avenisacult

[avenisacult]

Honestly, ace discourse wouldn’t exist if people were capable of understanding that every single person on the fucking planet not only has a DIFFERENT relationship to sex/relationships/attraction as everyone else but also a COMPLICATED relationship to sex/relationships/attraction. Every single person! Yes, even the privileged ones.

Because we live in a society that demands sex as much as it punishes it. That both glorifies and demonizes sex. Sex is only good within very specific contexts but if you don’t like those contexts or act within them, suddenly you are perverse and wrong. Even people with healthy relationships to sex, relationships, and attraction still face pitfalls that complicate matters–partners who don’t have healthy relationships or maybe they can’t get a partner at all. Break ups. Factors that affect their libidos or interest in relationships. Periods where sex and romance don’t matter at all because something else is a priority.

And of course, your gender, sexual orientation, race, class, and every other identity impacts not just YOUR relationship to sex and all that but also everyone ELSE’S relationship and response to your sex, relationships, attraction. And the identities of the people you are and aren’t attracted to impacts that too! From the race of your partner to same gender relationships to people who prefer fat partners to whatever the fuck else… all of this impacts the complications around sex, relationships, and attraction.

And yet it is only people on the ace and aro “spectrums” who are obsessed with pretending their relationships to these things are wholly unique or special. That they have created new social classes. They are obsessed with feeling different because they think there is some homogeneous relationship to sex and love that the rest of the world is partaking in that they are somehow excluded from. When really everyone has something complicated from, their own hyper specific contexts where they do or don’t want sex or love or whatever.

Nothing about your relationship to sex or love makes you more or less LGBT. If you are gay and don’t want to have sex, ever, you are still gay. If you are cisgender and straight and only feel capable of sexual desire for longterm monogamous partners and even then, you only want to fuck on Tuesday mornings and Friday nights.. you’re still straight. You haven’t discovered a new class of heterosexuality that is “queer’ or different. Rather, EVERY person who is heterosexual is different in how they perform or experiecne it. You are the same in your difference. A cishet who doesn’t ever want sex because of trauma is no more or less cishet than one who wants sex all the time because of trauma or a cishet who doesn’t ever want sex because they don’t feel sexual attraction or whatever else.

Gayness, straightness, and bisexuality are not defined by HOW you do or don’t want sex or HOW you do or don’t want to date, it’s just defined by WHO you want to be with. There are infinite ways for HOW you can gay, straight, or bi and none of them are separate identities.

[avenisacult]

I need y’all to know that putting “exclusionists” on the level of racists, transmisogynists, or literally any other type of bigotry makes you look like a dumbass. You see someone warning people about a racist user and you say “they’re also a panphobe watch out” shows me that not only do you think that whatever sexuality you cooked up and inhaled, all of a sudden has years of being treated like dog shit and have laws put in place to specifically harm them in such a short amount of time, but that you relate something from which people die from as on the level of someone going “bi lesbians make absolutely no sense”

[avenisacult]

i love catholic tumblr

[avenisacult]

friendly reminder that the stonewall inn has the ace flag hung up outside their door

friendly reminder that they also have the heterosexual pride flag hung up as well

[avenisacult]

Calling this "an example of Hate" is not just a thought-terminating cliché, but it's also wildly homophobic!

I shouldn't have to get into why. The statement re-printed in the photo is literally an established fact.

This is a cult tactic; this is thought control, and emotional control. They don't want people to acknowledge the measurable, material differences between homophobic oppression and the fairly immaterial experiences of "being misunderstood" that are faced by cis-het aces. Going on to say that noticing and explaining those differences as "an example of Hate" is an attempt to manipulate the audience into putting those two wildly different experiences on the same emotional level.

I really hope this is a troll blog, at this point, cos the cult thinking is so strong, with this post from them.

[handwritten in light green and purple: “inclusionists love to demonize gay men and act like they’re the most privileged people in the lgbt community when in reality gay men are being sent to fucking death camps in russia…a cishet ace will never ever have to go through that and that’s why they aren’t oppressed. “]

This is an example of hate. 

[avenisacult]

Calling this "an example of Hate" is a thought terminating cliché, and thus cult rhetoric.

Cis-het aces aren't directly affected by the homophobic intent of using "queer" as a slur. That's because they literally are not the targets. This is not only a valid argument, but a sound fact.

[handwritten in red and purple: “cishet aces can’t call themselves the q slur”]

This is an example of hate.

