Kaz's tumblings

A question about vocabulary

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:36:00 -0500

Because lately, I have seen people using words in the ace tags that are new to me, and also using words I know in ways that make no sense with the meanings I associate with them. Needless to say, this makes constructive dialogue a bit tricky.

Here I work through my thoughts and personal definitions for some apparently contentious vocabulary. I’d like it if people could tell me where their personal definitions diverge.

Repulsed: Having strongly negative feelings about the idea of having sex oneself (e.g. being disgusted at the idea, finding it repulsive). Does not have to mean being squicked or triggered by sex in other contexts (e.g. porn), although it frequently does. Does not have to mean not having a libido, not masturbating, not having sexual fantasies, not reading/watching porn, etc. Does not imply anything about one’s attitude to sex in general, other people having sex, etc.

Sex aversive: Is a new word I’ve seen that appears to cover the same ground as “repulsed”? It doesn’t really make sense to me, though, because averse is the word that means “having an aversion to”. Aversive mainly has meanings a la aversive conditioning. Plus, I’m also not too keen on the association with Sexual Aversion Disorder - so I’m not currently planning on using that word for myself.

Indifferent: Having neutral to slightly negative feelings about the idea of having sex oneself (e.g. feeling “meh”, “boring” about it). Just as repulsed, doesn’t have to mean anything about sex drive, masturbation, moral feelings about sex and sexuality, etc. Does not have to mean actually willing to have sex or consider having sex themselves.

Sex positive: Okay, I cheat, I know the difference in definitions here and am just taking the opportunity to point out it exists. This word frequently gets used as “not judgemental about other people’s sexual decisions and sexuality”, with the implication that if you’re not sex-positive you’re an arse. I personally don’t feel it’s possible to divorce it from the sex-positive movement, and I’ve had such nasty experiences with ace erasure and anti-ace attitudes there plus other issues with their priorities (embedded in “positive) that I refuse to identify that way despite having those attitudes; I call myself “sex-nonjudgemental” when I need to describe this, which I feel is more accurate, but that doesn’t seem to have caught on.

Nonlibidoist: Originally very strongly associated with the Official Nonlibidoism Society back in the day, it looks as if this term has lost its antisexual elitist connotations and is now just a word for “someone who doesn’t have a sex drive”?

I should probably also toss in that I, personally, try to use ace as an umbrella term for the ace spectrum - it was suggested a while back and I liked the idea a lot. Now, however, I worry that this is idiosyncratic and hence I’m being read as ignoring/erasing grey-a people.

There are probably others I can’t think of right now. What spurred this post is someone drawing a distinction between “sex-aversive” and “repulsed”, which really confused me. I’ll also note that it seemed as if “repulsed” was taking on a negative meaning, and that… kind of makes me angry? Because I actually identify that way under the above definition which I am *relatively certain* was widespread at one time and I feel as if people are stealing my label out from under me. Plus, it’s pretty frustrating to not have the slightest idea what is going through people’s minds when I say “I’m a repulsed ace and…”

Attempted Danger: A Minority within a Minority?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:34:47 -0500

Attempted Danger: A Minority within a Minority?:

outlawroad:

I posted not that long ago about being a celibate/sex-aversive asexual, but lately, I’ve been reading a lot of posts online by asexuals which seem to be hammering home the fact that asexuals can and do have sex and sometimes enjoy it or feel enthusiastic about it otherwise…. And again, it’s making…

Ironically, I just complained to my friends on DW about this very thing. Spurred by seeing someone answer an ask that essentially went “I think I might be asexual, but I really don’t want to have sex and everyone is talking about how asexuals do have sex so I guess I’m not?”

And… it’s easy, I think, to slip into the idea of “well, everyone assumes ace people don’t have sex, so it’s the ones who do have sex who really need to have that discussion and explain their issues.” And, well, aces who have sex or are open to the idea DO need to discuss their problems etc., it sucks when they get erased.

