Carview!

CARVIEW

MOTORHOMES

Select Language

HTTP/2 200 server: nginx date: Sun, 18 Jan 2026 03:39:59 GMT content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 vary: Accept-Encoding x-hacker: Want root? Visit join.a8c.com/hacker and mention this header. host-header: WordPress.com link: ; rel="https://api.w.org/" vary: accept, content-type, cookie link: ; rel=shortlink content-encoding: gzip x-ac: 2.bom _dca MISS alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400 strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 server-timing: a8c-cdn, dc;desc=bom, cache;desc=MISS;dur=456.0 an asexual space

What am I willing to share?

1 Jun

A year or two ago, I got into a kick of reading primarily young adult literature over that written for adults. It’s not that I think one is better than the other, but YA lit has the tendency to do a lot more identity-exploring than adult lit, and I find that interesting.

I’m currently crawling through the beginning of writing a book I want to try to get published. This is something I have wanted to do since I was about three years old, so it’s a long time coming. It’s YA, and because I want to write in YA and I like reading there, I’ve started following a fair number of YA-focused blogs. A little for advice, but mostly for book reviews.

(Obligatory recs: Check out YA Highway for general news, reviews, and advice. Intergalactic Academy is awesome for sci-fi reviews. Seriously. Go read it now. Although their light-text-on-dark-background layout may make it easier to read in a feed like Google Reader.)

One of the blogs I follow is Malinda Lo’s, and she just wrote about YA Pride Month. Basically, taking the US’s general Pride Month of June and focusing on it through a lens of YA lit. The part I found most interesting in her post (and that makes it worth mentioning on this blog) is a footnote about how Lo will be interviewing authors writing YA novels with LGBT main characters. The book I am working on now has queer main characters so it caught my eye.

I decided that in my YA Pride series I wanted to mostly invite writers who identify as LGBT to be interviewed or guest post for my site. While I don’t believe one needs to identify as LGBT in order to write about LGBT people, I also feel that there is value in supporting LGBT writers. In the interests of full disclosure, I have had trouble finding transgender-identified YA writers to participate in this series, simply because there are so few of them. I haven’t finished my search for contributors yet, and I may still be able to find a trans YA writer to participate, but if I don’t, the reason is not because I didn’t attempt to find one; it’s because we need more of them.

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, books, coming out, gender, genderqueer, GLBTQIA+, neutrois, non-binary, transgender, writing

Comments 3 Comments
Categories Asexuality, Neutrois

Shoulders

27 May

This might seem like a weird area of my body to focus on with regards to gender dysphoria, but recently I had to shop for clothing to attend a wedding in and I realized I have a thing about my shoulders and collarbone.

Bare shoulders and a bare collarbone are not neutral. Unlike other items of “women’s” clothing that happen to fit my body, I can’t find neutral/masculine details to tilt me away from an overall feeling of pretending to be a woman that I’m not. Exposing that part of my body in public is unabashedly feminine. Guys may go around with a couple of shirt buttons undone, but unless there’s exercise or sex involved, you don’t see dudes going into events with shirts that show their collarbone from shoulder to shoulder.

You might be wondering why I bothered looking at anything that would leave my shoulders bear. To be honest, I just don’t want to melt, and it was also the more economical option. The wedding is going to be on a hot summer night. Dresses expose skin in a socially appropriate way that also allow for greater cooling capability. Plus, I own no other formal clothes I can wear without a binder, and you would have to pay me a decent amount of money to wear a binder for an entire wedding on a hot Southern night. What can I say, I overheat easily. A dress was also going to be less expensive than finding an entire suit.

Continue reading →

Tags: clothing, dysphoria, gender, genderqueer, neutrois, non-binary, presentation, transgender

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories Neutrois

Asexual Paneling

18 Apr

I went to my first ace panel! It was at my old undergrad school and Sciatrix was leading it, having organized it through the LGBTQIAetc club there.

