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asexual triangle controversy


AstralFist

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So I recently saw a post about how the aven triangle or asexual triangle is a copy of the pink triangle used on LG people during the holocaust.

I am going to assume that that is not what it is suppose to be seen as. And I have barley seen the triangle used any wear other then aven.

But it does seem a little to close and if its making people that uncomfortable I think aven should create a new symbol to use.

The bisexual community changed their symbol to twin moons because theirs was originally 2 upside down triangles that made people uncomfortable.

So I think changing this would be the right thing to do.

(also I have seen alot of people vilanizing asexuals because of this and I would rather not be attacked and called homophobic for a symbol I don't even use. And as new members of the lgbtqia I think we should do our part to make it a comfortable place for every one)

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I am going to assume that that is not what it is suppose to be seen as.

I wasn't around paying attention to the design process for the triangle, but I'd guess the resemblance is not accidental --- at least indirectly. The pink triangle has long been "reclaimed" by the LGBT community as a symbol for gay rights --- and a forceful reminder of how horrific attitudes against gays are still often much more "socially acceptable" than straight-up Nazi hate propaganda should be. The asexual gradient triangle is probably an intentional variant on the pink triangle and rainbow motifs used in LGBT movements. As with the pink triangle used by LGBT movements, the point is not to support it's "original" use as a symbol supporting oppression, but its "reclaimed" use in calling out and correcting such wrongs.

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Have you got a link to the post you read?

I won't pretend that I know anything about any triangle symbols used during the holocaust, I'd never heard of any until now, but (and I'm in the realms of total ignorance here) I don't think we should stop people from ever using triangles as symbols just because they were once used for something evil.

(also I have seen alot of people vilanizing asexuals because of this and I would rather not be attacked and called homophobic for a symbol I don't even use. And as new members of the lgbtqia I think we should do our part to make it a comfortable place for every one)

Really? I've never seen anybody vilify asexuals or asexuality over the use of the triangle symbol (Not saying that I think it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's a common occurrence).

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Originally, the AVEN triangle was the Kinsey scale (heterosexual to homosexual) as the top line and asexuality as the bottom point, with the gradient being the sexual-asexual spectrum. This was the inspiration for the symbol but that would exclude non-binary identities, so now I think the symbol is just a symbol of the spectrum in general.

It seems like a stretch to me to connect the asexual symbol with the pink triangle. It makes sense for the bisexual symbol to change because that symbol actually had a pink triangle (overlapping a blue triangle). The triangle shape by itself wasn't the issue.

I don't really know what the argument is though as I've also never seen a post saying something like that, so if you post it I'll give it all due consideration.

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I knew quite a few gay Jews in my ACT-UP days and they did deliberately reclaim the Nazi pink triangle by turning it so that it pointed up instead of down.

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Have you got a link to the post you read?

I won't pretend that I know anything about any triangle symbols used during the holocaust, I'd never heard of any until now, but (and I'm in the realms of total ignorance here) I don't think we should stop people from ever using triangles as symbols just because they were once used for something evil.

(also I have seen alot of people vilanizing asexuals because of this and I would rather not be attacked and called homophobic for a symbol I don't even use. And as new members of the lgbtqia I think we should do our part to make it a comfortable place for every one)

Really? I've never seen anybody vilify asexuals or asexuality over the use of the triangle symbol (Not saying that I think it doesn't happen, just that I don't think it's a common occurrence).

I originally had the link on here but then I accidental hit the back button on my mouse and it erased everything :P

I'll see if i can find it again.

I think the post was new so there are a bunch of angry people jumping all over it. and by vilifying asexuals I basically mean tumblr being its usual self and jumping a bandwagon of "omg f*ck those guys" alot of people on tumblr seem to already have issues with the ace community already (that I have seen anyway) and that post seemed to just add more fuel for people to be dicks. But I can understand why some would be uncomfortable about it the holocaust is a sensitive topic.

but apparently something like this happened in 2011 so maybe im just worrying for nothing :P

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http://ghostfaeprince.tumblr.com/post/126652787507/what-was-the-holocaust-symbol-they-used

here's the link

again maybe im just worrying to much about this because barley anyone uses the symbol anyway but i have just seen alot of ace hate on tumblr lately and I just really don't want people to see are community and think "oh wow those guys are homophobic assholes" bad enough alot of people on there just see us as "basically straight people" :P

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Is the 'problem' with us using another communities recolored symbol or that its originally nazi related?

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Well, here's another person who has, until reading this post, never heard of nazis using triangles to differentiate different classes of prisoners. I would not be surprised if whoever devised that symbol was similarly unaware.

Somewhere along the way almost every symbol or phrase has had some negative connotations. What next, shall we ban squares because they have too often a place where massacres, oppression and tyranny have occurred.

Please, a little common sense here.

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Is the 'problem' with us using another communities recolored symbol or that its originally nazi related?

I think its both in all honesty

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Ms.Frankenstein

I find it incredibly odd that a triangle is controversial. It's one of the most common geometric shapes in existence, has been used by just about every group of people that ever used symbols for anything. It seems incredibly silly to get worked up over someone using a triangle for a symbol now.

