sea-piglet

TWO TESTS WERE CANCELLED!

NO HOMEWORK!!

WE HAD A BREAK OF 30 MINUTES (we normally have a break of 5-10 min)

AND MY CRUSH ASKED ME TO WORK ON A PROJECT WITH HIM!!!

I watched irl queer groups disintegrate bc a few ppl who got into leadership positions used that to make the space hostile towards ace ppl (among others as well), saw friends go from being loud and proud aces n aros to actively avoiding any mention of it and letting ppl assume their sexuality. I myself, having been IDing as ace for 10 years at least, have in the past couple since this whole “"discourse”“ came into being, actively and intentionally stopped telling anyone at all that I’m ace. To put that in some kind of perspective, I am incredibly out as trans and will actively out myself pretty constantly except to total strangers I will never see again. I feel safer telling ppl I’m trans than ace. Especially in queer spaces. It’s fucked me up so much I didn’t even quite grasp how much but today my therapist asked me for the first time about like romantic relationships and I physically could not say I am aro and ace. Completely incapable, utterly frozen, and I just kinda let her believe what she will. Ironically the fact that I’ve gone from being willing and ready to tell ppl I’m ace as just another facet of myself to entirely unable and unsolicited to tell anyone, is probably a thing one might want to talk w one’s therapist about.

but then this fucking shit happened. around 2015 is when it really kicked into high gear. “discoursers” or exclusionists or aphobes or however you want to refer to them consider asexuality to be a joke and that everyone who identifies as ace is a cringey cishet college-aged white girl who loves dr who. recycled biphobia, homophobia, and even terf rhetoric made its way into the mainstream tumblr conscious by reframing the arguments to target ace people (you’re only X because you’re ugly/can’t get laid; you aren’t part of the community if your partner is of a different gender; maybe something happened to you to make you this way; have you had your hormones checked?; by accepting this identity you are allowing the oppressor to infiltrate our spaces; etc.). you know, in case you think this is just about “snick snack” memes.

this has alienated ace people of color, who already struggle with desexualization/hypersexualization, disabled aces, ace survivors, trans aces, mentally ill aces, neurodiverse/AUTISTIC ACES (you guys get REAL fuckin nervous when i highlight that the majority of your jeering about aces’ perceived awkwardness, missed social cues, infantilization/dehumanization, or “unfuckability”/“cringey-ness” are repackaged ableism, especially considering that a good percentage of the ace community is also autistic), and both young AND older aces. 

younger people are being discouraged from exploring the possibility of being asexual by exclusionists for reasons that vary from internalized homophobia to asexuality being a side effect of SSRIs. they are being told that they are “actually” something other than what they say they are, or that they are broken, or that they’re too young to know, or that our ace identity is simultaneously something that must be excruciatingly examined to determine its “cause” yet so irrelevant that it’s unworthy of discussion or representation—”nobody cares that you don’t want to have sex”. i WISH i had known about asexuality as a teenager, as a kid. I wish i had saved myself from so much grief, abuse, pain, and corrective rape by not subjecting myself to experiences that i hoped would “fix” me. 

and older people like me, who in the grand scheme of things is uhhh really not that much older than the majority of tumblr, are ridiculed for having a presence on tumblr in general, let alone as an asexual person. aces over 30? 40? 50? unicorns. conjured rhetoric. people straight-up don’t believe they exist. people ten years my junior attempt to deny and erase the lived history of aces by saying asexuality was “invented” only ten years ago. i have been terrified of attempting to enter Q* spaces irl because i have heard from even my IRL gay friends that aces do not belong, that “it’s not important enough to form an identity around”, that we are not oppressed enough or we just desperately want to be oppressed. 

i have only heard in passing of people much older than i am who are ace. i have absolutely zero examples to turn to of people like me continuing to live a long life or any evidence that i am worth loving unless i become a parent, which i don’t want to do. when you’re a teenager there’s more discussion about sexual boundaries, but what about dating in my 30s? what adult is going to be satisfied knowing i can never validate their sexual attraction, unless they were ace like me (less than 1% of the population)? am i forced to be alone forever? you can imagine how bleak my future feels. 

it pisses me off that i’m seen as a curmudgeon who “just doesn’t get the young people’s humor” when i have to beg people that i consider friends, for the eight billionth time, to stop making/reblogging jokes about how “cringey” aces are or are tongue-in-cheek declaring themselves to be aphobes, and then those people try to assuage me with respectability politics about how it’s about “THOSE” aces on tumblr and not, yknow, me, who is “one of the good ones”. and since the jokes themselves are so juvenile, it further compounds on the poor social graces and stoicism assumed of asexual people if I’m getting upset over ace war criminal moodboards or whatever the fuck. EVERY time i post about asexual ANYTHING on tumblr, to this day, i lose followers. without fail. people dont bat a lash when i spam 20 untagged posts in a row about a fandom they dont care about but i post two positive words about asexuality and theyre gone.

