Calling people off the ace spectrum "sexuals" and/or "non-aces"... okay? Or hypocritical?

One of the biggest and most frequent ace complaints is the constant sexualization to which they are exposed.
If an ace refers to a non-ace as sexual, is or isn't that automatically sexualizing the other person? Wouldn't that be pretty hypocritical, if an alternative term can be found?

I've seen three separate occasions just on Tumblr of non-ace individuals getting massively upset at aces for calling them "sexuals" or "sexual people". I can imagine how anybody with a paralytic disability, or who is a virgin (voluntarily or involuntarily), or who practices celibacy/abstinence intentionally for any amount of time, or who has a sexual dysfunction, or who is nonlibidinistic, or who is unable to have sex or without being ace just really doesn't want sex... might find the instant involuntary sexualization of this term to be insulting, hurtful, and inappropriate.

There are no shortage of Greek and Latin roots; we slap them in front of -romantic and -sexual and -gender, etc., with cavalier frequency, for the sake of being understood by other parts of the GSM communities.
There are no shortage of other perfectly ordinary but little-used words that we could assign an alternative meaning, the way "straight" is an uninsulting label for heteronormative individuals.

Is it so hard for us to come up with a decent word for non-aces, which doesn't automatically disinclude them ("non-ace", makes it sound like aces are some kind of prized elite, a minor insult by extension) nor sexualize them?

Does anybody else even perceive this as a problem?

For once, I'm putting my opinion out there, as a demisexual who participates in just enough sexual activity (and until later in life did not even know that 'asexual' was a non-pathologistic option, therefore always assuming I was sexual-but-just-disinterested) to maybe have a right to speak for sexuals who object to these labels. [oooh, run-on sentence. Ouch.]
Way I see it, back when I identified as other-than-ace, I would have been pretty peeved to be called "a sexual person", because I was as far as you could get from being that. There are loads of non-aces who really aren't interested in or able to engage in sex.
If even just a few actively OBJECT to those labels, which were imposed on them involuntarily... then if they don't provide one of their own, is it not perhaps the obligation of us, as the minority setting its own boundaries from the majority, to create an appropriate term?

I've tossed around a few options; at the moment, I most favour "verisexual" (and by extension, "veriromantic" to non-aromantics) for individuals who experience sexual attractions.
Veri- is a Latin root meaning "true, real, able, and/or actual"; it's a truth value, the way A-, meaning "not, no, without" is a truth value.
They are literal opposites... and verisexual doesn't force on the non-ace the implication of either being a) excluded from some elitist group or b)forcibly sexualized by the very language that qualifies us as different.
This also allows us to avoid the use of words like "normal", which imply that anything outside that norm is abnormal and therefore wrong or unhealthy.

I also favour "isosexual / isoromantic" for people who are in the "normative/average range" of libido and romantic drive (that is, between hypo- and hyper-). Iso- = "same, equal, even, middling, average".

As always with me, poll is multiple answer-allowing, answer-change allowing, and indefinitely/permanently open.

Thank you all for your feedback; I crave and appreciate it.
I'm including veri- and iso- in our dictionary, at my own whim, but by no means do I demand that anybody else use those terms.

I like veri-, and I lack opinion on "iso", though my initial reaction is some unexplained distaste.

I'm not 100% sure that this is actually a problem, I haven't seen the same outrage crop up over the use of the term, but if it is a problem, "veri-" either fixes it or some people will just never be pleased.

I don't see "non-ace" as problematic though, at all. Not that it should be the primary term we use to describe people off-spectrum, but sometimes it's the most applicable.

I really dislike "non-ace," as it reminds me of "non-trans" and linguistically marks aces as other - the only people who need a word, because everyone else is just "normal" (and chock-full of unexamined privilege).

I've also seen the arguments about "sexual," and that's in part why I id as grey. I fully agree that sexualizing people without consent is not okay. At the same time, I think we do get to name them and that they *need* a name, much like cisgender people do. It's a tricky line between coercive labeling and forcing people to confront normative values and their own privilege in not needing to seek out a word for themselves. But I don't think the majority in power gets to refuse a name that means something other than "normal."

