also

[sciatrix]

So I was writing something, and I absentmindedly wrote down "in the asexual community..." and went on with my sentence.

And then I looked back at it and I thought about that phrase, and whether it really quite fit. The thing is, I don't think you can actually say anything about "the asexual community" any more. There's too many different asexual communities with too many distinct cultures to be able to make that generalization. This is awesome.

This has hit me pretty hard, guys. Because when I first started identifying as ace, you could legitimately say that--there was AVEN and there was basically nowhere else to discuss asexuality. Oh, there were maybe a few tiny, isolated pockets of discussion where individual asexuals found each other in other spaces to talk, but nothing big enough to have its own culture that wasn't essentially identical to AVEN culture.

But now we have lots of different communities! And the cultures are changing, and this is just so cool.

I'm going to go off and be happy about this for the rest of the day now. I love the fact that we're decentralizing and spreading out so very widely. And just... eeeeee~<3

Comments

[morethanx]

This is something I hadn't even realised, although I had noticed a difference between Tumblr and AVEN, for example. In between the shitstorms, that is. I thought a lot of the other communities (like Knights of the Shaded Triangle or Cakegasm) were either not very active or shut down. Am I missing something?

[sciatrix]

Nope, you're not missing anything about the forums--the only ones I'd call active are the Transyadas and AVEN, these days, although Apositive had its own distinct (if, ah, seriously not my cup of tea) culture.

I actually had ace cultures in various media in mind--there's Livejournal/Dreamwidth asexual communities, like here and the asexuality comm and asexual_fandom (which are THEMSELVES two comms I'd say have their own very different cultures). There's Wordpress/Blogger blogs, which are different from LJ/DW blogs in tone and focus, in my experience. There's Tumblr when it's not being overrun by the shitstorms, as you mentioned, which is different from all the rest of them. I can't think of any other nuclei of asexual community off the top of my head, but that doesn't mean there are any.

When I was coming to asexuality, everyone essentially had to go through AVEN. That's just not the case any more, and seeing that makes me really happy--it's proof to me that asexual communities and visibility efforts in general are really beginning to take off.