Terminology Poll

[greenchestnuts]

Hi everyone,

After a lot of discussion in the Tumblr asexual communities, I've created a poll trying to get some feedback on preferences for a term for people who aren't asexual, demisexual, or grey-asexual. The link to the poll, and a brief explanation of why it is necessary, is here at my Tumblr. Even though this project came out of things on one particular social media site, I'm hoping to get a wide cross-section of responses from across the Internet, so I'm sharing it here.

Thanks!

Comments

[jeshyr]

Not all but most of what she says in that post implies that any single word which lumped all non-ace-type peoples together would be just as bad as "sexual" ... so I am somewhat baffled about why it is good evidence for finding a different single word to lump them all together.

[greenchestnuts]

I don't agree with her proposed solution partially because I know people identify as more things than heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and pan/polysexual, and so writing them all out will never be totally inclusive. I think it's important to have a concise term with which we can discuss our outgroup, the 92-99% of the population that isn't like us. However, her post illustrates some of the ways in which "sexual" has been used to hurt people. I myself am uncomfortable with the use of "sexuals" because I know that throughout history, many groups have been punished or hurt because they were viewed as too sexual.

Besides that, "sexuals" is very vague and inaccurate. Asexuals can be sexual, too, if we have sex or act on sexual arousal in some way. "Asexual" only has one other meaning, reproducing without a partner, but "sexual" has a host of different meanings, and I think if we try to set up "sexual" as an antonym of "asexual" we're going to contribute to stereotypes about aces not having sex drives and never having sex.