I really like "verisexual." It has tones of "verifiably sexual" to me, which, I'm not sure if that's positive or negative, or what that might connote. I'm not sure about iso-; I think it would lead way to a greater use of hypo- and (more problematically) hyper-. I really dislike labeling people as hypersexual unless they so self-identify. I think it strays far too close to policing, regardless of intent.

I do believe it's very important that we figure out a neutral-as-possible term. While some people will doubtless continue to be upset at having a word foisted upon them, I hold to the cisgender analogy. So long as the word does not have other consequences (like oversexualization), it's appropriate.

I'm not sure about iso-; I think it would lead way to a greater use of hypo- and (more problematically) hyper-. I really dislike labeling people as hypersexual unless they so self-identify. I think it strays far too close to policing, regardless of intent.

In that particular case, since the metric being described would be the individual's libido (which has zero relation to gender, sex assignment, and attraction, and is entirely a matter of drive-by-degrees and only confirmable by that person and/or their Significant Other, who would know)... it would never technically be the point of that label that it be used on people other than oneself, except to be as a general mass-qualifier, as in "compared to isosexual people (the range of 'average' that would never be at risk of a shrink pathologizing their sexual drive or lack thereof), I see myself as more/less/etc."

If it gets used in the second person, instead of first or third person tense, it's kinda' purpose-defeating.
https://demigrace.forumotion.com/t42-tegid-s-model-work-in-progress
I've attempted to make a set of metrics that would allow a person to visually identify and self-qualify where they believe they sit on the larger scales of romantic and sexual attractions and drives/desires.

Note, any metric I draw can be altered in a few moments, and I'm not defending the uses of hypo-/hyper-, with any great love for those terms, and iso- by extension. I just figure... the first two existed without any help from me, and they do get used self-descriptively, often. Iso- is, as a Latin root, the literal position of "evenness" between hypo- and hyper-, and it doesn't have to mean a single point on any scale... just a range of middling points between extremes.
I do feel it needs to be differentiated (between drive and attraction), because one of the earliest major conflicts in ace comunities was that of nonattractionists v.s. nonlibidinists. :-/

To me, 'verisexual' looks like 'very sexual', which kind of sounds silly, whereas it never appeared to me that 'sexual' had any other meaning than 'non-asexual' when hearing it in the context of the ace community. It may have other connotations, but so does the fleur-de-lys. Sexual-asexual follows the pattern of theist-atheist, so I think it's the easiest to understand for a newcomer. 'Non-asexual' just sounds somewhat circumlocuitous.

*pronounces 'veri' with long e and schwa, veer-ih, not vair-ee*

*...has been known to swap 'w' and 'v' in latinate roots...*

I can clearly recognize that most English speakers will pronounce it identically to very, but I simply don't read it that way, so it's never really felt silly to me. *shrug*

That said, circumlocuitous is an awesome word.

I was reading my friend's tumblr and they gave a good argument for why the phrase "non-asexual" should not be used for people who aren't on the ace spectrum.

Basically, non-asexual implies that a person is not asexual. However, this could also include many people that are greys or demis. So in a way it's erasure.

I just wanted to throw that out there.

Hum okay, I suppose if that's the way that it's supposed to be pronounced then it's not so bad. I'd only seen that root in words such as verity and verily, which are of course pronounced similarly to 'very'. So you mean you pronounce it with a w sound at the start, like how vino became wine?
I'm so proud of making up a new word!
Good point, Tea. It's like how in English, a double negative doesn't quite have the same meaning/implication as its supposedly identical (in meaning/implication) positive counterpart.

Adam wrote:Hum okay, I suppose if that's the way that it's supposed to be pronounced then it's not so bad. I'd only seen that root in words such as verity and verily, which are of course pronounced similarly to 'very'. So you mean you pronounce it with a w sound at the start, like how vino became wine?
I'm so proud of making up a new word!
Good point, Tea. It's like how in English, a double negative doesn't quite have the same meaning/implication as its supposedly identical (in meaning/implication) positive counterpart.

*laughs delightedly* Exactly.

