"Asexuality: An Overview" by, Swankivy

[A Gray Phantom]

Has anyone else seen Miss Ivy's latest video?

I really liked it. Though dry, it is informative and to the point. I left a comment on the video saying how I think it sounds like it could be part of a 6th grade sex ed class. In fact, I'd encourage teachers to show this video in class to help educate the next generation about asexuality.

[Member4445]

I can't take anything she says seriously.

[A Gray Phantom]

I can't take anything she says seriously.

Wha-!? Why's that?

[Member4445]

The whole -signing up to a website known for sexual relationships and hookups, then getting pissy when people use that website for the reason it was designed- thing. Instead of educating others on asexuality, she deliberately insults them.

[ithaca]

Around 1:35 she says "They may or may not like kissing and cuddling, and they may or may not feel sexual or aesthetic attraction" when the latest subject "they" may be referring to is "asexual people". From the tone of her voice and the short break after she says "sexual", it sounds like she realized she made a mistake, maybe she forgot to fix it?

[Kellam]

I liked it, it seems like it could be realy usefull to anyone looking for information for a sex ed class. Swankivy does great work. Some of the production value is low but I don't think that matters. She sees a need and she does her best to fill that need. If only we had more like her.

[A Gray Phantom]

If it weren't for her, the only exposure I'd have to asexuality would be House. While I get what you're saying about OKCupid (though I think all dating sites are lame) I find her videos quite informative.

I've been in contact with her, and she took the time to answer all my questions and helped me discover myself. She's actually a much friendlier person than she seems in her vids. I'm sure OKCupid is only one of many sites she uses to meet people, and she doesn't perceive OKCupid to be a dating only site.

Around 1:35 she says "They may or may not like kissing and cuddling, and they may or may not feel sexual or aesthetic attraction" when the latest subject "they" may be referring to is "asexual people". From the tone of her voice and the short break after she says "sexual", it sounds like she realized she made a mistake, maybe she forgot to fix it?

Maybe. Though there are asexuals who fall into the "gray" spectrum, it may just be Freudian slip.

[LionRoar]

Swank Ivy is great! I love her stuff!

I also first learned about asexuality mainly through her videos.

[Lydian]

I first saw her asexual bingo video and found she came off as biting people's heads off at times. She might get a lot farther politely explaining things to ignorant people than jumping on them and making fun of them, even if they are sometimes being rude it's best to come off as the better person and respond politely. Then it's fairly obvious who the assholes is.

Still, I liked this video a lot more and found it very educational. I know my mom was asking about asexuality after a rather frustrating talk where I told her it DID matter to me that she wouldn't accept asexuality as a thing. I might show her this video, it might answer a lot of her questions.

[swankivy]

The whole -signing up to a website known for sexual relationships and hookups, then getting pissy when people use that website for the reason it was designed- thing. Instead of educating others on asexuality, she deliberately insults them.

I've heard comments like this before, but usually they are made by people who think I'm trolling in a deliberate attempt to get people to rant about. No, I am not pissy at people for using the website for hookups--as long as they don't target me for such things (and if you're defending their right to completely ignore my profile and assume everyone is there for whatever level of hookup or relationship they're looking for, I think you're being kind of unfair, since I do everything I can to make sure people who encounter me there know I'm not interested in dating or sex).

No, I am not "deliberately insulting" anyone, and one of the above posters is correct that the site is used by MANY people as a matching site (with built-in categories of "friends," "pen pals," "activity partners," "long-term dating," "short-term dating," and "casual encounters" available). Considering a) the creators of the site built preferences right into it to allow various types of matching and b) it has WORKED as a friend-finding site for me since 2005, I don't see a reason to suggest I'm there for some underhanded, predatory reason.

I'm also not there to "educate about asexuality," though I do disclose my asexuality in my profile BECAUSE there are people who insist that the site is not *actually* allowed to be used for anything but whatever they are there to use it for. Anyone who's out as asexual probably knows that disclosing asexuality invites criticism in some cases. Most of the people who contact me with questions get the typical behind-the-scenes answers and education. If the conversation instead becomes an example of intolerance and ignorance, at least I can still use it as an educational tool in some cases. There you go.

