More about allosexism and about how an allosexual-privilege/ace-spectrum-disprivilege model does not adequately explain it.
This is a continuation of this post from yesterday, in light of outlawroad’s commentary. I’m making a separate post because these are separate thoughts, and I don’t want it to get lost in the reblogs.
Don’t get me wrong when I say a privilege/disprivilege model is an inadequate description of my experiences.
I know that because of allosexism, there are people who think I’m broken, there are people who think I’m lying, and there are people who think my sexual orientation is a medical condition or result of mental illness.
Because of allosexism, there are people who like nothing better than to harass aces and demis about every little inconsistency in our explanations of ourselves and use it against us to “prove” that we’re just heterosexual. Because of allosexism, there are people who mock us for the terminology we’ve created to better understand our own experiences of attraction, and there are people who invalidate our committed relationships (whether romantic or not) by telling us “that’s just a friendship.”
[Trigger warnings: rape culture, corrective rape]
Because of allosexism, asexual-spectrum people feel pressured by allosexual partners to have more sex than they’re comfortable having, and asexual-spectrum people police each other’s sexual activity or lack thereof with allosexual partners (by saying it’s “abusive” to say no to an allosexual partner or to be in a relationship with an allosexual person and not have sex with them). Because of allosexism, there are famous people like Dan Savage who publicly condemn asexual-spectrum people as abusive for being in committed relationships with anyone but another asexual-spectrum person. Because of allosexism, there are people who want to correctively rape asexual-spectrum people for being asexual-spectrum, and there are people who threaten to do so to us.
[End of triggering material]
Because of allosexism, there are people that are quick to dismiss asexual-spectrum people on the internet as “trying to be trendy” or “trying to be special snowflakes.” Because of allosexism, the first response I got when I disclosed my asexuality to another person for the first time was, “No, you’re not. Humans aren’t asexual.”
It doesn’t make sense to me to use the privilege/disprivilege model originally used to describe how racism propagates to describe how allosexism (or any systematized prejudice other than racism) propagates. White people on the whole have an awareness that there are individuals who are not in their racial category. Allosexual people do not on the whole have such an awareness that there are people who are not allosexual. We need a model other than privilege/disprivilege to explain allosexism. We can hold people accountable for allosexism (and for reinforcing systematic allosexism) without asserting that allosexual privilege is a phenomenon. We just need to figure out how.
This entry was published on 8 August 2012 and has 16 note(s).
It was tagged: allosexual, allosexism, actuallyasexual, asexuality, asexual, corrective rape, rape culture, outlawroad, demisexuality, alisexual privilege, allosexual privilege, sexual privilege, alisexism,
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