The “Carnival of Aces” is a blogging carnival where each month people are invited to write about a specific topic that is related to asexuality/the ace spectrum in some way. Or creators can participate in other formats including video, poetry, art etc.
It’s now April 2019, and it is the sixth time that I am hosting the carnival. Before, I hosted select months in 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018. You can find those in the masterpost.
I was surprised to realize that not that much has been written explicitly on asexuality and this concept of “The Five Love Languages”. Wikipedia explains more but the basic takeway is that most people have a way they communicate love and not all humans have the same way. People can feel like someone they care about isn’t ever expressing their love if the two people in that dynamic have mismatched love languages.
As is typical for me I’m late, I but still decided to write something for The Carnival of Aces. The theme this past month was “Asexuality as a Blessing”. Also note that I’ve written this all on my phone and so some odd errors might show up in this. Feel free to point them out to me and I’ll fix them!
As an atheist, to be quite frank, the entire concept of blessings fundamentally clashes with my worldview. However metaphorically, or in a symbolic way, I still can appreciate certain things in life as reminiscent of the concept of a blessing (or, conversely, a curse).
Greta Christina writes from an atheist perspective often very similar to my own, and she discusses feeling fortunate for all the things that believers in a god might frame as a gift they’d been given. I have plenty of those feelings too for all sorts of things in my life, sure. I appreciate the ways things work out for me in my life circumstances in various venues. In fact, even when I did “earn” or do “deserve” certain things, I acknowledge that not everyone who deserves or earns certain good stuff ends up getting it and I can be appreciative of my situation in many many cases.
can… be a major source of stress that can put ace activists at risk of experiencing burnout – the state that results when the continued stress of an activity becomes overwhelming, to the point where individuals may find themselves less and less able to continue with it.
[o]ccupational burnout is thought to result from long-term, unresolvable, job stress.
But personally don’t feel that close to burning out. On the contrary, I think I successfully keep adding fresh fuel to my fire. I’m energized, fulfilled, and engaged. Most places consider “engagement” to be the opposite of “burnout”.
I apologize for any autocorrect typos, I wrote this whole thing on my phone. Let me know kindly and I can fix them.
Two years ago, in September 2016, I wrote a prose poem about my asexual experience without really realizing I was writing poetry again. (“Again”, because I hadn’t written any poetry in 4.5 years, since my Creative Writing class my final semester of college ended.) September 2016 was during that blip in time when Imzy existed and I was in the 100 words community, challenged to write exactly 100 words, no more and no less, on a different prompt each week.
The concept was always framed with a presupposition; there would of course come a point in time when I’d be ready. When that time came, I needed to be armed with knowledge. I must brace for the emotional consequences. Itwas an inevitability.
So I learned. For over a decade of my life, I prepared. I absorbed more information than was really necessary. I planned ahead.
But society was wrong. Maybe all along I’d been a broken clock. I’d felt stuck. I tried to push myself forward.
As it turns out, though, I am the flower doomed to never bloom.
I am still not entirely sure if it counts as a poem. But writing about an asexual experience with metaphors and without ever once using the word asexual seemed poetic somehow to me.
It was a start of something.
A key concept from those hundred words made it into a stanza of my new poem, No “Just” About It that I wrote two years later in September 2018 — just last month (as of the time of me writing this blog post) — and which was published in The Asexual (edit/update: AZE Journal now), a literary journal. My second piece of writing to be published in one of the issues of this journal but my first poem.
This poem is kinda… Political. It’s also fun. We’re often our own harshest critics but to me it seems apparent that it’s not very impressive from an artistic standpoint. But I’m glad I decided to write it, and I didn’t let the genre of poetry intimidate me away from something relatively simple like this.
If The Asexual didn’t exist as a platform I never would’ve thought to write poetry with asexual themes so I’m very grateful to Michael Paramo and everyone there who keeps it running.
From 2004 through 2008 when I was ages 14 through 18 and in high school, all four years I participated as part of the literary magazine club after school. We accepted fiction but mainly received poetry and a little bit of art. Once a week after school our club would read aloud as a group, discuss the merits of, and also respectfully criticize each submission. They would be typed up to anonymize each submission ahead of the discussion, no author listed and no handwriting to recognize. We were always keeping in mind the possibility that the author could be one of us in the room so we had to be careful not to be unkind in our criticism. (I don’t think the visual art pieces needed to be discussed; I think maybe they automatically got in.)
The “Carnival of Aces” is a blogging carnival where each month people are invited to write on a specific topic that is related to asexuality/the ace spectrum in some way.
