And it’s no one else’s business what the trauma is, or why the person who went through it is comfortable with the particular label they chose for their sexuality, not someone else’s business to determine the validity of that person’s chosen label.
(And hey, if they change thier mind later, than that’s ok too, because sexuality can be fluid, and recovery is not a “point a to point b” journey, but an ongoing process that can sometimes take an entire lifetime.)
Two episodes with the large part at the center skipped because a lot of nope, and a few other episodes later, and oh look, it’s another episode of “but everyone wants romance and/or sex, because if they don’t, they’re broken”.
*thumps head on desk* Damnit.
(Also, no matter what the lines are, or the facial expressions, there’s something missing in the interactions between them. Like Odo is going through the motions of something that he understands from observation, but doesn’t actually feel.)
Skipping the next episode, because I do not need to be screaming angry things at the screen about insisting that obviously everyone has sexual desire, because no such thing as asexual people could possibly exist, even among beings who aren’t even humanoid, even a character who has read as aro-ace since the beginning of the show.
Meaning of the letter “A” when appearing in LGBT[…]+ acronyms:
Asexual: 95.4% of respondents, 1936 total
Aromantic: 80.7% of respondents, 1639 total
Agender: 66.7% of respondents, 1353 total
Ally: 13.9% of respondents, 282 total.
I’m just posting this here for my aces and aros who are feeling down on themselves and defeated tonight. Remember that nine out of ten people support you and that the current loudest voices are not those of the majority.
If you don’t believe being asexual has any negative affect on people I was told by a psychiatrist that none of my relationships count because we didn’t have sex, and
I can’t say I’m gay since I don’t want to have sex with girls.
and I was taken off my antidepressants because they may be lowering the libido I never had in the first place (plus various other reasons, but still immediately, cold turkey, which should NEVER happen unless they’re switching you to something else)
But aphobia doesn’t exist and asexuals are privileged, right?
Sorry to add to this but I wanted to say since I’ve had bad experiences with mental health professionals and biphobia, I usually get asked “but are you sure you are sexually attracted to both sexes, are you sure it’s not just an emotional attraction?!” Like my dude don’t you think I can tell the difference between wanting to date someone and wanting to be friends? Also, due to be gray ace 90% of the time I am not even attracted to anyone but like sure, make me feel guilty that I can’t “prove” my bisexuality.
Sorry too but to add on, being aro isn’t much different. I told my therapist and she was immediately concerned that my meds were repressing “all my emotions” and wanted to take me off them. My insurance ran out and I went off them bc of no money before that happened. She also suggested dating someone anyway to “fix” the “issue” and expressed concern that my emotions (romantic feelings) weren’t present because “I’m suspicious and untrusting of everyone and don’t want to try hard enough.”
Having your orientation medicalized and invalidated is bad enough, but its fucking dangerous to have your meds taken away because you’re not performing relationships the way some doctor thinks you’re required to.
Aaaand this is why we need the bi/pan/ace/aro alliance.
this is why we need to recognize more queer experiences and identities than gay and lesbian, through increased awareness, information and representation.
It terrifies me that there’s so much raging passion in the lgbt+ community that insist on marginalizing asexuals and implying that asexuals don’t deserve to have safe spaces. There’s still so much acephobia so I just wanna know which blogs are genuinely supportive and a safe space for asexuals
I just hope that asexual people are still going to doctors to get checked before assuming they are in fact asexual because it is totally possible they could have a hormonal imbalance or more serious problem and because of the growing, validating community they might not even get checked out first
This is an old attitude that has been used against LGBT+ people for quite some time. It is called pathologization. The goal of pathologization is to find a medical or psychological reason for someone’s sexual, romantic, and/or gender identity. The implication is that the identity is 1) flawed and 2) requires a cure.
Pathologization can be an insidious form of violence. People who promote the idea often suggest that they are merely concerned about the well-being of others and acting in their best interest. The reality is that pathologization can lead to incompetent medical care and medical abuse.
This message is also repeated in the news. For example, Asexuality – Is it Even Real? by Fox News sex expert Dr. Yvonne Fulbright mentions HSDD, asks people to consider other options in her writing, and advises people to seek medical/psychological help if asexuality leads to “interpersonal difficulties.”
