Why I will not engage with anyone who insists on using the term “sexuals”, and justifies that with “but sexuals are privileged!”

coalhouse was kicking ass earlier and the asshole comin at her went really emotionally manipulative about it so I’m just gonna do a one-post quote roundup with bolding added.

i cannot bring myself to pretend to care about an otherwise-het hypersexual poly person romanticizing the idea of perceived oppression enough that they have to call a family meeting and break it to their parents that the only way they can get off is by breast-flogging in an iron maiden by their four boyfriends (and jesus christ let’s not argue this disingenuously: there aren’t chick tracts being passed around subtly advocating for the dehumanization and sanctioned murder of hetero aces). the societal pressures that hamper asexual acceptability are rooted more in misogyny and misdirected homophobia (“you must be a f*ggot with a beard if you’re not having sex with your opposite-sex partner”) and are not specific to asexuality; these are dialogues that would be better carried out in an ace-specific forum.

the reality is that developing a more cohesive label to the identity of “queer” (not even really developing it: just identifying it, because heteronormative society already dictates what the identity of “queer” entails) helps actual queer people discuss and ultimately dismantle the harmful rhetoric of society around them. it would be nice if labels belonged on jars and not people!!! but we live in a world where the simple act of coming out requires the kind of life-evaluation people who don’t experience same-sex attraction or gender fluidity will never have to think about and it is - dare i say it - homophobic to insist that queer people wanting a space away from people who either passively or actively contribute to the systems that make queer such a contentious label is ~judgmental and makes them ~prejudiced pricks.

it literally costs a person who has no forced ties to this label nothing to spend five minutes coming up with an identifier that does not a) make the people who have historically had this slur thrown at them uncomfortable, and b) make them seem like typical presumptuous straighties who want to feel better about themselves by circumventing their culpability towards modern homophobic mores.

the fact that it can even be called the title of a community is because of those ~judgmental, prejudiced pricks who risked their goddamn lives every day operating in this place called the real world and not pedantically arguing whether heteroromantic aces have anything to add to queer dialogues that regular straight people can’t over tumblr.

nobody can ~force them out of the community because people who do not fall under the spectrum of those who have had queer (as a slur) assigned them (that is, people who experience same-sex attraction: gay people, lesbian people, bi people, homoromantic-asexual people, biromantic people) do not have the societal pull to gatekeep in this equation.

in that vein, an otherwise hetero, hypersexual poly dude who dates bisexual women because it makes him feel ~subversive identifying as queer is bullshit, and it’s the right of the “community” (such that it is) to call it out. he approaches his view on his perceived ~right to use a reclaimed slur as an identity from a completely different perspective than a lesbian who grew up with “queer” as a daily reminder of the inherent inferiority of her very being. forgetting (or worse, pointedly ignoring) the loaded history of queer as a slur is a luxury only those who have never had it coercively applied to them really have.