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yrgirlkv
@yrgirlkv

there's this article that gets passed around every now and then called Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny. i am going to excerpt it here:

But the scene that left perhaps the greatest impact...is, of course, the shower scene, in which our heroic servicemen and -women enjoy a communal grooming ritual.

On the surface, it is idyllic: racial harmony, gender equality, unity behind a common goal—and firm, perky asses and tits.

And then the characters speak. The topic of conversation? Military service, of course... No one looks at each other. No one flirts.

A room full of beautiful, bare bodies, and everyone is only horny for war.

do you get it? war is bad because it takes sexuality away from us.

i try not to make strong declarative statements online these days. but i'm willing to make an exception here: this is a very stupid way to think about sexuality.


a chronicle about my experience with xenoblade

i played a decent chunk of xenoblade chronicles 3 through the early months of this year. i got mad at that game for late-game heteronormativity, but i should've anticipated that sort of failure much earlier on, because there is a real sense of early heteronormativity that kind of tips you off as to what this game is going to be about.

a brief summary: xenoblade chronicles 3 is about cloned soldiers fighting an endless war, and about six of these clones, three from each side, teaming up to figure out why and stop it. much of the early game is built around establishing what life is like for these clones, who pop out of pods as preteens with a manufactured 10-year-long lifespan. they learn nothing beyond what they need to know for war. they don't know cities, families, parents, children: in a word, sex. how does the game establish this?

the team of three you start with are two boys and a girl. after the tutorial mission they head to the big communal baths, and all of them strip, and it's not horny at all. eunie, the girl, at one point stands up with her tits fully out and neither of the guys give a fuck. on a surface-level read, this is a refreshing change from the played-out tropes of heterosexuality. no eye-goggling, no objectification, no double standards. these people aren't here to fuck and they don't.

obviously, of course, it's not meant to be read that way.

later, after the two sides pair up into a full group of six and are freed from some of the control mechanisms of their armies, there's a scene where they have to change, and the boys, apparently newly awoken to some sexual instinct or other, run off and duck behind some rocks so they don't have to strip in front of the girls (or witness the girls changing, i guess; i couldn't tell you which idea bothers them more.) the point being made here is unsubtle. sexuality is threatened by war, fascism, tyranny, etc. your oppressors will take away your right to be horny.

the performance of loyalty

rs benedict, the author of the article i linked, isn't resorting to some kind of reach; paul verhoeven, the director of starship troopers, has explicitly linked the fascism of the story and setting to the characters' lack of "libido." "it is sublimated," he says, "because they are fascists." as in starship troopers, as in xenoblade: a failure to be horny is a failure to be fully human.1

heteronormativity—a key element of fascism—is about more than just banning queer expression. you don't get to silently slide under the radar in a heteronormative culture. heteronormativity is not content with passive acceptance; it demands the active performance of heterosexuality on yourself and others. like, i'm a trans girl, but i don't think i was a super feminine child? but i wasn't a masculine child either. i wasn't willing to treat or talk about girls the way the other boys did. that was enough to get me called slurs, and i don't doubt there's plenty of other queer and trans people who would report similar stories. as it is with gender, so it is with sexuality: silence will not protect you. heteronormativity demands loyalty.

but, of course, the specter of straightness isn't scary to a largely-straight audience. the specter of asexuality, therefore, will have to do.

horniness in the time of corporations

as the rise of what i might call the "family-friendly internet" has enacted itself upon the web over the past decade, i've seen a lot of a very specific type of handwringing which professes to believe that it's about the suppression of "sexuality" in some abstract way. at its worst, it manifests like it does in starship troopers and xenoblade, by implicitly associating asexuality with tyranny, by suggesting that it is proof of denial, repression, or deprivation not to witness the expression of sexuality. asexuality has never had an easy place in queer communities, which often have strong sexual cultures and good reason to want to maintain them. but understand here that asexuals are not somehow privileged by the new system, that we are not building towards an asexual norm. marvel movies may not be horny, but that doesn't make them asexual; just because the straights have gotten subtler about their nods and winks in cinema to "protect the kids" doesn't mean that they're not still gesturing at the heteronormative structure above the little ones' heads. tony stark isn't ace. captain america isn't ace. peter parker, ant-man, falcon, bucky barnes, scarlet witch, the guardians of the galaxy—these people are not ace. they are straight.

