accessible aspec positivity

it’s so wonderful that you’ve found language to describe your experiences as they’ve changed, that you’ve gotten to better know yourself !!

i know it can sometimes be scary and hard and confusing to question and re-evaluate your identity, and i’m so proud of you for that !!

even in spite of other people’s misconceptions surrounding what it means to be demisexual or demiromantic, you are still allowed to identify as demisexual and/or demiromantic !! 

you have every right to describe your experiences with the words that feel most comfortable and useful to you !!

additionally, you are allowed to change the words you are using to describe your experiences as your experiences change or your understanding of your experiences change !!

you’re not bad or wrong for now identifying as demi after previously identifying as aro/ace !! you are not responsible for the misconceptions surrounding asexuality and aromanticism, or the idea that aro/ace people “just need to find the one” !!

you still have a space in the ace and/or aro communities, and you still absolutely have a space in the overall lgbtq+ community !!

your identity is 1000% yours to define and label and describe in the ways that make you feel best and most comfortable and no one is allowed to tell you otherwise; you are deserving of so much love, respect, and support, both for your identity/identities and for yourself !! 

the majority of the lgbtq+ community sees you and accepts you as a part of the community and in queer spaces. i know seeing all the hate on here from within the community can be incredibly disheartening and exhausting, but aphobes are just a loud and angry minority, they are not the norm in actual queer spaces.

I did a very quick, sketchy comic because I was extremely inspired by this post. (Credit to @pinkdiamondprince for the original post.)

[id: a comic comprised of a series of simple black and white digital sketches. The following are the drawing panels and captions in story order—

1. A simply drawn person stands with a confused expression on their face. Beside them float question marks colored in with the aro and ace pride flags. Above and around them, in black handwriting, narration reads “Trying to figure out if you’re ace or aro can be hard, because it’s trying to find the absence of something.”

2. “Imagine you’re at a pond,” it continues, “and you want to know if there are turtles at the pond.” The person stands on a rock at the edge of a small pond, peering down into the water.

3. “Say you find a turtle,” the narrator says. The person picks up a turtle, holding it up to their face as they both smile at each other. “Great! Now you know there are turtles.”

4. “But say you don’t find any turtles,” it reads. “Maybe there are no turtles.” The person shrugs, smiling. “Or maybe you’re just bad at looking for turtles.” The person gets down onto their hands and knees to look under a rock, but they find nothing. “And maybe you THINK you saw a turtle”—the person stands up, surprised, as they notice a turtle-shaped shadow from the corner of their eye—“but it was just a stick”. The person picks up the stick, annoyed.

5. A single turtle stands on a small hill. “Maybe there are only a few turtles.” The person is shown again, looking troubled, their head in their hand. “Maybe you need to do something special to find the turtles.”

6. Two turtles stand among turtle-sized rocks. “Maybe some of these rocks are actually turtles, but you couldn’t tell them apart.” The pond is shown, completely empty. “Maybe there just are no turtles.”

7. The person looks down sadly, discouraged. “You just...don’t know.”

8. Four new people are shown, saying the following lines—“And people are like, ‘There HAVE to be turtles! You’ll find them!’ and ‘How many turtles have you found in your pond?’ and ‘Try planting some vegetables at the shore to attract them!’ and ‘Oh no! What disaster happened that there are no turtles in your pond?’”

9. The original person is shown again, disgruntled; standing with their shoulders slouching, mud up to their waist, and a large net hanging loosely from their hand. The narrator says “And you’re just standing there, wet, with an empty net and a tired expression.”

10. “But whatever,” it continues as the empty pond is shown again, “because whether there are turtles or not, your pond’s ecology works just fine without them.” Now there are both a heron and a frog, shown living happily. “Because that’s what ecosystems do,” the narrator says. “They form a system with what they have.”

11. The person sits at the edge of their pond, smiling as they splash their feet in the water. “You aren’t missing anything if you don’t have turtles. In fact–“ the person stands up and runs, worried, towards another person who’s walking towards the pond with a basket full of turtles. “If someone tried to pour a bunch of turtles in, it’d probably screw something up,” the narrator continues.

