Academics sure are bad at talking about abstinence, huh

lol nothing like a little academic reading on “purity culture” to reopen some old baggage

[cn: conservative Christian talk, anti-ace stuff, discussion of rape (fictional and political)]

on sexual abuse and the direction of imperatives

Hi, folks. If you don’t mind, let’s sit down and have a talk.  An actual, honest talk, if you will.

This is a post about the target audience of imperative grammar (i.e. command words) in the context of talking about abuse in relationships. It’s also a post about making moral-grounds proclamations about sexual violence. It’s also a post about the internalized obligation to have sex. It’s also a post about that thing that we usually call victim-blaming. It may even be a post about rape culture in the guise of fighting rape culture? And, basically, yelling at abuse victims to stop getting abused.

Straight privilege is

a steady tide of people in your comment section asking you for advice on how to violate their partner’s boundaries.

AA: 25 Years

[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.

An Incomplete Log of Inquiring Minds

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.

[cw: rape culture]

Today I found out someone linked one of my posts and a post of Libris’ in a post arguing that, as long as it’s within certain circumstances, it’s okay and even good for a man to make a woman have sex with him when she wants not to.  I will never sleep again.

an ethnography of running for your life

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.

Exploitation and Power

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)

Centering

Discussions of how to call out a perpetrator rarely centre on the survivor’s needs. “Avoiding defensiveness” provides the pretence to shift the discussion back to the needs of the perpetrator. Once a perpetrator has been called out, a similar framework is used to undermine support for a survivor. The false supporters endlessly reassure us that they are not angry that a perpetrator was called out, it’s only the way they were called out. The fact that a survivor would speak openly about their experiences is seemingly taken as more violent and controversial than the violence of those experiences themselves, which warrant very little discussion by comparison. How a survivor’s public response might reflect their needs does not seem to occur to the false supporters as they are so preoccupied with their need to preserve an artificial social peace. Again we see liberal tendencies rearing their head, as the false supporters’ insistence on denouncing the resistance of survivors, on claiming to also despise the Culture of Rape while simultaneously diminishing any fight against it, is reminiscent of liberals who claim to agree with the grievances of protesters and yet condemn any actions they might take to address them.

—Betrayal: a critical analysis of rape culture in anarchist subcultures, bolding added.  I have my misgiving about this zine but it’s got some good stuff and I might be posting more quotes from it soon.

anyway.

[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.