Always find it so weird when people keep saying “Why must u label things?”
Humans do that. It is nice and convenient. It lets us describe common or unique properties. Some people also feel more valid knowing that what they experience is common enough and shared enough to have a descriptor (🙋). It’s also very nice to be able to form communities and discuss the specifics of shared experiences, no matter how niche.
Relationships that involve multiple people have their unique dynamics and features, such as experiencing and managing NRE (new crushes basically), polycules, etc. and so it makes sense that they would also have their own term for it. This would also be fundamentally different from platonic families.
Also, “platonic” is a very important term. I love my friends and family platonically. I love only my one partner romantically, but while I love my friends platonically, I can stll kiss them, which might be confusing to some. So it is good to have a differentiator term for that.
As for sexualities, yes, sure, it’s a spectrum and there are as many sexualities as there are people. But again, common-enough terms will survive. Aro/Ace are incredibly important umbrella terms for people who don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction - that’s a lot of people. But bigger groups of people will experience similar but distinct types of aromanticisism or asexuality and will ascribe their own terms to it in order to communicate between themselves - names are a natural linguistic formation for humans. They are important. So I would say let people ascribe terms so they can both feel more valid and also communicate on their shared experiences.
It’s normal to be confused by new labels and I personally don’t believe microlabels will survive long term. But nobody gets hurt by them if we don’t use them to isolate us. Being disrespectful to people for trying to communicate solves nothing.
If you believe asexual/greysexual/whatever people would benefit from your community, calling them “idiotic” won’t convince them.
Also, let’s remember that labels change across time and places.
Fair enough, i expressed myself incorrectly. My problem isnt naming these things, i have no problem with that and its good if it helps people who feel these things create communities of equals and share their feelings and thoughts on that. Rather, my problem is on what name is used to describe such things. I think its incorrect to describe “asexual” and “demisexual” for example with those words, since it implies they are a sexuality and i dont think they are. Sexuality and sexual identities are based on gender, both your identified gender and you partners identified gender, thats what defines sexualities. What defines someone who is gay? That their identified gender is male and their partners is also male. What defines bisexuality? That your partners can be both male and female (and also nonbinary depending on how you define it). Thats what defines sexual identities.
However, with asexual and demisexual, this is absent. There is nothing related to gender that defines these 2 “sexual identities”, rather they are completely based off your emotions. You can call it an emotional/romantic identity if you want, but its not a sexual identity. I also find it very problematic the inclusion of these identities with the wider LGBTQ movement. LGBTQ people suffer real, palpable discrimination and oppression. Thus, it is necessary to have a movement that fights this discrimination and oppression. I have never heard, and correct me if im wrong, of someone who is asexual or demisexual being discriminated for their identity. The most “oppression” i can imagine is some mean jokes in high school, which, granted, are very painful at that age, but do not amount to any real systemic oppression in my opinion.
And this is the crux of the matter. When a person is LGBTQ, this can be identified by outsiders looking at you. If you are kissing your gay partner in public, people around you will know that you are gay. If a trans woman has not fully transitioned yet and thus still has some male physical charachteristics, but still dresses as a woman in public, people around her will know that she is transgender. This is what allows people with reactionary views on LGBTQ people to discriminate and oppress them. Sexual identities are clearly visible on the outside, which allows people with certain identities to be oppressed. However, if you are asexual and you are walking down the street, noone will notice. Same if you are demisexual, only your closest family, friends and partners will know. You will not be forced into poverty and prostitution like many transgender people are. You will not be violently assaulted in the middle of the street. You will not be refused employment.
There is an objective difference between LGBTQ and all these other identities, which is why i believe comparing them as equals and including them in the LGBTQ movement diminishes the severity of the oppression that LGBTQ people face. Frankly all of this gives me the impression of rich privileged white people from the first world trying to pretend that they are oppressed. Not saying this is your case, im speaking generally.
I’m sorry for this invasive question. But are you LGBT? If you are, you should realize how irrelevant this conversation is. You can’t appropriate LGBT struggles. A heterosexual person has no impact on our oppression if they call themselves “demisexual”.
This is a useless conversation unless you believe that LGBT identity starts and ends at some flags and hashtags in social media.
The moment you can prove they are taking real resources away from LGBT people then you could start worrying about it.
