Last month, I said I didn’t care for most atheist models of identity. For example, I hate the “weak”/”strong” atheist distinction. I am not too fond of the gnostic/agnostic atheist/theist scheme. Dawkins’ 1 to 7 scale is okay though.
My views on identity label schemes is largely informed by my participation in asexual discussions. Asexual communities are renowned for making up new words and models. For example, one person might identify as heteroromantic demisexual gray-ace, and another as gray panromantic agender asexual. While these lists are often subject to mockery by Redditors, I find that they are far more intelligible and informative than, say, all the names we have for colors. Also note, for every successful asexual word, there have been many unsuccessful ones. Everything goes through trial by fire.
The atheist community tends to be a lot less introspective about labels, which results in the persistence of bad identity label schemes. Here I’ll discuss some general qualities that you want identity schemes to have.
Avoid judgmental labels
If you want to say that certain kinds of people are wrong, let your arguments do the heavy lifting, not the labels. Unless you intend to express outright hostility, each label in your identity scheme should be non-judgmental–a word that people will willingly adopt for themselves. If there’s a label in your identity scheme that nobody adopts, then the model is probably biased.
To give an example, I have heard many people identify as agnostic atheists, but nearly nobody identifies as a gnostic atheist. And it’s not hard to see why. The whole agnostic vs gnostic distinction clearly portrays agnostic atheists as superior. That’s not a classification scheme, it’s a tool to divide atheists into “the good ones” and “the bad ones”, and then to declare yourself as one of the good ones. It’s respectability politics, plain and simple.
Another common situation is for an identity term to be judgmental by way of being too positive. For instance, “bright” was a massive failure because it seems to portray atheists as the intelligent ones–and guess who the stupid ones are. This is also a problem for “skeptic” or “rationalist”, because they’re basically defined as people who reason correctly.
Of course, when different groups are hostile to each other, it’s usually impossible for them to agree on a non-judgmental identity label scheme. For example, consider TERFs (trans-exclusive radical feminists). Generally, TERFs consider “TERF” to be a slur, even though the acronym simply describes views that they openly hold. Instead, TERFs prefer to identify as “gender-critical feminists” or the like. The problem is that if we adopted “gender-critical feminists” as a way to describe TERFs, then “gender-critical feminists” would become the new slur. TERFs are horrible people, and even if we gave them a positive name, the name would become tainted by who it refers to.
Allow for gray areas
Some people are hard to classify, either because they’re unsure, or they exist on the boundaries, or outside the box entirely. In these cases, you want your identity label scheme to bend, not break.
There are a few common ways to address the issue. One is to use a spectrum. For instance, take the Kinsey 0-6 scale, or the Dawkins 1-7 scale (why didn’t Dawkins just make it 0-6? *grumble grumble*). Of course, just because you have a spectrum doesn’t mean that everybody is on the spectrum. Asexuals don’t really fit on the Kinsey scale.
The asexual model relies more on categories, often leaving the spectra implicit. For instance, we have asexual, gray-asexual, and allosexual, and if you’re not sure which one to pick, it’s okay because *whisper* it’s really a spectrum. It’s also fairly easy to add new categories not on the spectrum, and this leads us to imagine multidimensional spectra, even if we don’t always sketch it out explicitly. We end up with a large set of words, and you can basically pick and choose whatever seems useful.
Importantly, you can also omit words that do not seem useful. For example, there’s the romantic orientation model (homoromantic, biromantic, aromantic, etc.), but there are also a lot of people who don’t identify by any of the romantic orientations. You can accept a model while still maintaining that the model doesn’t apply to yourself.
Contrast with the agnostic/gnostic atheist/theist model. What if I just want to identify as an atheist, and omit any gnostic/agnostic label? Or what if I’m just an agnostic, and prefer not to identify as atheist or agnostic? The model doesn’t allow for that, because the model tries to describe everyone in a four-fold classification scheme.