(Also, vloggers are invited to speak on the topic in videos, artists/poets invited to be inspired by the topic, etc — whatever format you wish to participate with, please, use that format.)
For this current month, March 2018, this is the fifth time that I am hosting the carnival. Before, I hosted select months in 2014, 2015, and 2017. This time, since we’ve done mental health twice but never physical health, I decided to make the topic Physical Health and/or Our Bodies.
It may also have overlap with plenty of the things people ended up writing about when the theme was gender or about being nonbinary.
It probably has overlap with plenty of other topics the Carnival has been themed around in the past, the one on Touch, that one time about Kink, heck even my own theme of Sex-Aversion and Sex-Repulsion…
So maybe me listing all that is already giving you ideas for what you could now write. You may have not been able to submit for one of those old carnivals, but you can submit something now that ties into the current theme!
The point is literally anything having to do with physical health or our physical bodies and how it intersects with asexuality.
A bunch of ideas on what people might write about:
Hormone-related stuff, like hypothyroidism, HRT (Hormone replacement therapy) as an option for trans folks, and more in this regard
Masturbation or Sex-Drive/Libido, including if you wish to write about a non-existent Sex-Drive
Kink, quite possibly non-sexual kink, of the varieties that have to do with your body
Your relationship to sexual actions with other people
Your relationship to “sensual” actions with other people, and I’m using that word in the ace way to mean things that are non-sexual but still physically intimate
Gynecologist related thoughts
Or thoughts related to asexuality & your primary care physician
Body-image could probably be a big part of this theme
Any physical disability you want to write about including chronic illness and how this intersects or doesn’t with asexuality
etc! If I didn’t list something and you’re not sure if it’s close enough to the topic, go for it! We want the only tangentially related stuff too, truly. We want the stuff I didn’t think of. More posts is always good!
Let me know in the comments (or by email, etc) if you have any questions or concerns.
To submit your entry, either leave a comment below or send an email to me at pemk7@aol.com . The deadline is the end of the day Saturday, March 31st! If you would like to post anonymously, I can copy and paste text from an email into a Guest post on this blog of mine, just let me know that this is your wish. You can also contact me via my tumblr, which is luvtheheaven.tumblr.com – links don’t send in “Asks” though, so I’ll never get your post if you try to send a link that way. I do receive submissions and messages but in my opinion, email is easier, and comments here are easiest.
This is my first submission for the Carnival of Aces October 2017, themed around Asexuality in Fandom. The call for submissions is here. A definition of fandom for the sake of this carnival topic is here in the comments of the call for submissions announcement.
So I know this blog post below is a stretch when it comes to fitting this requirement of the carnival, especially in light of this explicitly being said in the call for submissions:
Be mindful that this call for submissions is not looking for fanwork, but for meta (aka discussions about fanwork, fandom and the way it relates to its source text and social context) either about the fandom(s) you participate in or about fandom in general. You can add some examples or recs, but make sure to focus on the analysis part.
However, I figure this compilation would be something fans of my blog here might be curious to finally see—seeing exactly how I sometimes inject asexuality into my fan endeavors. I blog so much about asexuality, and all the while the word “Fandom” has been in the title of my blog. When I hosted the Carnival of Aces 4 different times I didn’t ever think to make it about fandom specifically!! But someone else (Chrysocolla Town) did, and I appreciate it so much.
I’ll make this not just a list of my ace fanworks by also, in “meta” form, I’ll explain some of my thoughts behind working on them. 😉
(I’m sorry if this post is simply too long, I got a little carried away…)
So the most recent “fandom mixed with asexuality” thing I’ve done is… well, actually, it’s that I’ve written a fanfic that I haven’t actually posted yet.
So… The most recent fanwork I’ve actually finished is THIS, posted in September 2017:
And I’m very proud of this fanvideo of mine. I made it for a contest where each round is themed around capturing personal sides to our own life/who we are. For this round, we had to vid “our breaking point”, and at first I wasn’t sure what to do. The obvious answer was something to do with my abusive mom, cutting off contact, other moments related to those periods of my life… that all was very much “breaking points” in my life. However years ago in a couple of different contests I’ve vidded I’ve already captured in fanvideo form my feelings about my mother. I have that already on my channel. I also within the past year vidded my emotions over my grief over my grandmother. That was another low point in my life. But this… I’d never captured my own personal experience of asexuality in fanvideo form. I’d made an informational fanvideo on asexuality before (see way down later in this post) but never a personal one. And this was an emotionally trying time for me.
