By Megan Christopher
Syd’s note: Megan Christopher has been an active member of the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) since 2007, and is on the planning committee for Asexual Awareness Week 2011. She holds a Masters degree in professional writing from the University of Southern California and maintains “Hollywood Jane,” a blog about pop culture and her life in Los Angeles.
Megan Christopher
As an asexual woman writing a memoir about my lack of sexual attraction, I jumped at the chance to be a part of 2011’s Asexual Awareness Week, pitched as “an international campaign to promote awareness about asexuality.” That was in April. One meeting later and I had cold feet. The other members of the committee seemed to be much more experienced in the arena of activism, a word that had always left me with a feeling of dread, as if labeling someone ‘active’ turned that person into a social justice-seeking missile aimed directly at my wallet. My dislike of being accosted on the street by college students with clipboards, and resentment toward the emotional manipulation of Sarah McLachlan’s ASPCA commercials had left me reluctant to foist my personal crusades on others, no matter how worthy the cause. As a kid, I had a hard time selling school wrapping paper to my own relatives.
When it came to causes I cared about (pet adoptions, marriage equality, erasing Twilight from the public consciousness), it was easy to assume someone else was taking care of it. What kept me coming back to those Skype meetings, however, was the global ignorance surrounding something I considered a key piece of my identity. People outside my circle of LGBT-positive friends had a hard time understanding the concept of a disinterest in sex, if they were willing to consider it at all. The most common reaction to an asexual coming out was flat disbelief. I joined the Asexuality Awareness committee because one day I hoped to live in a society where I could tell people I was asexual without hearing, “What does that mean?” or “Maybe you’re just a late bloomer,” in return. In a movement so small, every voice counted.
Because a lack of sex drive, apathy towards intercourse, or one’s virginity wasn’t talked about without ridicule, a large percentage of the asexual community was unprepared for discussion. What were the talking points? What did the public need to know? How much was too much? As a result of that confusion, asexual conversations tended to become private, internal matters. Which was why there were so many expressions of relief from newcomers on the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) message boards. A safe space among like-minded people was something many of us never thought we would find.
I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be an “activist” for asexuality. As far as I was concerned, that would put me on the steps of City Hall with a megaphone and a catchy slogan scrawled on a placard. Activists were loud, even aggressive, in their campaigns. I cared about the message, yes, but that didn’t mean I wanted to poll strangers on the street or protest universities for a place in their LGBT centers.
But the time had come to move beyond the online haven we’d carved out for ourselves, and start spreading the word.
My approach in the past had been to allow asexuality to enter a conversation naturally, to treat it as something common and uneventful, figuring if I didn’t make a big deal about it, no one else would. At the same time, I was allowing interested parties to start a dialogue by showing I wasn’t ashamed of my orientation. I believed my guerilla campaign could work asexuality into the public consciousness without turning it into a platform.
Perhaps that worked on a personal level – slowly educating friends and family without direct confrontation – but whether I liked it or not, the obfuscation of asexuality was an issue. I gradually began to realize that the only way I was going to live in a world where asexuality was understood and accepted was to contribute to a statement that was difficult to ignore.
It wasn’t an easy transition from passive to active. A lot of the committee discussion revolved around education in academia, while I was interested in using creative outlets to inform the public on a broader scale. When email chains amongst committee members started to carry on for days about gender pronoun usage and race-versus-nationality in the asexual census, my first reaction was to wonder why it mattered. The minutia seemed irrelevant; what did the phrasing of a particular question have to do with asexuality?
As the debate raged on, it occurred to me that all-encompassing gender identifiers weren’t something that I’d ever considered before. I hadn’t given much thought to the idea that there were people in the world who resented that there were only two boxes to check on standardized forms – the same resentment I felt when presented with straight, gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual as the only legitimate forms of sexual orientation.
That’s when it hit me: Asexual Awareness Week isn’t important because we’re an ignored and marginalized minority, but because most of the population doesn’t know any better. The goal of Asexual Awareness Week is not to convince anyone that sex is bad, or that somehow, in our non-sexual state, we’re better than people who enjoy intercourse in one form or another. We don’t want to sway people to take sides where there are none. The purpose is right there in the title: we are raising awareness. We want to increase visibility. This activism is about an education not an agenda; we’re not asking for anything other than acknowledgement of our existence – and perhaps a little understanding on the side.
Often, the smaller the group, the louder, and perhaps more abrasive, the voices – but for the first time, I found a message that I needed to spread, even if it meant getting ‘active.’
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