Although to be honest, this is the first time I really realized that there is an asexual triangle symbol. I guess that tells you how much attention I've been paying.

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Calamity Jim

If this were Nazi Germany I'd be marked for death. I'm ace. I'm gay. And I don't doubt that there was someone like me who died in the 40s for those reasons. We've got as much right to the shape of the triangle as anyone. We also suffer violence. We also suffer discrimination. The biggest difference is people keep trying to strip us of any voice instead of acknowledging that we exist. Trying to claim we have no claim on the triangle because we're 'safe' and always have been is elitist and, frankly, just plain wrong.

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Batman's Ace

I won't pretend that I know anything about any triangle symbols used during the holocaust, I'd never heard of any until now, but (and I'm in the realms of total ignorance here) I don't think we should stop people from ever using triangles as symbols just because they were once used for something evil.

This. Any and every symbol can be reclaimed. Any and every symbol can have more than one meaning. Nobody should be vilified, condemned, attacked, or whatever because a symbol means something different to them than to somebody else. You can discuss it, by all means, and maybe that person will decide to choose another one, or maybe not, but we need to be polite and understanding about it. And nobody's got permanent claim to a freakin' triangle! It's like the most basic shape! What's next, we're banned from using horizontal stripes in our flag?

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If this were Nazi Germany I'd be marked for death. I'm ace. I'm gay. And I don't doubt that there was someone like me who died in the 40s for those reasons. We've got as much right to the shape of the triangle as anyone. We also suffer violence. We also suffer discrimination. The biggest difference is people keep trying to strip us of any voice instead of acknowledging that we exist. Trying to claim we have no claim on the triangle because we're 'safe' and always have been is elitist and, frankly, just plain wrong.

The Nazis imprisoned gays and sometimes performed medical experiments on them to try to determine what caused homosexuality. But they did not deliberately kill them. The Nazis didn't know anything about asexuality and there was no persecution of asexuals. So you as a gay asexual wouldn't have been known as a homosexual, and certainly wouldn't have been marked for death.

We don't need to exaggerate things in the defense of using a triangle.

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The Nazis imprisoned gays and sometimes performed medical experiments on them to try to determine what caused homosexuality. But they did not deliberately kill them.

You have a weak definition of "deliberately kill," since the Nazis did send thousands of homosexuals to the same Happy Fun Time Camps where they were treated to the same methods used for "not deliberately killing" Jews, Roma, leftists, etc. Some info from Wikipedia. Though gays weren't subjected to the most logistically efficient methods for mass-scale murder, being worked, beaten, starved, tortured, and/or shot to death still leaves you dead, and was a rather deliberate system.

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Batman's Ace

I was going to say we should get back to the triangles, but weirdly enough, I don't think we've gotten completely off-topic. How does this keep happening on AVEN?

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The Nazis imprisoned gays and sometimes performed medical experiments on them to try to determine what caused homosexuality. But they did not deliberately kill them.

You have a weak definition of "deliberately kill," since the Nazis did send thousands of homosexuals to the same Happy Fun Time Camps where they were treated to the same methods used for "not deliberately killing" Jews, Roma, leftists, etc. Some info from Wikipedia. Though gays weren't subjected to the most logistically efficient methods for mass-scale murder, being worked, beaten, starved, tortured, and/or shot to death still leaves you dead, and was a rather deliberate system.

My definition is pretty accurate: the Nazis deliberately killed Jews -- not by attrition, but by gas chambers and shooting into ditches.

No more Godwinning of the thread -- back to the intent of it.

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I don't believe triangles are "originally" anything other than a geometric shape.

If we really want to go down that road, ban them from math first.

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My definition is pretty accurate: the Nazis deliberately killed Jews -- not by attrition, but by gas chambers and shooting into ditches.

No more Godwinning of the thread -- back to the intent of it.

The "intent" of the thread (going by the first post) was discussing possible connections between triangle symbols and the Holocaust, so discussions involving Nazi treatment of gays (leading to the "reclaimed" use of the pink triangle symbol by LGBT rights activists) seems entirely on topic.

Deliberate killing through attrition (and executions for disobedience, and medical experiments with death as the inevitable outcome, etc.) is deliberate killing, even if slower and lower in number than gas chambers. Gays were targeted for eradication from Nazi society, both through mass imprisonment with intent to "reform," and internment in concentration camps with deliberately arranged patterns of fatal maltreatment.

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My definition is pretty accurate: the Nazis deliberately killed Jews -- not by attrition, but by gas chambers and shooting into ditches.

No more Godwinning of the thread -- back to the intent of it.

The "intent" of the thread (going by the first post) was discussing possible connections between triangle symbols and the Holocaust, so discussions involving Nazi treatment of gays (leading to the "reclaimed" use of the pink triangle symbol by LGBT rights activists) seems entirely on topic.

Deliberate killing through attrition (and executions for disobedience, and medical experiments with death as the inevitable outcome, etc.) is deliberate killing, even if slower and lower in number than gas chambers. Gays were targeted for eradication from Nazi society, both through mass imprisonment with intent to "reform," and internment in concentration camps with deliberately arranged patterns of fatal maltreatment.