The “interpersonal difficulties” asexuals may experience often have to due with (cis)heterosexism and pathologizing attitudes towards asexuality that they may experience from family and peers. So, advising us to seek help for interpersonal difficulties asexuality may “cause” ignores the fact that it is not the cause.
Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) is a sexual disorder that involves an absence of desire for sex. This can be used to pathologize asexual people. Some argue that it is harmless because it makes no explicit mention of asexuality in its original description.
The description of HSDD includes experiences asexual people may have. Asexual people often experience low sexual desire. Asexual people also often experience distress due to low sexual desire, because they are expected to experience sexual desire and act on it in a relationship.
In 2013, the DSM V included a disclaimer that self-identification of asexuality precludes diagnosis. This does not completely resolve the pathologization of asexuality, as there are many people who do not “self identify” with asexuality until later on in life due to things like compulsory (hetero)sexuality.
Furthermore, the medical treatments of HSDD are sketchy. For example, a drug dubbed as the “female viagra,” flibanserin, acts to raise sexual desire and lower inhibition. For more reading on the issues with HSDD and flibanserin, please check out the following:
People spend years unnecessarily suffering due to the pathologization of asexuality in our fictional media, in our news, in academic communities, and in our doctor’s offices. Nothing about the OP’s statement acts in the best interest of asexual people, and it villainizes a “validating community.”
Medical care already biases heterosexual people. We require research in order to provide competent medical care to LGBT+ people, because of past harmful attitudes towards these identities. Telling us to get help is not in our best interest. Investing in research that provides asexuals with competent care is.
In addition, statements like the one made above by the OP are particularly harmful to asexual people who are traumatized, disabled, chronically ill, mentally ill, and/or neurodivergent. Our asexuality may be tied to our traumatic, medical, psychological and/or developmental condition(s), but an important part of us nevertheless.
We could spend years trying to fix ourselves to suit an ideal that is perpetuated by our society, or we could accept ourselves and create spaces where we can function as asexual people. We are not required to “check ourselves” in order to be acceptable human beings.
Heterosexual people do not hear this, so why us? There’s no reason for it.
This is not to say to people that they cannot or should not seek out medical care. This is to say that the pathologization of asexuality does more harm than good to asexual people seeking medical care, and that we need to make an effort to provide competent care to asexual people.
It terrifies me that there’s so much raging passion in the lgbt+ community that insist on marginalizing asexuals and implying that asexuals don’t deserve to have safe spaces. There’s still so much acephobia so I just wanna know which blogs are genuinely supportive and a safe space for asexuals
In the few months I’ve been modding at fuckyeahasexual and touring ace Tumblr, there’s been a very. Steady. Stream of info that detail horrifically abusive situations and overall poor mental unhealth. Two a week in the inbox if I’m lucky, usually around seven-ten.
And there’s been so many, I can officially categorize all 500+ of these kinds of asks and submissions into an extensive bulletlist of Why Asexual Exclusionary Radicalism Is Incredibly Toxic And Shitty;
Coming Out To Family, Friends, And Employers
“My parents keep telling me that I’m something else, and it’s making me doubt my sense of judgement, not just about my sexual identity, but also about everything in general.”
“My family, friends, and co-workers keep referring to me as an inanimate object in a manner that’s clearly meant to humiliate and devastate me. Nothing I say will get them to stop.”
“My parents vocally/bodily forced me to undergo medical examinations, some of them concerning my sexual organs, many of them concerning blood tests and other trauma-centric procedures.”
“My family is intervening with my private life by changing my schedule to include exercise, socialization, friend influences, and whatever they think can ‘change’ me.”
“My friends/co-workers no longer respect my bodily boundaries when I came out to them, because they no longer see me as someone who should be respected. They regularly touch, fondle, grope, and prod me without permission, and/or verbally harass me, and don’t take my objections seriously.”
“My family, friends, and co-workers no longer just harass me, but also anyone I’m currently dating because they view my significant other as pathetic, underserved, or even being abused.”
