RADICALLY PRUDE

RADICRADICALLY ALLY PRUDE PRUDE

Words by Ngoc Lan Tran (she/her)

Consider this:

First, she’s a woman not having sex. In the hypersexualised capitalist society, this is incomprehensible. It goes against all the provocative advertising and the hookup culture it has desperately wanted to make “mainstream”. So society responds by rationalising: “Oh, she’s a prude,” because “She must be waiting for the right person. Is she waiting for marriage?” Or worse: “Maybe she was traumatised from being a survivor of sexual abuse?” – the same abuse that she would very likely fall victim to because of the hookup rape culture that the hypersexualised society created by insisting on objectifying women.

Second, she’s an Asian woman not having sex. The society that fetishises and hypersexualises women of color thought that this was a true disappointment. “What a shame, what a waste, she’s so cute. She’s adorable.” Because there was no rational reason for her to not have sex, it thinks her background must have something to do with it. “Right, she must be religious or something; it’s part of her culture.”

Last but not least, she’s an asexual Asian woman not having sex. Now the hypersexualised hetero-capitalistpatriarchal society just simply can’t grasp it anymore. “What do you mean this is not her choice!? It’s not celibacy? She’s born that way? Her religion has nothing to do with this?” Nevermind the fact that the aforementioned hypersexualised hetero-capitalistpatriarchal society failed to ask her if she was religious (The answer? The woman in question is quite atheist).

This is the triple-whammy of being an asexual Asian woman.

It feels awful to be marginalised in very different ways and not having a shared consciousness that fights back on the hypersexualised hetero-capitalistpatriarchal conglomerate in all its form. Indeed, in thinking about asexuality, I rarely think about feminism; when thinking about feminism, I rarely think about asexuality. The problem is that it is very hard to find a space that legitimises the existence of the asexual feminist/ feminist asexual. This has something to do with the fact, for most, that the asexual agenda and the feminist agenda do not always intuitively align.

Feminism is frequently misunderstood and easily conflated into its sexpositive movement, simply because the movement is one of the more dominant feminist projects with a strong critical stance in public consciousness. As a result, this misconception of feminism has created strife within the asexual community. Some proclaim that the ace community is taking the initiation to distance themselves from feminism altogether. The reason? Many members of the ace community find that the sex positive feminist movement does not provide a safe space for asexuals as they risk being immediately pigeonholed as purely “anti-sex”.

Some do not fall for the trap of conflating feminism into the sex-positive movement. So instead, they turn a blind eye on feminism altogether. It’s oddly convenient doing this, because the two “rarely intersect.” In their view, asexuality strives towards greater awareness and understanding of people about the ace spectrum, not the gender equality. Gender equality is the feminist’s job. Questions like “why should I care?” and “how does that bother me?” arose as a result. Here is one comment on a discussion thread of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network:

There’s no connection between asexuality and feminism. Feminism is “ way of looking at the world; asexuality is an orientation. There have been a number of discussions on AVEN about feminism, but not on the basis that it has anything to do with asexuality -- because it doesn’t. We have all sorts ” of discussions on AVEN outside of the topic of asexuality.

Of the marked discrepancy between asexuality and feminism, AVEN members seem to agree; feminism and asexuality are not intrinsically linked and therefore it is a connection that people make by themselves. As one explains:

Feminists talking about asexuality and asexuals talking about feminism “ does not mean that all of asexuality is making an intentional connection between itself and feminism. It is an accidental association brought on by the fact that there is a lot of cross ” over in membership between the two groups.

Something strikes a chord; reading these comments hurt. Here it is implied there is

nothing inherently related about the two that can be manifested without the presence of the person who identifies as being asexual and being feminist. If there is any chance of reconciling between the two, there needs to be active effort of theorisation and discussion to make this connection happen. Of course, it is indeed important to remember that asexuality is not a primary mode of feminist resistance, and feminism has not directed invested in asexual projects. If we insist on veering on this path, we risk ignoring and dismissing the bodies that are not just asexual but also of different gender, of diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, or disabled bodies who often have been assumed or dismissed as asexual.

This is the antithesis of solidarity.

Just as the feminist asexual feels difficult to find their space of activism within both feminist and asexual communities, asexual disabled people can often feel left out as the disabled community works to distance themselves from the ‘asexual’ stereotype and the asexual community works to not be assumed to be a medical condition. If we choose to ignore the intersectionality of asexuality, we missed out on the battling the toxic stereotypes and assumptions that made intersectional bodies feel left out.

