unfuck-my-life

[unfuck-my-life]

Asexuality as a white supremacist dream

Here’s the thing: perhaps be glad you don’t understand how “asexuality” as a concept has been a part of white supremacy. To a lot of us, it’s not just some abstract concept. It’s a brutal reality.

In my family history, for example, marriage was a form of survival and sex was an act of violence. British colonialism in the Caribbean ensured that female indentured servants - and before them, slaves - were useless property:

labelled as “the harlots of empire” by the british, this is an epithet that came to haunt their existence throughout indenture & long after to the extent that in the west indies, amongst indians, the word randi/रण्डी became a commonly used synonym in bhojpuri for ‘woman.’ there is a hell of a lot to say about what kind of jobs women were expected to perform and the specific dangers that came with them…

indentured labourers were housed throughout the indenture period in the same shacks that black slaves had had to live in, not long before these being long sheds made of corrugated metal, partitioned into small cubicles, in which a person or family was expected to live.��when the sun shone on them, you can imagine how gruellingly hot they would’ve become, and most importantly for women, the partitions between the cubicles did not reach the roof. it was possible to stand on a stool etc. and look over the top of the partition at your neighbours. this was deadly for women, particularly single women, whose only option was to marry themselves at the earliest opportunity in order to protect themselves from harassment and r*pe. this was the theory, at least, and the one indian women were coerced into following.

in practice, with the partitions not meeting the ceiling, once a woman’s husband had gone to work, she was left to defend herself to the point where it was difficult to bathe or change clothes or any action without being watched by a stranger whose intentions were clear. what it meant for indian women was that marriage didn’t offer the security it was supposed to provide, and many women were forced to take up multiple partners just to protect themselves from harassment and threats, leading to generalised accusations of infidelity and sex work which turned out to be deadly. so many women were murdered by their boyfriends/husbands that it has its own name, “coolie wife murders”…

…a woman who fled to the colonial authorities was unflinchingly dragged back to her partner, with the implicit knowledge she would be killed. a woman who begged for help from one of her partners against the other could just as easily be murdered by him tomorrow. “i kill my wife, why not? i kill no other man’s wife” being said by a young indian man, and have seen quotes by white visitors to the colony who, on the subject of the murders said “we can hardly help admiring this trait in his character.”

“such murders occurred at a rate ninety times greater in Guiana than in India in the previous decade [this report from 1871]…"In the heartland district where most migrants were from, the picture was even darker: Indian men killed their romantic partners at a rate 142 times greater in Guiana than in India’s Northwestern Provinces and Oudh.”

laws over time became more and more lenient towards wife murdering. where initially it was met with the death penalty, the plantocracy & indian men appealed to the judiciary, in light of the expenses paid to bring them to the caribbean & the value of their labour to remit the sentences given, to the point where murdering a woman eventually, at best, caused you to be relocated to another plantation as sufficient punishment. and it is worth noting also that the numbers of women recorded dead reflect only those cases where prosecution was successfully brought against a man. undoubtedly there were many murders where there was no prosecution. the rate was higher than recorded.

marriage was not a safe-haven for women either. the scanty rights protecting women were swept away once she got married. becoming her husband’s property, she had no right to leave him, and if he died before her and they had children, unless she could find another husband quickly, she was liable to be sent back to india as a nuisance an her children taken from her and put into orphanages where they were [forcibly] converted to christianity & put into work houses until they were ready to be married. 

(source)

So how does this reflect personally? In the generations since “liberation” from the system of indenture servitude, marriage still has the connotation of survival, or at least has for my parents’ generation. It is a mode of protection from government, poverty, and colonialism, turned into a mark of piety and respect for the family.

This is a coerced and compulsory sexuality, and one sourced from white supremacy. The social status of indentured servants and furthermore indentured women allowed for the Empire to denigrate our people to objects, where rape was seen as deserved (a pattern we see in the US with how the justice system deems Black women as deserving of sexual assault or else unfeeling). South Asian women were useless in labor and thus had to deserve murder and sexual crimes.

