"Ace week" in girl guiding.

The Times have reported on this today, with the paragraph

Angela Salt, chief executive of Girlguiding, said: “A year ago we did a consultation with members asking how inclusive we were as an organisation. Our membership — made up of girls, parents, carers, volunteers and staff — told us that we haven’t got it right, and we needed to do more to become truly inclusive.

I wonder what questions were on that consultation to result in Angela Salt thinking they needed an ace celebration week. And who do they send the consultation to? Do all members get it?

if you replaced ‘asexual’ with any other characteristic in some of the posts on this thread, such as homosexual, it would quite easily be seen as offensive.

Are you aware that Girl Guiding did NOT tweet anything for Lesbian Visibility Day?

Effzeh,

I completely agree. There are two bits to this I think.
Teens, at an appropriate age, exploring their feelings about their sexuality, with a trusted/appropriate adult or organisation. And to be fair there is enough info out there now, particularly on the internet, trained organisations and phse at school. I also think the main thing here has to be about their boundaries, it doesn’t matter how others label themselves and I agree GG should be a safe space for kids to be kids.

A children’s organisation promoting an everyone welcome message for members/leaders - pride, disability awareness etc. (All good so far) Without intrusively exploring or exposing the ins and outs of individuals sexuality. I have already had age-appropriate conversations with my pre-teen about what the extra pointy colours on the trans flag mean - I don’t need to discuss the finer points of whether brown owl is possibly asexual or a menopausal divorcee who prefers cats to men.

*almost entirely dismissive and hostile, not entirely (although the Times comments are entirely dismissive and hostile so far)

Effzeh that is why as I posted upthread, my DD’s asexuality is not something she has discussed with her younger siblings. She is not aromantic. They are two different things. You cannot have a discussion about asexuality without discussing or understanding sex. I don’t think it would be appropriate to discuss sex outside the home or sex education at school for a ten year old. I agree that ‘some people do not want to get married and have babies’ is quite fine for a 10 year old, but moving up the school, that is not what my DD got. She got ‘we are going to talk about sex because sooner or later, you are all going to want to have sex with someone’.

But anyway, ten year olds are not the audience of tweets. Therefore, the furore about this is not just about what is appropriate to teach to 10-14 year olds, it is about the societal place of asexuality. Which from this thread (and the comments under the Times article on the same topic today) is entirely dismissive and hostile.

And I don’t think it Is just because asexuality is impossible to discuss without mentioning sex or what you do with your bits. Arguably, homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality are about what you do with your bits. The whole entire history of marriage is about ensuring that sex is for procreation within a family unit (where and how bits are used). Until relatively recently in time, there were few opportunities for women outside marriage. Until relatively recently, women were condemned for sex outside marriage, particularly if they got pregnant. A whole social system based around what you do with your bits, which young people were (and still are to a large extent) socialised into.

Homosexuality among men was criminalised for a long time (and there was also an attempt to criminalise lesbianism in the 1920s), so society was very exercised about what men (and less so women) did sexually. Gay liberation was all about acceptance of what people did with their bits and with who.

And yet, asexual people are supposed to shut up and hide away because their existence can apparently be used to further the medicalisation of gender non-conformity, it may be a foil for paedophilia, they may be objectified and fetishised as an object of desire, it is part of a woke agenda - what else from this thread?

So it is not only because asexuality is about sex and an organisation which provides extracurricular activities for 10-14 years olds has tweeted about it (to their adult members), it is because broader society a) does not know how to place asexuality given the whole entire history and culture is built around marriage and family as the foundation of society and that is only slowly changing, b) part of that change has been the ever increasing saturation of sexual culture in our society, and c) that same society is fractured or even divided by identity politics and asexuality is seen as part of that, rather than something like homosexuality, ie just how people are (and also forgetting that the freedom if you like, to openly live and define as homosexual was hard fought for).

So rather than being just how someone is and accepted as that, an asexual person - going by this thread - has all this cultural and identity politics baggage to contend with, and I am minded to agree with whoever posted that if you replaced ‘asexual’ with any other characteristic in some of the posts on this thread, such as homosexual, it would quite easily be seen as offensive.

effzeh, purgatory that is making a lot of sense, yes. I'm pleased to see this thread on a more sensible track after rather alarming digressions on the earlier pages.

