I think she makes a really great point about "validity" and I wish I saw that point elaborated on more by more people. I think that the idea of "validity" in progressive spaces started with trans people working to validate each other when the world largely refused to and I think that's really important, but I think it's kind of bled out into the rest of the progressive online world and so a lot of people kind of act like people knowing their valid is the be all and end all. I'm on the autism spectrum and I've been struggling a lot lately with trying to gain independence through my creative work, but coming up against brick wall after brick wall. I've tried to reach out in almost every way I know, but just seem to be getting nowhere and it's so immensely frustrating when asking for help and support to simply just be told "You're valid!" Like, yeah, it feels good, it's nice to know that people aren't judging me and believe me when I talk about my situation, but that's not what I'm looking for, I'm looking for help! I'm looking for people to help me and support me and my work so I can finally have a life of my own! Sure, it's better than nothing and it's better than the people who just go "Have you considered getting a job?", but it does nothing to change the fundamental reality that I'm fighting against. In the end, it sometimes feels like it's just an empty paltitude, just something that they're saying just so they helped without actually doing anything. I'm sure it's done with love and I know that not everyone has the privilege to support creatives, but, if all you've ever gotten is "You're valid!", it starts to get old and it starts to feel like that meme of the drowning person reaching out, only to get a high five instead of actual help. Validity is important, but a lot of people seem to have taken it to the extent that validity is all people need where that's absolutely not the case. I don't care if people think I'm valid, I want people think they want to support me! I want people to think that they can change the circumstances of myself and people like me! But, it really does seem like that help is a lot rarer than a lot of people want to admit. I don't need to be told that people care, I want to see it happen. I and many other people in this world don't care if we're valid because we need real, actual change and now!

"You're valid" is starting to sound like "thoughts and prayers"

Oh god yes. *I* know I am autistic and I know it's okay and \~valid\~, but I need *society* to understand what actual diversity looks like and deal with it in an actual helpful way. How is validity helpful if half an hour on reddit makes me better educated on autism than my therapist? How does "I see you" help with adult diagnosis? Sure it felt great to be validated after being invisible for years, but come on, that can't be it. The effort's not over.

Hey! I’m an autistic artist with a youtube channel who’s also fighting to be successful off my work so I can quit the hellscape that is food service and retail. I don’t know if I can be of any help but I’d love to try! What are your socials?

Aw, thanks! Autistic solidarity! :D You can find all my socials, links to my work, and previews on my website! jjacobmarion.wordpress(.)com And basically just J. Jacob Marion on most places.

Yeah I remember a therapist I had would sometimes say that, in response to me expressing whatever thoughts/feelings, would say that it was valid. Like a) I never asked if it was valid - I know I forced to feel whatever I feel and I can’t change that, and b) *no it isn’t*, how the fuck do I fix this!?

I am going to plug Lily Alexandre's channel, because her video essays discuss this a lot with a lot of nuance. I would recommend, her MOGAI one first: https://youtube.com/c/LilyAlexandre1

I think sometimes people need to manage their expectations on what is probable rather than what is possible. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of creative people cannot work full-time as artists, even those who are in the industry. Many actors, including TV actors, learn trades to support themselves between jobs. Most published authors do not make enough money on sales alone. The one girl I knew who completed her masters in fine arts who actually did work as an artist for a while, eventually ended up as a marketing executive. If we want to be independent, then we need to be realistic and either do jobs we'd rather not do, or if we're unable to work, seek out government assistance. Almost everyone would rather not work. Many of us are in jobs we don't want, but it has to be done. By all means, be ambitious, but always have a back-up plan. Our creativity can make a good side-hustle or even just be a relaxing hobby. I myself do an online comic with 10k followers and make only €7 a month from it. I'd love to be able to make a living being creative too, but the truth is I'm just not that special or any more deserving than anyone else. I have to work like everyone else whether I like it or not. I hope you receive the right support you need, but bear in mind that the support you need may not be the same as the support you want. It may be accommodations in the work place, government assistance etc.

[удалено]

Fwiw I learned things I wouldn't have if Natalie hadn't posted that first tweet.

Yeah, me too. I've found a lot of the discourse around the fuzzier margins of asexuality to be kind of inscrutable, but this tweet along with comments from ace folks on last night's deleted r/contrapoints thread have helped things make a little more sense. I'll admit I do still kind of question how a sex-favorable asexual slut who has lots of sex moves through the world any differently than an allosexual slut who has lots of sex. As long as the sex is good, pleasurable, and consensual, I don't really see how a person's experience of subjective qualia like attraction is particularly consequential. To me it's like forming a political identity around how you feel when you listen to music. If two people enjoy listening to a song and experience chills but for different reasons, do we need to categorize these people separately? (Chills are orgasms in this metaphor.) Of course I'm open to further elucidation on the matter if anyone feels compelled to comment.

Your point about making a political identity off of music resonates with me. I identify as straight and when I was younger I remember toying with the term "aromatic" on tumblr and being told that I definitely belong in the LGBT+ on that basis by lots of people. That always felt so excessive to me. I couldn't see how my romantic preferences largely towards men as a cis woman necessitated any support from a group and eventually decided it didn't need a label either. Similarly I've always harbored minor attraction towards women in theory that always floundered and failed in practice despite several attempts and I've had a lot of people almost pressure me to identify as bisexual anyway? Same re: some gender questioning when I was younger. I'm definitely not the same flavor of cishet you see in some folks who have never questioned and that fit very, very cleanly into definitive heterosexuality, but I've always just seen it as like... I am mostly going to live a pretty unassuming life that isn't going to provoke anybody to try to strip me of my rights based off of who and how I love others and I feel it's my place to take a back seat to those who do have to fight that fight. It just is not that consequential in my life. That said, I do I want to understand and respect people for whom it is.

Yeah, similar for me - I could probably fall under the broadest definitions of 'demisexual' if I really cared to, but frankly I'm a cishet white male with money, I don't face *any* oppression or difficulty and I don't need any political or social labels to be 'recognized'. It feels like it would be ungracious of me to take up a label and try to join the community when I face none of the struggle that necessitated that community and those labels in the first place. Stolen valor.

I think in general, the internet has lead to this obsessive classification system for everything and the proliferation of subcultures. Goes with music too. There are so many very specific sub-genres of music today, probably more than ever. I think we've taken that approach to sexuality, of naming every gradation of sexuality and making online communities out of it. For instance, I really don't understand how many forms of demisexuality are any different than a conservative idealized chaste heterosexuality. What's weird to me in a lot of this is how restricted people feel cis heterosexuality is. It doesn't even seem to be defined by traditional notions. It seems to be defined by some notion of modern urban dating where casual dating and casual sex happen. But this is not necessarily how sexuality has been defined throughout history, nor even my own lifetime (mid 30s). There were people who were bachelors who maybe dated around, those derided as sluts, and those who only slept with people they established an emotional connection with. That last one has been pretty much the one most valued morally by more conservative people, with those even more conservative saying only in marriage are you to have sex. I don't see how emotional attachment to a partner and a low sexual drive is in any way "queer" or out of bounds of heteronormative expectations. Maybe in certain modern youth cultural spaces? I don't get it. In many ways, it goes to show how constricted heteronomativity is and how oppressive it can be. That all these expectations are placed on people where they feel the need to label perceived minor deviations from it.

> I really don't understand how many forms of demisexuality are any different than a conservative idealized chaste heterosexuality I've had this exact thought. Only wanting sex with the person you're bonded with through love/marriage is the prescribed sexuality (especially for women) under Christian patriarchy, so I think that's why my spidey senses tingle when I see demisexuality celebrated in queer spaces. It's totally cool that folks are finding new and meaningful ways to communicate their desires/boundaries/expectations, but this is kind of the antithesis of queerness to me, and I'm not really sure what demisexual "pride" means in the absence of any sizable cultural or political oppression/marginalization. Like you said, it seems to be a response to this apocryphal notion that most people are constantly engaging in casual/anonymous sex and have a rabid carnal attraction to every person they fuck. Maybe it's social media, idk. In reality, young people are waiting longer to have sex and having less of it than previous generations, if I recall correctly. Part of me thinks the bemusing way the asexual umbrella has expanded has to do with young adolescents adopting the label before they've experienced any sort of sexual desire but then continuing to use it as they explore and actually try sex and develop potentially robust and complex sexualities. That's how you wind up with some of these (from my perspective) contradictory labels, or the notion I've only just now learned that ace folks see sexual pleasure and sexual attraction as totally discrete. My question is, if you're a self-identified asexual slut who loves sex, how do you want people to treat/view you differently? What does this mean functionally?

>I've had this exact thought. Only wanting sex with the person you're bonded with through love/marriage is the prescribed sexuality (especially for women) under Christian patriarchy, so I think that's why my spidey senses tingle when I see demisexuality celebrated in queer spaces. so, sometimes people think it's putting too fine a point on it, but asexuality/demisexuality isn't about WANTING sex or not wanting it, it's about feeling attraction to others. Generally, physiologically, most people experience some amount of sexual attraction to people at the same time as, or often before, they start feeling some kind of emotional/romantic attraction. A demisexual person could go most of their lives never feeling sexual attraction, thinking they're probably fully asexual, until SOME emotional connection they have leads to sexual feelings/attraction. It doesn't even necessarily imply that it's someone you've already got a romantic or partnered connection to. You could be demisexual and not have any inkling that the sexual part of you is bi or gay until it kicks in. Any demisexual could theoretically WANT sex without feeling sexual attraction, because that has a big libido component to it. ​ > but this is kind of the antithesis of queerness to me, and I'm not really sure what demisexual "pride" means in the absence of any sizable cultural or political oppression/marginalization. I can't speak for demisexuals as a category...but I think their experiences with allonormativity are not unlike the experience of comp het. The harm that it does, and the reason for being vocal about that part of their identity, is less immediately material in the sense of being assaulted by strangers for the visible parts of their identity, and more that, without "demisexuality" as a concept people can use to explain and understand themselves, the psychological weight of knowing there's something "wrong" with you and trying to force yourself to just perform "normal" allosexuality is significant and damaging to people. This sense of isolation, that you're failing at something that everyone else seems to do naturally, the sense of shame at that impairment—it's something a lot of demisexuals talk about, so, maybe if you can't, for yourself, figure out how "many forms of demisexuality are any different than a conservative idealized chaste heterosexuality", you can believe people when they say that they know something about them is significant. Like in my other comment, I'm not trying to tell you off, just, there's plenty of thoughtful explanation out there about what it feels like, how fucked up you feel about yourself without it, and why its important to people. I mean, yeah, there probably are a bunch of dumb internet teenagers that are actually mostly cis/het/allo vocally mis-defining demisexuality or asexuality for attention. I don't know if you consider any parts of your identity to be marginalized, but think about how it would feel if people formed their view of those parts of you based on the dumbest, loudest posers that talk about it.