"okay but marvel movies still aren't horny"

i showed a first draft of this post to my sister, and she raised a particular objection: the american media landscape has been getting less sexual recently, even by purely heterosexual measures. i understand where this perspective comes from, and if you take the view of sexuality as specifically about the display of sexual desire, as about performing intercourse or pleasuring another person, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to make this call. i do, however, think it fails to recognize something key about sexuality: like an accent and a culture, there is no society without a normative version of it. even a majority-asexual society would have a sexual culture; it might not be a culture where sexual desire is expressed often (which, i know, is the very thing many are wary of), but it would still be a culture with an established norm on the topic of sex. this is what i mean when i say it's a mistake to think that culture is becoming "less sexual." what is happening is that major corporate interests have decided that there needs to be a tight leash on the ways and contexts in which sexuality is expressed.

tyrants argue with each other all the time

there has been, arguably, a shift in the media landscape from a culture in which heteronormative desire is expressed often to one in which it is expressed less often. you used to be able to show straight people wanting to fuck but not queer ones; now you can't show anyone wanting to fuck but you can maybe get in some queers at the last minute if you're lucky. like i said above, though, i think it's a mistake to describe this shift as becoming "less sexual." what has happened is that sexuality has gotten less neoliberal2 and more actively christian. tony stark has a child in the marvel movies; that character has logically had sex. is it, perhaps, a fairly chaste expression of sexuality, focused on reproduction and the nuclear family? yeah, probably. but even that's not asexual. it is the move from one form of heteronormativity to another, a sign that the more devout christians are reclaiming territory from the cynical and lapsed ones. that these factions have slightly competing interests in the culture war won't save us from their disdain. neither will ignoring ace people's identities because of some twisted belief that we're the model minority for a group of people we're lucky to be ignored by.

some final notes on who is horny

in spite of all this ink, i actually think the benedict article makes some solid points about eating disorders, feelings of threat, and the desire for strength. but it does what so many well-meaning and wildly overzealous white people do about the west, which is to note a moral failing and decide it represents a total absence of some quality—culture, in the case of american empire, and sexuality, in the case of movies. the norms of what does exist in that space are so omnipresent that people struggle to see them. but they are there, in spite of everything, and if you pretend they aren't, you will inevitably fail to recognize them at their subtlest and most insidious.

all of this is to say:

we are not the danger here. you do not need to live in fear of an asexual future, where the tyrants will suppress you only in parts but not in the whole. when the machine demands you work it, it will not condone your silence; it will compel you to swear your oaths aloud for all to hear. asexuality is not straight enough for straight people. only straightness is, even if they don't all agree on how that straightness should look.

it has not been an easy thing to do, but i am—in spite of the significant flak we've gotten from fellow queer people—proud to be ace. it is a rich and deep thing, i think, and one that offers a rare and enlightening perspective on the world, if only you are willing to listen. but you have to choose to be willing. intolerably, you have to gamble: that the people who treat us as an ill omen are not miraculously more tolerant of you. that your allies in deviance will define themselves in ways unlike you do. that it is worth making room for each other anyway.


  1. not to say that there is an inherent value to being normatively human, but whether any given figure is or isn't has very little bearing on the fact that this sort of rhetoric is meant to be insulting.

  2. "neoliberal" might not be the best word here but i can't think of anything else to describe gender essentialist straight people who don't like the stuff about the church banning them from being horny but also would still have called me slurs as a kid. if you have a better descriptor i'm all ears.


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

This is a really great critique, thank you for writing it.

One part you talked about that I want to highlight: the suppression of sexuality is not equivalent to asexuality. The two can seem similar at first, but they manifest in very different ways!

This is a very good essay, and it make me think about a lot of topics. I say this as someone who is not on the asexual spectrum, but the inclusion of asexuality in queer space is good not only for ace people (which is a good thing in of itself), but even to non-ace people, because it force the creation of a strong culture of consent, which is good, actually.
That being said, "late-game heteronormativity" is something. It, uh, it is something.

the slightly more nuanced summary is that of course it was building up a heterosexual romance the whole game through but some of the twists in that romance relied so deeply on the woman existing for the man's sake instead of her own that i got mad and quit in chapter 5 of 7 (i think. i didn't actually finish.) it would've distracted from the post tho; i just couldn't think of another example besides verhoeven