12. “So you don’t have to be totally sure,” it says as the original person shrugs with a smile. “You don’t have to search every inch of the pond before deciding there are probably no turtles.” The person wipes their brow, relieved.

13. “If you want to take the aro/ace label because you think it fits, GO FOR IT.” The person stands with their back to the viewer, looking out over their pond as the sun sets. “And if you do find turtles, you can always rename the pond.”

14. “SO GO FOR IT,” the comic concludes.

End id]

I’m so proud to announce that I am the first-ever openly asexual person in Paper Magazine! It’s a great step for asexual visibility, I can’t believe I’m in a publication like this speaking about the importance of asexual visibility. Your support has made this happen. We are here, we are being seen. 

Spread the word! 

When we talk about the LGBTQIA+ community, there still isn’t a lot of talk about the “A” portion, and that’s something UK-based model and activist Yasmin Benoit is actively trying to change.

As an asexual and aromantic person, Benoit does not experience sexual or romantic attraction. And while she’s spent the majority of her life comfortable with this knowledge, it’s also something she knows isn’t the case for many others — and a lot of this can be chalked up to a dearth of asexual and aromantic representation.

So, using the platform and visibility she built as a model, Benoit has spent the past two years making videos, writing posts, and giving talks about the topic, which is still rife with misinformation and harmful stereotypes. According to her, “when you say you don’t experience romance and sexuality and that those things are, innately, not a part of you, people think you’re less human,” which she says is a result of the importance society places sexuality.

“[They say] you’re robotic. You’re psychopathic. I often get narcissistic,” as Benoit explains, before launching into the misconceptions she has to deal with on a daily basis. The biggest one? Her occupation, especially when it comes to her work with lingerie, almost always elicits a confused public reaction. Even though the rationale behind modeling lingerie is simple: she likes the garments and enjoys mixing up her portfolio.

“People find it weird as an overlap, because I’m asexual,” she explains. “People think if you’re modeling lingerie, something sexual is going on. They don’t realize I’m just standing there for a couple hours, making a little conversation and shaking hands, before I go home.”

Yet despite Benoit’s sound logic, she says she still, on the daily, runs into a lot of questions surrounding her job, which is “seen as an oxymoron” — likely due to the inherent sexualization of lingerie modeling. That said, she says this isn’t the most troubling assumption she’s had to deal with, as exemplified by the myriad of invasive questions pertaining to why she’s asexual and aromantic.

“Literally, yesterday, I had a man insisting I had been molested, and I was just hiding it and repressing it,” she uses as an example. “He was insistent that that was obviously my issue. They think sexual attraction is the most human thing ever, and it’s impossible to not feel that. You can’t be human if you don’t feel anything.”

Sadly though, this sort of presumptuous projection and unfounded theorization has been happening to her from before she even figured out that there was terminology for how she felt. As Benoit says, she’d constantly be “quizzed on my sexuality” from the time she was around 9.

“Once other people around me started getting more hormonal, more into dating and going out with each other, I was like, ‘This is kind of silly. I just want to stick by myself and play with my Legos,’” she recalls. “I assumed it would kick in for me, but it wasn’t something I encouraged.”

Unfortunately, Benoit says that once people began noticing that she “wasn’t reacting to things the same way” as other girls her age — talking about her crushes or fantasizing about boys — they began coming up with theories, with some people even going so far as to tell her about their hypotheses, which ranged from theories about her being gay, a religious prude, a potential survivor of sexual abuse, or “just mentally slow.”

“Because I wasn’t reacting like everyone else, they concluded that I was stupid,” Benoit explains, also mentioning that she’s had to put up with other people assuming that she was repressing sexual trauma or that she was hiding a secret perversion. “But I just didn’t understand why other people were trying to work it out for me, because there wasn’t really anything to work out. I hadn’t been molested. I don’t have sexual hang-ups. I’m not against sex. There was nothing to work out.”

That said, even once she learned about asexuality and aromanticism, that apparently “didn’t stop people from coming up with theories” — including her own father, who she says recently went so far as to accuse her of pedophilia. But all the naysay has also, in part, spurred Benoit to dive into the world of activism.