For the record, there is a time and a place for sarcasm, anger, and not being nice. I always find it a little confusing when people suggest I should try to be the Well-Behaved Minority when we are talking about people who are using disgusting language to invalidate us and threaten us with sexual assault. The Asexual Bingo video is a collection of the most egregious examples of anti-asexual criticism. If someone asks a respectful question, I have no history of biting their heads off. Most people actually seem perplexed at how calm I tend to be in dealing with people who aren't respectfully requesting education. You've got to keep in mind that sometimes the proper response to outrageous behavior is outrage. Otherwise, just patiently conversing with every jerk who demands education while insulting me, mocking me, and scoffing at me leads to an awful lot of wasted time. It's okay if you disagree with my responses sometimes. But I do reject the notion that it's my job to react to disgusting accusations and personal attacks as though these people deserve pleasant coaxing and respectful tolerance. There's a good reason "you're damaging your cause by getting angry" is considered derailing, so please do try to understand, and feel free to handle your own criticism however you think is most appropriate for you.

Around 1:35 she says "They may or may not like kissing and cuddling, and they may or may not feel sexual or aesthetic attraction" when the latest subject "they" may be referring to is "asexual people". From the tone of her voice and the short break after she says "sexual", it sounds like she realized she made a mistake, maybe she forgot to fix it?

I said "sensual" attraction. Many asexual people say they feel sensual and aesthetic attraction even in the absence of sexual and/or romantic attraction, so I wanted to make sure it got a nod. Just in case you're curious about what I've said on any video, though, I caption every video I make through YouTube's closed-captioning system, so you can turn captions on if you want to/need to. :)

I appreciate the compliments, thanks people.

[ithaca]

Thanks for your reply, Ivy, and sorry about the misunderstanding :)

It's probably due to my complete rejection of the word 'sensual' :lol:

[swankivy]

Thanks for your reply, Ivy, and sorry about the misunderstanding :)

It's probably due to my complete rejection of the word 'sensual' :lol:

Oh no, that's cool. I don't think "sensual attraction" is used very much outside our community. :/ Though in general I've found that because we kind of don't experience certain aspects of attraction and still DO experience others, sometimes we end up breaking things down in a way that seems silly or overdone to others, and there's not much we can do about it because there's no way to talk about it if we don't have words for it. I wonder how many other people will believe I said "sexual" there--I didn't think about it.

That said, here's a thing that got discussed somewhere else: the "types of romantic attraction" isn't necessarily accurate for everyone, because that model of declaring romantic attraction in terms how someone you're attracted to compares to your own gender becomes complicated if you're non-binary or are attracted to anyone who's non-binary. I thought about that and figured yeah, it really is a pretty flawed system (or at least too simplified), though I think we need the "hetero-," "homo-," "bi-," "poly-," and "pan-" labels because some people will prefer to use them and identify that way.

I was trying to be as concise as I could because the longer a video gets the less likely it is to be used as a learning tool in a class atmosphere, but I think if I had it to do over I would have liked to discuss not only heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, polyromantic, and panromantic labels, but also androromantic, gynoromantic, skolioromantic, transromantic, and lithromantic identities. (I really like that the latter terms don't require declaring one's own gender in order to say what types of people one is attracted to.) So that's what *I* don't like about my video.

[Lydian]

For the record, there is a time and a place for sarcasm, anger, and not being nice. I always find it a little confusing when people suggest I should try to be the Well-Behaved Minority when we are talking about people who are using disgusting language to invalidate us and threaten us with sexual assault. The Asexual Bingo video is a collection of the most egregious examples of anti-asexual criticism. If someone asks a respectful question, I have no history of biting their heads off. Most people actually seem perplexed at how calm I tend to be in dealing with people who aren't respectfully requesting education. You've got to keep in mind that sometimes the proper response to outrageous behavior is outrage. Otherwise, just patiently conversing with every jerk who demands education while insulting me, mocking me, and scoffing at me leads to an awful lot of wasted time. It's okay if you disagree with my responses sometimes. But I do reject the notion that it's my job to react to disgusting accusations and personal attacks as though these people deserve pleasant coaxing and respectful tolerance. There's a good reason "you're damaging your cause by getting angry" is considered derailing, so please do try to understand, and feel free to handle your own criticism however you think is most appropriate for you.

I definitely agree that many of the comments in the video were horrible and deserving of a little bit of sass back, though others seemed more or less like the general annoying but innocent understandings such as "when you've met the right person" and it came off as somewhat over-defensive. I literally did a face-palm when my mom almost perfectly quoted the "when your heart goes pitter-patter" comment to me and I know she's not doing it to be mean...she's just closed-minded at times. At the time it was the only video I had seen from you, and I do like the video posted in this link very much. It answers a lot of questions people have, and I may use it as something to link people to when they have questions. I wont deny snapping at people myself, including recently when I felt I was being treated as though my feelings were invalid regarding my relationship.