However, being an ace unwilling to have sex ALSO carries its issues, which we need to talk about. I think some people assume that there aren’t problems like that here and that “well, some aces never want to have sex” goes without saying, but tiny repulsed me ended up in an unwanted and traumatizing sexual encounter because nobody had ever told me it was okay not to want to have sex ever. Especially the new people really, really need to be told that that’s okay and that they don’t HAVE to have sex in order to find a fulfilling relationship. I especially worry when all our models of asexuals in romantic relationships involve compromise, because that can lead some very bad places.

So… I think those of us who aren’t willing to have sex need to talk about that more and not worry about “reinforcing stereotypes” or whatever. (And yeah, counting myself into that.) And those aces who are need to be careful not to erase those who aren’t when talking about the ace spectrum - the same as how it goes the other way around. It’s possible this is a phase thing, because it seems like some months everyone’s talking about romantic relationships and the next it’s all about QP stuff and sexually active/not sexually active might go similarly, but even so it’s frustrating.

I’ve also sometimes felt the undercurrent of “well, you’ll change your mind one day” even from other aces, e.g. when people tell me I must learn all about sex ed or the one time I saw someone say that we should all carry condoms even if we never planned on having sex because we never knew what might happen. Needless to say, that’s really frustrating.

TL;DR: So a question for people with platonic partners:

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:10:40 -0500

TL;DR: So a question for people with platonic partners::

writingfromfactorx:

physistorian:

Or zucchinis or whatever you like to call them:

How exactly did you get together? Because I can’t for the life of me figure out how to platonically ask someone out.

Really awkward conversations about the state of the friendship? Involving, in one case, increasingly less…

I wish all of tumblr (well, not the trolls) to know that that awkward conversation was EPIC because half of it was being terminally awkward at each other and half of it was going “oh my god, we may be the first ever people to be having the awkward ‘are you my zucchini’ conversation, we are MAKING HISTORY- but er well ARE YOU MY ZUCCHINI AAAAH”.

[/second participant in one of these :D]

I can't find who posted it,

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 03:25:36 -0500

metapianycist:

but so far my favorite response to my informal “What is your favorite response to give to ‘How do you know you’re asexual if you haven’t had sex?’ ” poll is

“How do you know you wouldn’t like eating live scorpions if you’ve never tried it?”

dying. DYING.

"You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Language skills that develop when others are missing

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 19:21:04 -0500

"You don't need this junk. You need a cat.": Language skills that develop when others are missing:

youneedacat:

I think I still retain one of the skills I used the most often to handle language growing up. My language comprehension, as opposed to (superficial) expression, ranged from “meh” to nonexistent. And so did the ties between my superficial level of expression, and what I was actually thinking. I…

Oh, wow. I identify with a surprising amount of this, considering I’m… er… relatively highly verbal.

I say “relatively” because I’ve noticed that I actually often say things without knowing what they are. If I am under stress, my processing time for understanding speech, understanding the concepts implied, working out a response and translating that response into words grows (I call it “processing lag”) and some bits may fritz out entirely (e.g. my auditory processing often goes.) And at some point, I developed an automatic response system that cuts in when the pause is too long. And I feel very awkward and sometimes have trouble believing it myself because it’s marvelously sophisticated! and often goes totally unnoticed even by me! but then sometimes I’ll realise I’ve said the opposite of what I was thinking or I’ve said something that doesn’t actually logically connect with the previous conversation or wtfever, and I will go “…why did I say that?” and the answer will be “well, I was taking too long actually understanding what had been said, so in order for there not to be a big pause I opened my mouth and words came out.” In the extreme case, I have had a conversation where I didn’t know what either of us was saying. And many, many more times I think I don’t realise I’ve done it at all.

The more I think about my actual verbal skills, the more I think I have a surprising amount of problems with certain things for someone who is highly verbal and, from the outside looking in, doesn’t appear to have any verbal difficulties whatsoever. Well, not counting the speech disorder, which affects an entirely different stage of the process and may be totally unrelated to spectrum.

And I am nodding so hard about the SJ buzzword stuff. I actually become uncomfortable about this sometimes, because some of the SJ language stuff pings me for ingroup/outgroup markers, and I trust my intuition on that front because it’s very finely honed but it upsets me because this is *meant* to be about justice and equality, not cliquishness - isn’t it?