There were four of us on the panel, all asexual, and then a fair-sized audience. I didn’t count but I’d think there were at least 40 or 50 people? They could raise their hands and ask questions, or text in questions to an internet account that another club member would read out to us. Either the questions were for specific people or we would go down the line and all give out answers.

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, girlfriend, GLBTQIA+, paneling

Comments 7 Comments
Categories Asexuality

Went to the doctor

29 Mar

Content note: I discuss sex drive in this, in regards to its unpleasantness for me and its presence in psychiatric treatment.

Today I finally had an appointment with a psychiatrist to get on an antidepressant. I’m hoping that it’ll work and I won’t have to try another drug, but I go back in a month to assess how things are going. We’ll see around then whether things have kicked in or not. My main goal for treatment is to be moderately less of a slug than I am now, and to generally not be so sad.

One thing I was delightfully relieved about was that neither the counselor I spoke to nor the psychiatrist asked me how I was feeling sexually. Over the past few months, I read a lot on depression and tried to see if that fit me, and I ended up repeatedly taking self-scoring depression assessments to evaluate how I was feeling over time. A frequent question was something along the line of “have you had a decreased interest in sex?” and once or twice there was even “I do/do not enjoy spending time around and looking at attractive people.”

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, mental health, sex

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Asexuality

Stereotypical

25 Jan

I stopped watching House a long time ago for various reasons. But since I’m on Tumblr to be involved with the ace community there, it would’ve been hard for me not to hear about the other night’s episode.

Spoilers beyond this point and warning for ace stereotypes and medicalization of asexuality

Here’s a summary of the episode from an AVEN user. There was an eye-rolling-looking emoticon at the end but I can’t copy the animation and don’t know how to type it out. Also if you click the link, you have to click “Show” to show the spoiler text in the comment.

A lady with a bladder infection attracts the attention of House, who tries to prove that she and her husband aren’t really asexual. Watson stops him, so House investigates the husband, who turns out to have a tumor causing his lack of libido. Treating it, which is necessary for him to live, but make him sexual. The wife ends up revealing that she lied about her asexuality because she likes sex (Because all asexuals are repulsed).

I’m amused at the Watson/Wilson mixup but I will also say — I don’t care that Wilson said House was wrong at the beginning of the episode. The final impression left about asexuality isn’t going to be a couple of minutes at the beginning of the episode, it’s going to be how the episode wraps up. The conclusions that the brilliant Dr. House reaches about asexuality. That’s what people will take away. When House disproved the asexual characters, he also disproved Wilson.

There are so, so many things wrong here. The writer of the episode responded to criticism on Twitter. But that doesn’t really make it better.

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, invisibility, representation, respect, stereotypes

Comments 9 Comments
Categories Asexuality

Looking into 2012

30 Dec

The theme for this month’s blog carnival is unfulfilled desires as relating to asexuality, the ace community, etc. Because WordPress doesn’t allow you to put just part of a post behind a read-more cut, and some of this needs to be cut, I’ll talk about community first and myself second.

Community

In 2012 I’d like to see the ace communities I’m involved in be able to spend more time talking to each other, and to people interested in real discourse, and less time fending off attacks.

It makes me anxious to even start thinking of all we’ve been through this year, especially the aces, graces, and demis I know on Tumblr. I realize this isn’t really under our control, since there’s nothing we can do about people who just want to argue and rile us up, or the kind of people who don’t want to have conversations and prefer shouting matches — the kind of people who don’t respect us and refuse to try.

But I do wish for us that we can have a year where we get to have good conversations and nobody has to worry about being deliberately triggered or told horrible things about themselves.

I’d also like to see some more creative writing — original or fanfic — come up around the ace spectrum, because I like reading and being able to relate to or see commonalities in what I’m reading. I did write a fanfic prominently featuring asexuality this year, which was well-received by my small fandom, but not wanting to cross my online names I didn’t really promote it … at all.