Describe useful distinctions
The thing about asexual identity labels is that they get used, even the ones that seem really obscure. There are ask blogs dedicated to quoiromantics. There is critical examination of autochorissexualism. These words are obscure, but they serve functions. They identify topics that people actually talk about.
In contrast, I have never heard people talk about strong vs weak atheists outside of establishing that the labels exist. There are no separate discussion spaces for strong or weak atheists. Neither group has any special needs. I just have no idea whether any of the atheist bloggers I read identify as weak or strong. It’s so useless, why is it a thing? Why is it that widespread asexual labels are mocked for being useless, while the most useless atheist labels go unquestioned?
You know what distinction we talk about all the time, and yet have no consensus name for? The whole distinction between atheist who are or aren’t on board with social justice. Atheists are just terrible at coming up with practical language. Really, it’s no wonder that the journalist-coined term “new atheist” has found moderate success, despite being widely disliked.
Man, a lot of people struggle with that.
Privilege? I’m guessing privilege.
How about we give up on the idea of “identifying as” things and just use words to describe beliefs and attributes?
“Heteroromantic demisexual gray-ace” and “gray panromantic agender” are both largely meaningless jumbles of words to me, so as means of communicating concepts, they seem rather lacking.
Breaking it down further, it seems those phrases contain the following terms:
1. Heteroromantic and panromantic.
2. Gray (and gray-ace).
3. Demisexual.
4. Agender.
OK, “gray ace” I think I understand— it’s someone who has limited sexual desire and transient attraction, but never enough to actually want to have sex. Basically, a gray ace treats sex the way I treat Caesar salad— on occasion, I’ll see one and say: “That looks tasty,” but the feeling is transient and evaporates by the time I can get a fork.
I think I understand “demisexual” as well— it’s a straight, gay, or bi person who is only attracted to people who they are emotionally close to; they enjoy sex but dislike casual sex and do not experience the involuntary sexual attraction to strangers that most straight/gay/bi people do. Basically, a demisexual treats sex the way I treat fruity cocktails— I genuinely enjoy them, but only when I’m with certain people and would never even think of drinking one when those people are not present.
“Agender” is a gender identity not a sexual orientation or preference, but since gender identity strikes me as a largely meaningless mess I can’t evaluate it further.
“Heteroromantic” and “panromantic” are worse than meaningless. I have yet to hear anyone offer a coherent definition of “romance” which is (1) consistent with being ace and (2) allows for “romantic orientations.” The traditional definition that “romance” is about emotional closeness and all the stuff that customarily goes into marriage other than sex is perfectly compatible with being ace, but it’s not compatible with the idea of “romantic orientations.” Since emotional closeness and so forth do not require you to ever observe your partner’s genitals, their biological sex is of no relevance and since gender is socially constructed we can’t possibly have hard-wired preferences.
So going back to your original identity labels— “Heteroromantic demisexual gray-ace” is a contradiction; you can’t be gray-ace and demisexual, while “gray panromantic agender” means, as far as I can tell, “While I may experience limited and transient sexual attraction, I will never actually want to have sex for its own sake. I don’t think you should care about my gender, and I certainly don’t care about yours.”
As for atheist labels, we really only need, like, four— one for people who believe in godless religions or who are “spiritual but not religious,” one for people who disbelieve all supernatural claims of an even remotely religious nature, one for people who actively oppose the idea of the supernatural, and one to serve as a catchall for the people who don’t fit into the above.
Damn it, who let the TERFS call dibs on “gender-critical feminists?” I was going to use that term for something unrelated but now I’ll have to find another one.
I’m inclined to say the same for gender.
Who says we need a word for that? I am not averse to using two words to describe something.
After all, the dictionary atheists who claim there’s nothing inherent to atheism that requires you to be a decent person are technically correct— being an atheist and an asshole does not involve a logical contradiction. Freethoughtbloggers aren’t feminists because being an atheist requires you to be a feminist; they’re feminists because being a minimally decent person requires you to be a feminist. Being as there are assholes of every persuasion, I don’t see the need for a specific term to describe assholes in the atheist movement.
