All Third Wheeled and Nowhere to Go

A post for the July Carnival of Aces, on the theme of “Home.”

In my culture, there’s two main categories of people you’re expected to live with, in the long run: family members and (romantic) partners. If you’re thinking about how asexuality affects who you live with, talking about romantic relationships is the most obvious connection to make—that’s one of the oldest topic in the community. If you wanted links on the subject, I wouldn’t even know where to start. There’s also plenty already out there on asexuality and family, usually in the vein of guides for parents or advice/reflections on coming out. There was even a previous Carnival of Aces on the subject.

But under the umbrella of “people you live with,” for many of us there’s actually a third category, and that’s the nebulous category roommates. There’s not nearly so much discussion of asexuality & roommates, presumably because the two are expected to have nothing to do with each other. Or, if an ace identity is relevant to a relationship with a roommate somehow, it’s expected that will occur only in the context of a friendship, meaning that any relevant reflections or advice will fall under the more general category of dealings with friends. Whether or not you live together is (ostensibly) supposed to have nothing to do with it. At least, that’s what I gather from the comparative silence on the subject. You can find a few AVEN threads and reddit threads about roommate issues, or the occasional comment thread, but it’s not anything people are writing big official guides about.

Which is unfortunate, from my perspective, because I could have used one.

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.

♦

tfw you want to talk to your therapist about some stress-amplified health issues but then you realize you can’t do that without spilling that a few months back there was a big spike in your suicidality and you can’t explain *that* without revealing your sex repulsion :/

>>

me: huh, well, it’s been a while, maybe my sex repulsion has just faded away at this poi-

movie trailer: *has a split second of sexual content*

me: nope, nope nope nope, definitely still here

thinking about high school assignments again

[cw: rape]

In my first year of high school, I was assigned to read a book with a subplot where a girl has pity sex with a boy because he’s a virgin, and whose plot and characters did not make nearly as lasting an impression as the rape/incest joke I can remember almost word for word.  In my second year of high school, I was assigned to read a book where I saw some of my own sexuality represented in literature for the first time, as a key part of a dystopian regime, and where the protagonist contemplates becoming a rapist out of irritation with an evil prude.  In my third year of high school, I was assigned to read the friggin Scarlet Letter, a book which could not possibly be more melodramatically obsessed with how awful the Puritans are — not for being racist, or misogynist, or any of the other things that the book gleefully embraces, but for being such darn prudes.  In my fourth year of high school, I was assigned to read another book where one of the main characters contemplates becoming a rapist because of an evil prude, a character whom one of my classmates described as an “All-American Hero” and who is overtly celebrated in the book.

You know, sometimes, I feel like how messed up I am is way out of proportion to my actual life experience, but when I get to thinking about the kind of things I had to read and hear as a teen kid, I kinda have to wonder how I didn’t turn out worse.

dirty trashy prude

[cw: sex talk, misogyny]

Initially I wrote an introduction to this but instead just have this list:

the superpower I didn’t know I had

The other day I was talking with a friend and someone else about this event that’ll be going on out in the desert this summer, and they let slip that a lot of people at that event like to walk around naked, since they’re “away from society’s rules” and whatever.

So I said I could never go to an event like that, then, because I really dislike seeing naked people.

And my friend looks at me and jokes, “You could just take off your glasses.”

Ah, yes.  My own personal censorship program.  Thanks.

⚀⚁⚂

add-on recs needed

I’m thinking about getting ponify or some similar browser tool to replace every instance of the word “orgasm” with “root beer.”

tapping on the glass, pt. 2

A sequel to this mess.