Every Friday, 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!
The F-ace-ing Silence zine has had its second issue.
Coyote discusses the romance options in Dragon Age and how they relate to amatonormativity.
There were a few responses to Queenie’s post about sexual grey areas. epochryphal discussed grey consent, had some more thoughts and greyness, consent, and brains, and tried some wordsmithing. Olivia has more musings on sex. Coyote discussed the role conflict-aversion can play and wrote a response to Olivia’s post. [EDIT: Proceed with caution, as the links may contain triggering material, especially if you have triggers related to sexual violence or coercion.]
New academic paper on asexuality: Freedom, Invisibility, and Community: A Qualitative Study of Self-Identification with Asexuality.
tristifere shared some media coverage of asexuality in the Netherlands.
The Asexual Agenda 
There were a lot of blog responses to Queenie’s post, but so far they’ve been rather rambling. I hope these ideas eventually become more crystallized…
I also find it interesting that so many people are writing their own posts rather than writing comments on Queenie’s post.
I think that’s partially because a lot of people aren’t responding directly to my post so much as taking ideas that I raised and running with them in their own directions.
Just FYI–some of the responses to Queenie’s post could really use some (more/better) trigger warnings. I’m not up for going through them all again right now, but some of the ways these things are being discussed sound VERY similar to rhetoric adopted by perpetrators trying to gaslight/groom their victims. I’m at a point right now where I’m not trying to avoid those triggers and processing them is actually helpful for me, but it’s best to be cautious. I’m sure there are other survivors who aren’t at that point right now.
It may be a little bit before I respond to this discussion, because I am really aiming for crystallized clarity here, but I think I am on to something and I will eventually post it.
Yeah, I probably should have put trigger warnings in the linkspam, but reading through some of them was difficult enough that I had to step away for a bit. I’ll add a note telling people to proceed with caution.
I wrote a post in response: https://cakeatthefortress.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/another-adventurer-mapping-the-gray-area/ (warning: talk of sexual coercion, harassment, compulsory sexuality and sex-normativity)
I also intended to write another post about how the concept of gray area in terms of consent may be useful for some peoples’ experiences, but this same concept can be misused to gaslight and dismiss survivors of sexual violence. Society sees a hierarchy of sexual violence survivors, and the concept of gray area consent, when misused, reinforces it.
Am dropping it in the linkspam! Also, I’m really looking forward to that second post, ’cause, uh, yeah, that needs to be discussed, and a lot of the discussion has sort of side-stepped issues of sexual violence.
The post said we’re allowed to self-promote, so…I’ve started an asexuality Tumblr at writer-ace.tumblr.com.
Cool, I’ll drop it in next week’s linkspam.
Pingback: Tread carefully in this gray area | Cake at the Fortress
Hi, I’ve created a searchable sortable master list of all the fiction with asexual characters I can find. Which is way more than I expected, thanks to self and online publishing. Anyway, it is here: https://www.diigo.com/user/acereads and I also have a tumblr where I post news and my reviews here: http://agentaletha.tumblr.com/
I hope my master list is helpful!
Oh my gosh, that’s awesome! Dropping it in the linkspam!
Pingback: Linkspam: January 23rd, 2015 | The Asexual Agenda