Also, the not knowing who was forbidding it - I am kind of angry at my brain now, because what is so wrong with leaving pauses in speech that I have to reflexively fill them with a random assortment of phrases and words that seem right for the situation? It’s similar to how I cannot, cannot, cannot make myself ask anyone to repeat themselves more than twice to three times maximum, and if I still haven’t understood it then I have to pretend I did.

@pmzzo

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 20:08:10 -0500

asexuality-exists:

I agree with you however some people doesn’t like it when they say they’re asexual and people just assume they’d never have sex, it bothers them. they wanna make it clear that it doesn’t necessarily mean that they would never have sex. whereas I have the same problem, I wanna make it clear that I don’t wanna have sex, ever. so yes, line is unclear for some but for some of us it actually is pretty clear.

(reblogging this because I can’t figure out how to reblog any of the posts further on in the discussion, aaaaugh tumblr)

I don’t think “repulsed” and “indifferent” can be taken to be equal to “don’t want to have sex ever”/”willing to have sex”. It does often divide up that way, but it doesn’t always. I’m especially worried about saying that indifferent = willing to have sex, and that you can only say you don’t ever want to have sex if you’re repulsed.

The way I know ‘indifferent’/’repulsed’ is that repulsed = you find the idea of you personally having sex disgusting or in some other way strongly negative. indifferent = you find the idea of you personally having sex neutral to mildly negative. And I really don’t want to say to people that they’re only allowed to go “no sex ever, kthnxbye” if they really, really hate the idea. It’s perfectly valid for an indifferent person to not want to have sex either. (In fact, it’s perfectly valid for an asexual who enjoys sex, a demi, a grey-a, a *sexual to never want to have sex!)

(And, of course, some repulsed people may be open to experimentation all the same.)

I sometimes feel as if there’s - ironically - pressure to have sex or be open to having sex in the asexual community, and saying that willingness/unwillingness to have sex precisely follows indifferent/repulsed lines seems to add to that to me.

Hey, everyone!

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:55:09 -0500

raumlet:

Just block unicornenimas. Really, your life will be much, much better.

At least the block button seems to be working properly again. I have never been so happy not to see something.

Beautifully Complex: This past week I have met two stutterers

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:43:58 -0500

Beautifully Complex: This past week I have met two stutterers:

miaim:

I don’t really ever use this anymore as a “blogging” outlet, but this past week and a half has taught me a lot of stuff about stuttering and myself that I really need to just iron out in a rambling blog post.

I have met two stutterers in the past week who have graciously come into my therapy…

You can make that three, if you want - I stutter, and it doesn’t bother me. Or rather, what bothers me is when people react badly or make assumptions about me because of it, not the physical act of stuttering. In fact, I did speech therapy which turned me mostly fluent and it really freaked me out - I discovered I’m not actually comfortable unless I’m stuttering a little. Which does make me pretty much unique among stutterers…

The way I explain this is that… I don’t think stuttering is inherently an awful, terrifying feeling. But I think it becomes that for a lot of kids who stutter because of other people’s reactions. They get made fun of, they get told how they speak is wrong, even when people are *trying* to be polite they can see the awkwardness and embarrassment and not-knowing-how-to-react. If you get negative reactions every time you speak, you’re going to develop a fear of speech. If everyone treats your stutter as something to be ashamed of, that’s what’s going to happen.

And… when I was a kid, everyone around me was accepting enough that I was spared the more overt bad reactions to my stutter. I’m pretty sure people still did the awkward silence feet-shuffling stuff and even indirectly hinting at me about how it was a problem, but I’m autistic and especially when I was younger I had a really hard time picking up on that sort of stuff. So I grew up thinking only a very few people had problems with my stutter and those people were prejudiced and I probably wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them anyway. I wasn’t too happy to find out it wasn’t true, but it did marvels for my self-esteem and confidence in my speech.