Not that I need more projects, but it might be interesting to organize an ace fic fest since the one people had been talking about earlier never came to fruition. If I had the time and enough people were interested, I wouldn’t mind doing that.

Or possibly compiling an anthology of original fic, but I have no idea how I’d distribute it. Maybe a free e-book — but everyone contributing would have to be okay with that format, obviously.

Myself

I started this blog because I wanted to be more connected to the community. Because I felt alone, and I was too shy to be commenting on people’s blogs and I wasn’t involved with Tumblr at all, without having some kind of space to do my own writing.

Having this blog has helped me form some connections in the ace community that I never would’ve had otherwise, has introduced me to new contacts, and has shown me that I can actually make some physical transitions to get my body more aligned with my gender.

But you may have noticed I haven’t been updating as much recently.

Trigger Warning for depression and anxiety under the cut.

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, blog carnival, blog meta, fandom/fanfic, mental health, writing

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Asexuality

Asexual and neutrois

30 Oct

Although there were about eight years between the time I started identifying as asexual and when I started identifying as neutrois, I don’t think I could separate my asexuality from my gender, now.

But first I have to talk about how being asexual tied into my identification as neutrois. And I can see this post getting rather sprawling, so I’m going to attempt to use headings. I’m also going to put a cut, because this is kind of a long post.

(Warning: I talk about physical sex and sex drive in here, though not in much detail.)

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, binding, blog carnival, dysphoria, gender, genderqueer, images, neutrois, non-binary, presentation, transgender

Comments 5 Comments
Categories Asexuality, Neutrois

Boxes

15 Oct

Lately I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about my presentation, as it relates to my gender. My gender is neutrois, as I’ve talked about before, and I consider myself neutral-gendered. Masculine and feminine presentation don’t make me masculine or feminine, they’re just what I found striking while getting dressed. When I’m able, I want top surgery to make it possible for my body to be more neutral.

But there’s always going to be the issue of clothes. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how to comfortably incorporate the feminine details I enjoy in clothes into my wardrobe. I’m in the awkward situation now of almost never being able to go to the store; if I buy clothes within the next year, it’s going to have to be online. (Look at the confidence I hold in my ability to learn how to drive!)

Some things would be easy to buy. T-shirts, which already comprise 85% of my closet. I either measure myself, probably already own a t-shirt from the company, or can measure a t-shirt that fits comfortably to figure out what size to buy. Unisex t-shirts are also easy to find with masculine, feminine, and neutral designs and details.

When I wear my binder, I can wear men’s shirts without them gapping in the front. But I don’t want to wear my binder every day. I worry about long-term binding and I don’t like to bind for more than five hours at a time, although that might be partly because my binder isn’t broken in yet.

So while I’m working and until I have surgery, I’ll need women’s shirts. I understand this. In some situations, I prefer the women’s shirt. (For example, the other day I wanted a warm long-sleeved shirt to wear around the house in the winter. I ruled out the men’s because they didn’t have the pink flannel I liked best.) The surgery will just give me more options, and I’ll be able to buy women’s shirts because I like the design, not because I need the cut.

Obligatory momentary pause while I go all starry-eyed imagining never buying a bra again.

But then there’s … dresses. And skirts. I don’t know how to feel about these.

I used to hate them. I haven’t bought a dress since middle school — my grandma made me wear one to my uncle’s wedding. I’ve donated all my old Sunday dresses. I can’t remember if I wore skirts as a child or not. In undergrad, I never bought them, but I rarely bought clothes at all, and I blanched at the idea that I was expected to wear them. Now that I’m more comfortable in my gender, and at asserting control over what I wear, I … don’t know. And since I don’t own any anymore, I can just try one on for a day and see how I am.

It’s been causing me a bit of anxiety lately, not having any idea of how to express myself in clothing. I don’t want to be stuck in the men’s section of the store any more than I want to be stuck in the women’s section. I like things people consider masculine and I like things people consider feminine.