The Latin word for the concept Truth is 'Veritas', pronounced sorta' like "WEE-ree-toss" or "WAY-ree-toss" (English versions of those words, that is).

I can hear the articulated 'v', and I recognize that this IS the popular pronunciation anymore, but it's generally 'w' in my head, for Latin roots like 'veri' and 'vir'.

Veni, Vidi, Vici = Weeny, Weedy, Wiki.
[In front of nasals (n, m, ng) and laterals (l, r), 'e' in Latin is 'eeee', not 'ay'. It's 'ay' in front of any other consontant.]

NOT Venny, Veedee, Veesee. That's rendering the original Latin into the modern Italian equivalent pronunciations of the same spelling. XD

If we're treating 'verisexual' as Latin-based, 'very sexual' is the Italicizing of the original 'weeree sexual'.



And...

/linguistics major, geek, totally anal retentive about phonetics. :-^

^_^ heh.

I must admit.............I'm lost here. I've never really seen such an issue risen before, and I've never heard any (what do I call them? >_< )sexuals(?) raise an issue with it or see it as an issue.

I think I've definitely missed something here, I don't follow Tumblr.

I don't actually know what the actual definition for -sexual is, but I've always seen it as a catch-all term for anything regarding orientation, not necessarily equaling sexual activity.

*goes back to lurking* ~,~

So, I have been combing through prefix databases and I happened upon one I got really excited about:

CLARISEXUAL.

Like, it is clear to this person that they are non-ace-spectrum. It is clear to them that they experience sexual attraction, primarily unambiguously. Their sexuality is fairly clear. (This somewhat ignores issues of who that sexual attraction is targeting, but that is the whole point, yes?)

Am I so over-excited that I am missing a glaring problem or could this be a really good find?? I wanted to bring it here before positing it on tumblr - blacksmithing to remove flaws before I give it to the fire and whatnot. Input???

---
(Aside: Tegid, love your linguistics nerding out. Rock. Here's my pronunciation in IPA: /vɛ-rɪ-sɛck-ʃyu-ʊl/ ... whereas "very" would be /vɛ-ri/. Laaa~~

Also I guess I never responded about your iso- explanation! That all makes sense. The whole scale twinges me a bit, but mostly because of second-person applications and because subjective shifting around of scales seems even more likely than with attraction. I guess drive gets pathologized more than attraction, so that's what's bothering me. Little to do with iso- itself!)

Tegid wrote:And...

/linguistics major, geek, totally anal retentive about phonetics. :-^

^_^ heh.

Ahhh... I've given away my uncultured lack of knowledge of the 'correct' pronunciation of Latin.

Arcanine wrote:I think I've definitely missed something here, I don't follow Tumblr.

I don't actually know what the actual definition for -sexual is, but I've always seen it as a catch-all term for anything regarding orientation, not necessarily equaling sexual activity.

I think that's part of the weird thing here: the community is basically making up all the definitions as it sees fit -- this has been brought up in other places on these forums. Maybe it's just a question of putting all these suggested forms out there and seeing which ones take. It's like the whole gender-neutral third-person pronouns thing: some people use 'hir', some use 'ey', and others stick with 'they' or 'him'. I'm still waiting for a consensus on that too.

Darn it, I wanted to split adam's post into one where we talked about gender neutral pronouns but I don't have that power here *fail*

But I personally think that it's a different situation for each person. For me I have a very slight preference for they because when talking about people, the pronouns we use are gendered. And by making gender-neutral pronouns, it's encouraging more gendering even if it is non-binary. I find they to be a good way to somewhat avoid it, if not completely.

But that's why I chose that pronoun. Somebody else might want sie for a different reason which is just as valid.

Anyway, with the idea of people outside the ace-spectrum, I don't like the term sexual (I used to) because I started to realize how strange it sounded to use it as a noun in certain sentences. I thought about the term "Jack" for a while but that's...well, a terrible idea because it just doesn't feel right. I don't like non-ace because technically that could be erasure. So...I'm stuck >_<

So, I have been combing through prefix databases and I happened upon one I got really excited about:

CLARISEXUAL.