[avenisacult]

Calling this "an example of Hate" is thought control, information control.

Almost everything on this blog is a valid, and often sound argument, and literally none of it is given any reason to believe that it's an "example of Hate," beyond the thought-terminating cliché tactic of cult rhetoric.

Transphobia has many, many examples that are fairly unique to trans people. The bill passed in Texas (early in 2022), that explicitly targets trans youth and those acting in aid of trans youth, is a very prominent and recent example. In contrast, examples of "AcEpHoBiA" are overwhelmingly sexism —which isn't unique to asexuals. To re-brand sexism as "Acephobia" is only serving the goals of sexism (and transphobia is a sub-set of sexism), and also the oppression fantasies of the cult.

[handwritten in orange and purple: “Aphobia doesn’t exist. Transphobia does. Know the difference.”]

This is an example of hate.

[avenisacult]

Framing even the most sound critiques as being a form of oppression against the Group is an established cult tactic.

[Handwritte in pink and purple: “If aroaces actually felt like addressing the root problems of a society that pushes the idea that everyone wants a relationship/family and that sex isn’t owed to anyone instead of insisting they’re the only ones who face these issues caused by rape culture and mysoginy then MAYBE we would get somewhere in worthwhile discussions”]

This is an example of hate. 

[avenisacult]

Appropriating the oppression of others is common for cults.

Even Jonestown used racism and Capitalism to further the aims of Jim Jones to be a shameless dictator over his cult.

Happy Asexual Awareness Week

Also it seems that our colors are always associated with villains, why is that?

[avenisacult]

Trying to convince someone that they aren't what they say they are, but instead they're something else, is a form of gaslighting, and is a cult tactic that's used by TERF's and other transphobes.

It's also used by the on-line asexual community.

[Handwritten in red and purple: “it’s time for you to grow tf up and learn about how slur reclamation works”]

This is an example of hate.

[avenisacult]

LGBT people: share an experience that is based on persecution of our sexuality and gender expression, have formed spaces to openly express our sexuality and our relationship with gender as safely as possible (even though we still sometimes get killed for it when in those spaces)

Acey-beans: we should center LGBT spaces around REAL shared experiences outside of heteronormativity! Like cake! UwU

[avenisacult]

Bore da! Sut mae'ch diwrnod wedi bod, fy'n pobl rhyfedd?

Good morning! How's your day been, my strange people?

Why am I here? What is my purpose? Chances are, if you found this blog, you probably follow some of the relevant tags, and you might already be feeling offended. What the hell, you might be thinking, this is no more a cult than being trans! You must be a TERF!

First off, trust me, I'm a trans man. I'm a gay trans man. I'm well aware of TERF ideology, and I'm about as anti-TERF as a guy like myself can be. I'm in my early 40s, and I came of age when Kate Bornstein —who's been out as a bisexual non-binary trans woman since about 1991— was a staple on the pro-trans side of the talk show circuit in the 1990s. I've got some strong and nuanced opinions about the trans and non-binary community: While I do think the WPATH is there for a good reason, I also accept that people are going to do whatever. I'm all for affirming gender variant teens, but I also know that, as someone who masked his own dysphoria from overwhelming parents, there's always going to be the possibility that some gender non-conforming kid or another will feel like they have to swing their pendulum hard in the other direction to make their parents happy —but also, either way, that's more about the parents than the trans community. (As an aside, yes, I know that the Right-Wing hyperbole around the Younger case has been thoroughly de-bunked.) Needless to say, I'm not a TERF, I find their ideology deplorable, and frankly, they're also a cult, and if you want to know more about how they do, in fact, operate as a cult, another YouTuber broke that down pretty thoroughly, and as of the time I'm writing this, isn't even finished on that subject!

Secondly, in spite of regularly seeing accusations from the on-line asexual community, I have yet to see literally ANY evidence that TERF's have a significant "anti-asexual" sentiment amongst their ranks. No, vague claims of such from the on-line asexual community is not evidence of anything more than the willingness to believe something is true, simply because someone else from the on-line asexual community said that it is. In fact, let's use this as this blog's first example of how the on-line asexual community engages in the cult goals of Thought Control and Emotional Control, traits outlined by the BITE Model of cult identification, and put it in the category of a Level 1 Cult, alongside Q-Anon followers, and even TERF's, as outlined by the Cult Gradient.