At the end of posts I like to come to some kind of resolution, but I don’t have one here. I don’t know how to fix this feeling I have, this anxiety that I’m going to get trapped into another box that I don’t want to be stuck in.

I don’t identify with masculinity any more than I identify with femininity. I just pick and choose the things I like, and I’m not in a position now where I can go and things on. So I’m just stuck … wondering, and fretting. I don’t know what my wardrobe will look like over the years, or whether skirts or dresses would help me feel better, help me feel less boxed in. I don’t know how I’m going to pick out clothes or makeup or accessories that let me look the way I feel when I wake up not wanting to be very masculine or very feminine.

Probably, I’m lucky that overall I don’t really care about fashion: if I could wear sweatpants and unisex t-shirts every day I’d probably be fine. But I can’t do that. So I have to … I don’t know. I have to wait, and see. And waiting is hard.

But I know that I don’t want to be trapped in another box.

Tags: binding, dysphoria, gender, genderqueer, neutrois, non-binary, presentation, transgender

Comments 3 Comments
Categories Neutrois

Writing porn while asexual

9 Sep

One of the things about being in a small fandom where there’s often opportunities to say “prompt me” is that I get a fair amount of prompts, which my guilt superpower then makes me feel compelled to write.

Note: this post discusses writing porn, although in general terms instead of anatomical ones. But because people scrolling through this blog are more likely to be repulsed than in other areas of the Internet, I’m putting the rest of it under a cut.

Continue reading →

Tags: asexuality, fandom/fanfic, writing

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories Asexuality

Carnival of Aces 5: Round-Up Post

1 Sep

Hey everyone! The fifth edition of A Carnival of Aces turned out pretty well, I think. We’ve got a lot of pondering about trends in media, specific characters, and even a couple of original fiction pieces.

Overall, it seems like there’s a long way to go and a lot to be desired from the media in terms of ace umbrella representation. But people are also thinking about it a lot — and that makes me think that the future media landscape will be a lot better for all of us.

You can still submit! I’ll add things to the round-up as long as you give me the link.

eowynjedi unearthed an original piece of writing about the character Silfren Aesculeus, who reflects on not falling in romantic love.

Carmilla DeWinter wrote about the concerns involved in writing H, an asexual aromantic character. Also in German/Deutsche here. (TW for instance of ableist language.)

Sciatrix laments how the creators of characters perceived as asexual react badly to others talking about the character being asexual.

veerserif discusses asexual fandom (not asexual_fandom, the DW community), interpreting characters, and awareness. (TW for instance of ableist language.)

Norah talks about the Dragon Age games, interpreting ace characters, and regrettably automatically-sexual romances.

nami_roland wants media that lets aromantics in from out of the cold, and esteems non-romantic love and non-romantic relationships.

pippin wrote Love and Punch, an aromantic retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

Emily rewatches and muses on Fruits Basket, and thinks there’s room in it to easily see a queerplatonic relationship or two. (TW for animated icon.)

psyche2332 wrote about aromantic media representation and the question, “Why is it not okay to not want romance?”

Elizabeth talks about asexuals in non-fiction, specifically creative non-fiction, and the beginning of a memoir.

And I picked apart a plot device (which involved glowing based on your sexual/romantic orientation) and its many unanswered questions.

Tags: asexuality, blog carnival, fandom/fanfic, invisibility, representation

Comments 6 Comments
Categories Asexuality

← Older Entries

Design a site like this with WordPress.com

Get started

Original Source | Taken Source

Search

an asexual space

What am I willing to share?

Shoulders

Asexual Paneling

Went to the doctor

Stereotypical

Looking into 2012

Asexual and neutrois

Boxes

Writing porn while asexual

Carnival of Aces 5: Round-Up Post

Blogroll

Categories

Recent Posts