This is borne of frustration and likely should not be posted.

[quinara]

fiercelydreamed is doing a fantastic job at queerlygen (do come an join in, it's going to be great - I can tell these things), so this shouldn't be read as any sort of indictment of her and certainly isn't a call for people to come and 'help me out' in any way. The whole issue I'm going to talk about it is ongoing, so really this post will likely become irrelevant very quickly; I'm mostly making it because, if I don't, then it will be running round my head for the rest of the day and drive me up the wall.

Let's start with the basics. AVEN, an extremely handy resource, very helpfully defines 'asexual' as "a person who does not experience sexual attraction", and that's really all there is to it. In the grand world of sexual orientations there are several tickboxes for people one might be sexually attracted to, a simplified selection perhaps being 'my gender', 'the other gender' and 'gender undefined'. As I understand it, gay people tick the first, straight people tick the second, bi people tick both the first two and pan people tick all three. (My understanding of pan vs. bi is very simplistic, so please correct me if I'm wrong.) Ase people tick none. To make a very coarse analogy, for some ase people the entire population falls into the same camp as their mother/father/brother/sister/relative, and the idea of sex with them is utterly repulsive, while for others sex is just boring/not important and participating is no more bother than having a snooze in the garden when they'd prefer to be reading, while some even find that they do actively want to explore that level of intimacy with someone after they've got to know them extremely well/closely. Yet the boxes remain unticked.

[A couple of interesting side notes: everyone has people they aren't sexually attracted to (relatives are a good place to start), but that has no bearing on sexual development/sexual capability/hormonal health. If you feel the need to ask me irrelevant personal questions, just because I have more people in this group than you, you might as well click the back button now. Also, as far as as statistics go, the small number of surveys that exist would seem to indicate that around 1 in 100 people are ase. That's not very many, but consider that my combined LJ and DW flist/reading list is about 100 people, and I'm not the only asexual on it (and that list has been built by nothing more than standard fannish interaction). As few of us as there are, there are more than you might think.]

Moving beyond the basics, however, things get more complicated. Many asexuals like to differentiate between sexual attraction and 'romantic' attraction, which (I think) is basically the phenomenon of a crush/more-than-friendly draw to someone without any sexual element. Think Jeremy Clarkson/James Blunt, girl-crushes, pre-slash. Personally I find it hard to understand the difference between romantic attraction and friendship attraction (since I currently have no urge to find a partner to have any sort of special relationship with). In the world of fandom I suppose you could say I'm attracted to Spike in that way (ie. in particular over the other characters), but then you hit against the fact that he also pushes a large number of what I would call aesthetic-admiration-buttons (in his case swooshy coat + stompy boots + punk presence), which gives him an edge over other likeable characters such as Buffy (ignoring the fact that I didn't like her until S7, when the like became retroactive), Giles, Wesley, Tara etc. *shrugs* Other people's aesthetic-admiration-buttons can tend to align with one gender over another, which also affects the mix of attraction generally.

It's a bit of a quagmire, so people will often qualify being ase with another identity such as straight/gay/bi etc, to account for how they'll likely end up interacting with people. But, while I can't speak for them, I would think it's pretty obvious that 'straight' asexuals (even non-sex-repulsed ones) are no more straight than bisexuals who tend towards het relationships. Orientations are what they are and even if you're acting out the norm it's possible to feel alienated by the assumptions that surround it.

Anyway, to get to my point, queerlygen is a community about getting queer characters into gen fic and rejecting the idea that being queer is in itself threatening and brings with it a requirement of warning for adult content (because the sum of queer identity is more than deviant sexual practice). Hooray! And double hooray that 'queer' isn't limited to LGBT, but other identities that suffer prejudice, such as BDSM practitioners and poly people! Now, in the definition of what applies for inclusion in the community, there was originally only a distinction made between 'sexual minorities' and 'gender minorities', until someone pointed out that bundling BDSM etc. in with sexual orientations doesn't really make sense, since they are rather different things (not mutually exclusive but not necessarily inclusive of each other either). A series of bullet points was then drawn up of the various axes of what creates a sexual minority (orientation/practice/number of partners etc.).

After that decision was made though, someone else commented that asexuality should be differentiated, since it's currently in the section "orientation to partner's sex or gender" and asexuals can be "either gay or straight". So now there's a bit of umming and ahhing about what to do.

Simply put, I know it's not that important, but I really, really don't want asexuality to be separated out. To be honest, we most likely are another axis, since the decision whether one is sexual or not pretty much has to precede any other self-definition of sexual identity. But it doesn't feel like that's what would be appreciated here - it feels too much like asexuality would be relegated down the hierarchy beneath the proper sexual orientations as something qualitative rather than definitive. To me it would perpetuate the norm that everyone is sexually attracted to people (until you take the sexual attraction away). I am not straight/gay/bisexual/pansexual with my sexual attraction surgically removed. That way of interacting with people is foreign to my experience and I wouldn't know where to start if you made me work it out that way. There is no gaping hole where my sexuality should be; in the words of SwankIvy, I don't have "no sexuality, but a sexuality of no".

People understand that, right?