I may have gotten a different impression had it not been the first video I'd seen from you. I have to agree that some of the comments were obviously trolls and don't really need a whole lot of respect, though my own friends have insisted there's a 'fix' for me in similar ways to a few other comments. I know they mean well, they just go about it all in the wrong way. : /

[swankivy]

Thanks for your perspective, Lydian. That makes sense, sure.

Most of my videos are actually kind of just rambly or not terribly well executed, and most of them are certainly not about shaming people who tried to shame me. As for the comments in "Asexual Bingo," actually nearly all of them came when my video had been targeted for a full-scale twelve-day-long trolling by someone on 4chan. Every single night for nearly two weeks, the troll went to /b/, started a thread called "Ask an asexual anything!" and posted my link, using my photo and the username "swankivy," and began trying to impersonate me, claiming to be the author of the video. He then proceeded to "answer" people's questions by making elitist statements about asexual people being better than everyone else, throwing out pseudo-scientific reasons for "why" I was asexual, and even went as far as to post a naked picture of a girl who vaguely looked like me while saying I have no hangups about my body because I don't "sexualize" it and therefore don't mind posing nude on the Internet. This troll doing this every night caused me to get somewhere between 80 and 200 troll comments a night whenever he was online. And he would usually be found out as a fake very quickly because he couldn't spell, and people who did their homework could see that "the real swankivy" is an editor. :P

So those comments were just some of the most foul things said to me pretty much all on top of each other, without end, for a couple weeks. Not to mention the perpetrator was e-mailing me privately and trying to gloat about how he wasn't having to change my "message" or exaggerate it at all in order to get me all that hate mail, and how I should really be more grateful to him for getting my views up. When I didn't acknowledge him he had a big temper tantrum and also tried to impersonate me on Craigslist. It was sad.

And that's not even the worst trolling I ever got, but I prefer not to talk about the worst one because it took a lot of money and talking to lawyers before I won.

So that's probably a big reason why I'm not a big fan of being told I should just play nice. Haha.

It's frustrating when people think they can "fix" you, I know! Boy do I relate. And even when they're not saying these things specifically to smack you down, they're definitely very invalidating, and it's difficult to figure out what you can even SAY to people who are supposed to be your friends and loved ones but won't stop trying to tell you that you must be mistaken about what you feel unless you're sick. The condescending "You'll change, you'll see" mantra is one of the worst coming from someone you love. Because you can't insist "NO I WON'T" without sounding like you made a rebellious "decision," but if you agree that sure, they might be right, you sound like you're admitting that you're not the authority on your own feelings.

Bah.

[LionRoar]

Ivy, it makes me very sad when people hate on you.

[Qutenkuddly]

The whole -signing up to a website known for sexual relationships and hookups, then getting pissy when people use that website for the reason it was designed- thing. Instead of educating others on asexuality, she deliberately insults them.

You mean the same one I've met friends on?

[A Gray Phantom]

Wow, Ivy, I knew you got it bad when it came to trolling, but I didn't know it was that bad. Lots of folks woulda just said, "Forget it!" to the whole thing and stopped advocating, but you stuck with it. That's really groovy ^_^.

[swankivy]

Thanks for the props. Actually to tell you the truth one of the major reasons I feel like it's important to keep doing what I'm doing is that people who benefited sometimes are kind enough to tell me so. When I am in touch directly with the people who appreciate my message, it reminds me why the whole community is so important and why I'm happy to be where I am, having kind of accidentally fallen into this awareness thing just because I decided to have a rant on my website all those years ago.

It's been a real pleasure making so many friends through this community and no troll is worth having to give that up.

[michaeld]

Re: sensual, I'll just add the word has a long history that predates the asexual community.

"sensual contact" - like a platonic massage

"dressing sensually" - something that puritan Christian ministers like to complain about

"sensual attraction" - possibly invented by the asexual community (AVEN? Tumblr?) but I can't swear to that

As I mentioned on Avalanche, one of my very favourite singer songwriters, Kate Bush, made an amazing album called The Sensual World, back in the late 80s...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6lnyDp-joE

... so I'll always be biased in favour of this word. :P

[Lydian]

"dressing sensually" - something that puritan Christian ministers like to complain about

I love this. XD

[swankivy]

Re: sensual, I'll just add the word has a long history that predates the asexual community.