Sexual abuse is extremely pervasive in my and other family narratives and often silenced because of the nature of marriage as a form of survival. Later colonization - the political strife in the 50s-70s with the institution of multiple tyrants by the British and Americans - just exacerbated this system.

What’s this have to do with asexuality, then? Sexuality is a way to colonize a people. It is a way to divide the people you are enslaving (say, by gender) and thus weaken them (via justification of murder). And these traumas persist in cultures.

When I say it’s difficult for me to say I’m asexual, I really do mean, it is viscerally horrible to consider myself asexual. It is violent. It makes me think of my mother and all the women in my family put into arranged marriages and the regret the men face as they emplace their daughters in these marriages purely out of fear for them. It makes me think of the conviction my grandfather has when he tells us young girls that we need to be financially independent and educate ourselves, because we finally can be safe outside of marriage. It makes me think of the stories of soldiers roaming neighborhoods and grabbing women from inside their homes.

Asexuality is what they want. It is what the soldiers, and the masters, and the foreign governments want. They want us to lack something they deem human so they don’t have to empathize. They want us to not desire because it gives them sick satisfaction. They want us not to feel because then they can justify crimes against us in our own courts. How could it not pain me to call myself asexual?

I literally feel all of this weight every time I have to confront my sexuality, when I have to confront my family and my family history, which I’m trying to uncover because the British literally wiped our records. 

So maybe be glad that you cannot personalize the ways in which white supremacy operates via sexuality. But don’t think it’s some theoretical abstraction that has no place in discussions of asexuality.

[unfuck-my-life]

I’m seriously never here to villainize ace people sweepingly. There’s nothing to gain for me in doing that. Ace spaces have supported me a lot and I know there are wonderful networks out there.

And being inflammatory and angry about ace communities was something I did maybe circa 2013 when I started receiving a lot of casual racism and misogyny in conversations in ace spaces because I was angry, but people, including a lot of friends, called me on it and I restructured this space for conversations and not call outs. It’s partially why I don’t name names when it comes to harassment (the other part is because those people had large followings and I was scared).

My fundamental point, and I think part of my mistake was assuming my followers and their followers remembered the conversations I was having last year, is that a lot of ace politics started with a basic premise:

1. Intersectionality is fake 2. Sexuality is apolitical

And this dynamic duo has shaped a lot of the websites and organizations that have formed. What I’m saying is that this precedent has spawned every wave of intracommunity AND intercommunity violence /or else/ has permitted apologism of this violence.

For those who don’t know, there was a major issue starting around 2010 when mods on AVEN - separate from David Jay - would tolerate discussions about rape, race/white supremacy, anti-Semitism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. of a particular brand of violence in the forums. This included discussions on how survivors have no right to call themselves ace and directly to survivors, often underage (sound familiar?), and how asexuality was a means of “positive” ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, when survivors et al. tried to start discussions on the nuances of being survivors or disabled or people of color or women etc. in the forums, they’d be shut down and sometimes blocked/blacklisted for “hate speech.” I was hearing about this as recently as 2014.

There was a poll for World Pride to have a separate conversation within Ace Pride about race and asexuality. It was downvoted on AVEN (and perhaps a Google poll too?) and so didn’t happen. There was also a lot of critique from aces of color about how while it was nice to have a safe space almost form, it also felt like corralling our issues as “irrelevant” to the rest of the community. This was something that was happening a lot online as well, where white aces were consistently segregating themselves from aces of color and then gaslighting us about it (look back into the earlier pages of this blog).

In 2014, this thing with AAW happened, and a lot of prominent ace activists (like, the people going back to 2002 spaces and who have amassed a lot of power) targeted me and other people to silence us. I was also receiving a lot of hatred about how sexuality has nothing to do with race, and tried to have discussions on sexuality as a social construct and not an inherent, medicalized one, especially in the context of colonialism. Around this time, “allosexual” was proposed as an alternative to “sexual” because “sexual” was degrading in a lot of ways.