Not sure if that matches up to other people’s experiences, but it is my main theory to explain this because otherwise I have no idea. I was a really sensitive kid, by all rights I should have developed the usual issues - but I didn’t.

hm.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:02:13 -0500

mostlydeplorable:

Sometimes I think to myself “you can’t possibly be asexual. Only one percent of the population, as the very popular statistic says, is asexual. So the odds of you being one is crazy slim.” But then I think, “well nothing else makes sense and it seems to be like teenagers thinking they’re immortal and couldn’t possibly get hurt hurtling down a hillside road sitting on a skateboard. Even if it’s a slim chance it’s still possible.”

The way I usually view this is:

There is only a 1% chance that a random person you grab off the street is asexual. However - most of these people will never entertain the idea that they’re asexual. For most of these people, their sexual orientation - or the fact that they are sexually attracted to people - is obvious. Most of these people will probably never even have heard of asexuality before and not feel the loss.

If you are seriously wondering whether you’re asexual, the chance you are is going to be way higher than 1%, just due to the fact that you got to that point! “People who are seriously wondering if they are asexual” does NOT count as a random sample for this purpose. By that same sort of argument, I could say that someone who posts on the #asexuality tag only has a 1% chance of being asexual. How does that make sense?

In conclusion: ignore population statistics. They say nothing about individuals anyway. Do you think you’re asexual? Do you feel that the label “asexual” is one that’s useful to you? That’s what counts.

-a mathematician who has had people use the “but you must be straight because it’s statistically most likely!” argument on zer before.

youneedacat: “But anyway, we have seen a few discussions going around lately about how non-autistic...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:43:37 -0500

youneedacat:

“But anyway, we have seen a few discussions going around lately about how non-autistic professionals tend to say autism is about impaired socialization, “theory of mind,” stereotyped repetitive behaviors, etc. While autistic people say that it’s about profound differences in cognition, perception, and communication. (And often the autistic people disagreeing with the professionals about this, are the ones who’ve been labeled as severely affected or low-functioning or thought by other people at some point in their life to be incapable of understanding what was going on around them. And no, these things are not mutually exclusive with having been labeled high-functioning, mildly affected, etc at some other point in a person’s life.) And… one other thing we’ve noticed is this: Autistic people who believe that autism is primarily a deficiency in social skills, “theory of mind,” etc, often tend to be more unhappy than autistic people who believe (as we do) that the most important aspects of it are profound differences in perception, cognition, and communication. To actually have a lower “quality of life,” when it comes to what they want versus what they have. And this probably has a lot to do with the fact that they have been taught to believe that their entire life is going to consist of trying to strive after Almost Normal even though they will never quite get all the way there.”

— amorpha&, Things that make us headdesk (reading the whole thing is good for context)

This is FANTASTIC.

I have often thought about how the aspects of autism that get most stressed by allistic people, by professionals, by the way diagnostic symptoms are weighted, etc. are the ones that affect allistic people. Actually, “affect” isn’t the right word - the ones that allistic people find most annoying and bothersome. Read: differences in body language, not fitting into social norms when it comes to social skills, not demonstrating the coded behaviours that equal “empathy” for a lot of people in the normative way, etc. etc.

I used to think I was weird for going “well, the social stuf? Annoying, yes, but I can deal with it. It’s not actually the part of autism that has the biggest impact on my life.” In fact, it’s third place on my mental list, after executive dysfunction and sensory issues. But I’ve run into a number of other autistic people who think similarly. On the allistic side, it’s all social stuff all the time. Sensory stuff is only a problem, to them, if it makes us behave in non-NT ways in public (via, for instance, melting down due to overwhelming and painful amounts of noise). If I end up unable to go to loads of social events because they take place in environments that are too noisy for me (this being the reason I made no real friends at all my first year at uni), that’s invisible to them and therefore not important. Executive dysfunction isn’t even on most people’s radars at all, and that’s the thing that keeps me up at night, makes me wonder if I’m capable of keeping a job. Frequently, I see allistic people attacking autistic coping strategies without which they would have a much harder time as Bad Because You Look Autistic (stims, routines).

Obviously there are autistic people who have more issues with the social stuff than I do, who would say that it’s the thing that has the biggest impact on their life. But I doubt there’s enough to justify the relentless focus on it and brushing other issues under the carpet you see from the allistic side… the priorities are just totally out of whack, and out of whack in a very nasty way that marginalises the experiences of the actual people they claim to be talking about in favour of centring allistic ones.