Like, it is clear to this person that they are non-ace-spectrum. It is clear to them that they experience sexual attraction, primarily unambiguously. Their sexuality is fairly clear. (This somewhat ignores issues of who that sexual attraction is targeting, but that is the whole point, yes?)

Am I so over-excited that I am missing a glaring problem or could this be a really good find?? I wanted to bring it here before positing it on tumblr - blacksmithing to remove flaws before I give it to the fire and whatnot. Input???

---
(Aside: Tegid, love your linguistics nerding out. Rock. Here's my pronunciation in IPA: /vɛ-rɪ-sɛck-ʃyu-ʊl/ ... whereas "very" would be /vɛ-ri/. Laaa~~

Also I guess I never responded about your iso- explanation! That all makes sense. The whole scale twinges me a bit, but mostly because of second-person applications and because subjective shifting around of scales seems even more likely than with attraction. I guess drive gets pathologized more than attraction, so that's what's bothering me. Little to do with iso- itself!)

*laugh* I like 'clarisexual'; it's minus a few of the nitpicky issues that are bound to show up with verisexual.

I'd've used IPA, but it's worse than confusing for anybody who doesn't know how it works.

Also, unless you pronounce the 'al' in 'sexual' like the 'oo' in 'book', you need to replace the horseshoe-u with a schwa (upside-down e)...

...and unless you roll all your 'r', that 'r' needs to be upside-down, too.

Remove letter 'c' and 'y' (the 'yuh' sound is written with 'j'), and you're functioning in IPA, woop! ^_^

/nerdsplosion... pleez forgive meee...

I'll add Clarisexual to the poll.

Tegid wrote:
Veni, Vidi, Vici = Weeny, Weedy, Wiki.
[In front of nasals (n, m, ng) and laterals (l, r), 'e' in Latin is 'eeee', not 'ay'. It's 'ay' in front of any other consontant.]

NOT Venny, Veedee, Veesee. That's rendering the original Latin into the modern Italian equivalent pronunciations of the same spelling. XD

To be fair, the people who pronounce it “Venny, Veedee, Veesee” are pronouncing it wrong in modern Italian as well. Vici would be like “Veechee” because ci is a “chee” sound in Italian, while chi is a “kee” sound. Counterintuitive!

Arcanine wrote:I must admit.............I'm lost here. I've never really seen such an issue risen before, and I've never heard any (what do I call them? >_< )sexuals(?) raise an issue with it or see it as an issue.

I think I've definitely missed something here, I don't follow Tumblr.

There has been stuff on tumblr about it. But there was also a little discussion about it in a Scarleteen thread about integrating asexuality into sex education, which as far as I can tell is independent of the more, shall we say, tumultuous tumblr discussion. Here is a quote if you don’t want to read the thread. It is an interesting read though. This is from a self-id'd bisexual/pansexual sex educator for some context:

“I think the biggest issue around calling people who are not asexual sexual is that it necessarily sexualizes them, and suggests pretty strongly that being sexual is something that is pretty much always on or always off, to boot. That's big shorthand in both cases for the issues, but those would be my starting points. I'm also not sure if it's sound to try and come up with a term to create that kind of binary. Not only do we know that binaries are usually really poor systems when it comes to people, period, I think setting that binary up wouldn't serve people who are asexual any better than people who are not. It actually seems like in a lot of ways it would only feed into a lot of the things I tend to hear asexual people voice as feeling very oppressive, if you catch my drift.”

Tegid wrote:
Also, unless you pronounce the 'al' in 'sexual' like the 'oo' in 'book', you need to replace the horseshoe-u with a schwa (upside-down e)...

...and unless you roll all your 'r', that 'r' needs to be upside-down, too.

Remove letter 'c' and 'y' (the 'yuh' sound is written with 'j'), and you're functioning in IPA, woop! ^_^

/nerdsplosion... pleez forgive meee...

Oh my word am I that immensely out of practice. /dies of embarrassment. I swear I was always a syntax person anyway and am much better at that.

