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Daily Collegian — Asexual students at Penn State feel they have community, but not visibility


Homer

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One of the problems asexual people face is that people don’t know what asexuality is.

According to Kinsey Ballas, the moderator of the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity’s aces discussion group, asexuality is “more of an umbrella term than an identity” and many people don’t realize there are many ways to be on the asexual spectrum.

Feb 11, 2020 — https://www.collegian.psu.edu/news/campus/article_18a43aa4-4c54-11ea-9b1d-6343ea78a25e.html

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They're using a different definition... one that actually leaves enough wiggle room to look at asexuality as a spectrum. However this will open another can of worms as it leaves the question of how much is and isn't "little". Unfortunately they're throwing romance in there as well.

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everywhere and nowhere

Site unavailable in the European Union... :(

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18 minutes ago, Nowhere Girl said:

Site unavailable in the European Union... :(

3oyffo.jpg

At least this time.

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everywhere and nowhere

I don't understand "memes", I'm too much an old-timer for that. However, I'm really not averse to definition debates. I even rather like them.

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Accessible with a VPN :)

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  • 2 weeks later...
deletingthisaccount
On 2/12/2020 at 1:39 AM, Homer said:

They're using a different definition... one that actually leaves enough wiggle room to look at asexuality as a spectrum. However this will open another can of worms as it leaves the question of how much is and isn't "little". Unfortunately they're throwing romance in there as well.

I agree. I saw another article recently that defined asexuality as "attraction with a lot of caveats." We need to find a way to give all members of our community representation--asexuals, graysexuals, demisexuals, romantics, etc.--without creating more confusion as to what asexuality is. Describing asexuality like this article does, as an "umbrella term" rather than an identity, undermines those who consider asexuality to be an identity.

 

One possible solution could be to use "asexual spectrum" as the umbrella term (rather than "asexuality"). Then, we could use asexuality/graysexuality/demisexuality as identity terms that fall on the asexual spectrum, but are distinct identities with different meanings--and define each. I know all the distinctions are easy to understand for the asexual community, but it's just a really hard concept for most allosexuals to grasp. Considering that most journalists and readers will be allosexual, we have to try to be really specific about the way we describe asexuality and the spectrum to the media, otherwise we run into misrepresentation issues (in addition to under-representation).

 

I wish more asexual journalists/producers were out there so we could have more coverage from our own perspective. Even with media coverage featuring interviews of asexuals, the final coverage often inadvertently becomes saturated with the allosexual writer's perspective of the asexual. Which I know is NOT intentional on the writer's part by any means, but all the technicalities are just very hard for non-aces to understand. So we end up with unintentional misrepresentation.

 

In a way, I feel like misrepresentation is equally as bad as under-representation. With this type of misrepresentation, I feel like we're going to wind up with a lot of people misidentifying themselves as asexual. That then leads to further misrepresentation of the orientation and causes more issues for people who actually are on the asexual spectrum.

 

(Sorry, unexpectedly long rant lol)

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