Also, some of the other stuff in that post just reaffirms me in my belief that passing “privilege” isn’t a privilege at all.

Unpopular Opinion:

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:37:47 -0500

lizziegoneastray:

I think cumberbuttmunch is hilarious, and also totally has a point about Benedict Cumberbatch’s chin(s)…

Yeah, it’s - why do they have to clutter up the ace tags? I don’t find it funny, the userpic makes me cringe, and I don’t want to stumble across them when I want to read ace stuff. I originally blocked them and went on with my life, but for some reason they keep popping up and the “block” button isn’t doing anything. If I could think of a reason to tag their posts “asexual” it would be one thing, but the only thing I can think of is “to bother ace people who find Sherlock very important as an asexual character.” Which… doesn’t seem okay.

Neutrois Nonsense: Male as "neutral"

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:53:00 -0500

Neutrois Nonsense: Male as "neutral":

neutrois:

In reply to this post, Kaz said something very interesting:

I also often feel as if male is seen as a “neutral” gender - e.g. that a neutrois person who wants to be seen as a guy and prefers “he” over “she” is normal, but one who’d rather be seen as female/prefers “she” gets viewed as not…

I’m glad you thought that was interesting enough to discuss! :)

Honestly, I’ve felt pretty rubbed raw by male-as-neutral and how it affects nonbinary identities. I identify as in between female and neutrois (sort of female-ish demineutrois?) and I think that’s probably accurate, but I’m not sure. A lot of the stuff that originally led me to make that conclusion could be boiled down to “I’m not masculine, I can’t be totally neutrois”, “I’d rather be gendered female than male, that means I’m not totally neutrois”, etc. Or “I present too femininely, not androgynously” - well, a lot of what we call “androgynous” is on the masculine side of things. (First hit for “androgynous” on Google Image search? Someone wearing a suit and tie.) A lot of “androgynous” clothing comes from the men’s section. How I present is actually relatively gender-neutral for someone who cannot stand masculinity - jeans, T-shirt and hoodies all the way, I haven’t worn skirts or make-up or heels in years - but it’s not seen that way. I have even had people call me femme, and have only recently been able to put my finger on why that weirds me out.

It hit me when I was reading the blog of a neutrois person I know who wants to be seen as male and is transitioning that I thought their binary-gender-preference was perfectly normal and unremarkable and didn’t invalidate their identity at all - because surely wanting to be seen as male was normal and default, whereas I was just weird and probably not really nonbinary after all. And then I thought about that and went “brain, you are really damn sexist.”

THE FULL METAL BITCH: Dear Aspies Who Want To Keep DSM Separation of Autistic Diagnoses,

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 08:44:30 -0500

THE FULL METAL BITCH: Dear Aspies Who Want To Keep DSM Separation of Autistic Diagnoses,:

thefullmetalbitch:

I cannot stand your position on this, and I’m going to lay it out by rebutting the often-heard arguments, and then by stating what I believe this will do for the autistic communities.

1. But it’s not as accurate.

-The current categories of autism are artificial; they were not allowed to…

This, very much. Getting diagnosed for AS made me realise how very political and unscientific the entire process was - for instance, I’m not sure it was actually possible for an adult who to get diagnosed with any other ASD than AS at the place I went to, regardless of what went on in our childhood. The logic appeared to be “you made it to adulthood without getting diagnosed, you must have AS”… which has nothing to do with intrinsic differences between AS and the rest of the autistic spectrum.

…I also admit part of me hopes that it will get people to realise people with AS don’t have “mild” autism and can have problems other than social stuff, FFS.

Legit questions, do not spam the fuck out of me with hate.

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:30:20 -0500

sun-sica:

Okay, so when I go into the asexual tag, I often see long posts where an asexual will explain that they don’t desire sex, but if they love so-and-so, they will compromise and have sex with them. I also see posts where people express extreme revulsion at anything involving sex. So here are my questions. The last one is less specific than the others. I’d appreciate people responding with answers to one or more of them.