First off, as the on-line asexual community loves to point out, "just cos someone on the Internet thinks 'demisexual is just normal human sexuality' (or similar) doesn't mean that it is!" so wouldn't it then stand to reason that just cos another person in the "ace spectrum" community says a thing is true, that wouldn't necessarily mean that it IS true? Unfortunately, for the aces, so many people involved in that community are eager to accept that anything another ace says, thus necessarily IS true, especially if it supports the idea that those who identify as somehow "asexual" are being uniquely oppressed. It's considered a textbook cult belief, that the group is being actively persecuted, without any clear evidence of the alleged persecution, or at least if the perceived persecution is not unique to the group —for instance, the Waco compound was not singled out for their bizarre religious beliefs, but they piqued the interest of the federal government due to legal infractions that applied to literally everyone. In spite of the fact that no-one can point to anything on TERF blogs and Facebook groups that would single out asexuals, nonetheless, this belief persists within the on-line asexual community.

Furthermore, the idea that a significant number of TERF's necessarily would put forth anti-asexual sentiments is literally nonsense. TERF ideology rests on the notion that trans women are "predatory men who want to symbolically and even literally rape women," and as an afterthought, that trans men are "poor women who've been taught to hate themselves by the patriarchy." TERF ideology was first formally outlined in Janice Raymond's book, The Transsexual Empire, first published in 1979. Some followers of TERFism completely miss the bizarre satirical angle of The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, by the notable schizoaffective-disordered Valerie Solanas, and claim that pamphlet to be a part of their legacy, as well —but here's the funny thing: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto is very easily arguable as a part of asexual community history!

Siggy, author of the blog, The Asexual Agenda, wrote a multi-piece series on "Asexuality and Early Radical Feminism," which I really do recommend everyone read all parts of! For starters, it debunks the popular (in the asexual community) notion that a cerain 1969 photograph was necessarily linking "asexuals" with what would come to be known as the LGBTQ community (of course, looking at the fact that the poster behind the people, in the photo, also listed "straight" should be enough for people to debunk that cockamamie claim, but here we are...) More importantly, Siggy's series does a thorough deep-dive into the links between an asexual identity and radical feminism.

Now, if you're on Tumblr, you're probably kind of young, which is fine. I was once young, myself. I have a lot of young friends (and also a long distance situation with a young man about twelve years my senior [yes, senior], so zip it with any cries of moral panic). What I want to point out, though, is that if you're young, or just inexperienced, you are probably less likely to be familiar with the fact that there are two schools of thought that lay claim to the title of Radical Feminism, and I'm a firm believer in separation of TERFism or the "gender critical" cult from Radical Feminism.

TERFism is something I, at least once referred to as the Daly-Raymond or Daly-Raymond-Budapest School, after Mary Daly, her protégé, Janice Raymond, and Dianic witch Zsuzsana Budapest. I mentioned Raymond earlier, and her 1979 book. What I didn't mention, until just now, is that her book was originally her doctoral thesis and was overseen by her then-professor, Mary Daly. Daly is often regarded as a pagan author, and was at one time regarded fairly highly in the pagan community, but even by the 1970s, other professionals in her field of women's studies and anthropology, were finding issues with her own ideas, as she relied heavily upon Murrayism. Zsuzsana Budapest is another pagan figure, and is best known as the one who founded the primary lineage of Dianic Witchcraft, practiced today. Budapest's Witchcraft is heavily reliant on not only Murrayism, but also the works of Mary Daly, especially Gyn-Ecology, which is just as much of a foundational work of Dianic Witchcraft as Charles Godfrey Leyland's Aradia: Gospel of the Witches (which is... a relatively modern mythology, formed from a composite of sources). The Daly-Raymond-Budapest school of "radical feminism" essentialises the experience of womanhood on the same principles womanhood is seen in "radical traditionalism," being that a woman's identity is defined as one's ability to give birth, and this somehow informs everything that happens to women.

