#boostacevoices

To all my Ace- & Aro-spec friends - and anyone else that might be interested - I highly recommend you check out this new platonic friend-making app called Patook!! 

I’ve only just started using it myself (for less than a week) and I’m not 100% sure about whether it will be helpful to me or not, but it’s still early days with fairly few users. But as it gains users, I have little doubt it’ll become very popular!

And here’s some especially great news:

There's zero tolerance on flirting. We perma-ban everyone who tries it. If the flirt detector (FD) doesn't catch it, then you can use the "..." button on the top right and "report the conversation as flirty". We update the FD every week based on those reports (as well as any false alarms) so it's continuously evolving. (Tony)

And if you try to send a message that isn’t flirting but it still gets flagged that way, Tony is always happy to hear from you to try to improve the flirt detector’s algorithms & improve your user experience. 

Would you like some even better news??? 

Creator Tony has asked me to boost Patook on Tumblr and as an incentive for you to join, has given all us the coupon code “FEMINISTING” to become a Premium Member!  Apparently, says Tony, “the main thing with premium is that it gets rid of the ads, and then adds some stuff like ‘check if message was read’, extra profile ranking boost, recall messages, reset swipes.” 

So these are all good things, amirite? 

It’s because aces have no culture or oppression to call their own, so why not steal everything from the people they marginalize in a pathetic attempt to fit in?

But for real--it’s because they refuse to understand context. Aphobia and biphobia are similar in that people are “accused” of being straight but in actual context--bisexual people, who experience biphobia and homophobia, are being accused of having straight privilege meanwhile cishet aces and cis aroaces, who BENEFIT from biphobia and homophobia, are being accused of having straight privilege. Straight privilege, at its core, is benefiting fro homophobia. So, y’unno, perspective.

On its face, corrective rape is just being raped to “correct” your sexuality. In actuality, it is being raped to be punished for same gender attraction or being trans. Removed from context, ANYTHING could be called corrective rape because a lot of rape is done out a grasp for power to lord that over someone for being “wrong” or “weaker.” A woman who is raped for being a prude is being raped for her sexuality, as is a woman raped for being promiscuous or even SEEMING promiscuous. Context matters here. Corrective rape is a hate crime. “Normal” rape is fucking horrific enough, you don’t have to claim a homophobic/transphobic hate crime to be a valid survivor.

Likewise, compulsory heterosexuality could apply to ANYONE and EVERYONE removed from context. Everyone is hurt by the push to enter sexual heterosexual relationships because of the gender roles, rape culture, etc involved in the process. But comp het is SPECIFICALLY about how women who do not want ot be with men and WANT to be with women are hurt by this.

TERF is a term to explain how cis women turned on viable feminism to exclude certain women. It is about the oppression of trans women by people who should be their allies. AERF and REG are about LGBT people excluding their oppressors, which is, y’unno,technically every single LGBT person who thinks cishets belong. IN context, REG and AERF are just transmisogynistic garbage.

I can’t really speak about a-spec. As far as I know, I’m not autistic. But the refusal to listen to the fact that some people grew up with a-spec meaning autism spectrum (because, like, regional language exists? Just because you didn’t grow up hearing it, doesn’t mean other people haven’t.) is a refusal to understand context again. YOUR understanding of the word doesn’t trump other people’s experience and context with it.

And this refusal of context goes on and on and on--conversion therapy, gaydar/ace trace, wlw/mlm/ala, oppression vs discrimination, understanding why the LGBT community was called “Gy and Lesbian” before and how that STILL included bisexual and trans folk, etc--and it’s super fucking harmful. Because in defanging and decontextualizing these terms, they are taking away the power of these words, the conciseness. Which is taking away power from the people who need it.

LGBT people have specific words to describe our experiences because we have specific experiences. Our specificity helps us find solutions for our trauma and find community around them. Making them more broad, more inclusion, and less specific doesn’t help us. It only helps cis straight people who want to pretend to understand when they can’t ever understand.

Similar is not the same. And claiming to understand our experiences while stealing our language is not the same as empathy.

like at best it’s Deeply Uncomfortable to have ppl make infantilising, skewered assumptions about your maturity, “purity”, presumed sexual naivety and attitudes towards others’ sex lives based on your sexuality and at worst it’s sex-shaming, insulting to aces who do have sex and/or have had sex before and/or are on the grey-ace spectrum, and painting us as these inherently smug bastards with a superiority complex

The #CareBearStare is our ultimate weapon against the hate!

God, I actually want to cry. Blatant lies were regularly thrown at this person’s face to incriminate them, people used these lies to justify telling this person to kill themselves on every other post, they repeatedly gaslighted this person (and yes, I am using the word properly, thanks) and accused them of using autistic traits to be abusive and avoid responsibility, when this person provided solid evidence that they’d been abused, exclusionists piled onto them, calling them a lying, abusive pedophile apologist who hates rape survivors. And you know what? this person is not even asexual. They just happen to be a non asexual person who doesn’t get a kick out of calling our abuse fake.

they never see the posts where bad ideaology is called out. they never see the posts recounting legitimate forms of oppression and discrimination. they see a few odd people out there spouting bad rhetoric and are told thats all aces are--so i get why they hate us. id hate us if thats what i thought we were. 

i honestly think there are a lot of good people out there who are aphobes only because they happened to get exposed only to those echo chambers of bad-ace and anti-ace posts. when that “cut off contact with REGs” thing started i thought it was a good idea but now im wondering if we cant work to bridge the gap even a little. just a bit of polite conversation on both sides.