But if we do take that one extra step to actively take effort to think, research, discuss, and theorise on the intersectionality of our bodies, I reckon there is so much to be revealed and to be learnt about each movement as a first step to find commonality, find support, and strengthen solidarity.

As I began to research about the link between asexuality and feminism, the more I found from just one fascinating glimpse of asexuality in the 60s and 70s in the midst of the radical feminist movement. One of the most prominent pieces of asexual feminist writing was The Asexual Manifesto by Lisa Orlando. Writing for the Asexual Caucus of the Council of New York Radical Feminists in 1972, Orlando affirmed that the term “asexual” which she chose for herself effectively avoided the connotations of “celibate” and “anti-sexual” and means “relating sexually to no one.” This understanding of asexuality was the philosophical and political basis on which Orlando urged asexual feminists to both “be honest with ourselves [when] we tried to determine what our real needs are” while critically “examining the basic conditioning which had shaped our sexuality.” Not shying from the conflict between the time and energy spent to the struggle as feminists and the time and energy spent to develop and maintain relationships in which sex is a goal, Orlando contends:

Orlando is only one amongst a movement of anarchist feminists who was consciously chose asexuality as a method of resistance. These are the “radical refusals,” according to Professor Breanne Fahs who explains:

Asexuality is shown to disrupt key intersections between sexuality “ and the state, particularly institutions that control reproduction, pleasure, and women’s bodies. […] By removing themselves from sexuality, women can take a more anarchic stance against the entire institution of sex, thereby working toward more nihilistic, anti-reproduction, antifamily goals that severely disrupt ”commonly held assumptions about sex, gender, and power.

One of such radical refusals was Valerie Solanas, who is known for two things: writing The SCUM Manifesto, and shooting Andy Warhol (in believing that he destroyed her manuscript). Yes, she really attempted murder, and as much as it was an iconic true crime event of feminist history, it was also tragic. During trial, Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a classic patriarchal move that demonises the woman as well as the sex she associates with by stigmatising people with mental health conditions. The SCUM Manifesto is a 1967 satirical essay of “unabashed misandry” in which a dedicated fictional organisation called SCUM plots to overthrow society and get rid of all men. As much as I want to talk about the iconic line of “the male has a negative Midas Touch – everything he touches turns into shit,” for the sake of this article we need to go back to discussing the two things Solanas did incredibly well in her work: (1) she did not and would not give a fuck about what anybody thinks, and (2) she explicitly determined that asexuality was “cool” and “cerebral” but also distinctively a principleagainst “male culture”: Noting the power of Solanas’ writing, Fahs also mentions the publication of Dana Densmore in 1973 for a journal by the feminist separatism group Cell 16. In Independence from the Sexual Revolution, Densmore unravels the institution of sexual ‘culture’ in which fucking is often conflated and confused with freedom. “People seem to believe that sexual freedom […] is freedom,” she complains, even though “sexual freedom [includes] no freedom to decline sex, to decline to be defined at every turn by sex.” As Densmore succinctly sums up:

It is when we are not free, or do not feel free, to make such a set of minimum demands on a relationship that serious trouble arises. And we are not free when we are in the grip of the false conditioning that decrees that we need sex. We are not free if we believe the culture’s ominous warnings that we will become “horny” (what a callous, offensive word) and frustrated and neurotic and finally shrivel up into prunes and have to abandon hope of being good, creative, effective people.

The more I think about Lisa Orlando, Valerie Solanas, and Dana Densmore, the more I find that being asexual and being feminist have everything to do with each other. They intertwine and complement. They unite the two struggles that seemingly “rarely intersect” and seemingly had nothing to do with each other by denoting their common oppressor which is the global capitalist-patriarchalheteronormative complex. The very same system commodifies sexuality, dictates sex and desire, engineers the unrealistic, unachievable, utterly insane standard of female appearance and femininity; the very same system that sexualises female bodies, fetishises bodies of POC folks, invalidates and punishes asexual bodies for not being sexual enough; all on a systemic and societal level. asexuality as sexual repression, a mental disorder, abstinence, or celibacy. Therefore, it made sense that the online ace community naturally wanted to distance themselves from the radical feminist interpretation of asexuality as a political choice. But in 2022, when the asexuality definition is established, thriving, and accommodating towards different types of attraction (sexual, romantic, aesthetic, secondary), non/relationship dynamics; the asexual community’s biggest challenge is to be visible and to fend off exclusionists who deny that asexuals will not be able to take part in the queer or feminist movements.

