/u/Adam-The-Ace on How's being ace seen in your country?

I can't speak for the whole country. But I can speak from my experience in Cape Town.

I have connected with quite a few acespec people in CPT and mostly women. Only met one other man who identifies as ace. So there are a couple of us spreading the gospel of cake around :P

From the LGBTQA+ community however, I have found the following :

Gender queer and other queer friendly allies, even if they don't know a lot about asexuality will generally accept and inquire more about being ace. Especially in the more arty circles.

Being homoromantic, I spend a lot of time around gay men, and I have picked up a trend. Gay men under 30 are almost always inquisitive and ready to accept you. Gay men over 30 are very much stuck in the " I don't understand/You are broken/You are lying for attention" bracket.

I mean, I don't really blame them. They don't know any better. Because of the very open and thriving hookup culture here, many gay men only know validation and acceptance through sexual activity and they find it mind boggling that anything but sexual connections could exist. But that is more their insecurities about themselves rather than a reflection on other queer experiences.

Although, I recently posted about starting to go on dates again and it has gotten a lot better than when I was dating 5 years ago. I think because there was a lot of genderqueer visibility and activism in CPT in the past couple of year,s many people in the LGBTQA+ community as a whole has become more aware of the spectra of sexuality and genders as a whole and are more willing to discuss and understand peoples individual experiences than before.

The hardest thing I think for most people across the board to understand is that there are different types of attraction. For most people, secondary attraction ( like sensual attraction, romantic attraction ) and sexual attraction are the same thing.

So quite often confusion comes in when I say I find someone attractive but I don't want to have sex with them, because in their experience they can't find the distinction between intimacy, secondary attraction, sexual attraction and sexual stimulus. I think because acespec people experience some, or none of these it's easier for us to understand, but for most allo people, they experience all these attractions at once and don't necessarily know that there is a difference between how allos and aces can ( or don't) experience attraction.

So back to the original question. In Cape Town, there is definitely some acceptance and an upward trend in people wanting to understand and know more. :)

October 20, 2019 at 12:01AM