A lot of harmful people picked up this word and turned it into “allosexual privilege” and the rest is recent enough history. A lot of folks from the original point of origin of the word stepped back and critically examined the word itself and the need to name non-ace people en masse, and a lot of the critique came from other oppressed folks who saw the violence in it. I stepped away from Tumblr ace activism at this time for several reasons I’ve expounded on here and elsewhere.

My point here is that this framework of asexuality had persisted. It started as whitewashed/colorblind and early on developed a nasty habit of enabling violence. And here’s where I want to make a vital point. I am not saying that, for example, those few mods on AVEN represent everyone. I’m not. I’m saying, let’s look at the trend of violence in ace spaces and which has affected the most vulnerable aces as well as other people. There is a trend. There has always been a trend. And if there’s a trend, it’s either sourced in the founding ideology of the discourse, or it is in the patterns of the people who employ that discourse.

I’m saying ace politics were super basic and white at the beginning and set up in a way to target people who tried to dismantle it in the past 15 years (and so many wonderful people have been doing this work!). I’m saying that this? Happens in so many political movements but the specific way it happens with ace politics needs to be addressed. I’m saying the ideology that led to rape apologism and Nazi apologism on AVEN - without David Jay, whom I may not like but bless him and I hope he’s been able to dodge this - is the same framework that allows /violent people/ to take advantage of ace spaces. I’m not saying neo-Nazis are the same as annoying racists as well as the good people doing good work. Dear me, no! And I apologize for the implications of that, because while I’m brown and other things and so would be made unsafe by such rhetoric, I’m also not Jewish.

No, I’m not saying that. I am saying the apoliticality, the half-politics, the liberalism, the pro-Empire rhetoric, the homophobia and the anti-survivor sentiment, the corrupted leftism, these are things that were set up early by violent and well-meaning people alike, and are now still the means by which terrible people get away with terrible things. Why we are still having the “are cishet aces queer” and “allosexual privilege” arguments in May 2016 and enacting superb violence on so many people, and why we think we can get away with it, and why folks in power in these conversations - especially white het men - can wield power over the people doing good work.

So what I’m really talking about the exploitation of our labor and our bodies and our theory as intersectional beings and I’m not here to demonize that labor, ever.

[unfuck-my-life]

Hey guys I’m considering reblogging this to the-unfuckables? Like... I’ve gotten a fair amount of stuff over the years in regards to this and it might be good for this to be seen by a larger audience?

Why did you guys delete that post abput aphobes seeing ace people in public?? It was amazing ?? Dont tell me ur of THOSE ace pages which are like "uwu no drama only humor on this page uwu" when ur fellow ace people are suffering and being harassed by aphobes . I get that you dont post the ace discourse stuff bc all aces don't consider themselves lgbt but ignoring aphobia is ignorant. I'm gonna ask mod lilac about this too. This is one of my fav blogs here & i want u guys to be on our side

Ok. I’m tired of getting shit from various people for this. 1. Yes I am one of those “no drama on my blog” types and I’ve been pretty open about that.

You think I haven’t experienced harassment? Do you think I haven’t suffered? You, random internet STRANGER have no right to judge me for not standing up on every aspect of my social media for this.

When I first started going online, and looking at things about asexuality and talking to people about asexuality, I got so much shit.

I have had “you need to be fixed” conversations, real and online.

I have had rape threats.

I have had someone tell me I should be locked up for 50 years until I pick a side.

I have had people’s misconceptions about asexuality and lack of interest in learning anything new strongly negatively affect all kinds of relationships I’ve had with other people.

How DARE you call me ignorant. Do you seriously think I don’t know this shit exists?

2. The Unfuckables is an ESCAPE. Not just for those who visit it, but for me. I want to actively avoid all the toxic bullshit that comes with anything to do with tumblr’s “discourse” and that means I don’t want to be reminded about aphobia in one of the few fucking things I do to relax.

For the record, in both the LGBT and Asexual community I’ve gotten shit too.

numerous people outing me or pressuring me to out myself for various reasons, from forgetting, to considering my decision not to out myself to people I didn’t know well “immoral”.

