Kaladin not even considering that his men may want to get married. Kaladin being disgusted and annoyed by PDA. Kaladin’s only “crush” having been on his only (1) friend (who his parents also low-key expected to become his wife). This man is soooo aro coded
“Oh, so that’s why you are they way you are. You’re two fire signs ruled over by water!”
Pretty sure it’s just the ADHD.
A fun thing to do whenever someone asks you your sign is to lie about your birthday. It still means listening to them attempt to explain your entire personality badly for a few minutes, but then you can undercut them as soon as it gets too annoying.
So, for a while I was doing mailroom/account followup work for a nonprofit, and on my firt day there, one of the ladies, “Debbie” asked me when my Birthday was. Assuming she was planning office Birthday parties, I told her.
The next day she came in with my ENTIRE star chart with personality tropes, life advice, predicitons for my future and so on. Now, I don’t go in for Astrology but I can tell when someone is making a well-meaning gesture and I can say “Thank you” and shut up.
Especially because I told her the Wrong Birthday.
See, my birthday is in the middle of a cluster of a whole bunch of family birthdays and growing up I used to have to share my Birthday with my older cousins and while that’s not really a big deal (even fun if you’re older) it kinda sucks when you’re five and none of your cousins share your interests.
So mom made a deal with me: We’d celebrate my “Un-Birthday” in January, when nobody else in the family has a birthday or anything else, and the “real” birthday would be my Cousin’s. I got my own birthday and they got a second party and it was fun.
As I got older, I just started using my Un-Birthday for everything except paperwork, becuase January is boring and bereft of holidays except the one that’s really part of Xmas these days. On paperwork, I put my real one, but I’ve been celebrating my birthday in the wrong month for over 25 years now, and didn’t think about it when she asked, and told her my Un-Birthday.
And for a few weeks everything was fine.
But Debbie had a RIVAL.
Another woman in the office “Sharon” was also big into Astrology and was convinced Debbie was Doing It Wrong, so when she was going over payroll, she saw my Legal Birthday, realized Debbie had filled out the chart wrong, and then proceded to drag Debbie on the company facebook group, and a bunch of astrology groups they were both in.
I found out when I came in three days later from a long weekend and Debbie burst into tears and sobbed “HOW COULD YOU LIE TO MEEEEEE???”
After an extremely garbled recounting by our coworkers, a talk with my manager about “Hey yeah I don’t think it’s Legal for Sharon to take my name and date of birth from Payroll and put it all over facebook?”, the manager had a talk about “I know you are all over 50 but this is NOT WHAT THE COMPANY FACEBOOK IS FOR”, Sharon was ‘removed from the premesis’ and I finally got to sit down with Debbie.
I explained the slip-up and how I sort of have two birthdays and think of the January Birthday is my “Real” one.
Debie looked up from where she’d been sobbing into her tissue all morning, realization dawning on her less like the illumination of the sun and more like a baby sea turtle headed in the wrong direction because of light Pollution.
“Oh!” She said “You’re TRANS-ZODIAC! You might have been born as an Aries, but you’re really a Capricorn!”
As someone who’s been hit by a minivan and gotten a minor skull fracture from it, I’m pretty sure hearing that sentence gave me more brain damage.
“Sure Debbie.”
You know, I had no idea where this ride was going to take us, but of all the outcomes I expected, that was not it.
What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck.
Debbie was a kind woman with room in her heart for all the people of the world and the critical thinking skills of a Sea Cucumber.
Another fun thing I do with customers - specifically parents of very small children who don’t know they’re alive yet - is directly imply I think the coffee is for the baby, not the parent. and lemme tell you, like 70% of parents eat that shit up. They immediately go along with the bit and start discussing it with their newborn child, while the baby just stares at us like 😮
Kaleshwi is such a good ship. It’s such a good ship it’s so good and so beautiful. All the mirroring they have going on, the mutual respect, the friend among enemy lines situation. We might kill each other today but at least we get to hang out. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m protecting you but I will never admit it. I’m so glad you survived. We are enemies but I will try to bring you over to my side because you’re worth saving. I respect you even more for not giving in. You are my equal. You challenge me. I’m so glad you’re here.
pls give me 1(one) reason aces have ever been oppressed, and 1(one) example of aces being a part of lgbt history(before 2004 at least) and then maybe i’ll consider the idea that aces belong in the lgbt community lol
Proof of the existence of asexuals in LGBT+ communities before 2000:
The Golden Orchid association (1644-1949) - a group of women in China that included lesbians, bisexuals, and “women who wanted to avoid both marriage options, and any romantic or sexual partnership” that today we would call asexual or aromantic.