ASEXUALITY WAS NOT INVENTED BY TEENAGE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.

For more information on sexual history read this http://wiki.asexuality.org/Asexual_history

Before aromanticism was used as a term there was non-limerant. Limerance described romantic attraction and so a non-linemerant person didn’t experience romantic attraction. It has a lot of similarities to aromanticism and it’s first documented appearance was in a book called ‘love and limerance’ published in 1979.

Aromanticism was also not invented by white girls on tumblr.

AROMANTICISM WAS NOT INVENTED BY WHITE GIRLS ON TUMBLR.

I did know I needed this. But I never thought it would get me to tears. I never knew I needed it for me, to show to myself, to tell me it’s fine to be me.

This is why representation is important. This is why visibility is important.

Sometimes I see exclusionists shooting their mouths off about how the way you can tell aces aren’t oppressed is that our main need is for representation, that our positivity posts are about being valid.

And I’m just like… you have maybe temporarily forgotten what it is like to not see yourself reflected anywhere?? You maybe have been lucky enough to find people like you in history and in media before you came out?? Perhaps you are blissfully unaware that if you don’t have that kind of representation, the only messages you get are that you are a shitty gross broken person that doesn’t have any worth????? Possibly you do not know the effect of hearing that from both the straight and the “LGBT” communities at once??

I don’t know if anybody has studied this (I’m gonna find out!) but I would bet a lot of money that that stuff has a huge impact on health, and that it’s a big part of the reason that m-spec and a-spec people (including aros) have such incredibly high rates of things like suicidality.

One of them specifically came to Tumblr to be a resource for younger aces (the one in her late 40s) and left in horrified disgust over the level of direct, awful harassment she received.

We especially can’t escape when it’s purposefully flooded into our positivity tags. 

So: I am asexual. I hate it when people are actively working to shove us back into the closet and fracture our community when we have been acknowledged as existing since ancient times, and when we have had a term to name ourselves since the 1900s. 

This is our history, we have always been here, we will always be here. 

I went back to eating meat because I was literally starving myself. When I told my parents, they just said “ok sure” and went back to their business. I told them I was too depressed to feed myself and their reaction was to just let me quit doing something I cared deeply about. They could have been actually supportive parents by trying to help me find things I could eat that still aligned with my morals, or, you know, helped me beat depression.

But they didn’t. And I didn’t have any other support group online or irl, nobody tried to help me so I ended up just eating meat and dealing with the guilt for another 2-ish years until I moved out and got my depression under control myself.

Part of me knows and is angry with myself because I still could have done more research into quick and easy vegan meals I could stomach. But part of me is still angry at my parents for being useless and at society for spreading so much misinformation about veganism and being openly hostile to people giving a shit about animals.

So it really pisses me off when nonvegan leftists are like “not everyone can go vegan bc health reasons!” and just end it at that. And past me would have been pretty pissed too because hey I didn’t want to keep eating animals! Being disabled didn’t make the animals I ate any less tortured or dead. I’m sure there’s a lot of other disabled people that feel/felt the same way.

Stop acting like y’all are advocating for us. You’re only contributing to veganism’s inaccessibility for some people (which I can guarantee you is a much smaller number than you think).

Yes absolutely! There’s always nuance and I’m not arguing that those things aren’t *really* preventing people from going vegan at that stage in their life. There definitely might be a handful of people who absolutely can’t eat fully plant-based even with full access to a fully-balanced vegan diet (although lab-grown meat exists and will become affordable very soon, although that’s not a perfect solution).

Now that I’m more awake and finally started reading Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, I wanna talk more about this. The more I learn about the social model of disability, the more I realize that the disabilities that prevent people from going fully vegan can be broken down into lots of societal and other extenal factors that are harming people in many ways.

Like, for the example above:

Why don’t food packages have clear labels on the front that say if there’s animal products or potential allergens?

Why do companies shove animal products into so many things you shouldn’t expect animal products into?

Why aren’t there widely-available apps that can quickly assess ingredients (I know someone’s working on one but I only saw it mentioned a few days ago so it could be a while before it’s released)

Why can’t we rely on other people to check things for us like a friend or aid or employee? Like in a physical store there could be barriers preventing someone from asking an employee such as anxiety, language, availability.