I dunno how that 'c' snuck in there, I hate that 'j', I have always operated under the premise that since English has essentially one 'r' type phoneme we can write it simply as 'r'...and true, I think I was looking for the sound in 'cut' (not a schwa but the little triangle).

blarrrrrrrr so that was off-topic but whatevs. I'm glad clarisexual doesn't have any blaring errors for you, yay.

Unstressed syllable is always schwa in English, and schwa sounds like inverted v. XD

Aaaanyway, 'nough of my phonetic derailments.

Okay, so re: Clarisexual...

I've been talking to some ace friends, and they said it sounds like "someone who is clear about their sexual orientation / pattern of sexual attraction." So, more in contrast to questioning, possibly grey. That interpretation includes asexual folk, and also probably includes some demi and grey people who feel pretty clear about how sexual attraction works for them.

So, alas! I'm not sure how well that works after all.

I've also jokingly proposed "PWESAs" (People Who Experience Sexual Attraction) for non-asexual, but that lumps grey and demi folk into this majority category, which is not really what I at least am trying to do. And "99%ers" similarly specifies only asexual people, I think. I don't knowwwww, and it is just bothering me oh so much, bahhh.

While my laptops were decommissioned, it occurred to me that clari- might get that response. >_<

Of the two, clari- and veri-, veri- is more likely to result in jibes and snark... but I think clari- is more likely to result in totally missing the meaning of the word, which is a bit purpose-defeating [even the 'established, functional labels' are targets of snark, but most of them get understood quickly enough].

I like both words. I just don't expect that from everybody, or even a majority of those who encounter either of them. :-/

Read a tumblr post about possibly abbreviating the ace spectrum to GAAD (presumably Gray-Asexual, Asexual, and Demisexual) or GADA, and then non-GAAD or non-GADA... I'm sure you get the idea. It's suppose to be similar to the whole LGBT* acronym-type-dealy-thing, I think.

Dunno, just thought I'd throw that out there. Tumblr really confuses me, so I have no idea how to link to it. ; _ ; It was under the gray a tab and was posted by wecameforyourdead?

Haha, here's a link to that post: GAAD Proposal. And, it's posted below under the spoiler tag, since the site it's on is somewhat inaccessible.

Spoiler:

I've been using "ace" as an umbrella rather than a shorthand for asexual for quite some time now, but I'm also despairing a little as to whether it'll catch on (or be clear, if it does). And I think "ace umbrella" works well-ish, I wish "ace community" worked better, I dislike "ace spectrum" mostly because I dislike spectra... So I kind of like GAAD. I'm not sure why there are two A's - is one of them "And," is one of them attached to Grey so it's "Grey-Asexual" (which, meh. what about Greys and Grey-Sexuals)? But also, GAD looks less like an acronym and feels weirder, so.

I don't think "non-GAAD" solves anything that "non-ace-umbrella" didn't. It still leaves that group unmarked, there isn't equality in morphemes, it isn't very descriptive. It will do for now, and I can't see it coming under attack, and it does mean not having to mess with that tricky where-is-the-grey-line question (which is quite a self-defeating thing to try and puzzle out). But I remain discontented.

epochryphal wrote:Haha, here's a link to that post
I'm not sure why there are two A's - is one of them "And," is one of them attached to Grey so it's "Grey-Asexual" (which, meh. what about Greys and Grey-Sexuals)? But also, GAD looks less like an acronym and feels weirder, so.

As far as I know, GAAD stands for Grey-Asexual, Asexual, and Demisexual. Or Grey, Asexual, And Demisexual. o.o Hmmm... XD

I'm all for the logic and sentiment behind it, but the logophile in me finds it painfully awkward, and it leaves the possibility of becoming another endless acronym a la LGBTQQAAWTFBBQ, etc.

Acronyms are both excellent and awful in their endless amenability to additions. :-/
Thing is, in the case of LGBTQ, many groups ignore the Q, and whether or not ace umbrella types, pansexuals, trisexuals, and anybody not covered by LGBT all actually qualify as 'Q' becomes moot, since that umbrella gets ignored and/or excluded by implication.

Guayyyy.
Sorry; acronyms just mess with my universe. *shrug*
I fully encourage use of whatever terms you feel are appropriate, of course. That's the point of this thread, after all.