Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Asexual Meetups in United Kingdom and Australia this Weekend

Asexual meetup groups are springing up across the globe. This Saturday, February 7th there will be meetings in York and London (UK) and in Sydney, Australia.

For more info on these meetups and other future and potential meets up, check out the AVEN Meetup Mart.

Please also feel free to list any additional asexual meetups here, or if you wish to put out info for people to contact you over a potential meetup.

5 comments:

Stephen said...

Given the fact that asexuals do not have sex, I wonder if these groups have anything to do with the fundamentalist Christian groups that advocate abstinence as a form of birth control and as a way of not acting on "homosexual" desires????

Queers United said...

Stephen I find that to be an offensive assertion. Most asexuals are very hurt by the religious rights notions of sexuality. Many of them are just as much effected as we are, they don't want to have a marriage, and to "be fruitful and multiply", some are aromantic, while some are romantic and want a family but not the sex aspect of the marriage. This conspiracy theory is no worse than what a lot of these christian groups say about the gay agenda.

T. R Xands said...

Can I take that a step further and say that doesn't even make any sense? L. Stephen have you bothered to learn anything about asexuality outside of "they just don't want to have sex"? Not asexual myself but there's more to it than just that :/

Anonymous said...

L. Stephen:

Short Answer: No.
Long Answer: Really no, I'd have to look for a quote, but it was someone pointing out that if you were seeking a world of denial and silence, the last place to go is to an asexual meetup as there is almost constantly a display of openness and pushes for introspection. I've had unfortunate friends raised in fundamentalist christianity. My best friend, an ex-fundie, has a gay sister very deep in the closet that we're trying to help right now. The tactics used to insulate and destroy her are pretty much the opposite of an asexual meetup.

If you're running from the gay, the last place to go is asexuality and in fact I partially used my asexuality to get my best friend to open up about his Kinsey 1-ness. It opens the door that there are other lifestyles.

Furthermore, those who are religious asexuals have noticed that when they confront abstinence-pushing pastors about their asexuality, those pastors immediately do a 180 and start pushing the bible passages about being fruitful and multiplying and the need to marry and have children (these people are mostly women of course).

Abstinence education is not just about trying to deny the existence of sex, it is a deliberate attempt to eliminate sex education so more children get "trapped" in marriages before they are old enough to fully escape indoctrination and thus be continued soldiers for outdated and disproven conservative ideology. Asexuals are a direct affront to the whole mess because we can't be controlled by the usual methods of shaming people about natural desires for sex, we don't have them.

You noted oppression in an earlier thread. In the future, if oppression comes, it most certainly will be on the day that these fundie crusaders realize this possibility and threat to their means of control. Controlling sex and shame of sex is crucial to their monopolies of control, remove that shame, and they've got nothing but psycho rants because whose going to waste time listening to a crazy person when you could be having sex or reading a good book?

But yeah, seriously, no. Asexuality is being different. Fundies are all about enforcing conformity. Even the points where they play as embattled minorities (purity balls and other crap), they are still defending old conformities dying out in the last 30-40 years by intense social change. Asexuality is new, uncommon, and unknown. They're not going to embrace that, especially as they're currently working the heterosexuality is a choice, but totally the natural way to be angle.

Anonymous said...

Well we shouldn't dogpile him. I'm sure we've all had that moment of saying something stupid when just learning about a movement. I'm going to just treat this as a teaching moment.

Oh, also, advanced asexuality lesson: asexuality doesn't fully negate the possibility of sexual activity only sexual attraction. Also, virginity is not treated as a prize, few asexuals fetishize it like fundies do. In fact, I don't know of any who do as those who'd be inclined to value it mostly value its loss and few asexuals have intense motivations to build up that loss except by uncomfortable external pressure by society or partners.

Also, there are a number of homoromantic asexuals and trans asexuals who I'm sure would not be a likely fundie ally especially as the removal of sex from their relationships completely severs a favored line of attack for our fundie enemies. They pretty much rely these days on provoking the eww, sex reaction to build up hatred of gays. Happy "gays" who love each other but don't have "icky" sex (in the mind of stupids, not me), would blow their fucking minds as their "therapy" isn't about creating virginal gays but forcing conformity to a 1950s TV idea of heterosexuality that never existed outside the fevered racist imaginations of dying fundie psychotics.

Yeah, I don't like the movement. It's fucked up a good number of friends and friends' families. Even my SO, though her poison she's recovering from is catholicism (influenced by small town fundamentalism). I doubt I'd be the only one unwelcoming to an attempted fundie invasion of our organizations.

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