Although if you want one, try “atheist fundies.” I know the original definition of “fundamentalist” precludes atheists, but “fundie” has sort of become shorthand for the assholes in any movement so I’m a bit partial to “atheist fundies” in this case.
@Jake Harban,
Demisexual is often considered a subset of gray-A (also called gray-ace, grace, grey-asexual and other variants). Gray-A just means between asexual and non-asexual. Its meaning isn’t very specific.
I don’t think “atheist assholes” is very specific. It conveys judgment only, and no content. Like, we all hate assholes, but if someone talks about assholes I really have no idea who *they* think are assholes. Possibly anti-feminist atheists think I’m an asshole.
This was a very interesting read, particularly because I hadn’t come across the term “autochorissexualism” before. That whole “I like to think about sex, but it doesn’t involve me and centers on fictional people” thing always made me doubt if the ace label applied to me. It was eye-opening to find out other people who do identify as ace have described something similar.
…which has very little to do with atheism labels, but thank you for sending me down that rabbit hole all the same.
@The Mellow Monkey,
Haha, I just linked to the autochorissexualism post because it happened to be fresh in my memory. Autochorissexualism is unusual among ace identity labels in that it was coined by a researcher who read a thread on AVEN. So it describes a pre-existing narrative, although one that had not previously had a name. Giving it a name has brought more attention to this particular narrative and I’ve known a few people who felt it described them.
@siggy 3:
That’s not what I heard; the only definition of “demisexual” I’ve seen is the one above.
That isn’t really a thing. Either you’re asexual or you’re not— if you have no persistent attraction to other people and no meaningful desire to have sex for its own sake, then you are ace, and if you have some persistent attraction to other people or some meaningful desire to have sex for its own sake, then you are not ace. Among non-ace people, there is a great amount of variety in how much sex they want to have, under what circumstances, and with what partners (or type of partners), so unless we want to classify all non-ace people as “gray-ace” then your definition isn’t very useful.
Like I said, why do we need a specific term to refer to atheists who oppose social justice? Why not call them atheists who oppose social justice? Or anti-SJ atheists? Or atheist bigots? Or right-wing atheists?
@Jake Harban,
You’re arguing with someone who has personally been active in gray-A visibility and discussion since 2010. I’m also personally involved in collecting data that directly contradicts several of your claims. Is it really worth it to me to explain why you’re wrong? Seems like a waste of time.
@Siggy,
We’re arguing over definitions, which can’t be inherently “right” or “wrong.” If you’d like to explain why your definitions are useful, be my guest.
@Jack,
Empirically, a lot of people adopt these words, and continue to adopt them, so they must be useful. And if you can’t accept that as a brute fact, then you can look up some personal stories to find various people’s takes. One place to start is this linkspam. Also see this post for comments on the demi/gray distinction in practice.
The particular thing I object to in your definitions is the very narrow narrative of how gray-A & demi people respond to sex (gray-As treat it like a salad, demis like a cocktail). In surveys (see last section), only about 30% of demis are favorable to the idea of having sex, and 15% are repulsed. Clearly more complicated stuff is going on here.
My own experience is that I my attraction is so ambiguous that I couldn’t say whether it was there all the time or none of the time.
@Siggy,
Amongst your various links, I found this, which I read before and which provided my definition for gray-ace above.
I also found your posts here and here which appear to be lubricating language and proud of it.
Being vanilla-ace, I had to use my “attraction” to other things to serve as examples. As per the link above, gray-aces react to sex the same way as vanilla-aces but with a few technical distinctions; demis experience persistent sexual attraction under limited circumstances.
If you’d like to offer clearer or more precise definitions, feel free— I do prefer words to clearly mean things since it makes them less slippery and easier to use.
What does that even mean? Sexual attraction strikes me as the sort of thing you can’t help but notice.
I honestly don’t know how you got “limited and transient attraction” out of a post that includes neither “limited” nor “transient”, and whose main point is to argue against definitions that are too narrow.