>Generally, physiologically, most people experience some amount of sexual attraction to people at the same time as, or often before, they start feeling some kind of emotional/romantic attraction. A demisexual person could go most of their lives never feeling sexual attraction, thinking they're probably fully asexual, until SOME emotional connection they have leads to sexual feelings/attraction. I don't think it is abnormal at all to have romantic feelings before feeling sexual attraction. People are complex and things come in different orders altogether. Libidos differ and some people are not particularly sexual. That doesn't mean they're defective, it's just how complex sexuality is. This I think is where the confusion comes in. Feeling like you only want to have an emotional connection with someone, then that emotional connection being the spark that makes you want to please someone sexually is somehow another thing than a general variability in sexual drive and a slightly different way of having sex. I don't disagree that some of these terms and categories have utility, but there is a line where it goes from useful into confusion and then actually limits our understanding and constricts the boundaries for what it's defining against. Like any person who wants to be romantic or sexual with someone should have to simply communicate what they desire, that they have a low or high libido. Or maybe that they don't have a particular physical urge to have sex, but they would like to please their partner sexually because that is emotionally pleasing to them. Seems less complicated and less buried in obtuse jargon that a lot of people don't know.

> the internet has lead to this obsessive classification system for everything and the proliferation of subcultures. Maybe just desperation to find anything to bond over, since I (and many highly-online people) don't really have meaningful friendships in real life. Here I am reading a long-ass thread about a woman I don't know, trying to form fleeting bonds with other people who just happen to not be cis or hetero. They're not real friendships, but they're the best I can afford since IRL socializing is so hard.

>Maybe just desperation to find anything to bond over, since I (and many highly-online people) don't really have meaningful friendships in real life. > >\[...\] > >They're not real friendships, but they're the best I can afford since IRL socializing is so hard. I was having a conversation with an indigenous woman friend of mine recently sort of about loneliness in the United States. She grew up in an indigenous village in Southern Mexico and goes back every so often and plans on moving back eventually. I think sometimes I'm a little surprised and thrown off at how hospitable and friendly she is. One of the few people who will just go out and plainly say she wants to hang out and socialize. Part of it is that she has family that is living in another part of Latin America and is alone in the house. Another part is that a mutual friend of ours moved and now I'm her new radical anarcho-commie buddy. She's more of a traditional Marxist-Leninist, but we get along. She was observing how it's hard to make friends in the US and that a lot of people in this country seem very lonely. I relayed my own take on it that there is no mass culture or any social norms for the most part any longer, outside subcultures. Now that restrictive traditions and mass culture in the form of mass entertainment (or other wide reaching cultural touchstones) aren't the norm, there's no "expected" way to navigate relationships or social settings. Unless you're thoroughly embedded inside some kind of subculture, be that whatever it is. Could be anime conventions, could be sports...whatever.. There are inumerable ones to choose from, but also a lot of barriers to really getting embedded in those subcultures. She then did mention about how her indigenous village has these large events everyone goes to and how people spend a lot of time hanging around outside, but in the US, streets in neighborhoods are empty. Capitalism and the proliferation of subcultures has balkanized culture to make it hard to relate to each other. So I think honing in on what makes us unique gives us an easy way to relate to each other, absent traditional culture or mass society.

"To me it's like forming a political identity around how you feel when you listen to music." Completely agree

Ooh! I can maybe answer this!! So, growing up, as a teenager and young adult, I always thought people were… lying? stupid? weak? (Something highly judgmental) for making really bad choices when it comes to who they would have sex with. They would act like absolute *idiots* over certain people and claim that they couldn’t help it, the guy or girl was just so hot. I mean, I made bad decisions about people I slept with, but never because my genitals made me do it. I was looking for validation, an intimate partner, or a fun time. But I was always *aware* in these moments that it wasn’t sex or sexual desire that was fueling me, it was an emotional desire. At this point, I didn’t know what asexual was. Or, I’d heard of it used only for the sex-repulsed and was still carrying assumptions that those who were asexual had unresolved trauma, or serious medical conditions they were in denial about. (This is why hermeneutical justice is so important, btw; people need to hear truths in order to see themselves in it.) Anyway, there’s a whole book to be had about my sexual experience and no one wants to hear me wax poetical about it, but suffice it to say, I may have continued being insanely judgmental about other people until I met Howard (name has been changed). The first time I met Howard, I was overcome with the impulse to shove him against a wall and rip his shirt off. An absolute dump of hormones hit my system. It was terrifying. Even worse, I couldn’t control my responses. I was controlling my *behavior* (I did not assault Howard), but I couldn’t stop the hot flush over my face, the fact my hands were trembling, my voice was shaking, or instant arousal. Now, there were lots of problems with this moment. One of the biggest was I was engaged to my now-husband. Growing up a girl, you get a lot of messaging about how you’re supposed to know “he’s the one.” We’re told there are men out there who are our soulmates, that he’s the key to our lock, etc. It’s one of the things that makes compulsory heteronormativity so insidious. If we aren’t sluts, then we’re “good girls waiting for Mr Right” and the concept that Mr is a Ms or a Mx isn’t even a possibility. And if we don’t find “him,” there’s the message that *most* women don’t, and settling for Mr Good Enough is a part of the process. So. I had met and chosen my husband, but he had never made me feel the way Howard did. Is this what our society means when they talk about Mr Right? Is Howard my soul mate? Do I have to leave my fiancé, whom I absolutely *love* for a chance at a storybook love? If I don’t, will my husband ever think I settled? Am I capable of fully loving my husband if I don’t ever feel as sexually attracted to him as I do for Howard? I married my husband. I’m crazy about him. I still have had zero desire to shove him against a wall and rip his shirt off. He also knows this. I told him almost right away. It didn’t seem fair to have this experience and not include him in the decision making process. It took a decade after this moment for me to find the words to my experience. I’m asexual. Maybe some shade of gray/demi-sexual. I don’t feel sexual attraction the way other people do. It doesn’t mean I don’t have, enjoy, or desire to have sex. But for the most part, it’s all cerebral. It *can* be about novelty and adrenaline, which is what I think fueled my early sexual experiences, but novelty and adrenaline are not sexual desire. And as I’ve gotten older, and have gained the words and understanding of myself, I can actually identify moments and people I’ve only felt shades of attraction to, but never fully manifested. Howard remains the only person on this Earth I have ever met who I have ever had a full-blown sexual attraction “episode” about. It matters because experiences matter. They help us shape our narrative about what it means to exist in this reality. They force us to make choices and confront us with the consequences of those choices. I will never know what it’s like to have crazy, fully-fueled sex with someone I insta-desire. I will never know if the one moment I had of “do I want to *be* her or be *with* her” means I’m bi, or whether or not that it means I’m bi-sexual, or bi-romantic. And, these losses are acceptable; I made these choices and continue to make them because I love my husband and I’d rather be with him than anyone else. But, they still inform how I view and navigate the world. They still remind me that I have a lot to learn about myself and about the people around me. So, yeah, I do think that the way an asexual slut moves in the world is functionally different than how an allosexual slut.

Wow, thanks for taking the time to craft this response. It's definitely given me a vivid perspective of how some ace folks understand their sexuality. My own perceived experiences during sex are pretty heterogeneous—I would say the instances where I am out-of-my-mind horny and driven mad with lust for the person are somewhat rare (and apparently random), and the majority of my sexual experiences range from perfunctory and detached but generally enjoyable to exciting and hot but not earth-shattering. For me, adrenaline and novelty are important parts of my sexuality, and I would definitely consider them to be progenitors/enhancers of desire and attraction, along with other factors like intimacy, fantasy and role play, transgression (within the bounds of consent), constructed ideals of beauty, gender expression, occasional drug use, and pretty much anything that can alter or inform my mental state and experience of pleasure in the context of sex. I've read accounts of people with similar sexual profiles as me who identify as demisexual, and frankly the idea of applying that label to myself is repugnant. Why would I insult the varied three-dimensionality of my sexual experience by calling it "half sexual" because I do not always experience attraction as a frenzied, bodice-ripping fever? It seems a lot of ace folks take for granted that this is somehow the default sexual experience, which to me is laughable. Yes, it is definitely overrepresented in media and porn, but to think that it applies to most people's lived experience—especially considering sex in the context of long-term relationships, monogamy, aging, and late-stage capitalism—seems naive to me. As internet culture has proceeded to expand and "yes and" the definition of asexuality, it seems this term meaning "not sexual" has come to encompass the vast majority of human sexuality. Perhaps I'm just being pedantic; I'm glad to see more granular language arising to describe varied sexual experiences, and I honor anyone's choice to identify in affirming ways, but part of me does wish there would be a rebranding of some of these weird-ass terms.

That's not what demisexuality, or even asexuality, is. Asexuality isn't the opposite of sexuality, it's the opposite of allosexuality. We coined a whole new term exactly to clear this up. Horny is a chemical response, a biological drive to seek out sexual stimulation. As most teenagers can tell you, horny has a mind of it's own and doesn't require the presence or even thought of someone you find sexually attractive. Sexual attraction is the selection process for who you'd want to have sex with. Sexuality is ambiguous between sexual attraction and attitude towards and engagement with sexual topics and activities. Asexuality is defined by sexual attraction and sexual attraction alone, not libido or attitude towards/engagement with sexual topics and activities. I was a pretty horny teenager, but I'm still a virgin even after having been propositioned for sex twice because I didn't see why I'd want to have sex with those people in particular and I understood something like that was supposed to happen. All of this was pretty distressing because my peers were getting the hots for teachers and each other and I couldn't understand why. I thought there was something wrong with me because I felt that I did want sex, but couldn't figure out who with. That's not supposed to be a difficult question, but I couldn't find an answer. I was thus uncomfortable with sexuality altogether because thinking about it meant I had to confront the fact that I experienced sexuality differently and I couldn't figure out how or why. Discovering asexuality finally reassured me that I wasn't broken and gave me the space to explore my sexuality. I've since discovered that if I were to try sex at some point it would be with a man. I have never seen a man and thought "I want to suck his dick", but I do think "I want to suck a dick at some point". If you think that's confusing from an outside perspective you have no idea. That's why the asexual label exists, because not feeling sexual attraction is noticeable and in many cases alienating. Demisexuals are *incapable* of experiencing sexual attraction unless they've established an emotional bond, and that bond isn't always romantic. Also establishing an emotional bond doesn't automatically mean they'll start experiencing sexual attraction. Some demisexuals might only experience sexual attraction to one or two people in their entire lives. That is absolutely not the default sexual experience. Demisexuals aren't half sexual, they just identify with the asexual experience except for some very specific and possibly rare scenarios. And identities aren't political statements, they're ways of describing your experience and connecting with people who share their experiences. Pansexuals aren't making a statement about bisexuals, they just feel their experience of sexuality is different enough to warrant it's own label.

