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I am aroace too :o

Thanks. I have 3 Owl House shirts!

Glad someone else recognizes that toxic piece of advice so many of us seem to get! I frequently felt (especially with my mother) that I was straight up being blamed for the harassment I received. I didn't EVER feel like she (or some other adults) acknowledged that bullies were being jerks or that their behavior should be addressed; it was more a mixture of "well, that's LIFE kiddo, and it's YOUR responsibility to HANDLE IT or else you deserve what you get" and "You're being bullied because you're so damn bullyable. If you'd stop being weird or [insert whatever bullyable behavior she thought was responsible for me getting picked on], nobody would bully you." It was ALWAYS put on me as if I was the cause of my own bullying rather than the cause being a bully choosing to bully. And especially when you're a kid, telling an authority IS dealing with it. If you are going to a place you're forced to go (such as school) and you have no control over what class you're in or where you have to sit, adults in charge of this have a responsibility to protect the children in their care. If I'm expected to develop some kind of grand scale comeuppance for a bully that crosses me, I'm sad to say that even if that sort of thing worked or I'd had the resources to do so, that doesn't often stop bullies. They just get worse; they don't actually respect measures taken to trump them.

Yeah, I don't really like to keep people in my life who reinterpret my behavior in ways I don't intend it or repeatedly characterize my interactions with others as obviously sexual, so that is one of the reasons I haven't kept that person in my life. I wonder how much of the "dude will harass girl he likes" nonsense comes from the cultural message that men and boys can't have emotions or they're "girly," but they ARE allowed aggression, so displaying aggression toward a girl they like is the only acceptable way they can think of to show they like them? (I don't think a lot of it is intensely thought through; it's just something they can do to get attention. And yet, what do you DO if you like the girl and you've harassed her for attention and then that attention is NEGATIVE? Just goes to show girls and women have to be similarly socialized to interpret bullying and harassment as love for it to work.) And yeah, I have DECADES of experience with people deciding I'm offering to screw a man if I ever do anything nice for him (especially if it involves us being alone together). For many people there is simply no non-sexual explanation for a woman wanting to do anything with a man.

Good discussion! Yeah it's gross that some people think there's no reason to interact with another person if it isn't about sex. I've even had some people (mostly dudes) insist that having friendships is silly. Like, hey it doesn't surprise me that much that they don't have any actual friends if they think like that. But the idea that it's baffling for anyone to talk to another person unless they want sex is, in turn, baffling to me. And yeah, there's a lot of inappropriate aggression in these relationships. I just don't find it that difficult to frigging be nice to people. Maybe that's why I have plenty of friends I treasure and who treasure me in return: because I'm actually offering something rare. It doesn't seem like it should be, but it is.

@@swankivy I very much agree, i think if you can't be friends you really don't have anything much there. I had people i was friends with that are still married now after many years, the guy said i don't have any friends that are women they're just wifes friends. I had been around them all for years and considered them all friends. Some allos really do only see sex as meaningful. As a man who is ace i look back at how shameful i found being ace and seeing the way people behave about it i am stunned i ever admitted it to myself. And being nice never helped me, a nice man with no interest in sex round where i live isn't greatly respected to put it mildly. I still have to hide that i'm ace quite often. Point is that even the most aggressive is usually treated much better than someone who is kind and not interested in sex in my experience. Oddly its the women who are the most overtly mean about it. Like i was happy in the friend zone, please just let me stay in the zone i like.

@@cushmanarmitige2369 Well, regarding niceness and how it "never helped you" to be nice, I should clarify that "nice" is in the eye of the beholder, and what I mean by it is "exhibits behavior that makes the other person feel valued" or similar. Which may actually not be your idea of nice in the cases where you were NOT appreciated or valued. My earlier years are definitely full of being nice to people and being rewarded with scorn, mockery, harassment, and abandonment for my trouble. Eventually I dealt with this by forming relationships with people who valued what I valued in friendships, and not letting myself be so beholden to the idea that I could be friends with anyone I wanted to. Since the choices are either "change how you behave to make people want to be your friend" or "find people who want to be your friend because you behave a certain way," I went for the latter. There are definitely people whose version of nice I could never be (as we discussed with allos seeming to think positive interaction is indivisible from sexual attention and feel confused or angry if your niceness is coupled with "withholding" sex they think they deserve).