First Few Days Of Dating
“My date got irrationally angry and confrontational when I came out to them, in a manner that made me fearful.” (SO many of these.)
“My date immediately lost any respect they had for my boundaries, no longer asked for consent, and {tried to} force themselves upon me.” (A lot of these, too)
“My date tried to verbally circumvent any boundaries and issues I confessed to, and it made me feel like I was in danger.”
“I didn’t come out to my date at first, and when they found out, they radically changed their behavior in an attempt to control and manipulate our new relationship to their benefit.”
Long-Term Relationships
“My partner has forcefully and radically changed our long-term relationship after finding out about my asexuality, and I’m now trapped and controlled in a way that I wasn’t before.”
“My partner broke up with me/is fighting with me because of my asexuality, and trying to make it seem like I’m hurting them. It’s made me doubt myself and my ability to trust my own intentions.”
“My partner is slowly changing from what was once supportive of my asexuality, and I’m wondering when I have the right to be worried and when I’d be overreacting. I’m aware of the worst case scenario, but I also worry that I’m being selfish and childish – which are things I’ve been told all throughout my asexual experience.”
Self-Care And Self Development
“I don’t trust my ability to say either yes or no in sexual situations, and this has extended to my life in general. I don’t feel comfortable in my ability to self-determinate.”
“The lack of authority, definition, and schooling of the concept of asexuality has made me very uncomfortable with what I think I am, and that uncertainty haunts me every waking moment.”
“I think it’s too late/too early to tell if I’m asexual, but the longer I hesitate, the worse my mental health and emotional wellbeing gets. I’m effectively stuck.”
“I see no benefit in coming out, or even identifying as asexual. There’s no positivity, role models, or supportive community for what I consider a big and scary part of my overall identity.”
“I think this was sexual abuse, but I’m wondering if I’m just being selfish and childish.”
“I think I was treated badly by my parents/friends/partner, but I’m wondering if I’m just being selfish and childish.”
“I want to believe that I’m deserving of equal freedom and human respect paid to other, not asexual people, but people tell me I’m being selfish and childish.”
“No one encourages this part of me. And that makes me feel forgotten and abandoned in general.”
Shut the fuck up about your petty beef with tumblr bloggers and youtubers and Archie comics or whatever. I literally do not care, I can’t care. I see these messages every goddamn day – this post was written and drafted a month ago, and I very easily compiled most of this bulletpoint list from scratch, just by eyeing what I see in the askbox and what comes across my dash.
‘Ace discourse’ anger is empty and so meaningless. This is what I see by being part of this one 17k follow asexual ask blog for maybe half a year. I am so Done with all the faux rage posts and all the false positivity about how it’s ok to NOT be ace and all the acephobia that falls perfectly in line with the gaslighting typical of acephobia-101 while also having the audacity to claim it not so.
This is what’s real and I want to bleed it into your goddamn eyes.
Reblogging this again, for obvious reasons
Ace ppl are not INSTITUTIONALLY OR SYSTEMATICALLY OPPRESSED BECAUSE OF THE DEGREE THAT YOU FEEL SEXUAL ATTRACTION. If ur trans ur lgbtq. If ur aro but ur gay, bi, pan ur lgbtq. If ur ace but homo, biromantic etc ur lgbt. Being ace doesnt make u lgbt by default. Does the interpersonal lack of understanding suck and should change? Yeah. But society doesnt want u dead so cishet aces stay tf out our business.
Someone read this, all this stuff about struggles of people coming out as ace, people abusing them and telling them that their identity isn’t real or is a problem to be fixed, making people feel worthless and feeling that they’re in the wrong about their own goddamn identity, and said “nah they ain’t oppressed™ enough to be in a community of people who face the same issues”
U mad huh?
Anyway….aces can’t be systematically opressed. None of those things are examples of systematic oppression
Also nice how they called it “asexual exclusionary radicalism” as if it wasn’t a cheap tactic to compare ace exclusionist to twerfs
Asexuality was listed in the DSM as HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) until 2013, making it officially a mental illness that would be treated with therapy and medication. It is still in the DSM, except that you can ‘opt out’ if you self-identify as asexual, which is great except that asexuality is still so unknown that there undoubtedly many people who are asexual but don’t know that it’s “a thing”. This means that who knows how many asexuals have been sent to therapy and told they’re sick, then been “treated” for their orientation to try and force them to experience sexuality “correctly”.
