part 0: premises
the conversation that inspired this post got me to realize that many people are actually very unaware of what happened to asexuals in queer spaces as a result of the thing called "ace discourse." this stuff did real, serious damage to the ace community, especially where it overlaps with queerness writ large. it's odd to imagine that i have a perspective on this that is unknown to many others, but it does seem like i do, and i think it is worth sharing if only to establish a context for discussions of asexuality in the future.
so: this post is my attempt to document my own experience of ace discourse and what it did to us. it will be, in all probability, flawed; i am one woman with a limited perspective, and i am largely going to be speaking from memory because i don't want to go spend hours hunting down and screencapping a bunch of vicious bigotry about me and those like me. but my hope is that, while i may get things wrong here and there, the broad strokes will be accurate enough to give people a sense of what things were like.
(a brief note: this post has been lightly edited here and there to make it clearer that what i describe here is deeply influenced by my own particular perspective. this post is about The Discourse as i saw it, not necessarily as it happened.)
I joined tumblr in 2013 at the age of 17 and this lines up very well with my experience. Except I was also in a circle of lesbian tumblr blogs that were in a discord server together and got to deal with extra aphobia from that community that the server admin still denies happened. Which is fun. I ended up softblocking them on tumblr because they’re still weirdly gatekeepy about lesbian as an identity and I started openly IDing as a bi lesbian and didn’t want to get into arguments with her, because she started messaging me on discord about stuff I was posting, which was SO RICH after her refusing to do anything when half the server was posting explicitly ace exclusionist stuff practically every day when I first joined and was following people. Her solution then was “unfollow them if it bothers you” so I unfollowed me for her 🙃.
Anyways, I had some additional notes based on my own recollections:
- At some point (I think in 2017) I made a sideblog specifically for ace discourse and would trawl through aphobic tags to look for people to argue with. It was probably a form of self-harm, but I gave it up once the porn ban happened and the super sex-focused bloggers lost interest in using the site in general and suddenly the ace discourse dropped off sharply. As a part of this, I did find posts from TERF blogs talking about using ace discourse as a recruiting tactic. It was something they used as a wedge issue with lesbians, and it’s why ace discourse became so focused on how aces identifying as queer was inherently lesbophobic. They figured it was easier to get lesbians to draw lines around lesbianism and become lesbian separatists and radical feminists (the two main pillars of TERFdom on tumblr) if they could get them to draw lines around the wider queer community and associate queer identities as a whole with the act of having queer sex. It was insidious, but it worked pretty well because the lesbian blogs I remember being openly ace exclusionist are still struggling the most with accepting bi lesbians and not repeating other TERF talking points that aren’t obviously transphobic, because they all apparently followed the ace-discourse-sideblogs of TERFs who hid their transphobia on those blogs.
- Extra evidence that aphobia didn’t really die out for any larger social reasons and was more just shifting away from being a thing on tumblr specifically because of the porn ban: it started coming back with the rollback of some of the stricter rules associated with the porn ban. But aphobia also did die out as like. An IRL issue. Ace flags are seen at pride events around the world and have been for years. I’m sure if anyone tried to gatekeep cishet aces from a pride event or other queer happening IRL you’d get pushback from allos who are more ready to be allies because now aphobia is happening in front of them and feels the same as homophobia doesn’t it. Ace discourse is pretty much solely an online thing now and isn’t even a hot topic anymore.
- In my experience, once the aggressively aphobic blogs lost interest in tumblr as a whole, discussions about amatonormativity did actually start going places. The ace and aro tags on tumblr are full of essay-like posts analyzing themselves and the language they use to express themselves and the pressures they feel from society at large. And the ways other queer identities might intersect with those experiences. It’s been a very interesting time, but I also never stopped openly and proudly IDing as grayro ace and began modding for an aro pride blog in 2018, so I was always tapped into the active tags with interesting posts getting passed through them, which I imagine wouldn’t be the experience of someone who made the decision to go back into the closet to protect their online environment.
