When you were young and in school and your class won a contest or sold the fuck out of some hyper expensive candy and festive tins of popcorn, what did you get as a reward? A pizza party.
People getting together for movies? “Hey, man, yeah, come over, we’re ordering pizza.” Yes, there will probably be chips, and maybe even a festive tin of popcorn, but the draw is the pizza, the motivator is the pizza, the pizza is the only thing that is mentioned.
Having a staff meeting, and you want to encourage attendance? Pizza.
I don’t think I have ever been asked in my entire life whether or not I like pizza, only what kind. And I fucking love pizza. I literally just ordered some minutes before I began typing this and I ordered one for like four people so I can eat it as leftovers for DAYS.
So maybe what you need to do here is imagine (or reflect on your own experience) that you do not really like pizza and are kind of tired of every event being ~*~*~*~PIZZA~*~*~*~
Because this is kind of what being somewhere on the asexual spectrum is like, and it’s definitely applied in fandom, where I’ve seen porn used as a reward, as an incentive, and to encourage participation. It’s also often seen as an expected default in certain circles.
I feel already like I need to get several things out of the way to dive into this:
- I am not shaming your enjoyment of porn. Fuck knows women get some serious shit for liking anything - if you don’t like porn you’re girly and prudish and childish, if you do, you’re somehow less female and ‘nasty’, virgin or whore dichotomy etc etc, shit is gross. I’m not about that turning this into that, I’m just relaying some experiences and thoughts I’ve had. If porn has been a great transformative thing in your life, rad, but the place for that is not here, thanks!
- I’m not complaining. People make what they make. This is just stuff I’ve experienced and just some things to think about for a minute or longer. I’m just kind of illustrating the way some things are for me. Everyone is different, etc etc etc.
- I really don’t like being called 'ace’, so if you’re planning to reply to this or reblog it or whatever, please don’t refer to me that way. I’m not entirely sure I have a label for how I roll, and so I don’t really go into a description of my particular preferences and freakouts, but it’s on the asexual spectrum, so 'asexual’ is fine. Just please no 'ace.’ I don’t like that as a nickname for asexual in general, but I know some people use it to refer to themselves and really like it, so please just don’t use it to include me. Thanks.
That said:
During my first year or so on Tumblr, there came a point that the main fandom I was involved in had one person, and then many persons, going around being “The Porn Fairy”. Suddenly, there were random explicit short scenes littering my dash in the form of ask messages, with the reactions of my fellow fans all firmly in the park of shrieking in delighted bewilderment.
I was Terrified this person would hit me next since I was a very active member of that fandom circle.
And thus began the very short time in which I had a message on my ask link that said “Please don’t send me porn.” This is not something I ever imagined I’d have to do. It did not last too long, however, because I was legitimately afraid some mean-spirited anon would use it as a sure fire way to upset me. So I hoped that maybe some kind of personal space beacon of reason would eventually prevail and I’d be safe. The more people I saw exclaiming that they wanted to be porn fairies too made me feel like I was in danger of being hit by a bomb at any moment, and anytime I saw a message in my inbox, I braced for impact.
Luckily, the porn fairy never showed up to my box, but it was something like two weeks before I felt like it had been forgotten and I was safe.
Porn fic and art as a random gift apparently really works for some people, but I live in terror of the day that someone hears “I like A/B!” and, knowing me enough for that tidbit of info, but not enough else, thrusts porn right into my inbox. This is a largely irrational fear, waiting for some kind of surprise porn to show up and ruin my week, but I have felt like the tendency for “I ship A/B!” to be heard as “I LOVE A/B PORN” is enormous.
It’s definitely changed in the last ten or fifteen years, but it used to be that just the presence of a m/m pairing, regardless of what they did, increased the rating of a story or artwork. I remember mature filters on dA for handholding because both subjects were of the same sex. Because of all that homophobic bullshit, I remember having to offer quick disclaimers that I did not like the graphic sex sides of all the things I shipped in highschool, because it was like this weird default to assume that EXTREME PORN was just what shipping Meant. If you had to get through ~filters~ for it, you were up to some shit.