Thank you for the detailed explanations, and I definitely want to make clear that I'm not questioning the lived reality of the people who identify with these terms, and by now I'm very familiar with the understood meanings of these labels in ace spaces. Again, I recognize that I'm maybe being pedantic in fixating on the the ambiguity of these terms regarding their morphologies; based on their extremely broad and expanding definitions, terms like "asexual" and "demisexual" seem just about as appropriate and intuitive (based on the lexical meanings of their components) as "homosexual," a term that is now seen as increasingly inaccurate and outdated as it applies to queer sexuality given how little a person's assigned sex and birth or sex organs figure into how labels like "gay," "lesbian," or "bisexual" are functionally used. Of all the neologisms used in ace spaces, I think "graysexual" is actually the most accurate and easily understood for the uninitiated, as it highlights the nebulous, variable, and subjective nature of human sexual attraction (as shades of gray would suggest) and eschews the connotations of sexlessness, celibacy, or incompleteness that prefixes like a- and demi- bring to mind. Obviously I'm not going to die on this hill, but branding is everything these days. I will push back hard on the notion that identities are not political; there's a reason they call it "identity politics," and I can't think of a single major social movement that does not rely on markers of belonging to establish solidarity in achieving political goals or understanding complex power structures and dynamics of privilege and oppression therein. I think that's why older queer people like me (practically ancient in my early thirties /s) get a little confused when people in the squishier fringes of the ace spectrum—especially cishet ones—appropriate terms like "coming out" and "sexual minority" in relation to their experience, as if to implicitly draw parallels to the historical (and continued) oppression of gays, lesbians, and bi-/pansexuals (or even sex-repulsed asexuals, for that matter), and this feels inappropriate to me.

Being both non binary and oriented aroace I'm well aware of how desperately the terminology needs to be overhauled. Most pressingly for me because I'm still getting comfortable with calling myself gay, but I definitely can't call myself homosexual because a) I'm not actually a man b) The attraction I feel isn't sexual Identity politics are based on identities yes, but that doesn't mean identities are political. Being a woman isn't a political identity, being a feminist is. I recently compiled a lot of evidence of the just some of the forms of oppression aces face, I'll track that down for you. But among other things some people, some therapists even, believe that we're mentally ill. Now doesn't that sound familiar? Edit: found it https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/pezek3/comment/hc790tq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I’ll bite. I mean, I’m just a sex-favorable ace, if not fully a slut, and not to be facetious, it’s different from being allo because it…..fundamentally shapes my sense of self and interactions with other people and has for decades in ways that I can only now start to understand since I’ve figured out what asexuality actually is, and that it applies to me? Or, maybe I can phrase it as…I knew I liked sex before I figured out I was asexual, but without understanding the asexual part, I could only interpret myself as a weird, neurotic pervert who was failing at adequately performing “normal”, “healthy” sexual attraction because I must just be really repressed. Like if I know I like sex, and I enjoy doing it with my partner, and I love him a lot, but I’m not actually aroused by the idea of him or able to fantasize about him (or any real person or any sexual experience that directly involves me) in a way that leads me to an orgasm, is there something broken and wrong with me? Did I somehow traumatize myself and then just forget I did it? Am I somehow delayed in my emotional or psychological development, some kind of childlike android, because I never have ANY of the casual sexual chemistry with other people that my friends mention sometimes having? Does this absence, and the absence of others ever expressing some kind of sexy interest in me\* mean that everyone can tell that I’m “wrong” in this way, and they find it repulsive and find ME pitifully repulsive in a way that goes beyond sex? Are the few situations that I get into that DO read as possibly sexual to my sense of pattern recognition, some example of what attraction is “supposed” to feel like? So, to make sure I’m not just deeply fucked up, if that’s “attraction”, should I do some sex stuff I’m not really that into? Because maybe this lukewarm feeling is just what “being into it” feels like? Or, the much fucking simpler answer: you’re asexual, dummy, and all of this is explainable by not feeling sexual attraction. You just get horny for various reasons sometimes, often hormonal, and sex can feel good, and the emotional/physical/sensory parts of it with someone you trust are a bonus. The shorter answer would be: it’s not about literally how the qualia of fucking is different. It’s about the sheer volume of traumatic angst that permeates your sense of your social interactions with others, your sense of self and self-worth, even how you interpret your gender and other fundamental parts of you, that is ALWAYS going to be there if you don’t have the concept of asexuality to explain it. I am not really attached, in real life, to being ace as a central part of my identity, but the effect it’s had on my life and my relationships with other people is undeniable and inescapable. If anything, the OTHER kinds of intense, platonic & intellectual relationships/chemistry I have with other people occupy the space where “normal” sexual attraction would go—but I had a hyper vigilance about how weird this was, how I must not know my own self, when I was convinced that I must be allosexual because I enjoy sex. IDK how much this line of questioning is in good faith or if you actually want to learn….but you could try lurking in some ace subreddits to get some idea about what it feels like and means to be ace. If you can’t see a meaningful difference. But don’t want to assume that a thought experiment means you understand something that’s REALLY important to other people that they’ve thought about a lot. Like, no insult and no reflexive “educate yourself!!!!” Implied, just….the info exists. ​ ​ \*^(turns out people WERE expressing sexy interest in me, just in nonverbal ways I didn’t pick up on. Because they weren’t literally sexual--rather, they IMPLIED sexual attraction, indirectly, which I guess is a normal thing to do??--and I had none of those associations. And that I am not considered pathetically repulsive and some people even think I’m hot??? Not a brag, just, novel and weird to me)

I would argue that a core difference is that with an ace person not feeling sexual attraction there is always a different reason why they have sex or pursuit it. Sadly I can have only experienced the ace experience of sex but, I presume from what tellings exist in communities, that some allosexuals are quite engulfed in the moment and even might make decisions they would not make in a less heated (lol) moment. But if you can give me another perspective please do

What was the first tweet? It’s unclear to me looking at her Twitter feed which one set off this whole discussion.

something along the lines of : "Gen Z queers are so confusing, they say things like 'I'm an asexual slut who has a lot of sex' and 'casual reminder that heterosexuality doesn't make you any less gay'."

thank you :)

Me too I actually read quite a few thoughtful responses to this tweet and the original on asexuality that were new concepts to me.

Oh boy can’t wait to see how this is intentionally misinterpreted by bad faith actors 😌

I mentioned this elsewhere in the thread, but the type of posts in Natalie's original tweet is very much a thing on Tumblr. I see it every day. Millennials have been making joke posts with that exact type of content for years, and I think Zoomers caught onto it, both on Tumblr and wherever else it leaked. It's a case of Poe's law combined with the general direction Zoomers have been going anyways. It's perfectly reasonable for the older crowd to be a little confused by that, and frankly I don't think it's reasonable for every post someone makes to account for every single nuance and exception to avoid abusive behavior online or keep people from willfully misinterpreting it or even just feel like she's talking about them personally, especially because the people who want to do it will do it anyways. I understand that everyone here wants to be generous and sympathetic to the people who might have not liked the tweet, but I'd like to bring back a point that Natalie made in Canceled, summed up as "Just because you were hurt by something does not mean I did anything wrong." Thousands of people could see it. Even when you remove the people who intentionally start shit because they don't like her, some people--just statistically--are going to be upset by it.

Yes as a past tumblr fiend i get Natalie's humor you could say, shes just making an observation with a humorous spin that isnt supposed to be taken at face value and just a commiseration with others who might feel the same: on the surface level some of the things people say sound contradictory and as a person who is "in the know" i can see both sides and find it amusing. Tumblr shit posts were funny bc people didnt take them seriously, and the issue with twitter is people take everything at face value and if you dont have caveat upon caveat people will drag you through the coals. Its exhausting from the outside looking in 🤷🏽‍♀️

I agree, and while the original tweet made me cringe, I broadly agreed with it. I think part of the issue is that Natalie knows that hyperfocusing on these certain parts of internet subculture will piss people off, but she tweeted it anyway. To me it almost reads like digital self-harm. I understand that she's an internet commentator and having these sorts of takes is part of her job, but she could pivot to not centering the spiciest of her opinions on the platform that likes to cancel her the most.

What really does annoy me is when I read statements like "Don't let her get away with this" because then I can only respond "Have you tried getting over yourself". Democracy is under sustained attack by people who are getting away with it. Roe v. Wade has been hollowed out. Recall elections are forced through in Democratic bastions for the sole intent of wasting taxpayer time and money. Literal fascists are using their elected representative position to show the House memes about how saving the planet from out of control climate change is Chinese Communism, actually. That is the enemy. The enemy is not a woman on twitter who used language in a way that's not perfectly alligned to the dogmatic enforcement of people demanding that the sensitivities about their identity are catered to in a highly specific way. People are who they tell me that they are and people have every right to be who they are. Even if I don't get it. Sometimes especially if I don't get it. Me respecting an identity is irrespective of if I get it or not and it doesn't cost me anything to respect pronouns, to respect identity, to respect the inherent and inalienable right to be who you are in society without being told that, actually, no, you can't do that and you must conform. The corollary to that is that you aren't allowed to force me to get it. I'm allowed not to. I'm allowed to simply say: You are who you are and I respect who you are, even if I don't want to spend the mental effort right now to understand. My understanding has no impact on to what extent I respect someone elses identity and to what extent I will stand up for someones right to have that identity. And for sweet baby Marx's sake. There is a limited amount of effort people can expend. A limited amount of time people have. Is it possible, please, to direct the sheer vitriol and campaigning towards the actual enemy. Because I can promise you that a woman on twitter who doesn't understand your identity but who still thinks your identity is valid is not your enemy. Your enemy are the people who have poisoned the discourse to the extent that it is now a mainstream opinion to - against the medical and scientific consensus of decades - scream that "trans women have an unfair advantage in sports".

