Privilege and disprivilege

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Privilege and disprivilege

greenchestnuts:

metapianycist:

[snipped for brevity: original post here, outlawroad’s full post here]

outlawroad:

And one more idea: I think there are levels of sexual privilege/disprivilege even within the asexual community. Sexually active asexuals, asexuals who are indifferent enough to sex that it’s always an option, asexuals who like sex enough to have it with a series of partners in their lifetime—basically, any asexual who can be a functionally sexual person, has privilege that any sex-repulsed/sex-averse/eternally celibate asexual person does not have and will never have. Which is why hearing sexually active asexuals gripe about how mixed romantic relationships really can work and all asexuals should give all sexual people the benefit of the doubt and sexual people really aren’t as dependent and fixated on sex as we think they are, just sound like nails on chalkboard to me. They’re talking from a place of privilege. Hell, if I could go out and live my life like a normative romantic-sexual person, I probably would think better of romantic-sexual people too.

I am extremely uncomfortable with asserting that there is a hierarchy within the asexual community. There might be hierarchies in specific pockets of the asexual community (AVEN’s hierarchy definitely values romantics over aromantics, and asexuals over gray-As and demisexuals), but I find it extremely problematic to assert that there are such privilege hierarchies within the whole community, except if you’re contrasting visibility of white aces with visibility of aces of color. Every category of asexual person—repulsed aces, sexually active aces, aces in mixed-sexual-orientation relationships, aces in ace-ace relationships—gets shit for being asexual. It might be a different kind of shit based on the group, but no one asexual group gets any more or less shit for being asexual than any other group.

What you write in this paragraph is a very short step away from asserting that demisexuals and gray-aces have privilege over asexuals (or vice versa), when both of those groups get incredible amounts of shit for those identities. Let’s keep the Olympics in London and not have any Oppression Olympics within the ace-spectrum community.

Reblogging for metapianycist’s commentary, because outlawroad’s assertions also make me very uncomfortable.

Agreed. The whole post felt like it was written in a vacuum where no other -isms exist and intersectionality is not a thing.