The last five or six things I’ve shipped have included people who are clearly middle-aged, and the comments about those people even on the very cute stuff I was likely to read/view would inevitably include one person saying something like, “I can’t figure out how you ship this. I just really don’t want to imagine [anyone in the ship who is over 45/or isn’t ~*~*~beautiful*~*~] ever having sex!”
And there I sat, shipping enthusiastically, but having never even once imagined the characters having sex. There was a time that I believed that I had to actively want sex to happen between two characters to mean that I really wanted them in a relationship. Which made me a little uncomfortable about what that meant for real relationships.
Meanwhile, I have been asked why there is no porn of everything I’ve created. SWAN, DD9, various other minor AU fandom stuff, even some original things. People have straight up come up to me and asked 'Why are there no sex scenes? Where is all the porn art?’ I wonder how many primarily porn artists get asked where the fruit hat comics are.
I abruptly stopped making one of my projects because someone thought it would be great to tell me that it hit all their kinks even as it was. My skin pretty much crawled off, and my desire to continue the story/world with it.
In creating all of those things, I ached wishing I could just have the relationship at the focus of work just exist without sex, but with my earlier things, the feeling that I didn’t really ship it and it wasn’t a proper relationship unless they were sexual forced me to make them that way (along with emphatic pressure from people important to me, which is perhaps a story for LJ and not this post).
With my later works, I reluctantly decided that the canon characters were just too actively interested in sex and pursuing it for me to ever find a way to explain why they were suddenly kinda asexual in what I’d made. I do generally like canon, it’s why I’m making fanwork, so I like what I’m making to work within its confines to largeish degree. It’s so much easier to weave bisexuality into a canon character - active pursuit of one sex doesn’t mean a lack of active pursuit of any another! Rad. But active pursuit of, apparent obsession with, and (long and wince-inducing) scenes of characters enjoying sex make it harder to say 'They would be happy never having any and now they just don’t.’ It’s hard to see someone inhale six slices of pizza and then say, 'But he doesn’t really like pizza.'
(This is not to say some asexuals don’t have sex, or that there aren’t any who enjoy it, but I always feel weird about presenting and perpetuating 'exception’-y non-hetero orientations when we don’t even have a large amount of 'regular’ representation? If there were mountains of asexual things in media, it would be different. I understand the urge to illustrate something that is out of the usual because that shit is fascinating, but then it sort of creates this opposite day thing in which the 'unusual’ event - in this case, an asexual having a grand old time having sex - becomes the norm in fanworks. Plus, it’s sort of like I never see the sexual partner opting out. It’s always the asexual partner who opts in. It always just feels like “We will find some way to force you all into the sexual box!”
This is not as comprehensive as a proper essay and I will never be able to list all the disclaimers I need for this sort of thing, I’m just going through what I perceive and feel. I would never, ever go after sex the way Julian Bashir does, can’t fathom making it an Intergalactic Bingo Card out of it or enjoying strip clubs like G'Kar or Londo. So maybe this is selfish in that I want what I make to be comfortingly Like Me, but I haven’t had enough of that yet because I’ve been forced into a lot of other people’s boxes for years. This is something else I’ve fixed with reSWAN, and now reSWAN Johnny is exactly as difficult to deal with as I guess I am. Fucking deal with it, I say.
Anyway, I’m not saying anyone is weird or Doing Asexual Wrong or anything like that, because fuck that noise, this is just how the thing sits with me. I hope there are asexual spectrum people who write their own particular flavor of the thing, whatever it is.)
