Thank you to everyone who participated in or helped to spread the Gray-Ace & Gray-Aro Survey. This survey was released on July 28, 2022 and ran through September 15th, with the link shared on WordPress, Pillowfort, Tumblr, Twitter, AVEN, Arocalypse, Dreamwidth, Reddit, and various Discord servers.
The survey collected 1,404 responses in total.
Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image: Shadows & Fog by Adam Baker, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Continue readingThis survey is about gray-asexuality and grayromanticism. Anyone is invited to take it, regardless of identity. The purpose of this survey is to investigate perspectives on these identities and how they are understood.
Click here to take the survey. It will remain open until September 15th.
Questions about the survey can be asked in the comments below (no account required) or via this contact form.
If you can, please spread this survey and help collect more responses. So far, it has been shared to Pillowfort, Tumblr, Twitter, AVEN, Arocalypse, Dreamwidth, and Reddit.
Preview image: Shadows & Fog by Adam Baker, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
This month, Sildarmillion selected “beyond attraction” as the theme for the Carnival of Aces. I appreciate this theme because over the past decade or so, the ace community has become saturated with what I have called attraction fixation or attraction-based essentialism. For instance, you can see a lot of this in the AVEN debates over the phrase “little or no” (note, this series is PF login-only). Other examples, while less extreme, still reflect an attempt to isolate one specific feeling or experience that aces don’t have, which I think is inadvisable as well as unnecessary. When people take this kind of approach to asexuality, it generally reflects an ignorance of the history and prior debates on this subject.
Personally, I appreciate the “attraction” framework for describing certain kinds of experiences, but over the years I’ve gotten increasingly disillusioned about centering it in definitions of asexuality or gray-asexuality. Not only does that approach contribute to identity policing, but it also leaves a lot out of the picture, including what I consider to be more salient to my own identity as ace.
[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image: 1800 Series by Weijie, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.]
Continue readingAlthough zebras may be black and white, a lot of things in life are not — including when it comes to (a)sexuality, which is why we have words for the gray areas. Unfortunately, not everyone is on the same page about that. You probably already know what overt anti-grayness looks like, but even in communities that claim to support us, there can be a lot of more implicit ways to send a different signal. Here are fourteen signs that grayness isn’t entirely welcome in your communities.
Note in this post, I’m focusing on gray-asexuality, and I’m using grayness to talk about both gray-asexuality as an identity and grayness as an umbrella category for other identities like demi and lith. People among the latter may not necessarily answer to “gray-asexual” per se, but they can still be affected by anti-grayness as a phenomenon.
[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image: Black and White Stripes by Twjst, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.]
Continue readingThe field of asexuality studies* has grown a lot over the past decade, but generally the gray-asexual part of the umbrella receives minimal attention. Here I’ve compiled a sample of what that attention tends to look like. Note that most of these pieces have been covered by the Ace Journal Club, which provides a write-up with a summary and some notes, so I have included links to AJC posts where applicable.
[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image by Steve Johnson, licensed under CC BY 2.0.]
Continue readingThis is not a direct discussion of the “are aces queer” question. This is a personal reflection piece about what else has bloomed out of it like a fungus, modifying my relationship to all orientation labels other than ace.
[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image by OldTor, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.]
Continue readingA compilation of links on the gray areas of the ace & aro spectrums. Contributions welcome.
Note: some of these links have been copied over from Queenie’s 2014 teeny tiny linkspam on greyness, which is also worth checking out, but since it’s been a few years I decided to put together a new one in order to highlight some more recent posts, as well.
[Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image by Steve Johnson.]
Continue readingGray is a purposeful metaphor. An expression of imprecision, blending, and betweens.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about gray-asexuality again. It’s been a few years since I published “Experiences attraction infrequently” doesn’t cut it, and while I know that post is still useful to people, it’s also been long enough at this point that I’m embarrassed of my own writing. So this is a short reflection piece on why I still identify as gray-a, going on about six years now.
[This post has been crossposted to Pillowfort; cw: sexual violence mention.]
Continue reading
This post is my submission to the January 2018 Carnival of Aces under the theme of “Identity.” Specifically, this post deals with topics of sexuality, identity, alienation, labeling, doubt, touch, trauma, and abuse.
This impetus for this post is a tumblr post about “being stone vs. being asexual” that Rowan shared with me, after it came up as a recommended post on their dash. There’s maybe a few different things I would question in that post (emphasis on question, since some of it is beyond my depth), but maybe chief among them is how stone sexuality & asexuality are being presented as either/or, i.e. mutually exclusive.
It may seem strange, amid oodles of food analogies, but it occurred to me recently that I could craft a better analogy for my own experiences by comparing them to how I experience pain.
Just hear me out.
The Ace Theist 