi (another brave soul stuck on TERF Island), using comments from an openly exclusionist group on FB to discuss the most common stripes of aphobia that get thrown at us by other queer people and how so very much of it is Mad Libs homophobia. And a little bit about fandom’s casual aphobia as well. (Also, her hair is impressive.)
Being Aromantic-Asexual (especially during Pride Month) by mushbloom (a general pop culture YTer with a skew towards music). While I personally have issues with microlabels, I agree with a lot of what she’s saying, especially about “prawn” & its influence, and I especially appreciate that one of these videos is finally addressing how alienating it is from the rest of society when you don’t see romance as the apex of all connections.
Being Not Straight by JaidenAnimations. The GOAT of ace videos. This is the most relatable realization video ever made, to the point I cried a little when I first saw it. From picking an arbitrary crush to blend in to defaulting to bi at first cuz equal sums of zero probably count, it’s pretty much everything I experienced. It’s also funny, especially the high school part (“Why are none of you attractive?!”). Unfortunately, poor Jaiden got grief from both creeps & bigots as well as aphobic exclusionists, and I can understand why she decided not to talk about this subject beyond this video. I still wish her variation of the aroace flag took off instead of what we got, but again, I blame TERFs for wrecking the purple/green combo in many eyes. (Also, it took this long to realize she had a cameo from Scirocco the Kakapo in this.)
Given how many video channels I’ve seen go from making a point to include us to blowing off our mere existence as irrelevant to discussions where it is (two of the worst for this recently were Psych2Go and Tale Foundry, but I also wanna call out Sarah Z routinely ignoring how certain fandom discussions affect a-spec & m-spec folks more than others cuz C’MON), I wanted to highlight people who are talking about us and some of the ~super awesome~ stuff we have to deal with just by being here.
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Lighting-squared round! Cuz I love to torture myself every weekend trying to preserve this formatting. Especially for two weeks’ worth of this…
Look, obnoxious straight Millennial/older Zoomer women, you need to stop trying to claim that Tay-Tay is not one of you. She is the EXACT kind of cringe that y’all are, from acting like an annoying teenager well into her mid-to-late 30s to thinking “tee-hee, peener” is the height of smuttiness. Stop trying to pretend she’s secretly gay, and DEFINITELY stop trying to claim she’s ace cuz she’s finally as openly embarrassing as y’all have been. At least Gen X/older Millennial straight woman cringe like Hallmark has some deliberate embraced campiness…
In probably the most appropriately awful example of 90s boom nostalgia, the current X-Men event, the one that made me finally say “fuck it, I’m done” to one of my biggest creative influences, has had multiple “beginning of the crossover” one-shots and none of them align story-wise. As one comment on the X-Axis described it, “this crossover has hit the ground asleep on the couch”. I’d be enjoying some schadenfreude if it wasn’t built entirely around ruining one of my favorite characters. But I'd argue that most of his post-revival appearances are someone's OC wearing Doug’s skin, with the exception of PAD's use of him, so…
In what's likely to be the final chapter in this mess, SciShow decided to just delete/private their dumbass video about knitting. They also put out a “statement”, but given that it's basically another non-apology & also is clearly deleting any comments that aren't fawning over them, it's just more of the same. Can't learn, won't learn. They’re lucky they've tapped into the lucrative “Zillennials & Zoomers so self-stunted that they need a cartoon blorbo app to remind them to wipe after pooping” market, but unfortunately that also means that the rest of us actual functioning humans are gonna be stuck with them for a while longer.
"This whole project REEKS of a desperate man trying to keep his waning relevance." Yep, totally agreed. Unfortunately, they’ve cultivated a fanbase that will forgive pretty much anything (including nuisance lawsuits to silence critics) AND partnered with a studio run by another creator who’s done the same damn thing. 90% of the comments are of the whole “omg, dont liek dont watch u (slur)!1!, let people enjoy things” variety. Again, I suspect that this is one of those subjects that will not appeal to you if you’ve never built your life around an online quiz diagnosis & treating your “fandoms” like religious/political affiliations. But if the people it DOES appeal to could just shut up & tantrum in the corner instead of harassing those of us still capable of critical thought, that’d be a pleasant change of pace. UPDATE: After having read & enjoyed the source material, a sequel video was made. It only made her dislike the pilot even more.
