Though I have not been paying much attention to online discourses and discussions as of late, I did happen to notice that yesterday asexuality and aphobia seemed to be taking center stage in a relatively predictable way — some allosexuals were demanding to know how aces are oppressed, and some aces were detailing the ways society is structured against them, and the whole thing went off the rails in a predictably ugly and harassment laden fashion relatively quickly.
This essay is not about that convo. Or at least not in the sense of me mapping out the contours of structural aphobia — there are other people who are better equipped to do that than I am. But it is about a recurring problem that I’ve seen when we talk about sexuality-based oppression; a dynamic that seemed to crop up in the aphobia conversation the same way it crops in biphobia conversations and the discussions of the experiences of a number of sexual minorities.
Which is to say: the fundamental problem with a lot of these conversations is that the majority of us only understand sexuality on an individual level — and usually just our own individual level. If you are, say, bisexual, you may understand biphobia in the sense of people being mean to you because you are bisexual, because that is your experience — and if you’re not bisexual, the very idea of biphobia might befuddle you because you cannot fathom how bisexuals could be oppressed, especially since we can simply “choose to be straight.” A similar response occurs when allosexuals try to reckon with the idea of aphobia: how could something as personal, as private, as not wanting to have sex lead to systemic oppression?
I have been trying, these past few years, to stop talking about biphobia in terms of people being mean to me. People are mean to a lot of people, and while I think that cruelty and bullying are certainly a major component of biphobia (and often one of the most cutting ones!), I think it’s too muddled a consideration to move the conversation forward.
What I like to talk about, instead, is the way that bisexuality is often absent from the conversation — the way bisexuals are simply not considered as a distinct population with our own needs and issues. This became particularly visible to me when I started thinking about how sexual orientation OCD — a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder where a person obsessively worries about their sexual orientation being fraudulent or changing against their will — is primarily framed in monosexual (and often heterosexual) terms, imagined as a straight person terrified that they are secretly gay. The bisexual variation — in my case, a bi woman worried she’s lying to everyone and actually straight — necessarily functions differently from the monosexual version, both in terms of the experience and in terms of the treatment, and yet it is largely ignored in the conversation. Therapists will tell you that that’s because bisexuals with SO-OCD are rare — but given that the diagnostic is frequently only looking for heterosexual manifestations, one has to wonder if maybe it’s more that bisexuals with SO-OCD are under diagnosed.
That, to me, is so much more interesting than talking about people being mean to me — it’s also evidence of a system oppressing and erasing bisexuals rather than an individual level bully. We can also see this at work in the fact that bisexuals are more vulnerable to poverty, abuse, and poor mental and physical health — and yet alienated from the umbrella “LGBTQ” resources supposedly set up to address our needs. What would it mean to make LGBTQ services more explicitly bi-welcoming? Or is creating bi-specific resources a better use of everyone’s time? (And if so, what would that look like?)
These convos also push us to get people to think of systemic oppression outside of a simple “well are there laws punishing this identity/behavior” framework — a facile argument if I ever heard one given that explicitly, legally codified discrimination usually only happens when a marginalized population overcomes informal discrimination enough to warrant it. (Consider, for instance, that anti-trans laws are a very recent phenomenon and yet few people would say there was no transphobia in the 1990s; similarly, many explicit anti-gay laws only popped up post-Stonewall, when gay people began to be a more visible “threat.”)
I don’t doubt that aces face a parallel dynamic to bisexuals — that despite the ace experience being seen as the “choice” to not have sex, there are many cultural assumptions at play that alienate and marginalize aces. And I wish more of us good get out of this mindset of sexual oppression as explicitly focused on what we do or don't do in the privacy of our bedrooms — and start to understand that the cultural assumptions we have about “normal” relationships and behavior structure the entirety of how our societies function — and, yes, form the backbone of structural oppression.
Yes - one of the things that helped me understand the structural oppression of asexuality and demisexuality was to think about culture-wide assumptions like advertising. An entire premise of advertising, "sex sells," relies on allosexual sexual attraction - if asexuality or demisexuality was normal and expected of people, then pictures of sexually attractive individuals wouldn't be used to sell products.
(I'm calling out demisexuality specifically here because this came up for me specifically in the context of trying to understand demis as an allosexual, as something separate from asexual experiences and the way that our society has weird expectations for female sexuality.)
Same things for queerness - you only start noticing the ways in which different experiences are silenced and hidden when you look at the way our society assumes people will behave, and what structures are set up to deal with those behaviors.