I participate in this type of fanvideo contest where we vid personal things because I find it’s a way to vid things I really want to capture in fanvid form, to make a video I really want to make but probably wouldn’t without added incentive to do it, so I ultimately got myself excited about making this once I thought of the idea. It took a lot of time and effort to get the clips and figure out how I was going to do it though. I used a pretty popularly vidded song (“overvidded” in many of the fandom circles I hang out in, perhaps, or at least not “undervidded”), one that has made me think of asexuality every time I saw a fanvideo set to it and again heard the chorus about wanting to sleep next to someone and that being ALL they wanted to do “right now”…
I found a female cover version of the song. A cover was in part because many vidders have found the original to be copyrighted and blocked in some countries on YouTube and they had to pitch-shift the song in order to share their video, but also mainly I wanted a female singer anyway (the original is sung by a guy) because I wanted to capture the importance of the female POV in my journey. There isn’t enough female ace representation, especially on TV, and in headcanons in fanfiction, and maybe in novels too… and I find the fact that I’m female and ace an important nuance to capture. I tried to mainly show women’s POV throughout the vid… I included many characters to span varying parts of my journey and all were women or teenage girls (including canonical female ace Voodoo on Sirens) except for two canonically ace men (Todd in BoJack Horseman but just one scene for him, also a few scenes of Gerald from Southland Street), plus one particular headcanonned as ace male character who to me feels practically canon ace, an extra personal and extra important-to-me to include guy, even though much of fandom doesn’t agree he’s ace: Reid.
Yeah, about Reid…
The not yet quite finished and most recent ace fanwork I’ve been working on is:
I’ve finally written 3,300 words of a story which is tentatively titled Reflections on Love and Life where Spencer Reid from Criminal Minds is an asexual character. After I finish the final part of writing this fic, which is likely only maybe 100 more words, it really is so close… and also after it is beta’d (a fellow fan writer works as an editor with helpful suggestions to improve it) I will post it publicly on my fanfiction.net account as well as on my AO3 profile.
I say “finally” because I’ve been headcannoning Reid as asexual since I started watching the show, actually. I started watching Criminal Minds at the end of 2013, and binge watched all 8.5 seasons that existed at the time, and loved it so much. (I was unemployed and had extra time for watching TV, for what that’s worth.) But the end of 2013 was also when I knew I was ace. I figured out, after months of sitting on the idea, that I was definitely ace at the start of Asexual Awareness Week 2013, around October 21st or 22nd of that year. And I had been in fandom spaces, enjoying TV shows, for years and years, but Criminal Minds was the very first show I started watching, freshly experiencing it, after knowing I myself am asexual.
Not only that, but Reid being headcanoned as asexual is something I saw at least one other person, probably multiple other people, do. I knew quite early oh that I wasn’t alone in this interpretation! This was really validating and comforting.
Today, in the afternoon into evening as we went grocery shopping at a few stores and then cooked dinner together, I had some amazing conversations with my dad, spanning:
the nature of asexuality and aromanticism
the complexities of what different people experience
the often unintentional and subtle erasure in TV shows
multiple real people’s experiences in the local ace meetup group and what that ends up playing out like
etc
And basically I was engaging in a much more 201 (rather than 101), in-depth version of asexuality education, imparting my nuanced lived experience from 4-ish years exploring these topics and what’s been on my mind lately to a straight ally who has enough foundational groundwork to basically “Get” all of it.
For this month’s Carnival of Aces, one of the suggestions of topics we could talk about was:
How can those of us who aren’t professional educators teach about asexuality? What are some good places/resources to start? Is anyone currently looking for people to teach about asexuality?
and I think there are so many ways!! It’s such a complicated topic.
We’ll get to Ace Pride by the end of this post. First, I need to talk about Ace Shame.
[Content note: Heavy discussion of anti-ace sentiments, invalidation, shame, negative emotions, etc. Some NSFW text. Unhappy ace/allo sexual relationship dynamics also touched upon. It’s a bit of a rambling mess too.]
shame:n. A painfulemotioncaused by thebeliefthatoneis, or is perceived by others to be,inferior or unworthy of affection or respectbecause of one’sactions,thoughts,circumstances, or experiences.
What is there to be proud of? Isn’t asexuality nothing?
pride: n. a feeling of honourandself-respect; a sense of personalworth
“Are you sure you’re not repressed? because you grew up Catholic?”
“Maybe you should talk to a doctor about your hormone levels.”
“WAIT — you’re 22 and you’ve neverbeen kissed??”
The 40 Year Old Virgin is a great movie, made me cry. I’m so happy that he finally lost his virginity at the end.
“It’s natural and healthy to have sexual thoughts and desires”.
You’re betraying feminists if you fight Flibanserin (Addyi) being on the market.