The other group laying claim to the moniker of "radical feminism" is the Firestone-Dworkin-MacKinnon school. Shulamith Firestone (who was also diagnosed as being on the schizoaffective spectrum) is the author of The Dialectic of Sex, wherein she proposed a possible future wherein widespread practice of artificial wombs, thus removing the necessity of "biological sex" to the process of human reproduction, and thus assurance of a true equality of the sexes. Andrea Dworkin, a contemporary of Firestone's, built from the underlying thesis of Firestone's book, and went on to write that the notion of only two discrete biological sexes is outdated (something that has, recently, been confirmed by science, but seemed pseudo-scientific when she wrote it in 1971!) and that all trans people deserve access to gender-affirming medical care as a basic public service. Catherine MacKinnon, a friend and philosophical protégé of Dworkin's, has since become one of the most outspoken and eloquent advocates for trans women within a radical feminist framework. Needless to say, the position of the Firestone-Dworkin-MacKinnon school of radical feminist thought couldn't be any more different from the Daly-Raymond-Budapest school, especially when concerning the topic of trans people.

TERFism is basically the Daly-Raymond-Budapest school of "radical traditional womanhood" with the paganism removed. TERFism is thus less about the individual experiences of women (and men) and how gender was constructed as a means of social control, and more about a Right-Wing fatalism that insists on a pre-determined role being the presumed nature of all women, and the inverse and opposite role determining the nature of men.

Given that TERFism thus posits the notion that inside all men, which they believe trans women are, is a barely-contained sexual deviant, and thus trans women (again, according to TERFism) are hoping for a way to have an "in" to sexually abuse (cis) women. This certainly seems to take a tip from the anti-sex sentiment within the paragraphs of The SCUM Manifesto, along with taking the most superficial, at best, and overall bad-faith reads of Andrea Dworkin used to mischaracterise her work as "anti-sex, believing that all heterosexual sex is rape" (she never actually said that; what she did say was that heterosexual sex, within the context of pornography and other forms of sex work, is inherently violent, and that this has a ripple effect on society). It's not at all uncommon for outspoken TERF's to mischaracturise Dworkin, for their own purposes, and dipshits like (noted fake goth) Cathy Brennan and Sheila Jeffries are noted as being highly, and quite willful in their ignorance of Dworkin's pro-trans stance, instead preferring to twist a poor-faith read of her works critical of pornography and sex-work as "anti-sex," so as to distort her anti-porn thesis into something oddly against trans women.

Needless to say, the way that TERFism cherry-picks anti-porn ideas, and reads them as being (somehow) fundamentally both anti-man and anti-sex, certainly gives Absolute Zero reason to believe that TERFism has a significant thread that's at all "anti-asexual." If you understand what both Radical Feminism (the Firestone-Dworkin-MacKinnon school), and TERFism (the Daly-Raymond-Budapest school) actually are, and what each group stands for and hopes to see in society, the very idea that "TERF's also hate asexuals" is complete nonsense! It's an idea that can be traced to the "asexual spectrum" community on Tumblr, with no real origin from outside of that community —as in, it can't be traced to TERF blogs or fora, it can only be traced to the on-line asexual community, itself, in a bizarre attempt to make anti-trans oppression somehow also linked to any critique —even the most good-faith and not only valid, but sound critiques of the on-line asexual community.

This blatant eagerness to not only spread misinformation, but also to appropriate the oppression experienced by another group is an established cult tactic. This lie, in particular, hopes to manipulate the emotions and thoughts of the audience, make sure not too many (though ideally zero) questions are asked about the claim being made, lest one be accused, or at least thought of being not only "anti-asexual" but also, by extension or association, to be "anti-trans."

While I can accept that maybe a handful of individual TERF's may have voiced anti-asexual sentiments, that sentiment is not at all a part of either TERFism, or actual Radical Feminism. If anything, the twisted reads that TERFism takes from Radical Feminist writers, is very favourable to the 1960s/'70s definition of human asexuality as "one who abstains from sex as a radical political act." That fact is just clear, when you read some of the more Bizarro Logic tweets and blogs from prominent Internet TERF's —they really seem to be sympathetic to those who don't want sex, especially those who are women.

Ergo, TERFism, in general, doesn't hate asexuals. Most TERF's simply don't care about the on-line asexual community, it's irrelevant to them. Further, a significant faction within TERF on-line spaces are —if not explicitly, then certainly implicitly— advocates for asexuals who are functionally identical to the 1960s Radical Feminist definition of asexuality (being one who both a- identifies as asexual, and b- abstains from having sex with others). Anyone who claims that TERFism is somehow also "anti-asexual" is just lying. Maybe they aren't even aware that they're lying, because they never once questioned that claim, but are instead, uncritically repeating it. Regardless of whether or not they're aware of the lie, the goal is the same: To manipulate someone in the audience from asking critical questions about the cultish nature of the on-line asexual community.