We cannot erase history! I know, I know, its unfortunate that the only method we’ve got to document historical events are huge statues celebrating racists, but there is simply no other way!
You know what’s wild to me about ace discourse? It feels like it completely undid years worth of social activism and the principles a lot of it is based on.
Like some of y’all actually decided you prefer the definitions and opinions of non a-spec people about it than those of actual a-spec people, and agreed with outsiders on the treatment of a-specs over the testimonies of actual a-specs, completely undermining one of the most basic understandings we have of advocating for marginalized identities.
Y’all backtracked on years worth of basic feminism wrt rape culture. Y’all started hailing anti-sex worker rhetoric because it could be applied to aces.
Y’all literally and actually went along with “well making fun of this one group isn’t bad this time because they actually deserve it.” While you condoned abuse, violence, threats, doxxing, suicide baits, harassment, and pathologization of a-spec people and pretended it was justified.
Every single one of y’all exclusionists have undermined at least ONE of the very basic, most humane rules of social activism. Your “movement” undid years of work on the new kids being exposed to it, to the point that the 13 and 14 y/o exclusionists I came across were nasty, transphobic, biphobic, ableist turds. And that’s on you.
Really tho, the most arophobic posts i find tend to be from actual literal terfs, and they’re going after aro het men specifically.
Arophobia from run of the mill ace exclusionists is bad, I won’t deny it. But with them, 90% of the time we’re an afterthought. They reduce our aromanticism to screwing and not calling the next day, and they often forget aro aces exist.
When radfems do it, they frame us as all being straight men who use women for sex at best, abusive men at worst. The think the idea of being a man attracted to women sexually but not interested in dating her means he’s preying on her. They don’t even mention aro women or aros who are not exclusively attracted to a different gender. “Aromantic” gets processed through their minds as “straight misogynistic men”.
But you know what ace exclusionists do when they see those posts? Some probably check the source, but others trust it cause it’s going after a-specs, and they reblog it cause they either don’t know thats a radfem or they don’t care. And if you criticize it? They’ll defend the radfem. Supposedly anti-terf ace exclusionists will defend a terf if said terf is talking negatively about aromantic people.
This is how radfem/TERF ideas spread. It’s insidious. Be aware of who you’re supporting.
I know I talked about this on my blog once but it was a while ago, so I’m gonna say it again. I have seen so many radfems blatantly state that aromantic allosexual people should undergo conversion therapy. Not like implying it, just outright saying that feeling sexual attraction without romantic attraction could only be proof of mental illness and that also aros need help.
if you ‘defend’ trans women by accusing twefs of ~disrespecting our identities~ or whatever, you’re basically doing the twefs’ work for them.
respond with materialism, talk about how women are constituted as a class regulated by sexual violence and how this works in the same ways for cis and trans women, talk about how twef ideology exposes us to greater sexual violence and death, talk about how ‘biological sex’ is ideology that maintains gender and discuss the actual complexities, etc. etc.
but don’t make it about ‘identity’ please because not only is that easy for them to ridicule, even if it’s accepted it still makes trans women into lesser/fake women.
“Autistic and a-spec coding often go hand in hand because NTs use both of these identities to Other a character and make them seem ‘not quite human’” is a good breakdown of the problem, not “making autistic aspec characters is automatically ableist/aphobic” and CERTIANLY not “lack of sexual attraction dehumanizes characters” and otherwise throwing irl autistic aspecs under the bus
This.
A-spec and autism are both often used to dehumanize. Autistic characters are portrayed as lacking sexual (and usually romantic) urges, attractions, feelings because they “can’t comprehend those emotions.” A-spec characters are often stripped of any emotional “intelligence” and uncaring/ignorant of societal boundaries.
Specifically because autistic coding is usually lacking emotional intelligence and completely ignorant of how to act in public/manners in general and specifically because a-spec coding is usually lacking any sexual/romantic urges and feelings (which is different than lacking sexual/romantic attraction) and often as if the character feels “above” such base urges…
Because the stereotypes that don’t automatically go with being either autistic or a-spec essentially uses the same ridiculous coding as each other, it’s virtually impossible to tell if many writers meant to code autism, a-spectrum, or both. Perhaps no coding was intended at all.
These issues aren’t the fault of a-specs or autistics or a-spec autistics. And they aren’t the fault of a-spec autistic headcanons. These issues are society’s, these issues are with allosexuals and allistics that don’t even try to understand what either of these identities mean or how they intersect.
I’ll continue to headcanon autistic a-specs, because I’m an autistic a-spec, because I know this identity isn’t ableist or aphobic.
not to sound like tumblr but i really do wanna see more flawed woman characters who are fucked up in ways that impact themselves and others, but not centered around the harm they do onto men/male love interests. like “flawed” women in media always are seen as broken due to their inability to fit within a heteropatriarchal household. they cant cook/clean, they dont show love, they dislike children, they are cold/distant. and like thats fun i guess until they get fixed for a man which is boring. and its not that i want them to never develop as people, but i wanna see this development happen in a way that isnt focused on which guy theyre fucking, ya know. and i wanna see more interesting fucked up girls that are messed up in ways that are funny or heartbreaking and obnoxious or tragic. sometimes it gets fixed and sometimes it doesnt and sometimes theyre bad people and sometimes theyre just realistic! ya know!
but like that said im also really tired of women with flaws being abusive, racist, hurtful, and degrading. im not gonna write up headcanons about how the space nazi in star wars probably cooks dinner for the army she helps enslave! i dont care about the gritty realism of jessica jones manipulating and abusing a system of racism to leverage herself above the black men in her life! im uncomfortable with women who are abusive and uncaring towards their romantic partners! and yes i can appreciate some of these women being written as villains or antagonists and fleshed out in a way to carry on the story, but these arent the stories that reflect the types of people i want to look up to. and im really uncomfortable with the type of discourse that goes around insisting that i have to see these girls as ~feminist~ icons even though they reflect the same white abusive women who time and time again dehumanize and wreck me.
i dont know man! girls! they exist! i want complicated women who im able to relate to their flaws and struggles!
But is this an example of Google spending their resources on a public good (modular cellphone tardigrade aquarium technology), or should we condemn it as a strategic move to obtain monopoly in the hand-held tardigrade space?
well they’re not wrong
“It’s sort of like bears hibernating, where they need the
environmental signals to tell them to do the thing. And they need time
to do the thing. We kept being like, ‘Why are all these guys dead?’ And
it was like, ‘Oh, it was a 70-degree day. That’s why they’re all dead,’”
said Borgatti.
…
“The first time that we discovered that the camera being on was an
obstacle for these guys staying alive was a little bit of a frightening
moment. It got to such a temperature where these guys were dying off,
and if you don’t think about it too hard, that’s almost like, ‘Oh my
gosh, how are you going to take pictures of these guys if they can’t
survive for a long period of time when the camera’s on?’ That’s kind of a
mini-crisis that sort of requires a lot of rethinking,” said Gonzalez.
…
The engineers designed the experience around nudges that let you “play”
with your tardigrades without killing them with love. “If you’ve been
looking at [them] too much, we’d have a control that says, the next time
you try to open the app if it hasn’t cooled down enough, it would say
‘They’re resting right now, why don’t you see some videos that we’ve
taken before’, or what-not,” said Feehan.
🍓🧀 (archive) 