A source from 1999 noting that, while some female-female relationships in the early to mid-twentieth century were obviously lesbian relationships, not all of them were, but that it would be a mistake to label them all “friendships”. It specifically notes that asexual partnered relationships also existed.
of interviews done in 1990 by Catherine Whitney who interviewed heterosexual women married to gay men, and found that they were often asexual. It also describes how, in 1990, Ann Landers (a very popular advice columnist) asked her readers if married couples could enjoy a full life without sex and was flooded with 35,000 responses from people of all ages who had little or no sex and didn’t miss it. It also describes how “Boston marriage” was originally coined with a not-necessarily-always-accurate implication that such a relationship between women was nonsexual, but that later on the assumption was reversed to imply women in a sexual lesbian relationship, and how that caused some women involved in such relationships to hide the asexual nature of their relationships for fear of being called frauds by the larger lesbian community.
This 1997 book that states “To be a Kinsey 3 (bisexual) is to be equally attracted to men and women, i.e. completely bisexual…it is also to be equally unattracted to men and women, i.e. completely asexual. Bisexuality is never about two, only about one – asexual, or self-fulfilling – or three – continuously and equally attracted to both men and women”.
Proof of asexuality being considered as a concrete, distinct orientation before 2000:
The article “Asexuality as Orientation: Some Historical Perspectives” describes different historical studies on asexuality, including a study from Johnson in 1977 where the word asexual was used to describe women “regardless of physical or emotional condition, actual sexual history, and marital status or ideological orientation, [who] seem to prefer not to engage in sexual activity”. It also describes a 1980 study by Storms who included asexual as one of four orientation categories when mapping out sexual orientation. It also describes a 1983 study by Nurius that found out of 685 participants, 5% of males and 10% of females were asexual. It also describes a 1990 study by Berkley et al. that included questions “related to homosexuality, heterosexuality, and asexuality” and included four items (out of 45) that were specific to asexuality.
This book published in 1922 contains a lot of what I personally would describe as narcissism and pseudo-science, but acknowledges asexuality nonetheless: “In addition to the ordinary distinctive males and females, we have asexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, and old women of both sexes.”
This book from 1996 that notes “A transsexual may have a heterosexual orientation, a homosexual orientation, a bisexual orientation – or an asexual orientation” and clarifies that “a very small number – are asexual or bisexual.”
This book mentions a study by Malyon in 1981 that noted the options available to gay and lesbian teenagers choosing whether, or how, to come out by “[describing] three possible modes of adaptation in adolescence: repression of sexual desire, suppression of homosexual impulses in favor of heterosexual or asexual orientation, or a homosexual disclosure.”
Kinds of oppression that asexuals face:
Eunjung Kim wrote a chapter titled “How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality” that describes how “the absence of sexual desires, feelings, and activities is seen as abnormal and reflective of poor health” in Western contemporary culture “because of the explicit connection between sexual activeness and healthiness” and argues that “medical explanations of asexuality as an abnormality that has to be corrected constitute a large part of the stigmatization and marginalization experienced by asexual people.” It also discusses the ways in which some groups, specifically Asian American males, that are desexualized can erase the space for asexual Asian American men to simply exist.
A chapter of “Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives” that notes the specific way that asexual people are talked to/about: “Because asexual difference cannot be iterated in the linguistic field where sex and a sexed position dominate the discourse of sexuality and desire, the asexual subject is linguistically and visually dismantled and reconstructed in the position of a fetish object. This fetishistic conversion happens because the asexual person is made into an image, or spectacle, for consumption.” and “The difference between the unassailable asexual (someone who lacks all of the traits commonly blamed for asexuality such as past history of abuse, disability, etc.) and the spectacular asexual is that while the unassailable asexual allegedly makes asexuality digestible for a skeptical public and presents an accessible image, the spectacular asexual is always consumed as a fetish object, regardless of mental health, ability, and gender.”