“Who do you have a crush on?”
“You should watch this tv show, if for no other reason than the eye candy, you know what I mean? 😉 “
“Philosophical or psychological hypothesis: What if all human desires are, deep down, influenced by sex because it’s instinctual that we need to want sex in order for our species to survive? I mean it’s probably true, it just makes sense.”
My mom: “You don’t have to get Confirmed Catholic if you really don’t want to however… You might want to belong to a church for when you get married?”
“A soulmate is your other half, the person who completes you, everyone is waiting to find theirs unless they are so lucky to have already found them.”
lust can be such a powerful feeling that it motivates people to cheat with a stranger they just met
“without ‘passion’ in that marriage can you blame that miserable spouse for cheating?”
OK Cupid question: “How many dates will you want to go on before you’re ready for sex? One? Three? 12?” (See the 100 words prose poem thing I wrote, which I just tonight posted about this topic.)
Check a box: “Which of the three fits you best: straight, gay, or bi?”
“Have you tried having sex with both men and women and didn’t like it? Only men? You probably just didn’t give being lesbian enough of a chance.”
“Ok interesting. But. Are you absolutely sure you haven’t just not met the right person yet? You don’t want to close yourself off to that possibility too young” (said to me when I’m 24.)
Me before I accepted I’m ace: “I… this first kiss to you feels just as lackluster as the other time I tried kissing a different person last year. I need to admit something… I’m starting to worry I might be asexual, unfortunately. I like you a lot as a person already, so maybe I’ll turn out to be demisexual? Over time? (If we… fall in love or something?)”
It’s the standard narrative. Boy meets girl. One is too traumatized or just mistrustful of the world. Let’s say it’s the girl this time. The guy loves her hard enough, for long enough… that she learns to love him back with time. Or she suddenly has a revelation that the love of her life has been there all along. He might be suddenly attractive to her too. Like Lois and Clark in versions of their story where you see them before they get together. And wow. They feel all the feelings. They have a magical kiss or even the best sex ever by the end of the story. Happily ever after. It wouldn’t be a happy ending without getting together romantically.
“I’ve never met anyone who’s asexual before. (That can’t be real.)”
“Oh, that explains a lot about our conversations these past years. I always just thought maybe you were a bit prudish.”
Isn’t the idea of being proud to be ace arrogant, elitist, and saying you’re better than people who have sexual desires, shaming them for that, and that’s not cool?
“You’re lucky you’re ace. I wish I was ace. You have it so easy.”
Sorry I decided to write such a downer of a post for such a seemingly happy theme. I kind of went a pretty… different direction than the other entries. At first I wondered if I was completely going off topic but now I realize… My post is basically a long answer to (Purr)ple(L)ace’s final bullet point in the suggested topics:
How do displays of pride (in whatever forms you choose to show it) help you deal with any negative aspects of being ace? How do they help you love/accept yourself and your asexuality more?
This is of course late – yes, it’s already February – but actually this was written for the January 2017 Carnival of Aces, which was themed “Many Ways to Be Ace”. The call for submissions was here, and I’ll update this post with the round up of submissions sometime soon.
I’m an openly asexual person. Not only that but on a surprisngly large number of occasions I’ve been a person’s first and/or main exposure to asexuality, most often either through my use of Tumblr, or through an in-person coming out.
Sure, peopledon’t have toapply* the split-attraction model to themselves if they don’t want to. That’s what the vast majority of supporters of this model say – only use it if you want to. If it feels right.
And if I’m having a lot of trouble coming up with any identity label that feels right to me other than just “asexual”, then maybe I should consider myself to simply be asexual, end of story. Maybe I should not apply the split attraction model to myself. Maybe that’d be the easiest, simplest solution. Maybe that’s all I need to do.
But there are a lot of reasons that it makes sense for me to want to apply it to myself.
One of the main reasons is that I am a member of a group (the online ace blogging community, specifically) where most people seem to apply a romantic orientation to themselves, and if they don’t actively claim one, with time they tend to eventually accept that they are aromantic – by default, by nature of not dating, etc.
Another reason I feel like I need a romantic orientation is because, while I know I am cisgender (female), I need to clarify exactly why I’m not “het” in the way the “aces aren’t LGBT” discourse on tumblr lately has been going, talking about “cishet aces” to… at their most generous, only mean the heteroromantic aces. Because at this point in my introspection, one thing I do know deep down is that I’m not heteroromantic.
Now “not wanting to be marked as cishet” is not just me trying to be “a special snowflake”, although I’ve let that cross my mind. No. That’s unfair to me and so so many other aces.
From Fandom to Family 