Why aren’t there more 100% vegan stores that people can acess so they don’t have to worry at all?

And in a more general sense:

Why aren’t there more nutritious foods available that don’t trigger people’s allergies or digestive issues?

Why aren’t there more (accessible) treatments for allergies or digestive issues (that actually work)?

Why aren’t plant-based foods that mimic the taste and texture of nonvegan foods more widely available?

Why aren’t there more community-oriented food programs that offer/deliver mostly/fully vegan meals to people who need help preparing food/eating? Like healthy plant-based TV dinners that someone can just throw in the microwave.

Why don’t hospitals or other health programs offer a wide variety of healthy vegan food?

Why are there still medications that test on animals or use animal ingredients?

Why isn’t there a huge selection of plant-based foods so people with certain EDs don’t get triggered by the limitations?

Why do people (including so many nonvegan leftists) refuse to share resources to help people struggling to go vegan? Whether its accessible, quick and easy recipes, or guides for people with EDs/allergies/sensitivities, or other non-dietary things people can do to help. How come I never see any non-vegan sharing any of that?

That’s not even getting into the fact that animal products CAUSE or EXACERBATE many disabilities. Meat is a carcinogen and is linked to a lot of the top killers in the US (What the Health is on Netflix and talks about this). Most epidemics/pandemics come from people eating/exploiting animals. So many people are made sick by animal ag waste or harmed working on farms and slaughterhouses.

These are all legitimate reasons that someone might not be able to go vegan at this time (although there’s always something someone can do even if they cant change their diet, like avoiding leather or soaps with animal ingredients). BUT these are all things that should be worked on in the fight to make veganism more accessible. 

Society has made the accessibility of veganism an issue for many people, not disability. The meat/animal products industry is so pervasive with its lobbying and shoving animal products into everything it can get its grubby, disease-filled hands on. None of this is the fault of veganism or animal rights groups.

Saying “not everyone can go vegan” and leaving it at that helps literally no one. Not disabled people, not poor people, and especially not the animals or the environment. If you refuse to share resources, or boost disabled–or other marginalized–vegan voices, or do anything that can help improve accessibility to a fully vegan lifestyle, then you are part of the problem.

I went back to eating meat because I was literally starving myself. When I told my parents, they just said “ok sure” and went back to their business. I told them I was too depressed to feed myself and their reaction was to just let me quit doing something I cared deeply about. They could have been actually supportive parents by trying to help me find things I could eat that still aligned with my morals, or, you know, helped me beat depression.

But they didn’t. And I didn’t have any other support group online or irl, nobody tried to help me so I ended up just eating meat and dealing with the guilt for another 2-ish years until I moved out and got my depression under control myself.

Part of me knows and is angry with myself because I still could have done more research into quick and easy vegan meals I could stomach. But part of me is still angry at my parents for being useless and at society for spreading so much misinformation about veganism and being openly hostile to people giving a shit about animals.

So it really pisses me off when nonvegan leftists are like “not everyone can go vegan bc health reasons!” and just end it at that. And past me would have been pretty pissed too because hey I didn’t want to keep eating animals! Being disabled didn’t make the animals I ate any less tortured or dead. I’m sure there’s a lot of other disabled people that feel/felt the same way.

Stop acting like y’all are advocating for us. You’re only contributing to veganism’s inaccessibility for some people (which I can guarantee you is a much smaller number than you think).

There are countless radfem and T(W)ERF blogs that I’ve blocked that said ‘secret radfem sideblog’ in the description.

Ace/aro exclusionism

Bi exclusionism or claims that bi people are “less queer” bc of “straight passive privilege”

Saying you have to be dysphoric to identify as trans

Invalidating nonbinary people

Calling queer a slur regardless of context, saying people can’t identify as queer, and saying that it can’t be reclaimed

“Mogai hell”, “kweer”, or otherwise mocking less common labels and claiming they are “just cishets who want to feel special”

Excluding sex workers from feminist discussions or claiming that sex work is inherently evil

The idea of trans male privilege

The idea of AMAB privilege

The idea of passing privilege

Gatekeeping and policing queen identities, such as claiming that butch and femme are lesbian exclusive terms

Anti kink or Anti sex positivity

“No leather at pride”

Separatism

Supports cops at pride for “our saftey”

Refers to anything they can as misogyny (such as the disliking cats is misogynistic)