I’ve been chewed out for not wanting to march in a parade the first time I went to pride.

I’ve been told I’m a bad person for not wanting to go to pride with a sign saying asexuals have sex too, because I didn’t want to have a bunch of strangers know about my sex life. Or be asked, by strangers, about my sexual experiences.

Online, there’s alot of name-calling and negativity on both sides of the discourse. Theres also alot of exclusionist stuff within the asexual community. As well as a bunch of things that make me feel alienated from it because I’m not a “model ace”.

I’m sorry you have an issue with how I want to be support myself and be happy about my sexuality and have ONE space where I don’t have to fucking deal with everyone else’s bullshit.

I also never would have let that post be made if I had seen it sooner. Because of people like you who can’t just let me be happy on my own terms because I’m not making a statement with the tumblr… where I reblog memes….

[unfuck-my-life]

Do you have any LGBTQ apps/games? I've looked, but haven't found much.

Good luck, I know there’s a visual novel/dating sim called lovestruck, and probably a few others, that have lgbt rep but...

[unfuck-my-life]

How do I find LGBT+ friends? I'll be going to college next year, and I really could use some. I don't want to be the only not straight person I know

See if the school has lgbt resources (mentoring, a pride association of some sort). Look around the area for lgbt meet-up groups.

A lot of online groups might theoretically exist, depending on the school. You could check social media (reddit and facebook I know have worked out for alot of people).

Also, take this with a grain of salt, I’ve seen people use dating apps to get queer friends. Just be clear about what you want I suppose.

[unfuck-my-life]

Why did you guys delete that post abput aphobes seeing ace people in public?? It was amazing ?? Dont tell me ur of THOSE ace pages which are like "uwu no drama only humor on this page uwu" when ur fellow ace people are suffering and being harassed by aphobes . I get that you dont post the ace discourse stuff bc all aces don't consider themselves lgbt but ignoring aphobia is ignorant. I'm gonna ask mod lilac about this too. This is one of my fav blogs here & i want u guys to be on our side

Ok. I’m tired of getting shit from various people for this. 1. Yes I am one of those “no drama on my blog” types and I’ve been pretty open about that.

You think I haven’t experienced harassment? Do you think I haven’t suffered? You, random internet STRANGER have no right to judge me for not standing up on every aspect of my social media for this.

When I first started going online, and looking at things about asexuality and talking to people about asexuality, I got so much shit.

I have had “you need to be fixed” conversations, real and online.

I have had rape threats.

I have had someone tell me I should be locked up for 50 years until I pick a side.

I have had people’s misconceptions about asexuality and lack of interest in learning anything new strongly negatively affect all kinds of relationships I’ve had with other people.

How DARE you call me ignorant. Do you seriously think I don’t know this shit exists?

2. The Unfuckables is an ESCAPE. Not just for those who visit it, but for me. I want to actively avoid all the toxic bullshit that comes with anything to do with tumblr’s “discourse” and that means I don’t want to be reminded about aphobia in one of the few fucking things I do to relax.

For the record, in both the LGBT and Asexual community I’ve gotten shit too.

numerous people outing me or pressuring me to out myself for various reasons, from forgetting, to considering my decision not to out myself to people I didn’t know well “immoral”.

I’ve been chewed out for not wanting to march in a parade the first time I went to pride.

I’ve been told I’m a bad person for not wanting to go to pride with a sign saying asexuals have sex too, because I didn’t want to have a bunch of strangers know about my sex life. Or be asked, by strangers, about my sexual experiences.

Online, there’s alot of name-calling and negativity on both sides of the discourse. Theres also alot of exclusionist stuff within the asexual community. As well as a bunch of things that make me feel alienated from it because I’m not a “model ace”.

I’m sorry you have an issue with how I want to be support myself and be happy about my sexuality and have ONE space where I don’t have to fucking deal with everyone else’s bullshit.

I also never would have let that post be made if I had seen it sooner. Because of people like you who can’t just let me be happy on my own terms because I’m not making a statement with the tumblr… where I reblog memes….