All this to say: “Is it the same? No, but I can’t give less of a shit when I have to stay closeted to keep my job”
Well, depending on how you define it, i could be either heterosexual or bisexual. Im mostly attracted to women (im male) although i have felt attraction in the past towards specific men (not all of them were acquaintances). I have never had sex or a relationship with men tho, so i consider myself heterosexual but open to homosexual relationships (here in Spain we call this “bicurious”). Still, i wouldnt say i have ever faced oppression/discrimination for my sexual identity (although i have faced extreme discrimination due to me being a drug user/addict, on the level of being immediately evicted, threatened and beaten up by a landlord as soon as he found out that i used drugs), but i think thats because in Spain, especially the youth (which im part of), are very open to LGBTQ people, very socially progressive in general. I have always been pretty open about my bicuriosity, especially at parties (when im on drugs/drunk i rarely shut up, i often talk too much), and have never faced any problems due to it. Same with some gay and lesbian friends i have, they are very open about it and 99,99% of young people just accept it. Because of this, i dont consider myself to be oppressed due to my sexual identity, although im definetely oppressed because of my status as a drug user.
Im not trying to appropiate LGBT struggles. All im saying is all this talk about “asexual/demisexual liberation” and so on, like its on the same level as LGBT liberation, trivializes the real oppression LGBT people face. There is no country where asexuals/demisexuals are hanged for just being themselves. However, there are many countries in the world in which LGBT people face torture and brutal execution by hanging for just being themselves. There is a very real objective difference between the oppression LGBT people face and the one faced by asexuals/demisexuals and similar identities. Look, i myself have experienced severe bullying, i know what its like to be constantly mocked by your high school peers because “you never had a girlfriend/youre a virgin ahahsjsha”. And im not asexual, i actually love sex! So i cannot imagine how awful that must have been if you are asexual, if you just didnt like sex but were mocked for this. Im not denying this, i agree its terribly wrong and shouldnt happen.
But this is not even remotely on the same level as LGBT people being beheaded with a sword in Saudi Arabia just for who they are. Do you see what i mean? Im not saying asexual/demisexual/etc people shouldnt have the right to express themselves freely and be free of mockeries and mean jokes. All im saying is its a different struggle, and thus should imo be separated from the LGBTQ struggle. I dont think theres anything controversial with this. Is the LGBTQ liberation struggle on the same level as the black liberation struggle? Ofc not, blacks have suffered an oppression unfathomable to white LGBTQ people, they were literally enslaved, transformed into a commodity to be shipped and sold on demand. This doesnt mean LGBTQ people havent been oppressed, it just means that some people are oppressed more than others. Ofc all liberation struggles are important, but we must keep in mind the realities of these oppressions so as not to trivialize them. Thats all im saying.
I will say that a bisexual person has the right to acknowledge their identity even while being on a safe space from bi/homophobia and not having relationships with the same gender, maybe ever. The bi community benefits from the normalization of the identity and the bi person can understand themselves better.
I understand feeling like “not enough bisexual” but there’s not a long checklist my guy. But that’s a personal thing. Feel free to reach out to me if you need to talk about this, I struggle with it as well.
Idk im not a huge fan of labels personally, which is why i originally said “why do we need to label everything”, although its ok if people want to label themselves. I really dont care what i am, whether you think im heterosexual or bisexual, i dont care. When i describe it to people, i generally say im “80% heterosexual, 20% homosexual”. I think it describes it more accurately than just saying im bisexual. I dont think checkbox labels are very fitting to describe these types of things, i prefer more accurate lenghty descriptions, but thats just me.
Nah you did not make me feel uncomfortable my dude. Frankly the absolute dogpiling i got today for posting a video of Infrared here made me way more uncomfortable than anything you ever said to me in this thread lol (if you dont know what im talking about see my post history).
I do not mean to be rude when I say this, but this sounds like it is lacking a proper analysis of gender and like a dismissal of the struggles ace people face both, comrade.
There is nothing related to gender that defines these 2 “sexual identities”, rather they are completely based off your emotions.
Sexuality and sexual identities are based on gender […] However, with asexual and demisexual, this is absent.
This is fundamentally flawed. The asexual identity of ace people absolutely has to tie in to gender.
You can say you are homosexual because you identify with attraction towards same-sex individuals. Put this another way: You identify with having no attraction to any other gender, except for the same one. Take that one away too and what do you have? Asexuality.
If you take that same gay person and they realize that actually they’re not only not attracted to the other sex - they’re actually…not attracted to the same one ether. Or anyone else. They might come to the conclusion that they are asexual.