I know that I can be a spiteful little glob, but I can’t be the only person who looks at certain celebrities and secretly hopes that they try to make their own Jonestown with their most loyal (and annoying) fans.
Zucchini update: So… that thing doesn’t actually bear useful fruit and probably isn’t even a zucchini. What grows resembles yellow squashes, and what ones that have formed have all been about 3-4 inches in size, which the local squirrels appreciate. So it’s basically ornamental, which is fine.
Anyone who’s been following me for a few years online knows that I’ve had a yarnwork-themed magical girl/superhero hybrid character I’ve been working on forever, and I had been using the codename “Knitwit” for her. But it doesn’t really fit, as she’s themed around yarnwork in general and not strictly knitting. And the only other alternative I’ve come up with is “Stockingnette”, which is still knitting-specific and a mouthful. So if anyone can point me to some good yarn-themed superhero handles that aren’t licensed already, it’d be greatly appreciated.
Here she is, with & without her magical animated scarf. Sorry, “Eyesore” and “Yarn Vomit” are off the table for codenames.
Horse-girl game update: I got the wedding dress event variant of Mayano even though that event is long over, so maybe there's still hope that I can get El Condor Pasa’s cool gear someday. Fingers crossed…
Just saw something from the ex-moot who turned out to be a diaper freak that looked like an actually interesting & intelligent project from them… immediately followed by them sharing Among Us p*rn. There’s allo nonsense, and then there's whatever THIS is.
According to the internet, these little guys are the sexiest things ever created.
Wish people who trot out “if you don’t like it, don’t listen to it” to anyone disliking their chosen nasal vocoded-to-death droning song-bot would realize that’s pretty much impossible when the garbage you can’t stand anymore is PRETTY MUCH INESCAPABLE.
Still on the topic of music, it feels like there’s currently a generation that will run screaming & crying from the room covering their ears if they ever hear a guitar riff, cuz it’s just too much for them to handle.
Glad I'm off Bluesky, cuz I really don’t want to see a bunch of people I used to think were decent defending an animal abusing champagne socialist cuz “something something Murica Bad, something something Palestine”. His fans elsewhere are already doing it, but at the sky site, there would be zero pushback. This guy is at the top of my “please make your own Jonestown” list, but that would require leaving his mansion between 8-hour streams where he hurts his dog if it doesn't sit still like a good prop while he's screaming at news clips.
“Lol id love to meet a Hanna Barbera otaku” Oh, we're out there. Some of us just learned that it's not worth the time or energy to share our interest, thanks to decades of smug animation hipsters and a certain late-night block making it… unpleasant.
I still enjoy anime, but I haven’t really engaged with it largely because so much of what I like is on Crunchyroll, and Crunchyroll has been devoted to shitting the bed & rolling in it for the past couple of years. I had cancelled my decades-old premium subscription over the bad obviously-AI-generated subs that even my non-fluent ass knew were mistranslations, but I didn’t know about them completely wrecking RightStuf along the way. Really hoping HiDive somehow gets the rights to MGRP Restart when that starts airing, cuz I don’t wanna give CR my eyes if they’re just gonna keep getting worse than the infamous Japanese-to-Mandarin-to-English bootlegs of Ayashi no Ceres that my friends had in college.
No, YOU’RE tearing up over the Dudleys giving the Hardys their boots in their last match, a simple tradition that so many other greats I loved never got to do…
Watching my most autistic former moot go from “Gaza is worse than the Holocaust” & constantly sharing obviously-fake GFMs to “who cares, it's just bombed-out land” overnight solely cuz his favorite animal-torturing streamer wasn't the person who negotiated the ceasefire would be entertaining, if he wasn't so obnoxious about… well, everything. But it definitely shows just how little so many of the people like him actually cared once they couldn't claim it as a “win” in some way for “their” side.
Finally saw other people criticizing Mystery Incorporated, after all these years… Is it finally safe to do so, without getting swarmed by people who only watched it & will only ever watch it? The more time passes, the more it feels like the gateway drug into [as]hole land.
Filmmaker: “This portrays depression as a living featureless shadow that not only follows you everywhere but also constantly intrudes on your life.” Zoomers with zero critical thinking: “The shadow is a black silhouette, so this must be racist. I totally know what a metaphor is.” (Presented without strings of laugh-cry emojis, of course.)