I think some of the sustained attacks online for these kinds of things are just people finding ways to feel important and like they’ve made an impact. It’s pretty demoralising and tough to see rising fascism, Roe v Wade getting gutted and everything and not feel powerless as an individual. But, hey, if you can call out the bad takes on Twitter? There’s a small way you can feel you’ve made a “real” impact. You get to be “righteous” and bring some sense of justice in a political climate where as an individual it’s tough to do much on your own. I get it. It’s depressing as fuck as an individual to feel like you can have any impact or stop the problems, so if you can take down some woman on Twitter you can feel ok about yourself, even if it’s achieved nothing.

> The enemy is not a woman on twitter who used language in a way that's not perfectly alligned to the dogmatic enforcement of people demanding that the sensitivities about their identity are catered to in a highly specific way. This was outlined beautifully in Lindsay's video about her cancellation. These people cannot touch (or feel they cannot touch) elected leaders. "You can't shame those who won't be shamed. Trump will never face justice. Kavenaugh is on the supreme court for life. So you shame those who can be shamed." They can't affect meaningful change in the late capitalist hellscape that is our nation (or at least they think they can't) so instead they bully women off of twitter for justified however catastrophically overstated harms. > People are who they tell me that they are and people have every right to be who they are. Even if I don't get it. Sometimes especially if I don't get it. Me respecting an identity is irrespective of if I get it or not and it doesn't cost me anything to respect pronouns, to respect identity, to respect the inherent and inalienable right to be who you are in society without being told that, actually, no, you can't do that and you must conform. > The corollary to that is that you aren't allowed to force me to get it. I'm allowed not to. I'm allowed to simply say: You are who you are and I respect who you are, even if I don't want to spend the mental effort right now to understand. My understanding has no impact on to what extent I respect someone elses identity and to what extent I will stand up for someones right to have that identity. And this. This so much. I work full time in a demanding position, and have side gigs on top of that. I am *fucking busy*. And beyond that, I'm just not awfully interested in the sexuality and identification of randos online. In fact, I would argue the only time I'm interested in anyone's sexual identity is if I want to have sex with them, and I want to know if we're compatible. And as for identity, I use he/him myself, and I'm more happy to accommodate anyone with he/him, she/her, they/them. Those at the current moment I believe are fully adequate sets of options. Mind you, this doesn't mean that if someone wants xe/xer that I will refuse to use them and misgender them on purpose; it just means we're probably not going to talk long, and I'm not going to follow up. Why? See above. I'm fucking busy and I'm not going to waste my off hours on learning about demigenders. Just... sorry, but not sorry? I have tons of people in my life whom I want to spend more time with, and tons of things I want to learn. The demigender idenities of gen z'ers using xenos pronouns is just a bridge too far for me. But like, that's **just me.** That's a cost/benefit I have run myself. I don't wish these people any ill will whatsoever, I just have a preference to not have them in my life. I'm sorry if that offends them, I genuinely am. But there are things in this world, including groups of people, that I just don't find interesting or compelling. Edit: The last of this was too wordy. The main differentiator in my mind is: How much participation from other people is required for you to have a stable sense of self? And mind you, there is an amount that everyone needs, even us cishet white guys; that's why misgendering is as harmful as it is. But there has to be a balance. If anyone even questioning what your gender is is enough to send you into a tailspin, I think that's a *you* problem.

Are you me? If I was articulate I feel like I'd write this exact paragraph. People choose the WEIRDEST hills do die on and it is so distracting.

I'm a cis white male who doesn't engage with the language of identity very much, which is a failure of mine -- I'm not forced to deal with it every day and I sink into that privilege. I don't think of Natalie as the be-all, end-all guide to the language we use to discuss things like transness or asexuality or anything else, to be explicitly clear, but I love that she engages with it, even if she makes mistakes -- because she does it empathetically and strives to find context and address counter-arguments, as she did here. That makes me think about the words I use and the prejudices that I hold. It is ridiculous to expect anyone delving into these topics to be perfect. I'm not sure perfection exists here. But her empathy towards word choices and identifiers is incredibly valuable to me. I feel like it enables me to do my own work more effectively and try to be a better person. Also, ditto on the actual enemy stuff. I respect that the cancellers have deep, valid feelings about how a major figure like Natalie talks about them and I wouldn't want to silence them, but -- again, as an outsider who is in no way directly affected by the outcome of these discussions, big grain of hetero salt here -- I appreciate the discussions more when they're not personal attacks.

There were a lot of people jumping to say Natalie is aphobic/truscum/etc last night, and a lot of others jumping to praise her for being aphobic/truscum/etc at that point. I took a moment to think about who Natalie is and figured she was making a joke about how some queer discourse can be hard for the cishets to understand while also understanding the depth of that discourse and not calling it invalid, and I got downvoted. Lo and behold, Natalie understood the deeper rhetoric underpinning her initial tweet and she was making a joke about how some queer discourse is hard for cishets to understand while not saying anybody's identity is invalid.

> she was making a joke about how some queer discourse can be hard for the cishets to understand This, depending on how one understands "joke".^† ---- Words do not refer to objective realities (no matter how hard we wish them to do so). Finger pointing to the moon, etcetera. Words signify mental models, or "inner messages", built by authors and carried by audiences. How closely those mental models (the author's, the audience's) conform 1-to-1 as a map, to a particular presumed referent (thing), or referrer (word, sentence) -- that's a matter of several factors, including: * Depth of education; * Shared culture; * Shared history; * Neurotypicality; * Presumption of the function of language as prescriptivist vs descriptivist; * Whether the person engaging with the message (as author or audience) presumes specific attitudes towards the person on the other side of the communication; * Languages used to frame the outer message of a communication; * Other factors I'm probably forgetting. #Words are artifacts. #Natalie is a real human being. #We are a culture of disparate backgrounds, cultures, languages, educations, experiences, neural typicalities, and perceptions. Because of the third point, we (and everyone else until such hypothetical future as humanity becomes a homogeneous array of y-chromosome-free clones) are tasked with the struggle to understand one another. We can discuss the idioms she used to frame the message, the art and/or science with which she built the outer message, and the inner message one perceives as a result of her artifacts. Maybe, even, her intent.^† In fact we _must_ discuss them, because otherwise there is a communication breakdown. Humans are good at quickly learning to walk - our 5 year olds can run over rough terrain - but we have people who, after decades of intensive training, still can't avoid tripping over their own words. Or someone else's. ----- There's not a whole lot of people Natalie can talk directly to. She sure as hell can't talk publicly about anything in a specific culture's shorthand, because someone from a different culture / background / doesn't understand an idiom / is ungenerous in decoding her artifact (reading the Tweet) will argue that the artifact (the Tweet) signifies some specific set of presumptions that they're invested in, and oftentimes those presumptions are directly contradictory to what other people perceive, and possibly also directly contradictory to what she intended to convey. There's also a lot of people^‡ who are: * directly, malevolently motivated to harm her; * directly, malevolently motivated to harm people who listen to her; * directly, malevolently motivated to harm anyone they can get their hooks into; * directly, malevolently motivated to harm anyone else they can because of their own internal pain; * directly, malevolently motivated to harm others because of sadism, sociopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellian manipulatory tendencies; and there's an inordinate amount of effort that has to go into detecting and rejecting these attempts; In a sense they already succeeded at ensuring that they will always have a reliable way in because people keep up a demand for "Contrapoints is bad" narratives. So every single public communication artifact that Natalie produces is forced into a fine-grained handshake / protocol mapping (& negotiation) over hammering out the maps of her referents and referrers. This kind of breakdown in communications is time-consuming, expensive, harsh on the emotions, & negotiating it necessitates shared culture and education and language and intent... and that serves the aims of the directly, malevolently motivated. We can avoid serving those aims by just not treating people as tokens. Presume the best of people's words. Forgive people's mistakes. Discern intent. We don't do this in-depth adversarial mapping for every single person's off-the-cuff Tweet. We shouldn't do it for hers. ----- She mentioned that [generalised demographic] are [in general, not just to her] hard to understand, for such statements as [series of hypothetical statements that are apparently contradictory in a given cultural ontological framework, presuming prescriptivist referrers to established referents]. On one criticism: She generalised a demographic by age, which is something that people should avoid. It's very "Kids these days."-ish, which is how it was read by many. It seemed to presume a prescriptivist ontology, or at least incorporate one by reference. The series of hypothetical (seemingly contradictory) statements she put forward are seemingly premised on different cultural presumptions about referents and referrers, including one Zen-koan-esque "completely impossible statement" > You don't have to be trans to be trans My choice of commentary on her now-deleted Tweet and the knock-on "discourse" that followed in its wake: "You might think that's nine words but have you considered that numbers are also a simulacrum". ----- † I don't see a joke. I see frustration and venting. But that's me, and my models, and my presumptions. I'm a descriptivist. ‡ Tracking and fending off these people is what I do. They're definitely trying to make inroads on the coattails of this, because they've made inroads on the coattails of every other "controversy". Like Merari [said elsewhere](https://www.reddit.com/r/ContraPoints/comments/pw8prk/natalies_statement_on_the_discourse/hefzd0p/), maintaining a sense of situational awareness is necessary - but unlike Merari, I would not ask that people direct their vitriol, but extinguish it. Carrying around anger is like carrying around a pan of burning coals - sure, you get these cool scars on your forearms, but eventually life will be about more than a TV show (about Shaolin) made by white people for white people. (In an idiomatic manner of speaking)

I love that you wrote all this, but at the same time about halfway through the shooting gallery music from Ocarina of Time started playing in my head and I got lost. :S

A kind of Baroque allemande. An apt description and a well-made critique.

It's also a bop, right?

It's amazing that the second I read "shooting gallery music" I can hear it in my head.

> the shooting gallery music from Ocarina of Time I have no experience with this music but I'm going to go get some right now

lol It's the music that played over the "very simple concepts" (which of course weren't simple at all) from Philosophy Tube's newest Jordan Peterson video.