It is not based on “emotion” it is based entirely on who you are sexually attracted to - it happens to be no gender at all. You can say that homosexuality is entirely based on “emotion”, as gay people just happen to be attracted to a random sex - but this is a flawed argument, as it lacks a fundamental understanding of attraction.
An asexual person’s attraction can simply be rephrased as: no matter what gender you are, be it the same as theirs or not - they are not sexually attracted to you. And you cannot have that definition without gender.
When a person is LGBTQ, this can be identified by outsiders looking at you. […] Sexual identities are clearly visible on the outside
Absolutely not true. Dare I say, the majority of LGBT people are straight passing. Gender presentation, gender identity, sexual attraction and romantic attraction are all separate things that do not, in any way shape or form, have to coincide with one another at any given time for any particular individual.
The only thing visible on the outside is gender presentation. If a guy presents in a feminine way, they may very well be straight. Or bi. Or ace. You cannot tell unless you ask. Any trans person can be any sexuality. And non-binary person can be. You will be harassed by reactionaries based on your gender presentation - if they can clock you as trans or potentially gay-looking, they might harass you.
An ace person wearing an ace pin is going to get harassed just the same. An ace person rejecting the sexual advances of reactionaries is going to get harassed just the same (got forbid they say “sorry dude, i’m ace” and out themselves are non-hetero-normative). They also face their fair share of “I can fix you” or “I’ll make you like sex” types like gay people face “i can turn you straight” ones.
Aro/Ace/Etc. people are, and always will be, part of the LGBT movement if they wish to be so, because their struggles stem from the fact that they are not hetero-normative. And finally, fundametnally: There is no minimum bar to the the amount of oppression one must face - we all have the human right not to be opressed in the first place. Even if ace people had it all peachy - we should still support them and listen to their voices like any other.
And the topic further extends to the fact that sexual and romantic attraction are separate, so one can be Asexual and homoromantic, or homosexual and aromantic, but I will let you research that yourself.
I still dont fully agree with you, but i will say that you have made me think and question my previously held beliefs. In the end, if ace people feel they need to be part of the LGBT movement and it benefits them, then i guess i cannot do anything else but support them. Hopefully they will face no more prejudices under socialism.
If asexual people aren’t getting in the way of anti-transphobia, anti-homophobia and anti-biphobia, it’s grasping at definitions to complain about whether they are or not LGBT. My and your opinion doesn’t really matter at the end of day because it hurts nobody beyond some confusion.
Always find it so weird when people keep saying “Why must u label things?” Humans do that. It is nice and convenient. It lets us describe common or unique properties. Some people also feel more valid knowing that what they experience is common enough and shared enough to have a descriptor (🙋). It’s also very nice to be able to form communities and discuss the specifics of shared experiences, no matter how niche.
Relationships that involve multiple people have their unique dynamics and features, such as experiencing and managing NRE (new crushes basically), polycules, etc. and so it makes sense that they would also have their own term for it. This would also be fundamentally different from platonic families.
Also, “platonic” is a very important term. I love my friends and family platonically. I love only my one partner romantically, but while I love my friends platonically, I can stll kiss them, which might be confusing to some. So it is good to have a differentiator term for that.
As for sexualities, yes, sure, it’s a spectrum and there are as many sexualities as there are people. But again, common-enough terms will survive. Aro/Ace are incredibly important umbrella terms for people who don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction - that’s a lot of people. But bigger groups of people will experience similar but distinct types of aromanticisism or asexuality and will ascribe their own terms to it in order to communicate between themselves - names are a natural linguistic formation for humans. They are important. So I would say let people ascribe terms so they can both feel more valid and also communicate on their shared experiences.
It’s normal to be confused by new labels and I personally don’t believe microlabels will survive long term. But nobody gets hurt by them if we don’t use them to isolate us. Being disrespectful to people for trying to communicate solves nothing.
If you believe asexual/greysexual/whatever people would benefit from your community, calling them “idiotic” won’t convince them.
Also, let’s remember that labels change across time and places.
Fair enough, i expressed myself incorrectly. My problem isnt naming these things, i have no problem with that and its good if it helps people who feel these things create communities of equals and share their feelings and thoughts on that. Rather, my problem is on what name is used to describe such things. I think its incorrect to describe “asexual” and “demisexual” for example with those words, since it implies they are a sexuality and i dont think they are. Sexuality and sexual identities are based on gender, both your identified gender and you partners identified gender, thats what defines sexualities. What defines someone who is gay? That their identified gender is male and their partners is also male. What defines bisexuality? That your partners can be both male and female (and also nonbinary depending on how you define it). Thats what defines sexual identities.