@@swankivy By nice i really just mean a caring friend. I admit i'm too much of a people pleaser with friends in the past. It was only once i started saying no when i was trying to stop being overly agreeable that i found that i was around people who kinda wanted to use me (quite a few of them anyway). I found i had surrounded with people who cared more about what i was useful for than for myself. Its good in a way, i now have the chance to find better people now that i am becoming more assertive and saying no to things i don't want to do. Its actually that thought process that got me to admit to myself i'm ace. Like its ok not to want that stuff and say no. Basically i'm doing what you did, maybe a bit later than i would have liked but i'm being myself and seeing who will accept that rather than changing for anyone. Is a lot more lonely though as the less i hide the more i realise who my friends are. I went from dozens to a few real quick. I think that losing friend coming out as ace is something rarely talked about but there are a lot more people who would drop an ace man particularly than people realise. And yes i realise my friends were not good but though thats partly on me and the life i have lived i think maybe its something quite common. Thanks for the videos (and the book) anyway, these things really do help people like us. Particularly when a lot of the people round us don't.

Ugh, the third parties admonishing you to accept unwanted attention or you're "unfriendly" is the worst. I used to get that from my mom. Some dude hit on me in a grocery store and I complained about it, and she told me how rude it was for me to be so unkind and that maybe I should actually call him (he had given me his number) and "let him down easy" or at least give him a chance to meet me or whatever--because after all it's SO HARD for men to get up the courage to talk to us so we should reward them for their bravery. Yeah, sounds like I'm supposed to navigate my entire life around what dudes impose on me. Thankfully as I've gotten older I'm happy to be told "well that's so unfriendly!" and response "OK, I'm unfriendly. So what else is up?"

Yeah, there's a lot of prejudice. And given how many people HAVE been harmed because they said "no" to sex, I'm certain that some people have been hurt for being asexual before, even if the perpetrator didn't yell "HAHA, I specifically hate asexual people and that is why I am stabbing you!" Asexual people are sometimes seen as outsiders if they can't or won't partner up the way they're expected to, and it definitely leads to us being ostracized. Sorry things like this have happened to you.

The good news is that he probably isn't a scientist. As I'm sure you know, lots of people love to invoke "science" as if it's some kind of objective black-and-white discipline. But nearly all REAL scientists I know are flexible and curious people who above all love discovery and learning. Obviously there are some exceptions but as this person was here to shut down discussion about what's possible with the human experience, I feel like I was talking to a pretty solid pretender. :)

If you look at my other Letters videos you'll see many featured commenters being referred to as she or they.

@@swankivy k. I just didn't want to watch every video again to find out myself. Thx.

@@Astronomater Do you want some examples of other genders being jerks in my videos? To be fair, the majority of the negative messages I get ARE from men, so that does tend to be represented here.

It's the suggestion that the term is "taken" and will mislead people that really gets me. How do they suddenly become obtuse enough to believe "asexual" indicates human people are reproducing asexually, which is impossible, and therefore there's no excuse for using it? Isn't the very fact that it's OBVIOUS IT'S IMPOSSIBLE justification enough to claim it for an orientation term? Just silly to act like it's going to prevent anyone's understanding.

Yep. That's exactly what he was. The whole "yeah well you're not special at all" "uhhhh I didn't say I was special" "YEAH WELL YOU'LL NEVER CONVINCE ME YOU'RE SPECIAL" was really classic.

I once knew someone who was more interested in making sure their romantic partner was willing to have multiple cats in the home versus whether they were sexually compatible. It takes all kinds, and it really betrays a closed mind when someone insists that his own priorities in a relationship are universal among people in his demographic.

well cats are important :) @@swankivy

I really shouldn't have had to explain to him that people have different ways of getting off and sometimes those ways are just as acceptable and make the person feel just as loved even if their partner doesn't want to personally have sex, and I shouldn't have had to explain to him that not everyone who is in love gets their sexual needs met with each other, and I shouldn't have had to explain to him that not every asexual person is opposed to having sex. He certainly could have done just a teeny bit of research before telling us how we should be running our relationships. But even though I shouldn't have had to trot out a bunch of options, sometimes eventually getting to that point is effective (or at least useful to someone reading the conversation, if not to the person I'm actually talking to).

That's right, if other things are more important to you, you might still prefer to be with a specific person who doesn't satisfy one preference. Not to mention there are quite a few other ways to get that desire met that don't require a non-sex-desiring ace person to give it to you against their will. Time and time again, super selfish people insist that sex above all else is a need that cannot be compromised on and ANYONE's relationship because it's some kind of universal understanding that sexual compatibility is at the tippy top of the pyramid in terms of needs. I'm so tired of people like him trying to tell people who are minding their business that they aren't doing relationships right.