Stemming from this is some kind of 'Oh, you’re asexual, how can you ship anything, you must just read the gen-est gen-fic that ever gen-fic’d. Wouldn’t you just write it too?’ Like people have actually asked me what I’m doing with relationship stories in the first place if I don’t like sex. And straight up, right now, being totally fucking honest with you guys? I don’t read gen fic. Pretty much ever. I just don’t fucking care. If I wanted gen, I’d watch/read the thing again. Even things I say I’d really like to see in the canon I’ll never look for fic of it, because I’d rather it have just been on the screen/in the pages/whatever. I like relationships and how they develop, I like people being close and figuring themselves and each other out because it turns out that just because I’m super wigged out at the idea of granting access to parts of my body to other people and it makes my skin kind of freak out even typing that, I don’t lack the desire to have some kind of relationship or find the idea super repellent. (I find real people’s relationships kind of repellent though. I’m never going to think you’re 'such a cute couple’, and I don’t care how you met or the 'so sweet’ thing your partner did for you. Do Not Care, Gross, Stop Talking. But if you’re fictional, I want to draw that shit and cover it in glitter. I don’t know.)
Meanwhile, vast oceans of ship-ish fic is inaccessible to me. Filter on AO3 sometime and watch how the numbers plummet when you exclude Mature and Explicit or a number of relevant tags, it’s like watching my bank account. Liking a lot of m/m pairings and finding everything about butts really repulsive is an exciting exercise in “I can’t read any of this.” (Like suddenly all these dudes who discover they are bi are abruptly super down with having things shoved up there, there is no one who is just like 'no, I’m sorry, I can’t divorce that from 'gross’ in my mind, we have to do something else’??)
Other sources of Have Your Own L.Y.X Fandom Experience Fun: anytime you want to read a story after you’ve exhausted all the non-sexual options, play a variant on Chicken and see how far you and the story can last on a collision course until you have to freak out and duck away to the scroll bar because suddenly bits and pieces of anatomy are busting out everywhere (and usually called super crude things that make you wince). It’s great fun. Sometimes, I can see an end that looks like business has concluded and then I can keep reading and finish the story. Sometimes, sex is the end or so close to the end that I can’t really wade through the sexy mine field for the last paragraph two of conclusion, so I consequently read a lot of just intros to fic.
A while ago, someone in one of my fandoms asked for fics of the relevant pair without porn in them, and all the ones I thought I could recommend turned out to be ones where I’d played Porn Words Chicken and just forgotten that sex was meant to be an original component of the story. And then I really had nothing to offer that poor person. I wonder if they ever got frustrated enough to play Porn Words Chicken.
I tried once to start a request meme for a dying fandom on LiveJournal. I called it that, rather than a kink meme, because I’d hoped to generate things that weren’t ALL porn. And they weren’t ALL, but it was still 80% of what was requested and I couldn’t really blame anyone, so I just turned off the notifications for the post and walked away from it. (But not before someone asked for porn of one of my things, and I sighingly told them I wasn’t surprised and didn’t really blame them for asking, but that it wasn’t going to come from me and I couldn’t stop anyone else from doing it.) It was probably a combo of format and fandom, but it still felt like a reminder that I was doing everything wrong because I just didn’t understand.
Tropes like hatesex make no sense to me, because I flip the fuck out imagining having to have sex with someone I even really extremely like, let alone someone I hate. I don’t do any hate shipping because of this. (Those of you just starting Babylon 5 because of me are SCREAMING toward my ask box to contradict me, to which I say, “Stay your hands, friends, and come back and talk to me in Season 5. You will be screaming for a different reason, and all will make sense. And then you can come to my Livestream parties on the subject.”) I can barely understand casual 'Meh, this person is here, I guess we’ll do this’ sex, so hatesex is utterly beyond me, and it will never process. The gears grind against each other in my head.
All my work is sort of the opposite of hatesex as much as it can be, and the way that’s seen in fandom is sometimes sad to me. Mostly, people see it and are delighted and I love that so much, but the overwhelming feeling of 'Your asexual thing is really childish!’ left over from real life permeates even here. (Combine this also with not liking alcohol, the other Default Thing That Adults Like for a Combo Bonus! People speak to me like a child or maybe a passably bright dog, with their voices an octave higher and like they’re just a breath away from spelling words a letter at a time to keep my delicate self away from Real Adult Things. I am humored if not laughed at.)