However, with asexual and demisexual, this is absent. There is nothing related to gender that defines these 2 “sexual identities”, rather they are completely based off your emotions. You can call it an emotional/romantic identity if you want, but its not a sexual identity. I also find it very problematic the inclusion of these identities with the wider LGBTQ movement. LGBTQ people suffer real, palpable discrimination and oppression. Thus, it is necessary to have a movement that fights this discrimination and oppression. I have never heard, and correct me if im wrong, of someone who is asexual or demisexual being discriminated for their identity. The most “oppression” i can imagine is some mean jokes in high school, which, granted, are very painful at that age, but do not amount to any real systemic oppression in my opinion.
And this is the crux of the matter. When a person is LGBTQ, this can be identified by outsiders looking at you. If you are kissing your gay partner in public, people around you will know that you are gay. If a trans woman has not fully transitioned yet and thus still has some male physical charachteristics, but still dresses as a woman in public, people around her will know that she is transgender. This is what allows people with reactionary views on LGBTQ people to discriminate and oppress them. Sexual identities are clearly visible on the outside, which allows people with certain identities to be oppressed. However, if you are asexual and you are walking down the street, noone will notice. Same if you are demisexual, only your closest family, friends and partners will know. You will not be forced into poverty and prostitution like many transgender people are. You will not be violently assaulted in the middle of the street. You will not be refused employment.
There is an objective difference between LGBTQ and all these other identities, which is why i believe comparing them as equals and including them in the LGBTQ movement diminishes the severity of the oppression that LGBTQ people face. Frankly all of this gives me the impression of rich privileged white people from the first world trying to pretend that they are oppressed. Not saying this is your case, im speaking generally.
I’m sorry for this invasive question. But are you LGBT? If you are, you should realize how irrelevant this conversation is. You can’t appropriate LGBT struggles. A heterosexual person has no impact on our oppression if they call themselves “demisexual”.
This is a useless conversation unless you believe that LGBT identity starts and ends at some flags and hashtags in social media.
The moment you can prove they are taking real resources away from LGBT people then you could start worrying about it.
All this to say: “Is it the same? No, but I can’t give less of a shit when I have to stay closeted to keep my job”
Well, depending on how you define it, i could be either heterosexual or bisexual. Im mostly attracted to women (im male) although i have felt attraction in the past towards specific men (not all of them were acquaintances). I have never had sex or a relationship with men tho, so i consider myself heterosexual but open to homosexual relationships (here in Spain we call this “bicurious”). Still, i wouldnt say i have ever faced oppression/discrimination for my sexual identity (although i have faced extreme discrimination due to me being a drug user/addict, on the level of being immediately evicted, threatened and beaten up by a landlord as soon as he found out that i used drugs), but i think thats because in Spain, especially the youth (which im part of), are very open to LGBTQ people, very socially progressive in general. I have always been pretty open about my bicuriosity, especially at parties (when im on drugs/drunk i rarely shut up, i often talk too much), and have never faced any problems due to it. Same with some gay and lesbian friends i have, they are very open about it and 99,99% of young people just accept it. Because of this, i dont consider myself to be oppressed due to my sexual identity, although im definetely oppressed because of my status as a drug user.
Im not trying to appropiate LGBT struggles. All im saying is all this talk about “asexual/demisexual liberation” and so on, like its on the same level as LGBT liberation, trivializes the real oppression LGBT people face. There is no country where asexuals/demisexuals are hanged for just being themselves. However, there are many countries in the world in which LGBT people face torture and brutal execution by hanging for just being themselves. There is a very real objective difference between the oppression LGBT people face and the one faced by asexuals/demisexuals and similar identities. Look, i myself have experienced severe bullying, i know what its like to be constantly mocked by your high school peers because “you never had a girlfriend/youre a virgin ahahsjsha”. And im not asexual, i actually love sex! So i cannot imagine how awful that must have been if you are asexual, if you just didnt like sex but were mocked for this. Im not denying this, i agree its terribly wrong and shouldnt happen.