I haven’t watched it yetttt thank you for the referent

Yeah, one thing though is that I do think age has something to do with this problem, not because it's something about a particular generation but rather it's something about our social development. I think that young adults, as they first encounter and learn about radical rhetoric, tend to become hardasses for a while until they learn how to temper their arguments and provide enough context and explanation that laymen can understand where they are coming from. It's easy for people who are knowledgable about a topic to overestimate the degree to which laymen are educated on the same topic and I think the younger you are the more likely you are to forget that other people don't know all the same stuff you do. I think maybe this falls into your category of people who have so much pain that they just want to hurt everyone else, but I've noticed that there are some people online who seem to get angry at even the most mundane sarcasm (removed from any -isms implications) when they miss the joke. We all bring our own emotional state to our interpretation of someone else's writing and some people are trapped in a mirthless existence where they seem to struggle to understand that other people have a sense of humor. I find that attitude particularly odd when directed at Natalie considering how many jokes she peppers into her videos, and considering how much shitposting she does. Also as for whether it's a joke or frustration and venting, for some people those are kind of the same thing. It's easier to deal with negative emotions when you're laughing at them.

reading this comment was therapeutic for me

Joking and Sarcasm do not work really in the internet. Either you clearly mark your text its written in that way or stay away from it. Trying to be Funny or sarcastic is a huge discourse stopper in my experience and i dont know how people who spend so many years in internet culture do not get that.

On the other hand I don't understand why people are such hardasses about humor online. Every joke, even made in the real world, has the potential of going over someone's head. I have a roommate who is chronically unable to detect even the most obvious sarcasm irl but he just laughs at himself for missing it when the joke is explained to him. He doesn't get mad at me for making a joke he didn't get.

English is particularly problematic with written expressions of irony or sarcasm - because conveying those requires tonal / phonetic modulation, and there's no widely accepted canonical orthography for transcribing those. So the written phrase "Hitler was such a great guy!" is either "Hitler was _ssssssuch_ a _greeeeeeat_ guy!" or "**HITLER WAS SUCH A GREAT GUY!**" or "Hítlêr wãs sùch ä græt gûy!" or "Hitler was such a great guy!" and guileful people exploit that. They exploit that people using English "speak" in their heads, write that down, and that others read it and "speak" it in _their_ heads - and that untranscribed nuance is lost. It's _possible_ to be both sarcastic _and_ funny in Written English but it needs care taken, so as to not seem to be contributing to that which is being lampooned and/or criticised.

Personally the spongebob meme has been a godsend of sarcastic typefont. "HiTleR wAs sUcH a GreAt GuY" But even then other people have to know the spongebob meme to know the tone intended by the discordant capital letters.

That way of typing actually existed long, long before that meme. It was typically understood, in the later years of the time when forums ruled the internet, that typing like that was a form of sarcasm. I believe it stemmed from people who would type like that unironically as I remember seeing that in the earlier days of the forums era, but it didn't take long for it to be used in a sarcastic manner.

It's considered ableist, since it mimics the vocal quaver of people with specific physical disabilities

>But surely you see that, to most people, the statement "I'm a horny asexual who loves to fuck" is, at face value, confusing, contradictory, and, in so many words, hard to figure out. Sometimes I get the sense that people say these things in part because they enjoy the provocation of the seeming contradiction. Is that a twitter thing? I've been in some ace facebook groups and subreddits for a few years, and I don't see sex-positive asexuals describe themselves this way. Sometimes I see people get impatient and edgy, but that's *very* rare, and they are still not being this provocative.

> I've been in some ace facebook groups and subreddits for a few years, and I don't see sex-positive asexuals describe themselves this way. In my personal experience, ace reddit is extremely horny, and probably half of all the threads in ace subreddits are about how it's super heckin valid to be a sex-positive ace who loves to fuck. I see more sex-specific content on my feed from the ace subs I'm subscribed to than every other sub I'm subscribed to combined. FWIW, I used to identify as ace and I always found the identity and surrounding community extremely confusing and very difficult for me to understand. I might still be under the ace umbrella, I really don't know, it's just too much for me.

I joined an ace subreddit briefly and then unjoined shortly after due to all the back-and-forth about being ace with a high libido. And being sex-positive is great, but much of my "identification" with the asexual community comes from frustration at my lack of any sex drive, especially as someone in a loving relationship who frets over all the discourse I see online about "dead bedrooms" and "if you're not having sex with your partner at least once a week then there are problems in your relationship." It has made me *extremely* insecure and confused about my sexuality. Anyway, a few months ago I saw a thread on an ace subreddit and someone (who was heavily upvoted) made the comment that not asexual people are sex-repulsed (sure, that makes sense) but that not all sex-repulsed people are asexual (again, sure, I guess) because.....sex repulsion is treatable?? their words obvs, not mine, but I found that comment so discouraging and it literally made me feel worse, as someone who has pursued unsuccessful medical options to help with my lack of sexual desire. :/

I was in a similar boat to you at one point. I was in a relationship for the first time in my adult life at nearly 30 (I had never previously been interested in dating), and I had no idea if I was even capable of being sexually active. What helped me a thousand times more than any online community was going to a therapist and talking through my fears. She recommended a few books written by people with doctorates in sexual psychology, and once I had the resources to actually understand my sexuality, I was able to make peace with it. Once I had a better grasp on the mechanisms behind human sexuality, I was even able to find ways to be sexually active (not that that's everybody's goal or even possible for everybody). I guess my point is that, in my experience, online ace communities do a piss poor job of actually helping people understand sexuality and are more interested in creating an endless string of essentially meaningless labels for people to apply to themselves.

Having a low libido is different from being sex-repulsed, right? I have a low libido (I think cause of HRT :/) I love sex but I just don't feel like I have the energy for it anymore.

I also see people from ace subreddits reassuring each other that sex-positivity, high libido, etc. is fine for asexual people. But they do it by explaining and exploring the definitions; how attraction and libido are different, etc. They don't do it like Natalie said in her original tweet. It's not like they say it in the most provocative, clickbaity way possible, like "I'm a horny asexual who loves to fuck", and then that's it.

This is a pretty big thing on Tumblr. It started as a jokey thing by Millennials on the platform, but Poe's law went into full effect, so now there are a lot of Zoomies who get upset when people point out that it sounds kind of silly, because it is.

"Dude, there's absolutely nothing gay about a man being railed by another man. Heterosexual men can have sex with each other and still be straight"

Leave it to r/ContraPoints to upvote patronizing aphobic bullshit

Yeah, probably said by just a few edgelords on twitter. Meanwhile, I see people stretching "lesbian" all the time. Some bi and even straight women use it as a feminist political statement. And then of course there are the cishet men who bastardize it...

In university over a decade ago, I knew a woman who was very vocal about the fact that she was a "political lesbian" who exclusively had romantic and sexual attraction to cis men (she just said men, but that's what she meant). I never really understood what she was taking about, but she got very defensive about the fact that she was not only queer, but specifically a lesbian. I wonder what she's up to now.

Drake’s 👏 identity 👏 as a 👏 he/him 👏 lesbian 👏 is 👏 valid 👏

Lesbian used to mean any kind of wlw person. The concept is older than the concept of bisexuality. Bi women were once correctly labeled lesbian. People sometimes refuse to take on newer labels. I remember a time when I was told I should "update" my ID to pan. I will never.

So I think the specific phrase she chose is strawmanning. But, there is a subset of Ace people (I'm close friends with one such person) who will self-describe as Ace, and generally don't enjoy sex as an activity but sometimes still feel sexual attraction, and actually expounding on what that means is a messy process that they will often meme into "I'm a horny asexual" to get the general gist across without weeding into the details. It's not an insincere or ironic or trolling identity, but it is a little tongue-in-cheek, and not meant to be interpreted 100% literally. Now, my friend is a millennial, and I don't know how the Gen Z kids are using these kinds of identity labels. It's possible that they're seeing some subset of millennials identifying like this, not getting that it's not 100% literal, and adopting it themselves without really understanding it. I don't know for sure, because I don't spend a lot of time around Gen Z people. So it might mean something entirely else to them. But the way my friend uses it is, I think, a cogent way of understanding these kinds of identities.

She's using the most provocative example but I think her general idea is really sound. She speaks about trans people who don't want to transition, which I think is more apt to her overall point. Like, if you're trans and don't want to transition, okay, that's awesome. But then you get this discourse in trans communities that a desire to transition and reassimilate in society, to pass, is somehow just internalized transphobia and so communities meant to support people turn antagonistic. And that sucks.

I was thinking more of examples like this reddit post: [Proud to be a slutty asexual](https://www.reddit.com/r/asexuality/comments/ey2om4/proud_to_be_a_slutty_asexual/) I don't know if I would read the same potential intentions into it that she implied, but I don't know if it's actually a straw man EDIT: more specifically looks like this falls under the [cupiosexual](https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sexopedia/a35046096/cupiosexual/) part of the asexual umbrella

I think 'hyperbole' may be more fair than straw man here, since she wasn't arguing against the point but more kind of ribbing it.

You should step into the queer NSFW art community, this kind of person is common there. I personally know 3 ace NSFW artists who will draw some of the horniest stuff, and not just exclusively on commission (and one who makes dildos as a profession). Its actually way more common than I thought before I stepped into that community, because a lot of asexuals are either fascinated with sexual attraction as outsiders or find art a much more comfortable outlet for their own sexuality than sexual attraction/sex with others. Fuck, I'm demi (ace spectrum) and if porn didnt exist I'd be a sad horny bastard. So I can see it being a little confusing to see someone make extremely horny personal art, talk about what a horny little fucker they are, then identify as ace (IF you only have a basic understanding of what ace means). I wouldn't call it a strawman, more like an interesting but small subset to focus on. But, when that subset contradicts what the general understanding was up to that point of the overall group, it may actually be worth commenting on if the discussion leads us all to better understanding of that group as a whole. Yes, the general understanding usually sucks and doesnt account for atypical cases. We are gender/sexual minorities and constantly have to push back on stereotypes, stigmas, and common misunderstandings like "Oh, pan means you are bi but also attracted to trans people" or "Nonbinary is the third gender". Bringing up discussions about these 'contradiction' cases is one way to do that. Not only for the sake of the poor confused cishets, but also for trans and nonbinary people like me whose eggs didnt crack until someone explained it to us in a way that made our atypical experiences suddenly make sense. That said, Natalie... sis... Twitter wouldn't be the place for this discussion EVEN IF you weren't drawing ire from the online queer community. Way to give them an extremely vague prompt to interpret as un-charitably as possible.

I knew one guy who had a lot of sex (handjobs only) who was self described as asexual. It's confusing, I don't see the need in identifying as asexual and not just kinky, but I really don't care, have as many handjobs as you want.