Some critics have pointed out that the conversations around asexuality of radical feminists in the 60s and 70s only “skirt around” our modern interpretation of asexuality as an orientation and a spectrum. To this I respond that, it is important to understand that I am not trying to suggest of a historical continuity between the 2nd wave feminism and the modern asexuality movement. But on that note, I would rather propose that there is much about the likes of “radical refusals” that our current ace community could learn from, particularly on the politicisation of asexual matters. As one asexual blogger notes, this photo, Lesbian Dynamics (1973), which was dug up thanks to prolific ace Tumblr folks, would likely have not been well received by the ace online community had it resurfaced 10 or 15 years ago given the feminist historical significance of the photo and its mention of asexuality. But it resurfaced in 2018, and ace

Those who found out about asexuality may have encountered online ace communities formed in the 90s and the early 2000s instead, where AVEN, Yahoo!, Tumblr, and livejournals were the places where awareness of asexuality blossoms and thrives. During this time, when asexuality visibility was non-existent and much was to be worried about the integrity of the definition of asexuality, there was a lot at stake. The online ace community’s biggest purpose then was not to politicise their existence, but more fundamentally making asexuality recognised as an orientation, avoiding misconceptions of

folks love it – maybe that says something about how much our understanding of asexuality is undergoing a radicalising shift towards a political movement.

Last year for Queer Dit, I penned an article called Don’t Forget the A in LGBTQIA+: Making Asexuality Visible (sorry for shamelessly promoting my article, but also, not sorry). I argued that the endemic problem for the ace community is with visibility, because it is invisibility that prevents asexuality from being recognised as a part of the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, and it is invisibility that enables discrimination. “The invisibility of asexuality has the implication of making acephobia not seen.” What I failed to include in my article was a discussion of what visibility means and should mean for ace people in the future. We have done incredibly well for ourselves in creating a massive online movement, starting from Zoe O’Reilly’s 1997 blogpost My life as an amoeba on StarNet Dispatches which is commonly regarded as the first ‘out and proud’ asexual, to David Jay’s founding of AVEN forum which now is hosting 135k+ members, to Instagram activist Yasmin Benoit who founded the influential hashtag ‘this is what asexual looks like.’ Yet at the same time, the online space can be an incredible individualised and anonymous space and holds little effect when making the invisible visible. I myself have great friends whom I have known for years before I found out that they were on the asexual spectrum too. If online visibility is the only visibility the ace community is settling for, then friends, we still have a lot of work to do.

Asexuality needs to be a tangible, recognisable, publicly visibly organised movement that deliberately takes up space in everyday life if this community truly wants to be included and represented. What we haven’t done so well is to make asexuality a relevant and important political issue, to flaunt ourselves in parades, organise protests, collectives, book clubs, and petition for recognition and welfare from our government leaders. On this, perhaps we can learn a thing or two the broader queer movement and the feminist movement instead of distancing ourselves from them for not “getting” the asexual agenda. .

. When I started writing, I had variously different visions in mind. I firstly wanted to talk about being an asexual Asian woman, but I also wanted to deep dive into the nooks and crannies of feminist and asexual histories. Things have kind of gotten out of hand; I ended up writing about everything. This is because it’s difficult and almost impossible to separate these aspects of my life into distinctive parts. Favlia Dzodan writes, “my feminism will be intersectional, or it will be bullshit.” Along her lines, I say: my asexuality will be radical, or it will be nothing.

For most of us, being ourselves is not easy when we have to work to carve up a space that allows for existence. It is the hard work of reflecting, thinking, healing, researching, discussing, theorising, hurting, bonding, fighting, loving. Last year, I wrote an article to speak up about asexuality and visibility. This year, I write this article to struggle, actively and deliberately, so that I can find for others and for myself what an asexual feminist/feminist asexual space would look like. That struggle takes different forms; mine is to accidentally combine three articles into one… But it’s all worth it in the end. Without struggle there is no solidarity.