But this is not even remotely on the same level as LGBT people being beheaded with a sword in Saudi Arabia just for who they are. Do you see what i mean? Im not saying asexual/demisexual/etc people shouldnt have the right to express themselves freely and be free of mockeries and mean jokes. All im saying is its a different struggle, and thus should imo be separated from the LGBTQ struggle. I dont think theres anything controversial with this. Is the LGBTQ liberation struggle on the same level as the black liberation struggle? Ofc not, blacks have suffered an oppression unfathomable to white LGBTQ people, they were literally enslaved, transformed into a commodity to be shipped and sold on demand. This doesnt mean LGBTQ people havent been oppressed, it just means that some people are oppressed more than others. Ofc all liberation struggles are important, but we must keep in mind the realities of these oppressions so as not to trivialize them. Thats all im saying.
I will say that a bisexual person has the right to acknowledge their identity even while being on a safe space from bi/homophobia and not having relationships with the same gender, maybe ever. The bi community benefits from the normalization of the identity and the bi person can understand themselves better.
I understand feeling like “not enough bisexual” but there’s not a long checklist my guy. But that’s a personal thing. Feel free to reach out to me if you need to talk about this, I struggle with it as well.
Sorry if I made you uncomfortable with this.
Idk im not a huge fan of labels personally, which is why i originally said “why do we need to label everything”, although its ok if people want to label themselves. I really dont care what i am, whether you think im heterosexual or bisexual, i dont care. When i describe it to people, i generally say im “80% heterosexual, 20% homosexual”. I think it describes it more accurately than just saying im bisexual. I dont think checkbox labels are very fitting to describe these types of things, i prefer more accurate lenghty descriptions, but thats just me.
Nah you did not make me feel uncomfortable my dude. Frankly the absolute dogpiling i got today for posting a video of Infrared here made me way more uncomfortable than anything you ever said to me in this thread lol (if you dont know what im talking about see my post history).
I do not mean to be rude when I say this, but this sounds like it is lacking a proper analysis of gender and like a dismissal of the struggles ace people face both, comrade.
This is fundamentally flawed. The asexual identity of ace people absolutely has to tie in to gender. You can say you are homosexual because you identify with attraction towards same-sex individuals. Put this another way: You identify with having no attraction to any other gender, except for the same one. Take that one away too and what do you have? Asexuality.
If you take that same gay person and they realize that actually they’re not only not attracted to the other sex - they’re actually…not attracted to the same one ether. Or anyone else. They might come to the conclusion that they are asexual.
It is not based on “emotion” it is based entirely on who you are sexually attracted to - it happens to be no gender at all. You can say that homosexuality is entirely based on “emotion”, as gay people just happen to be attracted to a random sex - but this is a flawed argument, as it lacks a fundamental understanding of attraction.
An asexual person’s attraction can simply be rephrased as: no matter what gender you are, be it the same as theirs or not - they are not sexually attracted to you. And you cannot have that definition without gender.
Absolutely not true. Dare I say, the majority of LGBT people are straight passing. Gender presentation, gender identity, sexual attraction and romantic attraction are all separate things that do not, in any way shape or form, have to coincide with one another at any given time for any particular individual.
The only thing visible on the outside is gender presentation. If a guy presents in a feminine way, they may very well be straight. Or bi. Or ace. You cannot tell unless you ask. Any trans person can be any sexuality. And non-binary person can be. You will be harassed by reactionaries based on your gender presentation - if they can clock you as trans or potentially gay-looking, they might harass you.
An ace person wearing an ace pin is going to get harassed just the same. An ace person rejecting the sexual advances of reactionaries is going to get harassed just the same (got forbid they say “sorry dude, i’m ace” and out themselves are non-hetero-normative). They also face their fair share of “I can fix you” or “I’ll make you like sex” types like gay people face “i can turn you straight” ones.
Aro/Ace/Etc. people are, and always will be, part of the LGBT movement if they wish to be so, because their struggles stem from the fact that they are not hetero-normative. And finally, fundametnally: There is no minimum bar to the the amount of oppression one must face - we all have the human right not to be opressed in the first place. Even if ace people had it all peachy - we should still support them and listen to their voices like any other.
And the topic further extends to the fact that sexual and romantic attraction are separate, so one can be Asexual and homoromantic, or homosexual and aromantic, but I will let you research that yourself.
I still dont fully agree with you, but i will say that you have made me think and question my previously held beliefs. In the end, if ace people feel they need to be part of the LGBT movement and it benefits them, then i guess i cannot do anything else but support them. Hopefully they will face no more prejudices under socialism.
If asexual people aren’t getting in the way of anti-transphobia, anti-homophobia and anti-biphobia, it’s grasping at definitions to complain about whether they are or not LGBT. My and your opinion doesn’t really matter at the end of day because it hurts nobody beyond some confusion.
I agree