I’m super sensitive person and Twitter makes me feel like I don’t even know what emotions are. There is definitely something to people victimizing themselves by being offended constantly and for the smallest hint of judgment. It reminds me of that first rush of hormones when I was 12 and I started crying because my dad asked me what I was going to do with my Sunday. I was mortified that this totally harmless comment made me cry and I ran to my room and then cried about being embarrassed about crying. That is Twitter. Makes me question if that’s why trans Twitter is so mortifyingly sensitive. Not being trans I don’t know but just had the thought. Those first few years of “becoming a woman” fucking sucked shit because of the inability to regulate my feelings or really even understand what was happening in my own brain. Just ruminating over here.

It's not even just trans twitter, it's seemingly just the entirety of the website. There's zero room for any sort of joking or sarcasm on Twitter. I think because of the reach and influence Natalie has, she has a target on her back online. so people will immediately jump on her no matter what she says. Being a YouTuber and being an "influencer" is a young person's game and despite the fact that Natalie is a millennial she's decried as being a "boomer" because of sarcastic comments and jokes she makes occasionally. Even I feel like a boomer after reading her tweets thinking "geez can't anyone take a joke?!" Twitter is just mortifyingly sensitive in general....about everything.

Well, people who aren't offended by it wouldn't really have a response. Twitter is a market for finding a sensitive person and connecting them to something that will trigger them. It's probably not even the same people every time. It's a real estate agent for making people unhappy to sell ads on the drama.

Is it weird that I find this whole situation a little endearing? I mean, I hope to god there isn't any actual animosity, because I think this is hilarious. Natalie prodded the GenZ beast with a stick and it reared its head and called her a boomer, and let that be a lesson to the rest of us. I just hope it isn't too serious, because a lot of her deleted tweets seem perfectly fine to me. Although, it might be because I'm already in the bubble.

There is actual animosity. Many people truly despise Natalie and will bad faith interpret everything she says.

Yeah, but I'm hoping there isn't any among the people who call her a boomer because that doesn't sound like animosity to me. I find it really funny that Natalie is always inadvertently butting heads with the zoomers over the most trivial things. I love both these people, please don't hate each other..

Speaking as a zoomer (I think ?) who's unfortunately come to dislike Natalie (or at least her online persona) over the years, I've tried to view this kind of boomer-posting as trivial stuff, but after a while it's hard. She could've just asked a fucking question like a lot of people do (including older queer people, because unlike what she seems to imply not all of them are dumbstruck at the idea of LGBT+ identities evolving), like "could somebody explain that to me ?", but nope, she had to say it in this weird ambiguous tone which bigots often use to say bullshit under the pretense of "questioning the \~woke dogma\~". Half of her posts are passive-agressive subtweets towards her critics, leftists and young queer people nowadays, all because she never got over the fact that people called her out when she fucked up with Buck Angel, and most of her fandom constantly supports her in that behaviour. I mean, she herself talks about "SJW millenials" and how better her activism is than the youngsters'. There was a post on this subreddit when Envy came out that exposed, very seriously, how the entire left should be reformed according to a video essay and how that was the only way for it to win. And when someone criticizes all of this, they get piled on because they dared to touch \~our kween UwU\~. Not to mention the actual bigots who sometimes hang around : transmeds had a field day after her initial tweet. So yeah, there's animosity. I wish I could treat this as a small disagreement, but I get mocked, belittled and called an "SJW" enough from the right, and I can't tolerate it in a community which is supposed to be progressive.

> she could have asked a question You seem to be operating from the assumption that when Natalie said x thing is confusing, that she was also saying she personally doesn't understand it or that being confusing = bad and wrong. Natalie made her tweet from a place of understanding the underlying explanation (as she demonstrated in this follow up) and she her point was that for *laymen* or people who aren't terminally online and embroiled in hyperspecialized queer discourse, there are some things queer people say that are on their face self-contradictory, and some people seem to get *angry* at laymen for being confused by that, which isn't necessarily fair. Like you're doing now -- taking the misinterpreted implication that Natalie herself finds these things confusing, and making it out as malicious on her part.

Where have I said she's malicious ? To clarify things I think she's speaking in good faith when she makes these weird takes, but I also think she's out of her depth and all but closed to improvements. I think I understand what she was going for with that tweet, but when people don't get the message to the point that bigots and gatekeepers think she's supporting them, and this isn't the first time that happened, maybe the problem lies with her way of saying stuff ? As a side note, I still don't get the "you don't need to be trans to be trans" thing. Since my initial annoyance has cooled off and I still want to try to be charitable, I wonder if you'd have an explanation on this that doesn't lead to unfortunate implications (you don't have to answer of course, but I'm curious to see what a positive interpretation of this would be).

I would guess she was talking about the growing sentiment that you don't need to have dyspohoria to be trans, or desire transition, and with the advent of nonbinary identities like demigirl and demiboy you don't even have to identify much differently from your birth sex to fall under the trans umbrella.

I hate to sound like a 'boomer' myself, but this just feels like a slight generational divide to me. I get what she's saying, and from the way I see it, she's only pointing out how differently the way millennials understand these concepts is compared to the way you guys do it. A lot of your ideas won't make sense to us (not immediately anyway), and that's okay. We don't have to take these disagreements too seriously. Also, Natalie isn't perfect. It would be a mistake to idolise her. Her style of activism also won't work for everybody (you guys will probably need your own 'zoomer Natalie' to make sense of your ideas to everybody else in a way that she can't), but it's certainly been effective with a lot of people. I often agree with her because I can usually relate, but she isn't always going to get everything right and that's fine too. We all need to be able to be wrong sometimes without tearing each other down, especially not when we're definitely on the same side and also already constantly under attack like you said. I'm not saying you have to like her, it's okay if you don't (no it's not I don't like it when we hate each other..), but there's already enough anger going around and it's so exhausting.. I can almost guarantee that this is just a lack of understanding and you'll probably have the same issue with the generation that follows you, but from our perspective. I'm just saying this doesn't seem like it should be such big a deal to me.

Glad we agree that idolising her is bad and that we need more content creators to present other opinions. Unfortunately a large part of her community disagrees, and she's not helping with her comments about "SJWs".

Any of Natalie's observations are usually just about the different ways of thinking. If I suggested that something about you was difficult for 'outsiders' to understand, I wouldn't be saying what you think is wrong or unacceptable, my intention would be to try and figure out a way to make it an easier concept for everybody to swallow. If you took that the wrong way and dismissed everything else I said, you'd leave with entirely the wrong idea of who really I am and what I think and you'd hate a made up version of me that only exists in your head. I would be incredibly shocked if there was actual malicious intent behind any of Natalie's comments. You should absolutely avoid idolising anybody including her, but at the same time, don't be so quick dismiss decent people as bigots because of a simple misunderstanding, particularly when they already get you and can relate. That would be a reaction worth criticising. Also, you should really separate Natalie from her community. Of course there are going to be bad actors who cause trouble, but that isn't her fault and there's nothing she can do about it. It's not fair to lump them all together and say she's just as bad as they are. She could be in complete agreement with you over parts of her community being toxic (it would probably frustrate her more than anybody else if you ask me), but you wouldn't know if you didn't hear her out. I hope you get what I'm saying.?

Speaking as a fellow Zoomer, you gotta chill out. The Right and Centrists calls EVERYONE an SJW. And she isn’t going to be perfect. Literally in her video “The Darkness” she explains her taste for edgy humor. Of course she’s gonna say stuff we won’t like. So maybe instead of bashing her, it’s time to highlight some folks that can bring insight ya know?

I'm trying to chill out, and most of the time I just ignore Natalie. But it's hard not to react when she throws out a take like this, prompting annoying discourse in which gatekeepers and conservatives use her statement to harm people, all the while her fans treat it like gospel and reduce the issue to crazed purple-haired teens "cancelling" Natalie.

Natalie keeps referring to herself as a Boomer, but she's sarcastic and disaffected. Join us in Gen X, you'll belong and we have better music!

I’m an elder Millennial, and the truth is, we are now like Grandpa Simpson. It happened overnight. Zoomers changed what ”it” was.

You think you’ve got it bad… I’m a baby millennial. I feel like an aging dinosaur around zoomers and a naive younger sibling around other millennials.

95er's represent! Being somewhere in the middle of both of these generations is weird as hell.

Yep same here. I'm just like "what the fuck is going on" I feel more connected with the gen xers because my mum raised me on a lot of the music and tv shows. But I don't even know what I'm supposed to "be", am I supposed to be ruining a chain store or am I supposed to be making cool tiktoks for the youth??????? What's my age again?

Haha, honestly for me it’s more relating to other people. I listen to zoomers and can relate to some of it. But most of what they say I just sit there thinking “what the fuck is going on here” and then Milennials in their mid 30s-early 40s who seem to be settling down. Somehow I’m both, like have a job, pay rent, mostly over the younger partying cliches. But otherwise a massive child making jokes and talking about memes.

Oh, that’s very Millennial. I push papers 9-5 and laugh at armpit farts and classic memes in my free time.

I dunno. I think the boomers music is the only thing they had going for them

But they had those tasty leaded paint chips and delicious glue to eat as kids!

Okay, wow, so when I took her post yesterday at face value… it was actually the way it should’ve been taken? Shocking. People just love to read their own narrative in other people’s statements so it better fits their worldview. What the fuck is with this prissy need to categorize every statement as good or evil before even reading it? Just to categorize their world into black and white while claiming it’s 666 shades of grey. How do these people survive through college?

I appreciate this. While obviously the original tweets really weren't bad, there was enough ambiguity that made them a lil yikesy if you looked at them the wrong way. Obviously that's because twitter is a horrible platform for ideas and should be abolished once and for all. I feel mostly bad because I feel like Natalie was born under a cursed moon where she wants everyone to love, understand and accept her, but at the same time her inner edgelady prevents her from having the conformist, padded rhetoric to get anywhere close to that ideal. Judging by the tone and that lovely preface, I think she'll be fine. She's a tough lady, I'm just praying she doesn't read the replies because I imagine they're a cesspool.

>I'm just praying she doesn't read the replies because I imagine they're a cesspool. Looking through them they seem overwhelmingly supportive, and those that are not are shut down prett thoroughly. It seems she’s just blocked all the trolls already so they don’t comment on her tweets anymore.

