I'll be interested to hear other thoughts on this, since I honestly don't consume much media, but here are my initial impressions, broken down by category:
1 - actual canon explicit ace characters: 7/10
Maybe my baseline here is kind of low, but while it's still really rare to see an ace character at all, let alone one that isn't white cis male: they exist! Wow! And overall, we do seem to have moved away from House-style cure plots of the 2010s, so that's nice. Plus half the AO3 and Tumblr population seems to be asexual, so even if canon ace rep doesn't exist, we will MAKE it exist.
2 - narratives that don't exclusively centre sex and romance: 8/10
BRO WE ARE SO SPOILED NOWADAYS. Ok, so not to be a Nineties Kid (tm) about it or anything, but when I was growing up, basically every show (or at least Australian, British and American ones) sold you the exact same hetero happy after and that made my coming out process really miserable. Also probably why I was so into Japanese media that centred friendship rather than romance. But! Now we have movies about wet cat science teachers befriending alien rocks to save the universe?? Hell yeah!
3 - real-life a-spec people in real-life places: 5/10
It's better than it was! It's better in some places than others! Certain social media platforms censor or shadowban you for using the word "asexual", and that's bad, but the aces have also taken over Tumblr and that's good! Queer venues are dying out and queer festivals are smaller than they used to be! Most of them now use the "A" in the acronym and sell ace-coloured merch, which they didn't previously! It's a mixed bag, really!
4 - media promoting anti-asexual conversion practices: -999/10
Ok, so here's where the points begin to drop off.
A lot of countries around the world have had a political lurch to the right over the past few years, especially the US and UK, both of which have also seen a surge in interest in cisgender HRT or other "treatments" designed to boost libido. That comes with a whole heap of formal and informal propaganda about how bad it is when people aren't interested in sex and how urgent it is to fix this problem, especially for cis women. Add to that global birth rate panic (+related anti-immigration sentiment) and an American religious moral panic over "asexual marriages", plus a set of JK Moulding tweets about how much she hates asexual people, and yep, this kinda sucks. But! We shall prevail!
The fascism sucks and there's still a long way to go, but we HAVE made progress compared to the 2010s. So that's cool. Ace, even. Yay!
yousharknotpass
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