Asexuality: The "Online Identity"?
When you recall learning about the queer community in a class or during a conversation, what comes to mind? Maybe the Stonewall Riots or the legalization of same-sex marriage?
When it comes to queer history, most of its “foundational” events take place in real life. But what about asexuality?
The unification of a sexual identity is an important part of queer history, so why is it that we never learned about the ‘Asexual Uprising’ or ‘Asexual Act of 1998’?
Although asexuality’s history goes a lot
farther than most would think (which we’ll discuss in the next post!), the
title of “asexual” was only agreed upon in the early 2000s when its definition
was posted on a website. Why is this when asexuality became noticed and the community started to organize? What does the internet have to do with asexual history?
Today, I’m going to discuss the internet’s impact on the asexual community. Specifically, how it contributed to its growth and the different effects of various online platforms.
Source: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2017/12/the-asexual-magazine/
Before we get started, however, is it important to understand that asexuality is not an “internet orientation,” and the internet did not lead to the invention of asexual people. What it did do was help facilitate discussions and community at a scale and volume that had never been possible before, forcing society to acknowledge asexuality as a valid orientation and community.
Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/305681893449426779/
As of today, the first known online asexual community started in the comment section of an article titled “My life as an amoeba” by Zoe O'Reilly in 1997. However, it was a Yahoo group for asexuals, called “Haven for the Human Amoeba” (HHA), in 2000 that sparked the desire to have a bigger online presence. Through this Yahoo email thread, members started creating their own websites in an effort to have a web-ring (a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, and usually organized around a specific theme). Of these creators was David Jay, who, in 2001, created the website AVEN, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. With this web-ring, more personal communities were able to grow and emerge with differing ideologies and definitions of asexuality. This allowed the asexual community to not only expand it’s online presence, but help create and solidify the asexual spectrum. With a greater online community, more people started to share their asexual experiences, which helped contextualize and broaden the identity! As of 2017, AVEN had 250,000 members on its forum, showing how the internet provided easy access for joining the community. As long as someone has access to a computer, regardless of location, age, race, time zone, etc., they could join in on conversations and make relationships with fellow asexuals.
In addition to providing an accessible space for the community to organize and grow, the internet allows people to get clarity about their sexual identity and the asexual community. Naomi Gettman, a self-identified asexual, explained the internet’s part in her exploration of asexuality. She mentioned AVEN’s series of FAQs on their website, which allow questioning asexuals and friends of asexuals to be guided through a reflection of what asexuality means. The list of reflection statements, like “You Might Be Asexual If…” and “If You’re Asexual, Think About This…” not only help people start to think about asexuality, but provide a personal and discrete way for individuals to explore their sexuality.
Two other contributions the internet provided the community was the ability to self-define and destigmatize asexuality and form more relationships. The internet is a way for people to learn about and discuss asexuality, regardless of their credentials. This allows asexuals to talk with scientists and practitioners, preventing the manipulation of asexuality by actively resisting the definitions imposed upon them by scientific claims. The ability to reach out and dispute academia and scientific reasoning gives the community control over their identity, especially when it comes to pathologizing asexuality as a sexual disorder. The internet also grants asexuals more relationship opportunities through online dating apps and websites. With the community making up only 1% of the population, finding a potential partner can seem incredibly daunting and even impossible, but by using the internet, people can connect regardless of time, location, or political climate.
Source: https://blog.gaijinpot.com/online-dating-in-japan/
Aside from AVEN, platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and Discord have also provided a space for the asexual community to grow and unify. However, I want to focus on YouTube and Tumblr’s impact on community and education.
YouTube has been a major online influence in the radicalization of gender and sexuality in society. Although most case studies and experiments have focused on gay, lesbian, and trans individuals and how the platform either refutes or justifies heteronormativity and transnormativity, these results can be used to explain general trends that involve the asexual community.
YouTube has become a platform that allows marginalized voices to challenge normative expectations of their bodies and sexualities, but it also allows youtubers and vloggers to perpetuate normative standards. This is because the bodies and lives of youtubers are the only form of representation on the platform that their audience is seeing. With transgenderism as an example, unintentionally or otherwise, trans vloggers have reinforced transnormativity through exaggerating the physical aspects of medical transition and personally defining what it means to be a “man” or “woman.” In turn, creating transgender expectations for their audiences.
Source: https://swipelife.tinder.com/post/trans-woman
In regard to asexuality, YouTube enables radicalized voices from the community, but encourages normativity through the physicality of vloggers. YouTube may help people explain and destigmatize asexuality, but with the limited array of vloggers/youtubers excluding most of the asexual identities within the spectrum, normative standards are becoming expected of the whole community.