When my work is really prevalent in a fandom, and then I see people complaining about how vanilla said fandom is, or how there’s too much 'fluff’, I definitely feel a stab. Even if it’s not really directed at me, I can feel years of learned shame creeping in. Especially with the word 'fluff.’ What is 'fluff’ but 'unecessary,’ 'superfluous’, 'substance-less’. “Meaningless fluff”. Have you ever seen “significant fluff”? Maybe I’m the festive popcorn tin.
And I guess if I am, then I’m the person who needs the popcorn. I didn’t think my art was 'asexual art’ when I first started brain spewing all of this stuff. I wasn’t even sure that was a thing. A lot of the things I ship I assume are probably sexual relationships just because of canon evidence. I thought even if I never painted sex occurring, there was no way my art was going to be 'asexual’. And then I started thinking about how I’d once reflected on the things I’ve shipped hardest, on the things I’ve made, on the things I’ve responded to and have comforted me best when I was alone.
They’re all 'Damaged Person/Wise and Patient Person’ in some way. Every one of the things I’ve created are this fantasy that there is someone who will care a lot about someone who is a flailing mess, or who needs a lot of time to be comfortable, or who is so scared that they’re a little violent and intimidating. Some happy story I’ve been telling myself over and over for probably over 15 years that there is someone Wise and Patient who might think I am worth being Wise and Patient at.
And then my art all suddenly looked metaphorical to me, and it’s like I was understanding the language it was speaking and the thing it was desperately trying to say for the first time. People like me are so often seen as broken, we’re so often abandoned or just not even considered because we’re too difficult to adapt to or we don’t adapt fast enough or well enough. And then there was my work and Patient and Wise didn’t see broken, did not abandon anyone, and was willing to adapt together.
Even with characters I’ve been assuming were sexual, I’ve been making asexual-relatable content for years, and I had no idea.
So when I want to see things like that, violent-looking explicit sexual imagery of those same characters is kind of traumatic for me. This is part of the reason why I don’t track the tags of most things I love.
Meanwhile, I can’t tumblr savior anything that might help me not see porn things I don’t want to see. "NSFW" isn’t just porn. Some of MY work is not safe for work because of Banshee’s casual nudity and her fountains of blood. I’m interested in talks about identities and civil rights, which means the word 'sex’ is not going to cut it. There also would go jokes like 'Wow, X character looks just like A and B had sex.’ The word 'porn’ doesn’t do much better because I’d block this very post, and many things like it that I’d enjoy that casually mention it. There is really nothing I can block. If there’s an agreed upon tag for 'This is literally an image of sex happening’, I don’t know what it is.
The only two romantic relationships I’ve had in real life ended largely because of my spot on the asexual spectrum. A few online friendships died quickly when it became clear I wasn’t engaging with the sex talk about the Ship Du Jour. I’ve already talked about how dull real life people have suddenly found me when I clam up at the mention of sex.
It’s easy for people on the outside to say, “Well, just say you’re not comfortable talking about it.” But then you see how often people just throw sexy jokes around as casual friend banter, how many internet elbows are jabbed into internet ribs with raised internet eyebrows, and what you learn in real life starts to just carry over. You’re frustrated, and you’re a little ashamed that you don’t respond to this, but you feel you have to, because, wow, you’d like a friend, they seem otherwise fun and maybe once you get to know them, they’d understand. Truthfully, most people are probably cool with backing off on the sexual content, but the guilt I carry that I’ve cut them off of something they enjoy just so they can bask in the joy of my fucked up presence is really Present, so I’ve often just not said anything. I’m usually afraid to say, “Yes, I’m the broken person who doesn’t like this thing!” You get tired, after hearing it three million times, of even the well-meaning people saying, “omg, how can you not like pizza, lol”
