This is our session at OrbitCon. At time of writing, OrbitCon is still live, and you can find all the videos here.
A Trivial Knot
Everything is simple except when not
This is our session at OrbitCon. At time of writing, OrbitCon is still live, and you can find all the videos here.
The OrbitCon schedule is now online. You might say, “Yeah yeah, another conference I can’t attend.” But you can attend this one! It’s held online! This weekend!
I’ll be in a panel called “Ace/Aro Atheists“, held at 2:30 CDT Saturday, with Sennkestra and Emily Karp. Come join us!
“Aro” is short for aromantic, and “ace” is short for asexual (usually denoting the asexual spectrum). Yeah, last time I did one of these panels, somehow all the panelists were in romantic relationships. But this time all the panelists are aromantic-spectrum. That includes me–I’m both aro-spec and also in a relationship, funny that.
A few years ago, I organized a panel called Asexual Spectrum Atheists for FTBCon, an online conference. It was great success, and we were praised as “the nightmarish collision of FTB and tumblr!” OrbitCon is the spiritual successor of FtBCon, held on April 13-15. If I organized a similar panel, would anyone be interested in either watching, or being a panelist?
Ideally, the panel would have a variety of viewpoints, including ace/aro atheists/freethinkers who have never been involved in atheist communities, people who used to be involved but left, and people who are involved currently. Probably most of the time spent won’t be about atheism at all. OrbitCon will provide tools and information if you wish to conceal your identity.
I’m ambivalent about organizing this, because I’ve been doing this for so long and it would be nice to have fresher faces. Depending on the level of interest we can figure something out.
You may also e-mail me at skepticsplay at gmail dot com.
This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015, for The Asexual Agenda. A few small changes were made to incorporate corrections by commenters.
It’s well-known that English asexual communities are dominated by people in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. [The Asexual Agenda] has made minimal efforts to include voices from other countries, but one of our blind spots is China. You know, that one country that has three times more people than the US, UK, Canada, and Australia combined.
The thing is, between the language barrier and the Great Firewall, hardly anyone in the English-speaking community knows anything. The closest we’ve gotten is our interview with Robin, but Taiwan isn’t the same as Mainland China at all. And given the complete lack of communication, it’s possible that asexuality in China is so different as to be unrecognizable.
That’s why I was interested to see this recent paper: Asexuality in China’s Sexual Revolution: Asexual Marriage as a Coping Strategy. By Day Wong, in Sexualities, February 2015.
This is a repost of an article I wrote in 2015. I made a few minor updates, but all the speculation still applies today.
In my analysis of the 2014 AVEN Survey of online asexual communities, I showed that only 12% of aces (aces = people on the asexual spectrum) are men. According to my numbers, the fraction of asexuals who are men is similar. [Update: The 2015 Asexual Census finds the same result.] Someone asked me why that is, and I thought I’d make my answer public.
Extant data
In a community survey of AVEN in 2008, 28% of asexuals were men. Another community survey in 2011 reported 13% of aces were men. A Spanish-language community survey in 2013 reports that 36% of asexuals were assigned male at birth.
These are all community surveys conducted online, and they only tell us about people in the various online communities. They do not tell us about asexuals or asexual-spectrum people in general.
However, there was also an academic study conducted in 2004, based on a national probability sample in the UK in 1994. In that study 35% of asexuals were men. In theory, this should tell us about asexuals in general, although there are many reasons to worry about systematic biases.
This article is being cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.
In modern philosophy, there is a thing called a performative speech act. That’s when you do things by saying things. For example if I say, “I apologize,” it is not merely a statement of fact, but is itself an act of apology. Likewise, if I say “I identify as queer,” it is not merely a statement of fact, but is itself an act of identification. It makes no difference whether I say “I identify as queer” or “I am queer” because both of them are acts of identification.
Nonetheless, if we put on our descriptivist hats, it sure seems like people are making a distinction between identifying as a thing, and being the thing. Instead of dismissing the distinction out of hand, we should try to understand it. I will propose two basic interpretations.
In the first interpretation, “I am” is an act of identification, right now in the present moment. “I identify as” is a statement about how you identify in a more general set of contexts, not necessarily limited to the present moment. For example, the following is a true statement that I could make:
Sometimes I identify as asexual, but I’m not asexual.
This week is Asexual Awareness Week. Presently I don’t do any outreach or education work, but I do work on the Asexual Community Census.
The Ace Community Census is an annual survey by the Ace Community Survey Team, which collects valuable information on the demographics and experiences of members in the ace community. It is the largest survey of ace communities and creates a valuable pool of data for future ace community activists and researchers.
The survey is open to anyone: ace, non-ace, or still questioning; as long as you are 13 years of age or older we want to hear from you!
We have also just published a report of the results from our 2015 survey. Take a look!
I may talk about this report more later, but for now I am happy to take any questions, either about the report, or the survey.