Agressivly anti makeup

against makeup positivity/goes farther than “makeup shouldn’t be a requirement in society” into “women have been brainwashed or aren’t capable of liking makeup/shaving/viewed-as-feminized grooming choices for their own personal reasons” territory

constant reiterations of “all men are trash” “there are no good men” – especially be aware for signs of painting masc aligned traits with the same brush, and remember that a lot of this blanket statement talk lays groundwork to make it easier to accept gender essentialism

“Women must be protected from making or enjoying dark fiction because it harms them and grooms them” campaigns – very reliant on radfem terf and gender essentialist ideas underneath the fandom and media wrappings

a lot the “X character has flaws so it’s bad rep!” media viral discourse. (IMO it’s because they’re trying to teach you to think in terms of ‘good women and bad women rep [but really behavior]’ and ‘good lgbt+ and bad lgbt+ rep [but really behavior]

the fandom and media anti campaigns about how women, trans men and wlw shouldn’t consume mlm original or fan content or it’s “fetishization”

the logical extreme of that going around now “you can only consume content that matches your identity and orientation”

“The reason there are so many conservative boomers is the poor ones die sooner”. (A meme of someone pointing at an empty sign that has been edited to read “boomer vs millennial” discourse is no replacement for class analysis. the rich are oppressors, not the elderly.”)

“This isn’t even a joke. If you want to know why an older generation seems like a bunch of out of touch rich bastards, it’s because more of the wealthy than the poor survived”.

Vegans of color exist. Lower class vegans exist. You don’t have to be rich to be vegan.

-Many wheelchair users can stand or walk short distances. This does not diminish their need for a wheelchair.

-Many deaf/Deaf/heard of hearing people have limited hearing, the ability to speak, lip reading ability, or any combination of the three. They still require proper accommodations for their deafness.

-What a person with sensory issues can handle often varies on a day to day basis. Just because they could handle something a few weeks ago doesn’t mean they’re lying about an inability to do it now.

-The same goes for people with chronic pain or fatigue.

-Just because someone has a learning or developmental disability it does not mean they’re automatically unintelligent. With the proper accommodations and support, many can thrive academically. Some disabilities such as ADHD and autism can even make individuals more suited to certain tasks than neurotypicals.

-Unless you are a doctor with the correct expertise, disabled people most likely know more about their conditions and what accommodations they require than you do.

Vegan staples include things like pastas, noodles, rice, breads, grains, legumes, nuts and nut butters, lentils, chickpeas, beans, tofu, bread, potatoes, soy, oats, cereals, and frozen, canned or fresh fruits and vegetables. These items represent some of the cheapest and most nutritious food sources in any supermarket and they are widely available. This makes perfect sense economically because the lower on the food chain you eat, the less work has gone into the final product and thus the cheaper it is. This is why most of the world’s poorest people subsist on a primarily vegetarian diet. Often getting the cost of veganism is a simple matter of understanding what plant based options are available, and how to buy them cheaply.

As a general rule meals should include both carbs and protein, and so instead of a staple meat based meal like chicken and rice, you might substitute the chicken for lentils, chickpeas or beans. All three of these plant based alternatives are high in protein, lower in saturated fat, have no cholesterol and are much cheaper per serving than cooked chicken, or even the cheapest meats like low quality minced beef. You can be as creative with a meal like this as you could with chicken, you could make a bean and lentil patty or a bean chilli to go with the rice, or use the chickpeas to make a chickpea and rice curry, all very cheaply and easily. These are just examples, but you can see how many variations of meals you could make with just these four basic, very cheap ingredients.

The fact that this can be done can be demonstrated in no clearer terms than just how many poor vegans there are. Check the comments on any post about how veganism is expensive and you will find tonnes of poor vegans telling you that they exist, and how cheaply they eat. Most vegans I have met have been poor, since i’m from a working class area. In the US as well, most vegans are in fact on the lower end of the economic scale. Personally, when I went vegan I was living on loans and managed to cut the cost of my weekly shop by almost a third, and many other vegans report similar figures.

There are undoubtedly real barriers to going vegan for some people, from lack of food availability to not being in control of what food is bought for you, but the idea that veganism is in some way inherently more expensive than a diet which includes animal products is nothing more than a myth. Plant based foods are almost always the cheapest items in any supermarket, and in contrast, you’ll find that the most expensive items in most people’s shopping carts are animal products. In the vast majority of places, low quality meat will never be even close to as cheap as the staples I’ve mentioned.

So to sum up, it is not a fact that meat is cheaper than plants. I know this likely wasn’t your intention, but the fact that people question that poor vegans even exist is a huge source of frustration for so many of us, because it erases the struggles of the many thousands of poor vegans that absolutely do exist, and are sick and tired of people pretending they don’t or accusing them of lying about their economic situation.