Most of the folks who read this blog are already aware, but since there are a few of you that might not be tracking the matter: Julie Decker, aka swankivy on Youtube and Tumblr, has published a new book on asexuality, titled The Invisible Orientation. This is significant because other education-oriented books on asexuality are unfortunately few and far between — currently, there’s a traditionally-published book by a non-asexual academic, and a self-published book by an asexual man. Swankivy’s book is both traditionally-published (i.e. through a publishing house that’s going to pitch it to libraries and universities) and written by an asexual woman, which makes it an exciting step forward and a good beginner’s resource for learning about or explaining asexuality to others. Hopefully there will be more books like this to come as asexuality gains more people’s attention.
What with the stigma against the credibility of the internet, there are probably some people who would be more willing to learn about asexuality from a physical print copy of a published book than from a blog post or a youtube video, and while we shouldn’t have to use any one format in order to be taken seriously, I like the idea that people who wouldn’t normally go looking in those places for information about asexuality (or might not have internet at all) still might find a copy of this book while browsing a bookshelf. If you can, please request it for your local library so that we can raise the likelihood of that happening (and, ideally, make coming out a little easier, one person at a time).
You can find several ways to purchase the book here.
August 27th, 2014 at 9:07 pm
I work at a university library and I’ve asked our collection development librarian to purchase this :)
August 27th, 2014 at 9:16 pm
Awesome.