Oh, of course "sensual" predates the asexual community. (Heh, I hope people aren't saying we think we invented it.) But the concept of being sensually but not sexually attracted to someone is not often discussed by people in general, because as a community we tend to lack some of the pieces of attraction that many other people take for granted, and they often don't realize that sensual attraction can still happen without sexual attraction (even though if you have both, they tend to be intertwined). I can definitely say I can enjoy a massage from someone without having any kind of sexual attraction to the person providing me with it, for instance. But for some reason a lot of people reject sensual attraction to someone as an authentic expression of intimacy, and don't often accept the idea that sensual experiences can occur independently from feelings about the person. ::shrug::

As I mentioned on Avalanche, one of my very favourite singer songwriters, Kate Bush, made an amazing album called The Sensual World, back in the late 80s...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6lnyDp-joE

Yes, I own this album (and seven others) and love Kate Bush! I actually got into her because an online acquaintance said I sounded a little like her when I sing. After listening to some examples I quickly became a fan. :)

Here's a video recording of me singing "Cloudbusting" on a karaoke site. :)

http://www.singsnap.com/karaoke/r/c7a98d912

[kimbo21]

I love Swank Ivy's work! I think what she does for raising awareness is brilliant

[Ayda]

Good work on the video swankivy! As an educator myself I think educational material about asexuality targeted to younger generations is really important. Otherwise you get people like me who don't know they are asexual till they are in their mid-twenties!

anyway, love you vids. keep it up :)

[swankivy]

As an educator myself I think educational material about asexuality targeted to younger generations is really important. Otherwise you get people like me who don't know they are asexual till they are in their mid-twenties!

Thank you for the compliments, and I very much agree that educating about our orientation is important for the next generation. Most people who identify as asexual today can still remember when there were no resources of any kind anywhere for people like us, and it's only recently that the information is starting to get out there. It needs to become part of common knowledge that asexual people exist and that asexuality is a possibility; I'm sure the next group of teens coming into their sexual identities will still have as difficult time as anyone does, but they should at least know that asexuality is possible and that nothing is wrong if they don't feel attracted to others in a sexual way like "everyone else."

[michaeld]

Yes, I own this album (and seven others) and love Kate Bush! I actually got into her because an online acquaintance said I sounded a little like her when I sing. After listening to some examples I quickly became a fan. :)

Here's a video recording of me singing "Cloudbusting" on a karaoke site. :)

http://www.singsnap.com/karaoke/r/c7a98d912

<8

(OT so I'll spoiler the rest...)

Her Cloudbusting vid with Donald Sutherland is my favourite music vid ever. I first watched it in the late 80s/early 90s and over two decades later it still makes me cry... well ok not cry but tearful... every time. And I'm really not that type....

Btw, have you tried singing Babooshka? I think that song may lend itself well to Karaoke.

[Guest]

I personally have enjoyed swankivys videos, I watched the "letters to an asexual" line on youtube during figuring out what asexuality was and if it fit. Yes, she isn't the most respectful to trolls, but ... she's a lot more respectful than a lot of people would be. Usually her first reply is informative, then meets disrepect with some attitude. But, short of a great peace figure, most people do get a bit annoyed when they deal with the same prejudice and ignorance day in and day out. So, it's understandable. She even has a video on the multiple ways to respond to some things, including nice ways and mean ways. :D

Swankivy - Thank you for your work in awareness and I am sure you have helped many people in their journey to figure themselves out. :)

As for OKcupid - it is not a site for casual hookups alone, it's used for friends, quizzes and a large variety of conversations. So, I am not sure why people find it odd that an asexual would be there for friends. There are actually a lot of aces on it if you do a search for them. And a lot are there for friends only. There are also heterosexuals, bisexuals etc there for friends too. I have an account just to play with the tests and quizzes since The Spark doesn't have theirs anymore. *shrug*

[A Gray Phantom]

Hey, cool, the vid made the front page! ^_^

[Robin L]

Hey, cool, the vid made the front page! ^_^

Are you logged in? YouTube uses personalized front pages now, so if you watch videos about asexuality, thanyeah.

[A Gray Phantom]

Hey, cool, the vid made the front page! ^_^

Are you logged in? YouTube uses personalized front pages now, so if you watch videos about asexuality, thanyeah.

I meant it made the AVEN front page ^_^;

[swankivy]

Btw, have you tried singing Babooshka? I think that song may lend itself well to Karaoke.

Yes, but they didn't have it on that particular karaoke site. I have the karaoke file to play with on my computer though. So much fun--great song to sing!