Journey into asexual acceptance and away from slut-shaming

[ljwrites]

I know the subject of asexuality and sex acceptance can be a fraught subject because aces are already stereotyped as inherently slut-shaming and homophobic for their orientation. This is, of course, textbook aphobia: Being slut-shaming or homophobic is a matter of choices and beliefs, not a sexual orientation.

With that in mind I think it's still important to discuss that some people on the asexual spectrum do go through or went through a slut-shaming phase, myself included. Some determined jerks never leave that phase, but again, I'll let you use the fact against all aces if you can show me ONE marginalized group that does not have its share of jerks. Just one. I'll wait.

Here's another reason slut-shaming is no ace in the hole (hah) for aphobes: Far from being slut-shaming being inherent to asexuality, slut-shaming for aces is often a reaction to aphobia, not to mention an example of the utterly messed up way a lot of us are taught to engage with sex.

Think about it. Aces are told constantly that "normal" people feel sexual attraction and people who don't are irretrievably broken, doomed to loveless existence, even inhuman on some level.

Except the aforementioned messed-up attitude about sex provides an easy out. Because sex is essential to being human, but it's also somehow, inexplicably, a terrible thing. Specifically the people who have too much of it, outside of approved relationships, or otherwise with the wrong people or in the wrong ways are bad and have to be shamed and punished.

Voilà! An escape hatch. You, the asexual person, are not broken. No, you are a paragon of virtue! You just have a lot of willpower to control the sexual urges you no doubt have, and you're... just saving yourself for the right person! (Demisexuals and other sex-positive/neutral aces may even be able to validate this last point with their relationships.) Now, if only those other people, those damned sluts, would be more like you. Because you're not broken. Not broken. Not broken.

For me it was the acceptance that I am normal as I am that helped me break out of this damaging mindset. It may seem paradoxical but it's actually perfectly logical, given that for me slut-shaming was an attempt to provide an escape hatch for myself from internalized aphobia. It was wrong of me, of course, to try to get that psychological relief at the cost of shaming people who were considered too sexually active, or wrongly so, by some arbitrary social standard.

Far from being inherently moralizing and policing about sex, therefore, asexuality acceptance is actually a potent force against slut-shaming. At heart asexuality is about affirming a wide range of libido as normal. It's not a big leap from accepting the low end of that scale to accepting the higher range.

In fact, aphobic discourse is some of the most breathtakingly slut-shaming rhetoric I have had the displeasure of witnessing. I remember when I was hatereading an exclusionist's blog and they said demisexuality wasn't really a thing because it just referred to "normal" people. I stared aghast at that passage, thinking, Excuse me? Are you trying to tell me that people who have sex outside of deep emotional bonds, who have one-night stands or casual flings, are ABNORMAL?(1)

There is also the closely-related pushback against the word "queer," which, in addition to being too inclusive of asexual, trans, and nonbinary people for exclusionists' tastes, some detractors dislike because the label does not explicitly reject the kink scene which they see as perverted and degenerate. (I have some news about gay history for people who think this way...)

If we look beyond the personal to the social, acceptance of asexuality would not lend itself to slut-shaming but quite the opposite, since both forms of stigma are simply the flip sides of the urge to regulate and police consensual (non-)sexuality within "acceptable" bounds. Maybe that's why aphobia is so entrenched and hard to get rid of, because it's yet another means of controlling people through their sexuality.

Notes
1. Obviously demisexuality is normal, as is having sex outside of committed relationships or not having sex at all. In that sense the blogger was not wrong, but since they were arguing against the concept of asexuality and trying to deny the existence of aphobia I doubt they were going for such a humane and logical angle.