This is a great post, and y’all should peep it. But there’s one aspect I want to put a big ol’ blockquote around and make sure the point it’s making is clear:
To not want romance, sex, or kids is to break the norms of society at large, but in the new subculture asexuals have created, the new norm is to reject all of it, as far as what I feel. And if you don’t reject all of it – if you are looking for sex, romance, and/or kids, or happily are already having sex, are happily already in a romantic relationship, or you already have a child or children, you are breaking out of our little culture where you’re now supposed to like cake better than all of it, in order to be the truest ace you can be. You’re supposed to reject it all.
So by now most of the people who follow me kind of have a good idea what I’m about – anarchism, mostly, but also how that relates to asexuality and vice versa. I talk here about how we should smash amatonormativity, the way we view relationships, in conjunction with the rest of this bullshit system. I’ve said that we shouldn’t make the comfort of allosexual people with our existence a priority, and I still believe that.
But what I’d like to see is not an asexual world, or an asexual community dominated by a narrow vision of the spectrum, or a dictum on who gets to call themselves “true asexuals.” I like a world where every community gets to be as diverse as they possibly can.
Right now the name of the game is not replacing one preferred romantic relationship with another, it is abolishing socially held romantic preference in favor of the widest possible diversity of relationship forms. The name of the game is not to legitimize the “one true asexuality” as it stands in relation to “true straight” or “true gay” people. it is removing the concept of rigid sexual identities from the equation and letting people do – or not do – what they do – or don’t – want to do.
One of the dangers that the anarchist milieu presents is its unfortunate tendency to form tribal communities with unspoken vertical hierarchies, which no one in the group questions or looks at critically but which outsiders do notice. for the most part, these hierarchies simply enforce certain cultural norms and mores, like crust punks not showering and only getting their food from dumpsters because to do anything any other way would be an admission that they’re not committed enough to the dropping-out of capitalism, or anarcho-syndicalists and their enmity toward anything to do with “identity politics.” Social capitalism reinforces these norms, and in-group/out-group dynamics makes it hard for new ideas to enter and potentially infect the existing status quo.
In other words, radical and alternative ways of living and thinking about the world tend to recreate the infrastructure of the existing world we’d like to fight. This is something we need to push back against.