One benefit from YouTube,
however, is that it allows people to humanize and personalize the asexual
experience. Younger activists are showing it’s possible to live a fulfilling
like without sex through online media like YouTube videos and podcasts. One
example is Daniel Walker, a asexual and homoromantic youtuber. Through his
channel “Slice of Ace” he demonstrates how his platonic relationship “looks
pretty similar to any other gay relationship” (the Guardian, 2021).
Staring in 2014, Tumblr had become a more widely used platform for the asexual community than AVEN. With its primary usage as a space for community and information, Tumblr allows people to connect to peers from all over the world, forcing people to engage with multiple genders, sexual identities, and forms of self-expression. And while sites like YouTube and Tumblr are both spaces for asexual advice and support, Tumblr has most social media platforms beat when it comes to privacy. In fact, Tumblr provides more privacy and diversity than sites like Facebook and YouTube. This is because while other sites focus on a singular identity and emphasize normative expectations through their heavily structured platforms, Tumblr has a pretty chaotic and confusing setup. In fact, Tumblr’s “messiness” has been described as an appeal to many queer and gender-diverse young people because it challenges conforming mainstream media and their popularized narratives of coming out. The lack of videos and status updates on Tumblr, instead replaced with anonymous avatars and usernames, also move it away from a personal social media and networking platform and into a message board or forum.
Additionally, by “tagging” posts, individuals on Tumblr can find people of shared interests. This makes it easier to create asexual groups through euphemized things like “cake” (the asexual welcoming emoji) rather than explicitly having no sexual attraction. In turn, making it less intimidating for questioning people to join in on conversations and ask questions.
Source: https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/asexual?sort=recent
Overall, the internet has allowed people to create an accessible, safe space for asexuals to organize and grow their community and identity. With the help of platforms like YouTube and Tumblr, people can provide personal, relatable experiences in both public and private ways so, regardless of one’s comfort level, people can learn about asexuality. Even though the internet should not be credited with the creation of asexuality, it should be thanked for its support and resources that allowed the community to become what it is today.
🖤🤍♡💜Thank you so much for reading! Now go show the world what you know! 🖤🤍♡💜
------------------
Sources:
“Asexual History.” Asexual history - AVENwiki, October 2017. http://wiki.asexuality.org/Asexual_history.
Byron, Paul, Brady J. Robards, Benjamin Hanckel, Son Vivienne, and Brendan Churchill. "" Hey, I'm having these experiences": Tumblr use and young people's queer (dis) connections." International Journal of Communication (2019): 2239-2259.
Chen, Angela. Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Boston: Beacon Press, 2020.
Jo, Teut. “Sexuality and Translation in World Politics.” In Asexuality, the Internet, and the Changing Lexicon of Sexuality, 85–94. 2019. Reprint, E-International Relations Publishing, 2019.
Miller, Jordan F. “YouTube as a Site of Counternarratives to Transnormativity.” Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 6 (May 12, 2019): 815–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2018.1484629.
Radio, Southern California Public. “Asexuality and the Internet’s Key Role in the Ace Community.” Southern California Public Radio, August 11, 2016. https://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2016/08/11/51199/asexuality-and-the-internet-s-key-role-in-the-ace/.
Splinter. “How the Internet Created the Asexual Movement.” Accessed March 23, 2021. https://splinternews.com/how-the-internet-created-the-asexual-movement-1793860756.
the Guardian. “‘I Don’t Want Sex with Anyone’: The Growing Asexuality Movement,” March 21, 2021. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/21/i-dont-want-sex-with-anyone-the-growing-asexuality-movement.
Additional Information:
“AmeliaAce - YouTube.” Accessed March 24, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHAv1g2JODsrkUKfHh1nAwQ.
Byron, Paul, Brady J. Robards, Benjamin Hanckel, Son Vivienne, and Brendan Churchill. "" Hey, I'm having these experiences": Tumblr use and young people's queer (dis) connections." International Journal of Communication (2019): 2239-2259.
“Embly - YouTube.” Accessed March 24, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/user/Embly99.
“Samantha Aimee - YouTube.” Accessed March 24, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7UIkzvu73y8tqm1ydnYcXA.
Oakley, Abigail. "Disturbing hegemonic discourse: Nonbinary gender and sexual orientation labeling on Tumblr." Social Media+ Society 2, no. 3 (2016): 2056305116664217.
Przybylo, Ela, and Danielle Cooper. "Asexual resonances: Tracing a queerly asexual archive." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 3 (2014): 297-318.
Robbins, Nicolette K., Kathryn Graff Low, and Anna N. Query. "A qualitative exploration of the “coming out” process for asexual individuals." Archives of Sexual Behavior 45, no. 3 (2016): 751-760.
“Slice of Ace - YouTube.” Accessed March 24, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3vDNqa_MMGI43NAO2C-JJw.
Comments
Post a Comment