Very true (and again, makes it clear what perspective he's REALLY coming from even though he kept paying lip service to not wanting to change us). He doesn't actually know what a compromise is. And sounds pretty damn selfish too, considering he sees "anything that doesn't completely meet the amount of sex I want to have, in the ways I want to have it" as "basically unacceptable."

Yeah really. Conversation could have been over very quickly if he could accept "OK, then we both agree we shouldn't, personally, get into relationships we both don't want? Sounds great, but I actually mean that for everyone, while you only mean it for the relationships you personally relate to."

Great point! If it's so OBVIOUS that any "sane" man with a sex drive would never date an ace woman, then why would he need to spread the word at all? Silly. Guess it all goes back to some of these people believing that if we're supporting, participating in, or organizing social movements, we're granting ourselves power that could drown out the status quo. So many of these weirdos seem to think we have the ability to trap them in relationships or marriages that they'll then be sexually unfulfilled in, and the only solution they can think of is to either stop them before they start or make sure it's us that is unhappy instead. And yeah, people speaking for other people is always suspicious. Their points tend to depend on rewriting thoughts for other people, while our points literally push to expand the understanding of what kinds of diverse perspectives and thoughts people are bringing to the table.

It just goes to show that people like him don't realize that only SOME people have sexual compatibility as their NUMBER ONE REQUIREMENT. When being compatible sexually isn't the very first thing you think about when working out whether you want to be with someone, you can sometimes come to different conclusions, even if you're not on the ace spectrum and you're a cis dude. According to this guy I guess you should have gotten along most compatibly with with the ace girl! But somehow sexual compatibility wasn't what made or broke the relationship! It's like people are different or something! Haha!

This was a personal story told to me by the person who experienced it, face to face at an asexual conference (I believe it was 2015). I don't want to go into too much detail because it wasn't something I checked with the person about whether he wanted his story shared more widely, but he also didn't tell me not to tell anyone or anything. The asexual person I spoke to had an intersex variation that had him being treated by specialists who naturally would have been on the case to make sure his hormones were balanced. But one professional who cared for him was disturbed that he never reported being attracted to or sexually interested in anyone, and so kept upping the dosage of testosterone until it hit dangerous levels because this professional believed sexual interest and attraction was very important to make him "normal." He told me testosterone at that level destroyed his equilibrium and made him angry and self destructive. When he later got a different doctor, he was told the levels he was on were dangerous and that he had experienced medical abuse. He thanked me for writing a book that helped free him from believing he had to be "sexual" to be healthy.

@@swankivy thats incredibly screwed up, for so many reasons. But one of those reasons? The doctor was using stereotypes about hormones to determine which hormone would even create sexual attraction. Data shows testosterone isnt even the only driver of sex drive...its a combination of them all, with effects being created from the different proportions of those chemicals to each other.

He paid lip service to "you don't have to have sex if you don't want to!" and "I don't want to change you!" but then still defaulted to the default ignorance of "but if a man and a woman are together and either one of them likes sex while the other doesn't, it WON'T WORK unless the one who doesn't like sex CHANGES to keep the other one happy." And I mean, he even tried to say she should "learn to like" sex, not "have sex even though you hate it," but that's still pretty horrible considering a potential solution he proposed was a one-sided relationship so "at least one person could be happy." Iiiiiinteresting, so interesting, that having an ace person be unhappy seems like a feasible solution to him while having a non-ace person be unhappy with the situation was a non-starter.

​@swankivy I doubt he'd accept that he needs to "learn to like not having sex. "

@@mittenista 100% True! But somehow if an ace and a non-ace date, we're the ONLY ones who should accept that we're "the problem" because their perspective is more popular. Gosh! It really is like some of these guys think we're having relationships AT them, doing something to them, while if they find themselves in the situation where they're unsatisfied, they're victims. Every relationship participant should be able to be happy in the relationship on everything that matters to them! How they figure it out varies a lot! This guy needs to get out of other people's business.

Good point. I think he was just indignant at the idea that some asexual person might be depriving a man he relates to of sex in a relationship, and thought I needed to disseminate the information to my community that ace people need to stay away from non-ace people in relationships. Funny how the same people are NEVER upset at the idea of asexual people feeling like they have to "learn to like sex" (translation: do it more or less whenever the other person wants and not complain about it) or struggling in relationships because they're being pressured into unwanted sex. Hey, after all, it's better (as he said) if only one person (the non-asexual person) in the relationship is happy than if both are unhappy!