As Benoit started gaining traction as a model, she began toying with the idea of mentioning her asexuality online in an effort to reach others grappling with their asexuality. This all resulted in a casual post about the topic, as well as the release of a video called “Things Asexual Girls Don’t Want to Hear” — something she genuinely “didn’t think people would care that much about,” but ended up “spiraling, because not a lot of people talk about it.”

“The asexual community was very happy to see someone with a platform discussing it,” Benoit explains, later adding that she had “people messaging me how much it meant to them, which [made me feel like], if doing something so simple is really impacting people’s lives, I might as well keep doing it.” Benoit adds that she’d love to see more asexual and aromantic role models out there, especially since the stigma is so prevalent. After all, as Benoit explains, a lack of visibility and understanding surrounding asexuality and aromanticism makes those grappling with their identities much more hesitant to “come out” — whether we’re talking about men, for whom sexual desire is “seen as such a quintessential trait of masculinity,” or an asexual person who doesn’t want to potentially “embarass” their romantic partner.

For now though, Benoit is doing what she can, with her most prominent push toward asexual visibility so far being a hashtag she started last year called #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike, which aims to “dispel the idea that theres an asexual way to look or dress.”

“People often say I don’t look asexual, and I don’t dress asexual, but what do you think that looks like then?” she explains. “I was trying to show the diversity of the community and, at the same time, give a tool back to others, so that they can represent themselves without relying on the media.”

“There is a lot of stigma still around, so asexual people can go decades without realizing there’s a word for what they’re not feeling.”

That said, Benoit’s also quick to posit that while her asexuality and aromanticism have “never been a secret,” it took her until that point to “realize I was filling a space and providing that visibility, especially for asexual minorities.” That said, she also mentions that being a Black asexual activist is also an especially tenunous task, as there’s a huge racial disparity when it comes to visibility.

“People perceive my asexuality differently than white asexual people,” Benoit says, before mentioning the televised version of a documentary that she was cut out of — something she believes is “reflective of people higher up in the company who looked at us and was like, 'She doesn’t make sense.’”

However, in the uncut version posted online, Benoit said the comments about her were much more “sexually aggressive and racialized” than what the other white activists got. “There was a lot more anger directed at me,” she says. “People find it harder to compute that a Black woman can be asexual just because we’re hypersexualized a lot more.”

And though she acknowledges the difficulties of being a Black activist, Benoit says she’s undeterred in her mission to continue spreading visibility and tackling the misconceptions and stigma surrounding asexuality and aromanticism. Her next steps? According to Benoit, she’s currently working on a BBC radio series about asexuality, starring in another documentary about the topic, and potentially doing more talks at sex-positivity conferences and international Pride events. However, she’s also eager to help organize more events in the UK that would provide physical spaces for asexual and aromantic people to convene and feel seen as well as supported by others.

“There is a lot of stigma [and misconception] still around, so even asexual people can go decades without realizing there’s a word for what they’re not feeling,” Benoit says. “That has to change.”

Article written by Sandra Song.

In addition to linking to allo-aro folks, I’m going to post something I’ve been working on: The Allo-Aro Community Directory. (Hosted on WordPress, currently focused on Tumblr blogs; I am in want of non-Tumblr communities, social media accounts and websites to list here.) I won’t say it’s complete because I’m sure I’ve forgotten people I shouldn’t, but if you’re after more allo-aro blogs and content, this should work as a starting point. I’ve got a section for community-style/themed blogs and a section for individual bloggers/creators.

Community-style/themed blogs for allo-aros include:

@allo-aro​

@alloarocommunity​

@allo-aro-positivity

@an-alloaro-blog​

@aroallostuff​

@aromantic-mlm​

@star-allos​

@yourfaveisarobi​

- You are not a failure

- You are not a waste of space

- You are loved

- You are wanted

- I believe in you

I decided to make some aplatonic postivity edits (or whatever the cool kids call em)

[Image description.1: A loud text put in front of the aplatonic flag reading: Aplatonic and proud!]

[Image description.2: A loud text put in front of the aplatonic flag reading: Not heartless]

[Image description.3: A loud text put in front of the aplatonic flag reading: Full of love!]

[Image description.4: A loud text put in front of the aplatonic flag reading: Nothing wrong with me!]