Posts of people describing the hardship they’ve faced for their asexuality:x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
The blog @acephobia-is-real has so many submissions and examples of hatred, harassment, hostility, and abuse, of aces who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted in an attempt to ‘fix’ them, and made suicidal due to aphobia and/or their own perceived brokenness, that it would be pointless for me to try and link any. Just go and start reading. Try their suicide tag.
There may be dissatisfyingly little research done on asexuality, but there has been enough done to prove that they do face discrimination, no matter how hard some may find that to believe. But guess what? You, an allosexual person, do not get to say shit like “aces don’t get kicked out” or “aces don’t _____” any more than I as a white person get to say that things I don’t experience must not happen to black people either. Just because you haven’t experienced it personally or witnessed it with your own eyes doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You haven’t walked in an ace’s shoes, you don’t know what they deal with. Period.
Not even other aces can tell asexuals that their experiences aren’t real or aren’t valid. Different people can deal with different amounts of oppression, that doesn’t mean the lack of oppression is the default “truth”.
Nobody is trying to say that asexuals have it “as bad” or worse than gay or trans people, but we don’t HAVE to “have it worse” to beincluded and for our experiences to have merit without being compared to anyone else’s. Let me say that again: our experiences have merit without being compared to anyone else’s.
Told asexuals to die: x, x, x, x, x (tbh this is only a tiny sample and I don’t have the heart to go digging for more)
Are all aphobes this vile? Maybe not, but this is still the disgusting, hateful attitude festering in the gatekeeping community, and it stinks like shit. The examples I have provided above are only a fraction of the harassment and abuse that is perpetrated on a regular basis.
“Het aces/aroaces are straight”
Some het aces identify as straight. Some het aces don’t identify as straight, they identify as asexual, and it’s not your place to label them against their will. There is no world in which aroaces, people who experience no attraction to anyone, are straight.
“We accept SGA (same-gender attracted) and trans aces”
Firstly, SGA (same-gender attraction) is a term that was used and is still used in Mormon conversion therapy, so as one can understand,a lot of people are very uncomfortable being labeled with this description. Secondly, it enforces a gender binary of “same” and “opposite” gender that leaves a large number of nonbinary people out in the cold. Is a genderfluid person only “same-gender attracted” if they’re attracted to other genderfluid people who are genderfluid in exactly the same way? How about agender, intergender, demigirl/boy people? And before the argument “well they’re included as trans” is made, there are plenty of nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. I’m one of them.
The standard of “SGA and trans” as requirement for entry to the LGBTQ community is used nowhere outside of aphobic tumblr, and it seems crafted specifically for the purpose of excluding aces, aros, NBs, intersex people, and others not deemed “gay enough”.
The modern American movement was first known as the “gay community” when cis gay men refused to even accept lesbians, then the “gay and lesbian community”. (Good reading on the subject.)
“After the elation of change following group action in the Stonewall riots in New York, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, some gays and lesbians became less accepting of bisexual or transgender people. Critics said that transgender people were acting out stereotypes and bisexuals were simply gay men or lesbian women who were afraid to come out and be honest about their identity. Each community has struggled to develop its own identity including whether, and how, to align with other gender and sexuality-based communities, at times excluding other subgroups; these conflicts continue to this day.” (source)
“From about 1988, activists began to use the initialism LGBT in the United States. Not until the 1990s within the movement did gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people gain equal respect.” (ibid)
Insisting that LG people have always been accepting of bi and trans people is incredibly revisionist and does a great deal of injustice to those who have been excluded.
Despite the fact that bisexual and transgender people have always been around, and have done great things for the community, they have faced a great deal of lateral oppression from the LG part of the group that did not want to see them get an equal share of attention, support, or legitimacy. This post is not about proving LG transphobia and biphobia, but it’s so rampant that I don’t feel like I need to provide sources whatsoever. Nevertheless, here’s a collection of biphobia, and the blog@terf-calloutdocuments some of the violent transphobia on this site, particularly in the lesbian community. This post is an example.
