a steady tide of people in your comment section asking you for advice on how to violate their partner’s boundaries.
[cw: sex as a site of conflict in a relationship, antigay/homophobic analogy, atrocious rape analogy]
This one isn’t very long, but I’m going to address this one piece by piece instead of in block form.
Originally I intended to post this list as part of a larger post. For now, I’ve decided to post the list alone. Got a hunch it might be useful to link at some point.
Below, an incomplete list of certain kinds of search terms that have appeared on my stats page since 2014. Expect some callous ones.
A post in which I talk about some comments on another post of mine, entitled What To Do If You Think Your Partner Might Be Asexual.
Consequently, expect anti-ace hostility and rape apologism in spades. Please note that even for anti-ace hostility, some of these are unusually extreme.
Perhaps the most significant mitigating factor of these conditions is Power. Both the power a survivor holds in the community as well as the corresponding power of a perpetrator are key to shaping that community’s response. When a perpetrator holds very little power in comparison to a survivor, or when the perpetrator is not even part of the community, a token show of support costs little and helps maintain the benevolent veneer of Rape Culture. Of course, this is rarely the case. It has commonly been urged that support of a survivor should not be hindered by a perpetrator’s position of power in the community, but the position of power itself receives little scrutiny, as does any possible correlation between that position of power and interpersonal violence (which is itself a brutal expression of power). The failure to establish this link is like asking what came first, the chicken or the egg, and then insisting that the chicken and the egg have nothing to do with each other. This blind spot is especially curious amongst anarchists, who claim to oppose all forms of hierarchical power.
It follows that a genuine analysis of the functioning of Rape Culture must also include an analysis of the relationships of Power that govern our lives. This implicates not only the hierarchies, formal or otherwise, which persist even in anarchist spaces, but also the larger systems of power which inform them, such as Patriarchy, White Supremacy, Colonialism, Ableism and so on. We must acknowledge Rape Culture’s rightful place within Capitalist society. Through this we can recognize Rape Culture as a mechanism for social control, as it reinforces these systems of Power and domination which in turn reproduce it as well. It then becomes necessary to undermine the hierarchical divisions which serve to both facilitate interpersonal violence itself as well as shape the interests of those in a position to respond to it. Many anarchists rightly reject the navel gazing of identity politics, but a sharp analysis of systems of Power, the ways in which these systems offer privilege to some of us, yet oppression to others, and the ways in which our experiences of these systems of Power influence the ways we fight against them, is crucial to genuine resistance. To successfully attack a Culture of Rape, we must strike at the roots of this Power.
—Betrayal: a critical analysis of rape culture in anarchist subcultures (bolding added)
[cw: rape culture]
One of the highlights of this mess of a nightmare conversation, in which a BDSM practitioner kept getting randomly defensive at me as if I had personally attacked her and kept spectacularly failing to respond to what I was actually saying instead of her tightly-wound bundle of preconceived notions, has to be this part:
Why not lay out all your sex life so we can stand here and tell you how wrong it is and how pathetically uneducated you are?
Mmmmyou mean that thing I’ve already done and that thing that’s already been happening long before now? You’re late to the party.
I… just. For Pete’s sake. You’re talking to an ace on an ace blog about being ace and the issues related to that.
Being criticized for the sex I (don’t) have sure is a novel idea, a true equivalency, and a conversation I find too threatening to dare to have! That’s why I started a public ace blog, write about being criticized for the sex I don’t have, and have repeatedly argued with the creepy rape apologists who occasionally cross paths with me! Great going! You really got me there!
I could probably do a whole series of posts just responding to several different points of her nonsense, but I don’t actually want this to turn into a kink blog, so I’m still thinking about how to balance the thoughts she (and similar others) have stirred with my desire to keep this mostly an ace blog.
