One of the really hard parts about being on the asexual spectrum is once in a while you'll just casually mention a basic fact if your existence, and an allosexual person will tell you with authority & confidence that you're broken. It's always freighted and veiled, but that's the message: your perceptions and feelings are wrong. Be more like us.
And the part that's hardest for me is queer communities are pretty much always worse about it than cishet ones, because queer culture is so sexualized.
It makes it really really hard to get social or emotional support when you need it on ace stuff, because cishet people lack the vocabulary and awareness, and the overwhelming majority of queer folks view your sexuality as a defect implicitly, if not explicitly.
Leaves a girl feeling very othered.
@Impossible_PhD Strong agree that it's very difficult to talk about wanting affection/cuddling without it coming across as sexual :-/
@woozle or even just parts of life/fashion/whatever that they code as sex-related and are completely uninterested in/unable to consider in any other light.
Or, worst of all, if one of us is uncomfortable with being seen as fuckmeat. Their entitlement to their leering, you know?
[witchzard]
@Impossible_PhD @woozle Yeah, went into a so-called "queer bar" here in Munich (last year). Basically, it is gay/lesbian bar re-branded as queer.
When people in the bar saw me, it was written all over their faces what they were thinking looking at me:
Men: "Too feminine to fuck!"
Women: "Too masculine to fuck!"
I had a drink and went to a non-queer bar frequented mostly by "weird" people: punks, antifa, 1860-fans, ... was way more welcoming there 😮💨
@ics @Impossible_PhD @woozle these are all the reasons why I generally don’t hang out in queer spaces.
I love that the queer umbrella is wide, but gosh being at the edge of the umbrella feels a lot like being _other_. Stack on the often aggressive sexuality of it all, and I’d usually rather be the oddity at the cis bar.
@woozle @nicole @ics @Impossible_PhD
Yeah, I am nonbinary, neurodivergent, 77 years old, and I don't drink alcohol. So bars are not my favorite places to hang out-- especially the crowded queer ones where some inebriated people feel they have permission to invade your personal space without asking.
@cherylgk @nicole @ics @Impossible_PhD
I don't drink alcohol either ^.^. I like the taste of wine/burgundy (parents tend to offer it) but it always tended to make me depressed, so I never could enjoy it.
@woozle @cherylgk @nicole @Impossible_PhD Well, you don't have to drink alcohol in a bar. And when I say "bar", I mean any place where people hang out, have drinks (alcoholic or otherwise), and just socialize...
But I get it, being ND myself (on a different spectrum, OCD, Autism) I know what you mean, though.
@ics @cherylgk @nicole @Impossible_PhD
The larger obstacle is, indeed, the neurodivergence -- feeling like my radio is just on a different station from everyone else's -- rather than the selection of beverages. (The latter is just one little extra way of feeling Odd.)
@nicole @ics @Impossible_PhD
Being neurodivergent (on top of the gender dysphoria for most of my life), I've never felt comfortable in bars and that kind of social space, so never even tried to hang out there. (This was a bit of a hindrance when trying to get into the music scene -- all the local musicians met each other whilst hanging out in bars, it sounded like...)
I've also never done dating (as it existed in the 1980s or so, anyway) because I couldn't see the point; I wanted friendship first, and anything more intimate (cuddling, generally, but also emotional intimacy/trust) would develop from that.