“The A stands for Ally so that closeted people can be the community without being outed”
No one is saying that we don’t care about closeted people, but a) even if you’re a closeted L, G, B, or T, you are still a L, G, B, or T. Allies do not need to be part of the acronym to be intrinsically welcomed. As someone said, this is like saying the ‘B’ in BLT stands for ‘bread’. We can pretty much safely assume that a sandwich is going to include bread, we don’t have to go of our way to give it a letter. Either you are outing every “ally” as a closeted queer person, or you are giving 100% cis straight people an LGBTQ member card, the very thing you are arguing against by trying to exclude asexuals.
Furthermore, this puts forth the argument “I’m willing to let cishet straight people into the community for the sake of a few closeted people” while at the same time stating “I’m not willing to let the A stand for asexuals because I don’t think letting cis heteroromantic asexuals into the community is worth giving all asexuals representation and support”. Which says that you consider asexuals less valuable and more of a threat than cis straight people.
“I have proof of an asexual being homophobic/transphobic/racist/a terrible person”
Of course there are asexuals who are terrible people. There are legions of gays and lesbians who are racist and transphobic. Does that make them not gay/lesbian? Does their bigotry invalidate their sexual orientation, or remove the L and G from the acronym? No, I don’t think so. Some asexuals being bad people doesn’t justify you trying to invalidate all of us.
“’Allosexual’ is a bad word because ____”
I actually have an ‘allosexual’ tag just for posts about why ‘allosexual’ is a perfectly fine word: x, x, x, x, x. x
“The split-attraction model is homophobic”
What we call the split-attraction model was first described by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay advocate from the 1800s, as “disjunctive uranodioning”. (source) (credit to this post)
“The term ‘corrective rape’ was coined by South African lesbians and should only be used by lesbians”
No one means any disrespect to lesbians or other victims of corrective rape, but this is not a correct statement.
“We’ll Show You You’re a Woman” describes the violence directed towards LGBT people in South Africa, stating, “Negative public attitudes towards homosexuality go hand in hand with a broader pattern of discrimination, violence, hatred, and extreme prejudice against people known or assumed to be lesbian, gay, and transgender, or those who violate gender and sexual norms in appearance or conduct (such as women playing soccer, dressing in a masculine manner, and refusing to date men).” It goes on to say, “Much of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on “corrective rape,” a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to “convert” them to heterosexuality.”
The Wikipedia article on corrective rape in South Africa states that, “A study conducted by OUT LGBT Well-being and the University of South Africa Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) showed that “the percentage of black gay men who said they have experienced corrective rape matched that of the black lesbians who partook in the study”.”
It is not only lesbians, but also bisexual women, transgender men, gay men, and gender non-conforming people in South Africa who experience corrective rape. This is not in any way meant to minimize the horror of the epidemic or shift attention away from lesbians, but other victims, including asexuals, deserve attention as well. Do not silence or speak over victims of rape by policing their language.
“Aces are valid, they’re just not queer/LGBTQ”
You cannot in one breath say “Asexuals are valid” and in the next deny their experiences. Spend five minutes in the community and you will see testimony after testimony from aces describing their abuse, their sexual assault(s), the countless times people have called them confused, broken, wrong, mentally ill, inhuman, sinful, and how these experiences have left them feeling hopeless, alone, alienated, subhuman, depressed, and suicidal. Almost every asexual out there will tell you a story of how their orientation has caused them pain and struggle, and you can’t call them valid while at the same time calling these experiences invalid and nonexistent.
“Aces take resources from other LGBTQ who need them”
I’ve seen some pretty wild claims about this one, insisting that asexuals “steal” things such as scholarships, beds at homeless shelters, food and space at pride events, suicide hotlines, and so on, yet I have never seen any actual proof that any “stealing” has ever taken place. For one thing, I thought “you’ll never get kicked out or fired for being ace”, “no one is suicidal because they’re asexual”, so why would you think aces need these resources? Either we don’t need them or we don’t use them, you can’t have it both ways.
