Community Memory and the Search for Unassailable Abuse

Would you be okay with allowing everything you and your community have ever done to be forgotten, like it never even happened? I wouldn’t.

I don’t want ace community advocacy to be nothing but a sandcastle. That’s what it comes down to. I don’t think our conversations, debates, insights, projects, and accomplishments should be so ephemeral that only five or ten years down the line, you hear someone saying “how come nobody’s done this?” about something you’ve already done.

This post is about that kind of breakdown in community memory, but it’s also about why it matters. In this post I’m attempting to patch a memory gap about conversations that have already been had before — important conversations about objectifying rhetoric, poisonous community dynamics, and the search for unassailability. Ignoring those conversations runs the risk contributing to activist burnout, stifling our stories, and creating a treacherous environment for survivors of violence and abuse.

Crossposted to Pillowfort. Preview image: Candle Lights by Esteban Chiner, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Why I Can’t Trust You With The Term “Purity Culture”

A brief note about the title: the “you” here may not be you personally, and it’s not that the term “purity culture” doesn’t have its place. Rather, there are specific uses of this term that have put a dent in a speaker’s credibility for me and impeded their argument. In those moments, I’ve wished for the words to explain to them what I thought they were doing wrong. This post is my attempt to put together those words: first by explaining the origins of “purity culture,” leading into my understanding of its key traits, and then contrasting that against the kind of usage I see a problem with.

[Crossposted to Pillowfort.]

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.

Ace Community Issues Linkspam

A short linkspam of linkspams (and some individual posts) on ace intersections, including intracommunity issues and problems faced outside the community.  I’m still not all there in the head but, hey, wanted to do a thing, still.

Note in case of tumblrwarp: please visit the original wordpress post in case of future edits/updates.

Gender (Identity and Alignment) – Carnival of Aces November 2011: Gender and Carnival of Aces March 2016: Gender Norms and Asexuality feature posts on being trans, being female, and being nonbinary.

Race and Ethnicity – Vesper’s APoC Resources page has tons of links to content on/by/for asexual people of color, including articles and videos on racism inside and outside of the community, such as The Large Space That White Supremacy Occupies In Conversations About Sexuality.

You can also find some posts on being Jewish in the roundup for Carnival of Aces October 2014.

Gay, Bi, and Queer – On this subject, I’d highlight Living gay (and ace), On “no romo”, and Being asexual, “of the bi-ish persuasion,” and afraid, as well as this post on guilt over desire for representation. For further reading, see Queenie’s so-called teeny tiny linkspam on asexuality and queerness.

Illness and Disability – Carnival of Aces June 2015: Mental Health  and Carnival of Aces October 2013: Disability and Asexuality feature posts on being mentally ill, being disabled, and choices on the part of the ace community, disability activists, and health care providers.

Sexual Violence – Queenie’s Ace Survivors as Rhetorical Devices series explains how to avoid damaging rhetoric about survivors of sexual violence.

The RFAS (Resources for Ace Survivors) Recommended Reading page covers a broader range of topics under the same umbrella of asexuality and sexual violence.

Miscellaneous – Examples of Bad Ace Advice and Hezza’s Asexual identity prescriptivism linkspam address identity-policing and other issues.

On abused consent

Hey guess what I’ve been thinking about again also.  Did you guess CSA rhetoric?  Because the answer is CSA rhetoric.

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.

Supportive Words for the Gray Areas

More than a year ago I wrote this post on “gray area” violence that has now made it onto the RFAS Recommended Reading page.  Reflecting back on that now, I’ve got some thoughts on how to give reassurance to people whose stories set off those kinds of red flags for you — when someone relates a past experience that sounds, to you, exactly like rape, sexual assault, or abuse, but they themselves explicitly communicate that, for whatever reason, they see it as more of a gray area.

Here’s a rough outline of what’s been helpful and unhelpful, in my experience, from on both sides of the problem.

You can (still) take it back.

[cw: rape culture, invalidation talk, and abstract talk of rape, CSA, etc. including vague talk of personal experiences]

Here is a response to the consent model I just talked about.

I’ll be quoting/responding in snippets, so if you want the full context, you can check the links first.

Preemptive vs. Concurrent + Reflective Consent

Here’s an idea I heard from someone else and want to pass along.  It’s relevant to starchythoughts’ post Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality, and I’m writing about it partially in response to Vesper’s more recent reflection post and the kinds of things they wrote about here.

x

Vesper’s been writing Things that make me want to write Things but I’m kinda scared & also my thoughts are disorganized.

One of the Things is a summary/rephrasing/discussion of a consent model post by someone else… which I’m ambivalent about referencing because then I’d be expected to link it, and it’s kind of weird if I don’t — but the original post has… stuff that I’m not even sure how to word the trigger warnings for.  ‘Cause I feel like those are less effective when they’re too vague for you to know what kind of stuff you’re in for, if that makes sense.  So I dunno how to handle that.  When you’re too vague, people just get curious, you know?  And I don’t want that to become a distraction.

The other of the Things is a personal story but oh God I don’t know how to prepare for the emotional fallout.