Deliberate killing is deliberate killing. I wouldn't keep arguing but this is a sensitive issue for me; I know a number of Holocaust survivors whose families and friends were outright killed because they were old or mothers and children and therefore couldn't work. It wasn't attrition or disease or intent to reform; it was shooting and gassing. Gays were not deliberately killed. The Nazis did not deliberately arrange to maltreat people so they would die; if they wanted them to die, they simply killed them. The difference can be gotten from any Holocaust history book.

But back to the triangle: I can't see any problem in AVEN using it, since gays don't use it as a symbol and they haven't protested us using it.

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Deliberate killing is deliberate killing. I wouldn't keep arguing but this is a sensitive issue for me; I know a number of Holocaust survivors whose families and friends were outright killed because they were old or mothers and children and therefore couldn't work. It wasn't attrition or disease or intent to reform; it was shooting and gassing. Gays were not deliberately killed. The Nazis did not deliberately arrange to maltreat people so they would die; if they wanted them to die, they simply killed them. The difference can be gotten from any Holocaust history book.

But back to the triangle: I can't see any problem in AVEN using it, since gays don't use it as a symbol and they haven't protested us using it.

My apologies for anything I said being taken as detracting from the horrors of Nazi mass-scale genocide against Jews --- that is not at all what I intend. In my view, one can talk about the badness of some things the Nazis did without diminishing the badness of others: there's not a limited quota of criticism that will get used up and leave some victims without their due. Acknowledging that the Nazis slowly tortured some groups to death (by deliberate policy) does not make them less culpable for quickly killing others on a far larger scale (by different deliberate policies).

On the triangle topic specifically, I've seen the "pink triangle" symbol used frequently in LGBT contexts (or, in modified form as a rainbow triangle); I'm not sure where you're getting "gays don't use it as a symbol."

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Nazis deliberately killed gays. Not very frequently, and not on the scale or with the organization as they did the Jews, but I think it's undeniable that they did, as a hard fact, deliberately kill gays.

That said, I was very angry when the gay community attempted to elbow their way in to the Nazi victim circle... the reclamation of the triangle was absurd, and I personally witnessed more than one very fucked up encounter where a gay person was castigating a Jewish person for not recognizing that gays had it just as bad. That's just ludicrous for a million reasons. The gay movement had plenty of real-time issues to point to... attempting to match or usurp the Jewish tragedy for political gain really disgusted me.

So I don't know what I'm saying except having lived thru that less-than-noble period of gay history, I get why it's a sensitive subject for you, Sal.

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Uhm.. I don't know what to say. Like.. "asexual triangle"? Wut?

I don't know if anybody's been using that triangle as symbol for asexuality, but I'm pretty sure that this isn't the reason it's the AVEN logo. Like, it seems to me that you don't even understand what this site is about. "Asexuality Visibility and Education Network". It's not a movement in the sense of, say, LGBT. It's an educational site. The thing that this site educates about is the fact that sexual orientation isn't one-dimensional (from hetero to homosexual). The concept of asexuality means that it's at least 2-dimensional, with "presence/absence" of a partner preference being the second dimension. The AVEN logo succinctly captures that two-dimensionality, and thus makes a very good symbol for the site. Like, frequently in discussions I will actually look at that logo to visualize to myself the whole issue of asexual vs gray-asexual vs sexual.

So yeah. If you want to create an asexual movement or whatever, feel free to use a different symbol. But as for AVEN, the symbol fits, and anyone taking issue with that doesn't really deserve being taken seriously to begin with..

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Woo. I'd forgotten (or maybe didn't really understand) what the asexual triangle actually depicts. Thanks for explaining it again, Tar.

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Woo. I'd forgotten (or maybe didn't really understand) what the asexual triangle actually depicts. Thanks for explaining it again, Tar.

Can not tell if irony or not. D:

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Calamity Jim

The Nazis imprisoned gays and sometimes performed medical experiments on them to try to determine what caused homosexuality. But they did not deliberately kill them. The Nazis didn't know anything about asexuality and there was no persecution of asexuals. So you as a gay asexual wouldn't have been known as a homosexual, and certainly wouldn't have been marked for death.

We don't need to exaggerate things in the defense of using a triangle.

I'm sensual. I like touching girls. I just don't want to have sex with them. By all appearances I act 'like a lesbian' everywhere outside of the bedroom, which is why I'm a gay asexual, or homoromantic. I'm still act 'homo' even though I don't act sexual and I have faced discrimination for being 'homo' that is different than the barriers I face for being 'asexual'.

Please don't tell me what my experiences are or how the world around me treats me.

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Woo. I'd forgotten (or maybe didn't really understand) what the asexual triangle actually depicts. Thanks for explaining it again, Tar.

Can not tell if irony or not. D:

No irony -- I was really thanking you!

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Calamity, I wasn't referring to your experiences in this current world. I was referring to what you likely wouldn't have experienced 70 years ago in Nazi Europe -- automatic death just because you were a homosexual.

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