The urge to buy one of those little fuzzy mics and record my Ace Week rant in all of my overemotional DelVal-accented glory is strong, but I shall resist.
RIP Drew Struzan. All the Photoshop filters in the world couldn’t hope to reproduce what he could do with his own hands & a paintbrush.
If your big witty observation after watching Jonny Quest is “omg, he must be soooo traumatized, his father is abusive cuz he’s not in a suburban school like me, that’s the ~realistic~ version of this”, please do two things. One, realize that pretty much every person left on WBD’s animation payroll has made this joke multiple times, to the point that people have been exposed to the series solely via these jokes & will happily parrot them to anyone who wants to see otherwise with the series, including people making revivals in other media. Two, if your response is to apply learned-it-off-Wikihow psychology to escapist media where yetis exist & the lead's adopted bro can have telekinesis sometimes to make it ~realistic~, you don’t deserve fiction. You’re too fucking boring. Go watch TikTok or something.
That last one applies to LOTS of genre works, by the way. Nothing shows that you want to appeal to the worst kinds of fandom kids than “let’s make this fantastic premise ~realistic~ and make everything about ~trauma~”. Yes, character drama/struggle/growth are important, but these people stop & end at “my childhood had exciting things happen, this is on par with surviving a murder attempt”, and they ALWAYS apply it to genres like superheroes, adventure, fantasy, etc that are DESIGNED to be… not-that-grounded. You want a slice-of-life drama, go make one of those and leave the interesting genres for the rest of us who like to get our mental illnesses treated instead of ~validated~.
Leaving names visible cuz this is an extremely good point. A lot of the creativity in Halloween costumes is kinda gone, and seeing a homemade one is depressingly rare.
Arby’s, I love you, but… why steak nuggets? I don’t get it at all.
One of the biggest things that’s holding up my next PV chapter is trying to convey that, after a point, excuses like “it’s okay, you had a sad backstory” or “your victims were a-holes so it’s okay that you killed them horribly” no longer apply, and you are officially a terrible person. It’s probably way beyond my abilities, but dammit, I’m kinda sick of the excuses being used at face value so much.
According to Adam Martyn, MTV Europe will be shutting down at some point before the end of the year. Given that it was in the same state of constant Ridiculousness as its stateside sibling, this is not a good sign.
Ever witness something that you really REALLY want to vague-post about, but it’s so incredibly specific that you can't possibly be vague about it? Cuz I'm in the middle of a real humdinger of one of those, and I'm biting my tongue so hard it's almost bleeding.
Me: “AEW is not a serious company, and its fanbase has done nothing but enforce that impression.” The fanbase: (provide numerous examples of just this, usually filled with the unholy emoji trio). God, how I wish the biggest rival to WWE wasn’t a consistently embarrassing mess by & for people who are incapable of mentally aging past 10th grade…
And now, for our safety, time to drive them off with a relatably cranky man from Philly’s spiritual sister city. Dude’s like living garlic for sickos & Wrestlesky.
Related to the above picture - man, there are a LOT of people who really cannot fathom that co-ed friendships exist. Presumably cuz they haven’t had any friendships ever, but living in a society where every bond that isn’t connected to sex in some way is seen as worthless hasn’t helped un-warp that perception.
A strong contender for “most dispiriting experience” is when you finally find a thriving social circle built around an obscure piece of media that you really enjoy… only to discover that it is MONOFOCUSED on shipping at the expense of literally everything else infinitely more interesting. And also on your least-liked character at their most suck-the-air-out-of-the-room-for-every-other-character handling.
A headline reading "Jim Carrey & Colin Trevorrow helming adaptation of classic 60s prime-time cartoon" damn near gave me a disgust-induced heart attack... till I saw it's gonna be The Jetsons. Crisis averted.
Horse-girl game update: They need to make Sweep Tosho playable soon. She's like Himiko from V3 but after downing several dozen energy drinks.
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Well... that was a marathon, huh? I’m sure this didn’t anger or upset anyone in any way, especially people who hold personal stories of strangers’ lives to the same standards to which they hold fiction. I made sure it was "too long, didn't read" just for them.
As is the custom, here’s a cat pic.
It’s a cat stitch crochet bag, so naturally he’d be drawn to it.
See you all next week, provided I manage to make it through this Ace Week unscathed. Ya never know.