[unfuck-my-life]

I think I'm demiromantic, but lately I've been wondering if I'm aro or qp, because I just. I love people and being around the ones I like, but I dont really think I want the kind of love everyone talks about. Got any advice?

I’m assuming by qp you mean QueerPlatonic, which is actually a style of relationship rather than an orientation to the best of my knowledge. I think the best advice I can give, as someone who is aro-spec as well, is to be honest with the people around you as to what you would be looking for out of them friendship wise or other. Looking into queerplatonic relationships as well, since the definitions of those are incredibly loose and malleable, if you do want to be close to someone but aren’t romantically interested.

I personally have felt alienated in the past since non-aro people will 100% prioritize their relationships over friendships, which is completely fine, but it isn’t a great feeling to know that you are more invested than everyone else. Being open with some of my friends has really helped that, because even when I’ve dated I’ve always put in effort to see the people I care about, since romance has never been a huge interest of mine.

[unfuck-my-life]

Anon from The Unfuckables

“Do you think heterophobia is a thing? I’m a sex repulsed ace and romance repulsed aro and I’ve noticed I’m less repulsed by homosexual sexual content than heterosexual sexual content, and I’m worried that I might be heterophobic (in case that is a thing) or unconsciously fetishizing homosexuality. I still think everyone is equal and allowed to love anyone and do anything as long as it doesn’t hurt others and is consensual. Still, I’m worried. Do you have any opinions/comments on this? “ 

Heterophobia exists, in the sense that people can have some inherent bias against heterosexuals, which is not going to be a cultural thing but is more likely to be something that is possibly fear-based.

In this case, you likely just have a preference. Being on the asexual spectrum, and being sex-repulsed, doesn’t mean you cant have a preference in the same way someone who is bisexual might have a sexual preference for same-sex over different-sex pairings. Also keep in mind that sexual content depicting different-sex partners versus same-sex partners are likely being catered to different audiences, so it could also be the difference in approach.

Also this is nsfw and you ignored what my old ask link said. Please be more careful in the future.

[unfuck-my-life]

Anon from the Unfuckables

“ Hi I'm a bisexual woman with an asexual girlfriend and I need some ace advise. At the beginning of our relationship we did some sex things but soon stopped bc she was disinterested. I recently was asking her if I had ever pushed her into something she didn't want. She said that she had wanted to want sex, and that's why she had went along with it, and that she really hated her sexuality for not wanting it. This is heart breaking for me, bc I want her to be proud of who she is. How do I help her?”

Be supportive and understanding of where she is coming from. It is possible she feels guilty for not providing you with sex, or is not comfortable in her sexuality. A lot of people, asexual or otherwise, do end up in situations where they pressure themselves to do or want things because of social expectations and feel guilty when they realize they don’t want that.

Also, this falls under nsfw and darker which were explicitly said to be off anon on the unfuckables, please be more careful in the future.

[unfuck-my-life]

Anon from The Unfuckables

“ so i’m 99.9% positive that i’m asexual, but whenever i think about how other people will get to experience sexual love and be that intimate with someone, it makes me really sad and feel like i’m missing out because i’m asexual. hhhhelp “

Hi! First of all, you blatantly ignored the ask rules on my original blog, so please be more courteous in the future.

Many people are going to feel like you’re missing out, and in some ways you are. Not experiencing something that the majority of the population experiences on some level can make you feel excluded. Whether or not you are asexual, however, doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t going to experience sexual intimacy if it is something that interests you. Otherwise, try to be open with your friends or steer the conversation when you are around so that you are able to contribute.

[unfuck-my-life]

It’s here! The completely unanticipated solution to my problems, and possibly not yours.

It’s the side advice blog for @the-unfuckables! Because nothing qualifies me (Winter) for giving advice more than getting a couple of followers for reblogging mediocre asexual puns. Life experience? Psychological studies? Who needs those.

[unfuck-my-life]

Hey all, it’s Winter. I will be moving the 3 anons from @the-unfuckables I have not deleted onto posts here.