For another, how heartless do you have to be to tell asexuals that they can’t use suicide hotlines? Do you realize that you’re saying that asexuals should be denied life-saving services? That, in essence, asexuals are suicidal due to their orientation, but you think they’re not “queer enough” so they deserve to die? Because that is the logical progression of refusing someone suicide prevention, and that’s the message aces receive when you tell them they are “stealing” suicide prevention.
Lastly, do you not realize we are alsoPROVIDING resources? We are bringing bodies and minds to the community, we are here to be voices, to volunteer, to bring encouragement, information, and support. We earn our keep. You just have to admit that you don’t WANT us here.
(Thanks to @livebloggingmydescentintomadness for these)
My own contribution:
Living in a world where the media is overflowing with sexual imagery and where society constantly puts value on sexual intercourse, virginity, and related topics – who can forget the phrase ‘sex sells’? – men and women who do not experience sexual attraction (the definition of asexuality) and who are sex-repulsed or masturbation-repulsed (as many asexuals, myself included, are) feel alienated and ‘broken’. We also face erasure in terms of representation, being either grossly underrepresented or represented as cold, harsh, and ‘synonymous with celibate’ people. Let’s not forget erasure from LGBT spaces – I have many times been told that asexuals do not belong in the acronym or in “our spaces”, even though asexuals have the capacity to be homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, etc, as well as transgender or nonbinary. And, if we don’t belong in LGBT spaces, and we clearly aren’t heterosexual, what do we belong? Nowhere, it seems. Of course, the argument also drifts to “asexuals don’t experience oppression”, which is false.
The LGBTQ community has had this real gross habit of hate keeping for decades now because not all groups face the same type of oppression. It’s gross, harmful, and has to end now.
Reblogging because this month is my pride month too and it hurts my heart to read these things. If you have questions, ask. Don’t add your discrimination to the shit we already take from the others.
“what a cheap tactic to compare us to terfs” yeah, thats because you are comparable to terfs. you use the same rhetoric about stolen resources and lack of “true oppression” to exclude a group of ppl. sry that has terf written all over it. nothing ‘cheap’ about it
Good lord I’m not saying “you personally have to be violently harmed by cishets to be queer” I’m saying that the term is exclusively reserved for the communities who’ve historically experienced oppression centered around that slur and experienced the violence that it embodies (ie LGBT people)
You’re spouting some nonsense interpretation where you could say “some lesbians are queer but not all” when what I’m literally saying is “lesbians can call themselves queer because the lesbian community has been a target of this slur and experienced horrific violence as part of it”. Ace/aro people who lack same-gender attraction have no place trying to reclaim it because it was never aimed at their community.
Except that historically, people have absolutely been targeted as queer for asexual behavior.
Everybody feel free to grab a beverage and get comfortable, because I spent a lot of time on Google today. (Asexuals, listen up, because we actually have some situations where you are represented in history here.)
Historically, people got labelled queer, and/or queer-bashed, for two major things.
The first was deviating from strict gender norms.
The second was not having hetero sex.
There are tons of examples of white people literature from the 1800s and early 1900s that use terms like “confirmed bachelor” and “spinster aunt” to imply that somebody was queer.
(I was going to say something like European/American/Canadian literature, but let’s call a spade a spade.)
Sure, nowadays we look back at that and go, “everybody knew those people were gay, it was just code for gay, nobody thought anybody was asexual, that wasn’t a thing back then.”
Of course, that still means that people who we would now call asexual would have been getting queer-bashed because people thought they were gay. So all those asexual people, already, have earned their queer stripes under the rubric above – that they are part of a community that got violently oppressed for being perceived as queer.
But is that all that was happening? Were straight people actually cool with people who they thought just weren’t having any sex at all?
Let’s see! (This is code for “hell no.”)
My favorite example that I came across was the Spinster Movement.
The Spinster Movement was really long-lived, from around the 1880s through the 1930s. It was a group of women who either felt no sexual attraction, or felt some sexual attraction but didn’t want to have sex. (I will be the first to say that I’m sure that there were also members who nowadays would identify as lesbian, bi, and trans. But it wasn’t the focus.)