Don’t some of you sometimes thing that this whole notion of compromise is kind of bad? If you don’t want to have sex at all, but you have sex with someone anyway to make them happy, how is that a healthy relationship? If someone loves you back, won’t they sacrifice for you? I guess that’s a cyclical question because the whole compromise idea is one of sacrificing something for the person you love. But for some reason it seems very unhealthy to disregard your orientation and so something sexually you don’t want to do. It makes a lot more sense for them to give up sex. They don’t have to act outside of their identity in order to do that.

How do you know that, if the very idea of sex repulses you, a) something didn’t happen to you b) you don’t have a phobia? If either of these things is true, I don’t know that you’re asexual so much as in need of therapy.

Doesn’t one momentary sexual urge make you… not asexual anymore? Or is it more consistency-based, like how someone can be a lesbian but still attracted to a certain man?

Sooo people have already responded pretty well to your points overall, but there is one thing I want to bring up:

I am all for people going into therapy if something about them is distressing and they want it fixed. This is going to be the case for some repulsed people, but definitely not all. If someone is fine with how they are, if someone doesn’t want it to change, who cares where it came from? What does it matter whether their aversion to sex is because they have a history of sexual abuse, or because they’re autistic and that sort of touch is a very negative sensation, or because of nothing at all, or whatever?

I point this out because although I’m sure you don’t want it to be interpreted this way, these things can *easily* go the route of “you’re not asexual if you don’t satisfy my criteria” with an extra heaping of “I think this thing about you needs to be fixed even if you are fine with it.” I am totally fine with being repulsed, I am in fact happy that it means it’s very easy for me to set boundaries about sex these days and not get dragged into the idea of compromise, and I have had a lot of people concern troll me anyway!

Also, another issue with the “but did anything *happen* to you?” question is that the cause/effect between unwanted/traumatising sexual encounters and being averse to sex can be the other way around - it’s very easy to end up in a sexual situation even if the idea of sex is awful just because of being told that you can’t possibly feel this way and as a result thinking that those feelings aren’t real or will go away when confronted with the actual thing, and if you’re repulsed pretty much any sexual situation will be awful. Why, yes, I am speaking from personal experience. :(

allies-person: deaf-aspie: Being overwhelmed by your environment does not make you a baby. Having...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:02:05 -0500

allies-person:

deaf-aspie:

Being overwhelmed by your environment does not make you a baby. Having a food aversion does not make you a baby. Having a public “meltdown,” however, suggests a lack of mature coping skills and room for learning. Continuing to “instantly throw up” when exposed to a long list of common foods instead of taking on the project of desensitization suggests an attitude of entitlement, that the world ought to bend to your preferences rather than you budging an inch to adapt. When you are a child, your parents are supposed to teach you ways to cope with your environment (and remove yourself as needed) so that you don’t have a “meltdown.” Yes, even if you are disabled. I understand that many parents think that a diagnosis means they no longer have to teach their child coping skills, and this is tragic. However once you are an adult, you have another chance to learn, this time of your own volition. Many of us do this, whether we have an autism diagnosis, another kind of diagnosis, or no diagnosis at all. It’s called adulthood and yes, it often sucks. A lot of people you would probably dismiss as “privileged” because our parents didn’t cottonwool us in DSM codes have suffered more than you know to try to make our way in the world despite various stumbling blocks and limitations. But struggling to improve and adapt is better than the alternative, which is giving up, laying down, and being a whiny baby who expects everything to be customized to our liking. Talk about “privileged.”

Hold on. I shouldn’t even attack this ENTIRELY on the basis of YOU calling someone who is disabled…..PRIVILEGED because of your disability and what they need. No, that’s not how the world works, thank you.

Secondly, I wasn’t diagnosed until I was an adult, so my parents never taught me anything, so thank you for the implication that I’m a failure.

Thirdly, I don’t qualify a list of 4 things “Tofu, rice, beans and pastes” as “Long list of common foods”.

Fourthly, these are the ones I COULDN’T desensitize myself to….I desensitized myself to one hell of a long list of veggies, fruits and other things (such as pudding, even), but these have been unconquerable.