The study “Intergroup bias toward “Group X”: Evidence of prejudice, dehumanization, avoidance, and discrimination of asexuals” is exactly what it sounds like. The article’s abstract states: “In two studies (university student and community samples) we examined the extent to which those not desiring sexual activity are viewed negatively by heterosexuals. We provide the first empirical evidence of intergroup bias against asexuals (the so-called “Group X”), a social target evaluated more negatively, viewed as less human, and less valued as contact partners, relative to heterosexuals and other sexual minorities. Heterosexuals were also willing to discriminate against asexuals (matching discrimination against homosexuals). Potential confounds (e.g., bias against singles or unfamiliar groups) were ruled out as explanations.”
The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality describes many issues that asexuals face, including: how asexuality is seen as “invisible” and lends to people thinking it does not exist, how asexuality is actively erased as “unimportant” or not its own identity, the explicitly and implicitly negative messages associated with a lack of sexual attraction, the fear asexuals face when they believe there is something physically or psychologically wrong with them for being asexual, the belief asexuals face about how they must be deeply flawed since they do not conform to other sexual identities, how asexuals face cultural ideologies that sexuality is biologically based and ubiquitous (that all humans possess sexual desire) and that don’t acknowledge asexuality, that to describe oneself as asexual is a statement of moral superiority or purity or failure to find a suitable partner, that asexuality is an immature state they will “grow out of”, that asexuality is a description of action or a preference, that asexuality is unnatural or unhealthy or has to be a symptom of something else, etc.
Asexuality has been shown in the media in a negative light for decades, reflecting the idea that (for various reasons steeped in classism and racism) any woman who wasn’t willing to marry and procreate was a threat to the status quo, as seen in this 1955 book that notes: “Women who did not marry incurred political and social scorn for another reason. The influx of eastern and southern European immigrants in the United States pushed the question into eugenic terms–the wrong people were reproducing. Educated women came primarily from white middle- and upper-class stock, the most desired element by dominant social norms. When these women refused to marry and reproduce, they forced a new concern into the public discourse. it is not a coincidence that the stereotypical asexual unmarried older woman emerged at this time as a source of popular humor.”
Because of these religious beliefs about asexuality, that also opens up asexuals to discrimination in various legal ways, including (but not limited to) things like the new adoption bill in Texas.
Asexuals have long been considered part of the bisexual community. When people used to talk about bisexuals, it included asexuals because asexuals were the bisexuals too. Bisexual history is asexual history.
Asexuals have also long been considered as a stand-alone orientation that was part of larger non-straight communities and could be studied in comparison to other sexual orientations.
Asexuals face many of the same issues that other marginalized orientations face as well as issues specific to their orientation. These include erasure, medicalization, misidentification, harassment, rape specifically targeted at them for being asexual, and religious intolerance, to name just a few.
None of this is exhaustive. There are more sources to be found and studied.
R.I.P. The 2976 American people that lost their lives on 9/11 and R.I.P. the 48,644 Afghan and 1,690,903 Iraqi and 35000 Pakistani people that paid the ultimate price for a crime they did not commit
You know what bugs me about soulmate aus? So, I’m assuming that this whole “the first thing your soulmate says to you blahblahblah” is a worldwide thing. So many of the aus I’ve read have a quote at some point that addresses how tragic it is when people have soul words that say something like “hi” or “‘sup” which makes NO SENSE! In a world where the first thing you say to people is THAT important, WHY GOD WHY would the culture still use standard greetings? Who the fuck is still saying hello at this point? Everyone in these worlds would surely develop a personalized greeting different from everybody else’s to prevent confusion. Like how no 2 racehorses can have the same racing name? The best part is that every time people met someone new for the first time, they would try to say something that no one else had said. You’d have people meeting eachother at a job intetview, they’d shake hands, smile politely, then one of them would be like “Every Tuesday, I hard even grape purple farm house sunsets too” and this would be perfectly normal. Or you’d go up to the cash register at Starbucks and instead of saying “Hello, what can i get for you today?” She’d look you right in the eye and say “I don’t know what Space Jam is” THEN ask you what you want and she’d repeat that to every customer in the line for the rest of her career. And because they live in the AU, nobody would think it was weird.
op you are forcibly opening my third eye with a crowbar and i am here for it
Adolin Kholin: So, does everyone around here fancy Kaladin or… Shallan Davar: No, I’d say that was accurate. Renarin: Definitely true. Most of Bridge Four: Agreed! The carpenters from Sadeas’s warcamp: Absolutely! That one ardent from Alethkar: He is very pretty. Leshwi: I wholeheartedly agree. 95% of Urithuru: Yep! Oblivious local acearo man Kaladin: W H A T-
ALT