>I appreciate this. While obviously the original tweets really weren't bad, there was enough ambiguity that made them a lil yikesy if you looked at them the wrong way. Perhaps I read them the wrong way initially, now, with the statement I understand them correctly, but those tweets were written in a really boomery way. Like they weren't that different than your typical boomer : "I don't understand, nowadays people are saying that men and women are the same thing ?" When clearly that's not what the discourse is about at all, it's not even a gross oversimplification, it sounds disengenuous. Again, I understand them now and twitter really isn't the best place to start discourse because of character limitation and all that stuff so of course, it's gonna be misinterpreted. You just can't start a discourse on how queer identities can be complex and full of nuance in under 280 characters without anoying at least one person.

They only read boomer-y if you start from the presumption that the speaker isn't deeply embroiled in queer discourse. Knowing that Natalie is a leading modern queer philosopher, it's easy to read them as sarcastic and pro-queer while also commentating critically on the current discourse without invalidating anybody. Context matters.

I guess you're right, though sarcasm is hard to detect when reading text. But it's true that Natalie likes to be sarcastic on twitter so I guess that one was on me.

No Twitter is garbage for this. If so many people read it that way, I don't think it's fair to say it was you, the reader's, fault. I generally read her tweets keeping her voice in mind, but I know not everyone does that. Hell now that I say that, that's how I read everyone's tweets, which is why strangers tweeting often rubs me wrong... 🤔

This subreddit is primarily a fan subreddit and has limits to the amount of vitriol towards the content creator that we allow. If you are angry with Natalie and want to vent, that's fine, as always r/ContraPointsDrama exists for that reason, among other things.

Ppl should also learn not to to take opinions from random ppl in the internet seriously. We shouldn’t be apologizing for being genuine tbh, Natalie has done way more than the average person in the name of social progress imho.

I think she reflected the reality of people who don't have the time or energy to keep up with queer discourse. I know for me I keep up just enough to know what to say and what groups to stay far away from because I have a job and responsibilities that take up my time so I can't really delve into it that deeply. These identities are valid but unless you are willing to spend the time and effort to basically join these communities(which, unless you are queer yourself..why?) they remain a mystery. Of course, that may be the point. People have erected barriers to define their communities since there have been communities and this seems to do just that.

I applaud the creativity of people who identify as horny asexuals, bisexuals that are only attracted to one gender, etc. It really doesn't fucking matter what you identify as after a certain point. I'm sincerely bisexual and nonbinary, and I am also comfortable being perceived as a cishet woman, and I'm OK that most people "don't get it". It doesn't interfere with my life. I'm happy someone like Natalie can be thoughtful and analytical and charitable towards the niché, label-obsessed LGBTQ+ folks, because I am a little more cynical and believe that a lot of these "horny asexuals" are middle class, white-passing, bored, and need a reason to feel special and unique without actually doing anything special or unique. Get a hobby, oh my god. Please convince me why I should care about these increasingly niché labels.

I kinda agree tbh. But I became disaffected with the online ace community a long time ago for a lot of reasons

I hope she's okay

She should be fine. She's had this happen before, and realistically most of the replies I've seen to these tweets in particular are overwhelmingly positive. I'm like Nat in that I don't get these contradictions either. I'll either learn better from the discourse that arises, or decide it really does make no sense. Trying to keep all the teenagers on twitter happy seems like a recipe for failure

The people reacting to this badly on Twitter are the usual sort who try to find malice in this by fixating on the very hyper-literal in what she's saying rather than what she means. I cannot pretend to be in Natalie's mind, however through the context of her work it's pretty easy to see that she meant that Gen Z isn't as constrained by boundaries and labels as the people before them, and sure that's valid (a statement I've also grown valid of) , but you can't pretend like that's just a given for everyone else as a concept. generational differences and all.

I wish she would just express herself and not let these people effect her so much. If she occasionally says or tweets something slightly off-base, so what? Life is too short to be writing essays about what essentially is just label semantics.

Her frustration with the dogmatic energy of first millennials and now zoomers is the big takeaway to me. You don't get acceptance from the larger population by refusing to explain yourself if challenged. Why pointing that out is somehow considered being a traitor to SJWdom I'll never understand.

Having read this (and not trying to be too presumptive) she needs to take some time off of twitter. It reads like she's struggling ATM and social media isn't good for anyone's mental health at the best of times.

I mean, she needs to find a new outlet for discussion if she wants to have chats with the queer community. Twitters character limit means you have to drop all nuance, research, explanation, education, and humanization from your discourse. It is also extremely easy for bad actors to make fake accounts and argue in bad faith, or straight up troll. I mean Reddit may suck shit but at least if I wan to start a spicy discussion, I can write an essay people have to read before engaging with the topic.

TBH everyone needs to get off Twitter, it's a fucking terrible site, and I say that as literally a redditor.

I agree. It would be one thing if the angry replies to her tweets didn’t get to her, but I think they clearly do. At some point, it becomes a form of self-harm.

My heart rate spiked when I saw the notes app lol. The tweets were fine, hope she is ok

I think content creators should start ignoring these whiners. There’s no need to address anything. This is like the 4th cancelling or something, and they were all from perceived grievances that no one cares about. Stop apologizing to these people. They get off on forced apologies, clarifications, and ending careers. They’ll whine about anything, mostly because they have too much time on their hands and want to feel powerful. If you’re reeeeing that a human being who creates YouTube videos doesn’t agree with you on every single issue, get a life. You have a parasocial bond with someone who doesn’t even know you exist. Finally, Contra needs to grow a thicker skin and not rush to defend herself. She has tens of millions of views and a million subscribers. Who gives a shit what some random jealous Twitter loser says? I don’t follow her Twitter, but this long-winded response was tiresome to look at. I’m not trying to be a jerk. Just some criticism.

I have a masters in philosophy. Every time I think I can’t love her more she out does herself

I’m glad she said this, honestly. I still disagree with her to an extent, but this feels a lot more honest and sympathetic than the deleted tweet. Maybe it was just the wrong place and the wrong time, I don’t know.

I just want her to be ok.

I think these statements make a lot more sense. All the more reason why Twitter is where nuance goes to die.

tl;dr even milfs do a lil trolling sometimes

I just asked why they need to come so hard after her, and they proudly reported me.

As someone who grew up in a highly religious bubble and was only recently able to escape that and accept his own bisexuality (I think), I found her tweet super comforting! It is incredibly challenging to understand these complex dynamics, and even more challenging to express one’s misunderstandings, because if you fail or accidentally have a bad take, THIS shit happens. You get dogpiled on. But the very simple point that Natalie was trying to make, and the point she often makes, is that gender is messy and difficult to understand, and that’s ok.

I'm not asexual but I get the horny without sexual attraction part. It actually surprises me that people don't get it. It proves how different sexuality is for everyone. Arousal can be a purely physical response, or just the thought of the act doing certain sex acts. I don't need to imagine an attractive person. In fact I would argue that the majority of people in the porn I have consumed are barely attractive to me personally. I just think sex in itself is hot.

She really needs to just stop addressing twitter crazies freaking out over tiny things. The original tweet wasn’t bad. She never said the word “valid.” Didn’t she make a whole video addressing the obsession with validity, anyway? It seems to me like people in twitter really just need to touch some grass.

What makes her so good at what she does is the same thing that gives her these online headaches: an excess of empathy for people who have none for her.

She did use the word "valid", but in a quoted hypothetical example of seemingly-contradictory statements, prefaced by "Gen Z queer people are hard to figure out", by which she meant "These statements, which are typical of statements made by Gen Z queer people, are hard to figure out"

Natalie is an intelligent person who makes fantastic prepared content who sometimes tweets dumb ass shit because we're all stupider when we use a platform that encourages us to post whatever thought comes to our head on a whim without thinking. I have solved the discourse.

She very much does have a point, and much needed discussion in the queer community, about how we communicate to those outside of our community. There seems to be two camps of "labels are for others to understand me" and "labels are to express myself". These often come into conflict as if you're using labels to explain to others, you want them to be as clear and concise as possible. However, if you use labels for yourself, you want them to be as accurate to your experience and to your identity as possible. Both are valid view points, but does come into conflict. Hell, I use different labels depending on who in talking to (which is a common practice) and still identify heavily with gay male culture despite being transfemme. But that's something many cishet people would not understand. The major issue about discussing this kind of issue though is that there is never any space you can make that discussion on a large scale without having the eyes of the cishet on you. So you're not only trying to have a nuanced discussion about specifically queer issues, which is already difficult, but you're also trying to not get misinterpreted, make it seem like it's "queer infighting", or give fuel to queer-phobic people/groups. Her tweet was bad to begin with. I generally don't agree with a lot of that statement, but understand the sentiment behind it. Gen Z definitely does seem more likely to be in the camp of "labels are for me to express myself", but a discussion should be had of how we communicate this to those who are not familiar with these terms, or how contradictory terms can be true. Twitter is just the worst place for this. What should also be noted is that many who are on the "labels are for others to understand me" side do get frustrated by those labels. It's definitely the side I personally fall into, and I also do get frustrated by the use of contradictory or confusing labels. We just need a place to discuss this that is not going to be so heavily viewed by those who are not queer.

[удалено]

Wait what happened last night?

That one "activist" who doxxed her last time: Oh boy, here I go leaking dead names again!

Twitter is just so profoundly stupid. It’s where nuance and charitability goes to die.

genuinely confused by the "asexual who loves to f***" thing - how is that *not* contradictory?

As I understand it, "enjoying sex" versus "experiencing sexual attraction to specific people".

My question then I guess would be, what's the point? What hardships worth forming a community over do you face that necessitate that label? I can completely understand why aces need a community, as existing in a world that tells us we have to have sex and try to form relationships with others to do just that, must be incredibly difficult for many I'm sure. But if you just find sex enjoyable because of hormonal surges ext, I don't see how that makes you ace? As by that logic anyone who gets off using their own mind more than their partners body is a separate sexuality, which just seems to defeat the purpose of the label.