Fifthly, why are you using “meltdowns” in scare quotes? And not every place has somewhere to retreat to. Not every place has a bathroom, not every place has somewhere not public, etc. There’s not always a way to avoid meltdowns, because guess what? We don’t like having them any more than you like seeing them happen. So yeah, most of us try VEHEMENTLY to avoid them.

Sixthly, I’m APPALLED at someone who thinks that I’m laying down and taking it. Yup, because asking someone to work around something that makes me projectile vomit is definitely something that’s privileged. Yup, totally means that, for once, me asking someone to work around me (despite, I dunno, a lifetime of giving in to everyone, ever, in the form of vocal communication, phone calls, forced socialization, giving up my accommodations for their annoyances, generally acting dumber for their posterity, etc), I’M the one who’s viewed as being ignorant and “privileged”?

I’m sorry, but liberals, come getcha folks.

I’m obviously super-immature because I avoid onions and a lot of other foods which I can’t tolerate taste- and texture-wise.

Seriously, how does this make any sense whatsoever? Since when is eating a wide variety of foods a significant symbol of maturity?

I extend a huge amount of effort on a daily basis to manage my sensory sensitivities and other triggers for meltdowns—no quotes. Most of the time I do a pretty good job. (One of my coping mechanisms is avoiding the triggers, BTW. Going out of my way to expose myself to them without good reason just is inviting trouble.) It takes a lot of chutzpah to judge me because I’m not always 100% successful.

It is not productive to treat meltdowns and sensitivities as personal failures. This kind of attitude is what led me to spend too much of my time in middle school crying in the girls’ bathroom because I hated myself for being (in my perception and society’s) weak and crazy.

Lastly, I suggest not making too many presumptions about when we were diagnosed and what our parents did or did not do. This varies widely, and your description of our lives fall well short of the mark.

I… I… what? How does vomiting make you entitled? I don’t have food issues that severe, but I had a stomach bug a bit over a week ago and was reminded that throwing up is one of the most horrible experiences known to humans. I… would generally guess that someone who throws up when eating a certain food isn’t doing it to be annoying, or for fun, or in fact voluntarily at all, or… seriously, can anyone find some logic in this argument? because I can’t.

And I find it so weird how people will treat meltdowns as something done on purpose, something we could prevent, by assigning adjectives like “immature” or “entitled”, when it is to me painfully obvious that they’re nothing of the sort - they’re the brain’s natural reaction when overloaded with stimulation and there isn’t anything we can do about it. “Get yourself out of the situation” is all well and good but that presupposes that that’s always possible, or that “the situation” is always nicely encapsulated and avoidable, or that one catches the warning signs in time to be able to do that, or that nobody is pressuring one to stay in meltdown-inducing environments (ahahahaha I have a story to tell of allistic cluelessness here), or a multitude of other things I haven’t thought of right now.

I am probably so indignant because the possibility of meltdown is a constant looming presence in my life and affects my choices. I am lucky in that I can generally avoid the bad environments and that I have a good idea of the warning signals, but I’ve gone close to meltdown before and it is terrifying. Terrifying not just because of the sensation, but also because of how frighteningly vulnerable it leaves me. I go out every day knowing that if things go wrong I might end up hitting meltdown and if I do I could end up in a very bad situation (seeing as, you know, fun stuff like losing the ability to understand spoken language happens as I get closer to meltdown, and if I really overloaded I can’t see any way I could manage to get away without outside help). This is not something that makes me happy, and having people insinuate that I want life to be this way makes me see red.

sophia-sol: Just to reiterate: you can be sex-aversive AND sex-positive. ...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:36:27 -0500

sophia-sol:

Just to reiterate: you can be sex-aversive AND sex-positive. Really.
lucyzephyr:

sophia-sol:

lizziegoneastray:

Why is this? Because sex-positivity is not intended to be about personally wanting to have sex; it’s about supporting the right of all people of all genders to have as much or as little sex as they want without being judged by arbitrary standards of “purity” or “experience.”…

Yeah, I’m with Kaz on this one. Sex value-neutral all the way! There is nothing inherently awesome OR anything inherently awful about sex; it all depends on the context and on the people involved. The term “sex-positive” is dangerous because the terminology includes an implicit assumption that everyone should want to have sex; and I know not all sex-positive people would think that way, but it’s what the term implies, and language is powerful.

