Question of the Month: October 15th, 2019.

How do you feel about Halloween? Do you have any exciting or not so exciting plans? 

Restored Carnival of Aces: “Relationship Stages”

The Carnival of Aces has been around for many years, and some of the blogs that have hosted carnivals have gone defunct.  In some cases, I’ve restored the archives by finding someone who reblogged the carnival, but in other cases I’ve had to use Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.  I’m mirroring three of them here, one each month.

January 2016: “Relationship Stages“, originally hosted by Myscape

Linkspam: October 4th, 2019

On Fridays, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting.  We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!

Ace Blogging

People are seeing ads for HSDD drug Vyleesi.

Aro blogging

The Carnival of Aros for September was posted, on the theme of “fiction”.  The previous month, themed on “relationships” is also here.  The next call for submissions is now available.

Scholarly work

Przybylo talked about her new book, Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality.

Asexuality on the resume

I work for The Ace Community Survey. I lead a dozen volunteers in running an annual survey with 10k responses. I developed most of our codebase. Our reports attract academic attention. This kind of looks amazing on a resume.

But do I really want to disclose my orientation on a resume? This is a question with no universal right answer, and all the guidance you find on the internet says as much. But I will just explain my own decision and thought process behind it, offering a single data point where currently we have none.

Carnival of Aces: Telling Our Stories

The Carnival of Aces for September has been posted on Asexuality Archive.  The theme was “Telling Our Stories”.  Please take a look!

The next Carnival of Aces is being hosted by Ace Week.  The theme for October is “Reaching Out, Reaching In”.  Get your submissions in before the end of the month!

The Carnival of Aces is hosted by volunteers each month.  If you would like to volunteer, please see the masterpost for instructions.  The next available slot is in December.

Telling your second story

This article was written for the September Carnival of Aces, themed on “Telling our stories“.

When I spoke on a panel at Creating Change in 2013, I prepared and polished 30 second speech to introduce myself and how I came to identify as ace. That was my first story. Which is not to say that it was the first story that I ever told about myself, but that for most people in the audience, it was the first (and likely only) story they would ever hear about me.

I do not tell my first story very often. Something about regular blogging hammers the habit out of you. I can only tell so many first stories. Eventually I have to move on to a second story, perhaps even a third. If I were to write out a first story again, it might be new to most of you, but then it would no longer be new, and I would have to move on again.

What is the distinction between a first and a second story? In Asexuality Archive’s article, “Ambassador From Aceland“, it is argued that many of the stories we tell are all about presenting a certain image, and being a good representative. Certainly that is how I used my first story at Creating Change. But I would say the same is also true of my second stories, which are still, after all, intended for consumption. I rarely tell a story just for its own sake; I tell it because I have a point to make. My goal is to present an image that makes my point compelling.

Linkspam: September 26th, 2019

On Fridays, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting.  We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!

Ace Blogging

jotdancing discussed the assumption that inclusion is good.

Sennkestra has updates on Addyi and concerns being raised in the news.

polyallsorts speculates on how knowing they were asexual might have impacted their relationship.

Aro blogging

AUREA published a guide to maintaining friends.