Why Asexuals Need Sex-Ed (or, at least, this ace would’ve benefitted from it)

The sex-ed I got was crap. The “sex talk” I got from my mom was a book. From my dad? A really awkward thing that involved explaining how condoms work and something about how he doesn’t know why women like oral. From school? Generally a lot of ‘scare people into chastity’ stuff, like gruesome projections of the effects STDs have on genitalia. No one really talked about rape or sexual abuse or what to do when it happens to you. Generally, the consensus is “Don’t have sex. But if you do have sex, use a condom. No Means No.”. I didn’t masturbate, because I had no interest. I didn’t look up porn or anything like that on the internet, I didn’t even consider that it existed.

So, basically, I didn’t realize there was anything between kissing and sex. I didn’t realize anyone had sex before marriage. I didn’t realize people had sex unless they wanted a baby. You know that scene in Enchanted where Nancy gets pissed because she found a naked girl in a towel lying on her boyfriend and Giselle gasps and goes “she thinks we kissed?”- that was me.

Cue my first relationship.

A lot of things happened that were massive red flags, that I now would see and say “We need to have a serious talk about boundaries” or possibly just hightail it the other direction. Then, well, “No Means No” is a magic chant that protects you from harm right?

I didn’t really want to kiss this guy, and said as such, and eventually he just forced the matter. I figured it was okay and, I mean, it’s not like anything else could happen- we weren’t married and I certainly didn’t want to have kids with him! So then when he tried pushing further, it blindsided me. I didn’t know how to deal with it- “Wait? What? People like TOUCHING that stuff? Are you JOKING?”. So I went to my friends, and was met with a wall of “Well, duh” and “If you don’t do that, you’re a bad partner” and “You can’t say you don’t want those things!”. While still reeling over the fact that anyone even did this, and the fact that the magical spell of “No means no” wasn’t working because no matter how many times I said ‘no’ he’d still push the matter.

What does this have to do with sex-ed? Mostly, if I’d had a better sex-ed, a sex positive sex ed that acknowledges consent and that sexual abuse & rape actually happen, I probably would have been better prepared. If we were willing to actually teach kids about sexual activity beyond “when a mommy and daddy love each other…”, then I’d have been aware that there WAS sexual activity beyond penis-into-vagina sex. If we were willing to talk about abuse and acknowledge it happens, then I wouldn’t have thought “No Means No” was something everyone followed so I didn’t have to know how to defend myself for when “No means ‘force them into it anyways’”.

A lot of people seem to think that ‘asexual’ must mean ‘hates sex, so wants no one to talk about it ever’. And, well, some asexual people are like that- but some verisexual people are like that as well! Asexual people can be just as damaged by sex negativity and crap sex education resources, and can benefit from good quality sex education (that acknowledges us, that emphasizes that it’s okay to not want sex, that it’s okay to try it and not like it) just as much as anyone else.

(originally posted on tumblr)

The accusation is worse than the crime

Trigger warning: discussion of rape and various bigotries.

This is rape culture, so as always some poor woman is being dragged through the ringer for having the gall to say a man raped her. With the exact same tactics, which you’d think would make them easy to combat and yet they always work because they’re backed up. I just read a really moving post by an amazing woman and some of the comments on it, and…

How often does this happen? It’s worse to be called a rapist than it is to commit rape. It’s worse to be called a racist than it is to spread racism. It’s worse to be called homophobic than it is to be a homophobe. It’s worse to be called a cis supremacist than it is to be one. The accuser is a worse offender than the person who committed the actual crime. This is not good. We aren’t acknowledging how awful rape and racism and homophobia and cis supremacy are. We aren’t acknowledging how horrible it is for the victim to be subjected to rape or bigotry. And, I know that they are NOT on the same levels at all, but rape can have racist and homophobic and transphobic and all sorts of other bigoted reasons behind it, people without privilege are more likely to be raped than people with.

Why doesn’t this happen to attempted murder? That’s damn awful, right? Someone tries to take another person’s life. And yet it’s okay to accuse a person of murder. The accuser doesn’t get dragged through the ringer while people leap up and defend how it wasn’t really attempted murder because… or how the accuser is just a [horribly bigoted pejorative]. We don’t condemn the victim, dig up how the victim deserved to be murdered and was asking for it, attack the victim. Well, maybe we do sometimes, but it certainly isn’t something that is so common and so widely accepted.

So then why do we do it with these?

This isn’t good. This isn’t us seeing how horrible rape or anything else is. This is privileged people stigmatizing words in a way that only they can, taking away the power of the victims to describe their own experiences by tainting the words they need. This is making it so that if a person wants to honestly talked about what happened to zem, zie has to be ready to be attacked for doing so. After already being attacked in some way, far worse than any of the attackers are likely to ever know. This is silencing. This is oppressing. This is kyriarchy. This is bad.

Hilarious!

Trigger warning: rape “jokes” and apologists.

Our school has a van that makes a loop to various shopping places where students can get what they need and that is somewhat reliable. On it today, 2 people who I perceived as women were talking about people they knew, including how one guy they knew was probably going to “rape everyone” and make it “4 in 4″ (a reference to the “1 in 4″ group on campus that’s designed to stop sexual assault and harassment, the name because 1 in 4 women are sexually harassed and/or assaulted in College).

I’d like to assume they were joking. But even if they were, rape jokes are problematic so it’s still messed up. And it’s pretty likely that they weren’t really joking. Or they thought they were joking because they thought the guy was joking- but the guy wasn’t joking. I really wish I knew who they were talking about and who they were to report this to someone.

I’ve seen some people try to justify saying that they raped their partner by saying “it’s just an expression“. It’s not. Rape is not slang- it’s a horrible, horrible thing. And it’s not something that’s okay to joke about.