I think you're right here. I've been told stuff like that asexual romantic people should "figure your situation out before you try to date people!" but like . . . how are you supposed to just figure it out without existing in the world and interacting the way you've been told you should want to? It's not just a thing you figure out alone in your head. Thinking and talking to others is necessary for certain kinds of understanding. People expect "figuring out" our sexuality to look similar to the way other people do, when in fact when we try to figure it out the way they do, we mostly get more questions than answers.

Not sure how that's a correction on anything I said though--I know where the first study came from (made reference to it in my book a good decade ago). The 1% is a very generalized figure that people have been quoting for a long time (and of course it makes a lot of assumptions that the initially surveyed population is representative, which it may not be), but Anthony Bogaert kicked off his research in Canada and the USA based on that initial number and wanting to study the group that showed up in that UK study. Other research that builds on those numbers still ballparks at 1%, though of course that expands a little if you also broaden the definition to include people anywhere on the ace spectrum.

@@swankivy It's a correction on the 1% thing and I thought I should bring it up that it was the UK study only that was the 1% but it was labelled as worldwide, to my understanding. So for this long we've thought that was the entire world and it doesn't make sense, there can't be that few? Especially not with several new rounds of generations since. I've met more ace people than deal people and deafness should be a higher percentage. Unless they're all behind a portal somewhere XD

@@Roadent1241 I'm not sure who you're saying labeled it as if the study was worldwide--since I saw the statistic, I've seen it both acknowledged that it originally came from a UK study (with only 18,000 people) and that we're generalizing when we assume that number applies to other populations. I don't think it's a misrepresentation to use that number. If there's a reason to go in depth enough to quote the source, I've always pointed out where it came from.

@@swankivy I understood it was labelled as worldwide/the entire population of earth since it's not been called 'the 1% of the UK'. Only saw that was the possible correction recently which makes me wonder what the overall number actually is, just slept lots since so I can't remember what name was attached.

I think it's very true that her parents were grifters and encouraged her to behave badly, though as an adult she continued to lie and misrepresent herself and be nasty to "haters" (aka people who asked questions that made her look bad or called out lies). I'm certain that many of the worst things we saw out of the Tesch camp were not her ideas, sure, but at a certain point in your life you do have to start owning up to the lies you've told and damage you've done, and even as an adult she was writing fake blog posts pretending to be celebrity news coverage about herself and misrepresenting her status and education. But I haven't been worried about her or following what she's doing since her poorly conceived marketing efforts crossed paths with my literary criticism community--in other words, I didn't go out searching for her, and didn't continue to pursue information about her once she stopped inserting weird lies into my communities.

RIGHT?? Talk about argument from authority and misusing your credentials. (If he actually even had them.)

Right? "YOU being part of a group would make them less legitimate." Who frigging says that??

Oh, I hope it goes well. Never very nice to compare experiences and find that a person has a different measure of success than you do and is going to judge you for it. Here's hoping he's matured.

@@swankivyIt went about as well as possible. The subject didn't really come up. The roles are kind of reversed now. He's found Jesus and I'm an Atheist now. He asked me why I was an Atheist (by asking me if God had gone away), and I wanted to say something really profound and movie quote-ish like, "What I thought was Catholicism, was really my ace-ness." But I didn't, because our other fan pretty stepped in and said he didn't think we should talk about religion.

Legit. And you're right that there are many people you'd think would be cool to talk to about it who actually aren't. No point in insisting on talking to people who have made a point of not listening!

I relate to this! I was much more active on my blog with ace stuff ten years ago, but nowadays the only ace stuff I do is respond to interviews when I'm asked and make a video for this channel once a month. Sometimes I feel like I should do more, and other times I feel like I kind of did my thing already and it's time to let new voices have the spotlight, but it's not an either/or situation, so sometimes I think about whether more contributions would be helpful. I guess on some level I've wanted to just "be an ace person" without being in activist mode all the time for a while.

@@swankivy You deserve it! You've done so much for the community!

A bunch of people who excerpted her work in any way got DMCA'd. Maybe they figured if we wanted to fight back we'd have to disclose our legal identities (that's what you have to do to counter a claim) and they really wanted to have that information or something. Jokes on them, though; if someone sees images of me in her work and decides I must have been this terrible person and looks me up, they'll also see my description of these activities and learn how ridiculous the Tesch machine always was. And if they have no idea who I am from looking at a picture of me, then it has no impact whatsoever. Weird that whoever's idea that was would WANT people to come see what I said, but the family does not seem to have been blessed with many good ideas in their lives.