The movement particularly focused on opposing sex work, sex trafficking, and child sexual abuse. It was deeply tied up in the suffrage movement, which fought for the vote specifically so that women could oppose these things in the political arena. (There’s a lot more about this in a book called The Spinster and Her Enemies, by Sheila Jeffreys.)
“[in Norway], in
the 1920s and 1930s, female sexuality was suddenly discovered and all
women were supposed to have and enjoy their sexuality. At this point,
frigidity and asexuality also became a topic, a very problematic topic.
“You could say that the spinsters became queer because they didn’t have
sex or didn’t take part in sexual activities, and also because they
started to be perceived as potentially homosexual.
“Thus, the romantic
spinster friendships of the earlier phase that were not seen as
problematic in a sexual way became highly problematic in the 1920s and
1930s. Suddenly, all female relationships were seen as suspicious, they
were seen in a new sexual light.“
Notice the “and also” – they were queer for not having sex, AND they were queer for starting to be perceived as possibly lesbians.
In fact, “spinsters” were routinely slammed this way. In Britain, for example, the teachers’ union was attacked over and over with the double spectre of asexuality and lesbianism.
One example from Women’s History: “…The fear of spinsters and lesbians affected women teachers in Britain between the wars. A 1935 report in a newspaper of an educational conference expressed the threat in extreme terms: ‘The women who have the responsibility of teaching these girls are many of them themselves embittered, sexless or homosexual hoydens who try to mould the girls into their own pattern.’” It was very explicit.
And the whole thing is a common accusation that queer people still face today. That what we are is bad because it is going to destroy children and society.
People at the time felt very strongly about how unnatural it was for people not to have sex. Women, in particular, were often divided into “natural” and “unnatural” – i.e. queer – spinsters. Natural ones were widows; unnatural ones were those we have seen here.
In her book “Family Ties in Victorian England,” Claudia Nelson quotes writer Eliza Linton’s description of “unnatural and alien” spinsters: “Painted and wrinkled, padded and bedizened, with her coarse thoughts, bold words, and leering eyes, [the wrong kind of spinster] has in herself all the disgust which lies around a Bacchante and a Hecate in one…. Such an old maid as this stands as a warning to men and women alike of what and whom to avoid.”
Earlier, during the Victorian era, there was a popular but unsuccessful movement, for decades, pushing to evict spinsters over 30 from Britain, and send them to Canada, Australia, or the United States instead. They were perceived, at best, as “surplus females”, in part because there were many more women than men in the population there at that time.
There was some overlap between the different kinds of queer. Straight people, as a group, had even less understanding and interest then than they do now of what the different flavors of queer might be.
Shannon Jackson’s essay, “Toward a Queer Social Welfare Studies,” gives a good example of how describes how critics of Jane Addams’ Hull-House “called the settlement ‘unnatural,’ worrying that its women were ‘spinsters’ or that its men were ‘mollycoddles’.” In that case, I would guess that they meant “women who have sex with women”.
It’s a good example of how much they conflated the different kinds of queer – that some straight people could use the term to slam people for being asexual, and others could use it to slam people for the opposite. And it’s also a good example of how little they cared which of us they were attacking. The important thing, to them, was that we weren’t having solely hetero sex and living our lives centered around being hetero. Everything else was just details.
(Also FWIW, I want to note that I meant no disrespect to any of the previous commenters or the OP in cutting the previous posts from queerdemonslesbiandoe @punkrcgers and sushi-moss. Tumblr wouldn’t let me post my long-ass reply without trimming; it mysteriously “lost” the whole thing like it always does when I reply at length to a long thread, and I had to rewrite it.)
Also, this is a lot about women, but an unmarried man over a certain age was also considered “a threat to society” (and as mentioned above the term “confirmed bachelor” is still code for gay)
Right? I didn’t know ANYTHING about the Spinster Movement before I read about it yesterday, I didn’t even know that it existed. So I suspect that there are a shit-ton more examples like this. It could fill a really interesting book.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 