Hm. IDK, in my opinion, we call it sex positivity for the same reason we call wanting equality for the genders feminism. It’s not to say X is just better, only that X has been made bad or wrong, so to make X and Y equal, X needs to be uplifted. If that makes sense.

Hmm. I do see your point. But I think that the analogy is not perfect. Sex is viewed in society in a very dichotomous way, a combination of ZOMG AMAZING and ZOMG AWFUL. It’s presented as both at once, not as solely bad-and-wrong, and I think that the terminology we use needs to reflect that.

Yeah… this is actually one of my major gripes with sex-positivity as it is in practice, that people do not get that there is pressure to *have* sex and sexual desire as well as to *not have* sex. Like, there are people who are genuinely antisexual, who think sex is bad and wrong per se and nobody should ever be having it ever. These people? Are generally considered laughably ridiculous and a fringe movement. These attitudes are not the dominant discourse. That is something else entirely.

It is really, really not anywhere near as simple as “sex is bad”. Claiming it is gets my hackles up because you’re saying that all the nasty experiences I and other ace people have had with people trying to shove “sex is good” or “you should have sex” down our throats never happened or don’t count.

Perpetually Myself: What is ableist discourse according to Feministe?

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 17:54:54 -0500

Perpetually Myself: What is ableist discourse according to Feministe?:

allies-person:

The Feministe Comments policy contains this clause:

We will do what is possible to prevent publishing comments that are racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, or transphobic. (Italics in original)

I’m hardly the first to point out that this often does not happen. (Moreover, sometimes the…

I saw how the comments started and then bailed. I am sadly unsurprised they just kept getting worse from there. :(

Asexual People of Color: Welcome, y'all!

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 16:09:22 -0500

Asexual People of Color: Welcome, y'all!:

asexualpocsunite:

Hi there! I’m your main mod fivelettered here. Thanks for following us!

I made this tumblr after I decided to fully embrace the idea of being a grey-a/demisexual (something I’ve thought I was for a year or so) and going on AVEN. When I finished making my account, I realized that most of these…

Signal boosting because omg awesome.

Realisation of the day:

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:07:33 -0500

I do not have the slightest idea what a “whimper” actually sounds like.

Thought accompanying: being an autistic writer is really weird in many ways.

The thing is, I not only learned to write by reading tons but also learned a lot of my vocabulary from books (combination of being a bookworm as a kid and not being a native English speaker/never speaking English at home even when we lived in the US). Add that to me being very good at picking up connotations and subtleties in text, and it means that when I write I use lots and lots of turns of phrases where I learned them and their precise meaning from reading.

In particular, I have a vast array of nonverbal language descriptions for use in writing along with a very good idea of exactly what each implies - an array which is much, much bigger than the nonverbal language I can actually recognise in real life. Seeing as, you know. Autistic. And every now and then I will realise that I am using things as integral parts of my writing that I could not actually identify myself for the life of me.

Like how a few years ago I realised that I had no idea what a frown looked like - I thought I did, but my vague mental image was actually anatomically impossible. I managed to figure out what a frown apparently *actually* was, only to discovere I didn’t know how to distinguish it from a scowl.

Or how, today, I realised that although I thought I knew what a “whimper” was, although I have a very good idea of what sort of emotions and feelings it can convey in different contexts and have used the word myself in writing, I don’t have the faintest idea what one actually sounds like.

And it’s all part of a bigger pattern - that standard narrative conventions don’t actually correspond to how I think. Every now and then I will consciously realise how very alienated I am from what I write and read. I’ve tried writing how I actually think, but it comes out sounding very, very strange and feeling extremely private and just ends up freaking me out by making me realise just how different from the norm my thought processes actually are. I really don’t know how to fix this.

…although for now, I’m going to search “whimper” on Youtube, because the hell?

Asexuality Archive

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 20:06:44 -0500

Asexuality Archive:

neutrois:

AMAZING.

FINALLY I can link people to something other than the AVEN wiki.