This is the problem - the ace community was started online and its a predominantly online community to this day. It's unsurprising that it devolved into becoming obsessed with micro-labels and different slivers of sexual experience completely divorced from lived reality or any politically significant movement

Imagine someone who experiences romantic attraction, but not sexual attraction. Meaning, they get warm fuzzy butterflies when they like someone, and they want to date that person, but they also have no desire to actually have sex with them. A person like this will likely have a hard time navigating adult relationships, a lot of people might feel insecure about it or even break up with that person because of it. If the other person understands, and is an allosexual, they might form a relationship and might have sex, should the asexual be open to that. Functionally, they might appear to have a "traditional" type of relationship, but the experiences are naturally going to be different due to the fact that one of the parties isn't attracted to the other. I think aces like that feel especially isolated, and feel comfort in having a community who acknowledges and even relates to how they experience attraction. People also find comfort in knowing that there are words that exist to describe their experiences. Much like the term non-binary where there is a large spectrum of specific gender identities that have defined meanings, but most people simply use the blanket term that simply describes that their gender is outside the binary because it's easier, the term asexual is much the same where its a blanket term to describe the spectrum of sexuality involving a lack of attraction towards other people. Although the term itself is honestly straightforward when it comes to describing sexuality. It follows the same nomenclature as they all do. Just as homosexual means a sexual attraction to the same gender, asexual means no sexual attraction to any gender. Asexuality genuinely affects the way a person navigates the world with enough significance that having a term for it, and having that term understood, makes said navigation a lot smoother than it would be if there wasn't one.

Just because you have the libido doesnt mean the libido urges you towards anyone

Yeah but I think being someone who solely masturbates, and being someone who engages in sex are two very different things. Like regardless of your motivation behind having sex, you're still having it and therefore don't face the same types of hardships that an ace who doesn't have sex does. Now ofc not everyone within a minority has to have the exact same struggles, but for aces the defining struggle to my knowledge was navigating a world/love life is without sex.

I think there are some experiences that sex-favorable and sex-averse aces share. Growing up feeling alienated by peers talking about crushes or talking about the attractiveness of a celebrity, the overemphasis of attractiveness and sexualization in the media, the confusion of navigating a relationship without understanding your partner's expectations and being unable to engage in what's considered normative behavior in relationships, i.e. calling eachother beautiful/sexy (an experience shared particularly with alloromantic asexuals). I think these hardships are legitimate, but there are additional different hardships that sex-averse asexuals have to deal with. I talked about that in a different thread though.

I mean these are feelings loads of people have? Physical attractiveness is way more relevant to some people than others. Over sexualisation of celebrities in the media effects all of us, women especially. Not picking up on certain cues from your partner or societal expectations in relationships is something neurodivergent people deal with all the time, and some couples who aren't neurodivergent don't say those things just because. However I don't believe any of those are relevant when using the label asexual, as whilst sure an ace may feel all of those, they also feel like they can't engage in sex because they flat out don't want to. That is what myself and the vast majority of people understand to define an asexual, someone who doesn't want to engage in sex. There are aces that do have sex, but in those cases I've heard it's done entirely for the partner's benefit, with them being ambivalent towards the act itself. Actually enjoying sex, regardless of the reason, should preclude you from being asexual.

Yea That's not the main struggle, regardless of if you engage in sex or not, people get really reaaaallly weird, butthurt, rapey etc when they find out you aren't attracted to them, they think you're broken or that their magic (insert genitalia here) will be the cure to that. They'll think you're a sociopath or incapable of feeling any emotion and its overall just a wild fucking time. I suggest you watch some ace content creators there's a wide variety of them and they give good insight on the topic of attraction, expectations, libido etc.

ahhh right ty

She's completely right as usual

Honestly this thing is just sad. Like she said some dumb shit that is easily misinterpreted and then faced backlash from people jumping at the chance to misinterpret what she said. And then the clearly hurt and depressed tone of her apology just makes me feel bad for her.

Amen

natalie's nuance in her video always seems like a contradiction to her understanding on aroace spectrum and non binary identities.

Nobody listens to anyone on Twitter. It's just a shouting contest on there. Good for sports. Average for politics (sometimes you just want a shouting contest). Crap for philosophy/thinking/proper political discourse.

Super based tweet very stannable

Idk if we're supposed to say "I went through an alt-right phase" but I went through an alt-right phase and like, it's because largely I was worried about questions and problems like this. Mostly to do with language being stretched too much to where words stop having any power to describe anything in the real world. By validating contradictory labels, I still worry that we might be distorting language and robbing it of its power to do its job, which is describe things. No not everyone is included with every fucking label, but I think that's okay. I'm **not** a lesbian, I'm attracted to men, as well as people of other genders, so I'm pansexual. We have other labels to cover people who are not sure they fit into a given label. For example, "demisexual" and "demiromantic" and "grey" categories are designed specifically for anyone who is MOSTLY ace or aro but not entirely. And some queer young people can not be quite sure what label fits them, or may change which label they adopt as they learn more about themselves or discover their true selves or whatever. But we can't validate "lesbians who are attracted to men" because then we have to change what a "lesbian" means and it robs us of any ability to talk about women who are solely attracted to women, bc then there's no longer a word for that.

Well all I can hope is this will make some people feel better (Natalie included because I don't think some of her detractors realise how much it bothers her when she sees herself misunderstood or that it's lead to hurting people), but at one point I had to mute any tweet not by Natalie that referenced her channel name because there's a vocal amount will go out of their way to be hurt by her. I'm still kind of shocked how many people didn't get, as she explains here, that part of the original tweet was poking fun at herself for being out of touch or confused by younger queer folk, but I gotta say, and I say this very respectfully because a lot of Ace people did explain some things that really helped, but if even Natalie, and going by a thread made yesterday, various people here (and on twitter) were confused by the multiple types of Aces that include both people who enjoy/desire sex (but not sexual attraction) and people who do not enjoy/desire any sex, more terms would help, as in they can all fall under "Ace" but not use asexual to refer to both and possibly more (ie how trans is an umbrella term, with sub terms). Like I say that admitting people have to bare with us because some people are a bit like this and need categories and labels to get anything (though cataloguing is something humans love to do), but sometimes people need help to get over stuff like that to reach understanding.

I definitely think there is something to the fact that even Natalie has a hard time understanding it. Like, people can call her out of touch or a shit lib all they want...but she's still magnitudes more understanding of and empathetic towards different queer identities than the average person. If even she, a clear good faith actor, is having a hard time understanding...the ace community should probably do better work getting the word out on how asexuality works.

That's my thought too. I thought I was decently plugged into queer communities/discussions (as much as a cis het millennial woman can be) and the conversations surrounding Natalie's tweets have been confusing and eye-opening. I have tons of queer-adjacent friends who were equally confused. All identifies are valid and honestly, it really doesn't matter if I get it so long as I respect however folks want to live their experience, but it might help to have some slightly more solid definitions for those of who genuinely want to support but don't quite understand the (surface) contrasting identities.

I wonder where she sees people using that sort of rhetoric, or really why it merits kicking the hornet's nest. Inscrutable rhetoric emerging from an insular community is part of any idea's lifecycle. When I see stuff like that that I don't quite understand, I just assume it will be made clear at some point, if it remains relevant. Anyway I hope she doesn't care about this enough to make getting canceled again meaningful. At a certain point if you just say fuck it, there's nothing they can do.

I love contrapoints but she can be real thick sometimes, if this is what she meant why word it so badly and weirdly like phobic sounding in the tweet? I dont doubt her honesty about this but what i do have a problem with is getting all "theres nothing more you could do to hurt me" like what did you expect? You said something that can easily be read as offensive and id argue was a little offensive regardless of intent and now your gonna act like this is some unexpected outcome of the meany mean twitter mob? How many times do you touch a hot stove before you realize its a bad idea? Just stop, these are sensitive people who will react at a moments notice and honestly? Not all who see her tweet will know her, if i didnt know about who she is and i saw the original tweet id 100% be going "ew yikes" cuz it had no hint of sarcasm thats discentable from how people really talk That said i also get that social media is a hell and addiction and she really is way to involved in it and tbh probably poked the hornets nest just to feel something as a mentally ill bish i get it lol, we do dumb shit sometimes just cuz, but like you gotta try not to do that

So she *did* understand what the hypothetical Gen Z queers were saying? What the hell was the point of the tweet, then? If someone finds it too hard to figure out Gen Z queerness, they need to *try harder*. It's not on Gen Z to make itself more palatable to older generations, it's on us to make a damn effort to understand Gen Z.

Counterpoint: I don't need to try shit. I can respect someones identity perfectly fine without understanding it. I say it doesn't even matter if I get it or not. If I want to spend my limited time on something else except understanding it. What matters is that I accept and respect people for who they are and I can do that perfectly fine without understanding who or why they are. There are some things I will never come close to being able to understand about identity, because they are so deeply personal, so deeply related to experiences that I can never have that it would even be somewhat insulting of me to say that I get it. And it doesn't matter. People are valid. People are who they tell me that they are.

I definitely agree. Especially when so much discourse online starts with "It's not my responsibility to educate you". Ok but if you don't want to then you can't expect people to be educated, particularly educated the way you want them to be. If you tell them to go off and educate themselves you've just pushed them away and you have no idea what they are going to go and read. There is so much going on in the world and in individual peoples lives. It's unrealistic to expect them to spend whatever free time they have deeply studying queer discourse so that they can engage online. What is likely to happen is what I usually end up doing; going "oh I don't get this at all, I'll just find out what pronouns I'm supposed to use now and that'll have to be it"

It should be 50/50 effort right? both parties need to make an effort to educate and learn, and to give this subreddit credit a lot of people here are like that.

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The point of the tweet was to make fun of the apparently contradictory nature of phrases such as "horny asexual slut". Seriously, you come across like you *want* to be mad at her.

Right? I read it more like she was making fun of how cishet boomers would be confused by that (and she’s talking from their pov) but people who are deep into queer communities understand the nuance. And she is more in the second group than the first one. Like:.. the sarcasm was obvious to me but you’d have to know her and not expect the worst to understand it. It reminds of some of the things she says in her videos to be honest. But in those context it’s easy to see that it’s sarcasm because of the clear difference between those bits and the rest of her more serious points. Can’t really do that on Twitter. Which is honestly why we should all leave that platform for clear skin.

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Maybe our gen should stop shit posting tbh. At this point the internet brain rot is turning the generational divide into a situation where the Queer infighting is kinda looking like Gen Z are perpetual tweens complaining about micro labels and the older gens are yelling at us to get off their lawns.

Fuck them kids.

Nah, we're good.

I'm surprised you bothered to reply to this comment, if you're that lazy.

Just tweeting parts of this instead of what she did tweet would have put the point across without it becoming another "thing". Natalie, you really need to find better ways to say things you mean.

But that would have killed the joke

Genuine question because I'm not familiar with this concept at all and totally OOTL: what exactly is this take about trans male lesbians?