And there's no way to explain that clearly without focussing directly on sexual activity. It's not about who you love, or who you want to live with, which are the kinds of things a child or younger teenager has a reasonably clear, if immature, understanding of. It's specifically about what you do or do not want to do with your sex organs. Which a child or younger teenager really should not have to think about until they reach the appropriate level of maturity and initiate that conversation or train of thought for themselves, rather than having it imposed on them by wokesters (or worse).

Agreed with posters above. It's because the -sexual suffix in asexual has a different function to the one in, for example, bisexual.

In bisexual, it means attracted to both sexes.

In asexual, it means not having sexual feelings.

In terms of meaning, and what we think is appropriate to discuss with that age group, the word on the same footing as heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual is actually aromantic- someone who doesn't experience romantic feelings/urges.

and it wouldn't be sexual. I agree that asexuality should be told about to teens by teachers, not at guides to younger ones.

thefarting - being lesbian/bi isn't just about sex- after all a 10-year-old girl could have a crush on a girl

I've just worked out why I think this is so red-flaggy.

The reason the ace discussion is significantly different from talking to children about gay/lesbian relationships, is that the kinds of conversations most of us would have with children or younger teenagers centre around the relationship aspect: 'Yes, some women fall in love with men and marry/live with them. But some women fall in love with other women, and some men marry other men.' It's all about love, relationships, domestic setups, and you can have that entire conversation without in any way discussing sexual activity or what people do in bed.

By contrast it's hard to see how you could have a discussion about asexuality without that leading pretty directly onto questions about sexual activity. Of course you could say, 'some people don't fall in love with anyone', but that's not what ace means, and in any case the fact that some people aren't or don't want to be in a love relationship is included in the more neutral 'some people fall in love with...' conversation.

That's why this whole ace celebration feels so wrong - it's pretty much guaranteed to initiate some kind of direct discussion of sexual activity.

Apols if others have made this point before me and I missed it...

I've asked HQ why they deleted my post! Given that the girl guides have specifically made provision for transwomen to be leaders, and they are specifically talking to children about sexuality, I don't see how it can break any guidelines.

@Datun a generation steeped in queer theory, porn culture and doing anything and everything for social media validation. Including transwomen, yes.

But now? No thanks.

Nobody has mentioned the boundaries of guide leaders being violated. As with their queer theory UMA, I didn't sign up for having to teach or even discuss this sort of thing as a leader. I'm not qualified to pontificate on other people's sexualities or gender identities. It's one thing if topics better suited to sex ed just happen to come up in the course of a wider conversation, quite another if GGUK is actively promoting it as something that they are supporting, and by extension, individual unit leaders should be/are seen to be supporting. I have been hanging in there - unhappily - as a leader, hoping things get better, but I don't think I can carry on anymore. There are very few women willing to volunteer as leaders, ime, the most we've able to get is a unit helper who will come in every fortnight, and even then, they don't sign up for all the drudge work, the sesson prep and reams of paperwork. Lots of older leaders in my area quit during covid, and have not been replaced. What is GGUK trying to achieve? We are not PSHE trained, we are not counsellors, we are not gender theory experts. Exactly who will be the new people setting up units? Let me guess.

If you actually bothered to read the thread you'd know what the actual issue is, and then know why your post is whataboutery

How is it whataboutery when it's about the same topic?
Or is that only OK for some people to do, if you don't present as straight you should hide it?
As that's how Katies post came across and that's the one I was commenting in relation to.
Oh and yes, I could be bi, pan or ace, but I'd still be presenting as straight and that seemingly is OK and nobody has a problem with that on social media.

my FB says I'm married.
To my husband.
(I'm straight.)
Somebody mentioning they're gay, bi, pan or ace, is just doing the same surely.

No, not really. Saying you are married to a man doesn't equal saying you are straight. You could be "bi, pan or ace" after all.

I'm somewhat unimpressed by the woes of the asexuals, tbh. I accept that there are a minority of people who don't experience any sexual feelings. I don't think asexuals suffer any greater oppression in a sex-satured culture than heterosexuals, homosexuals or bisexuals. We all face assumptions and pressure to pair off romantically, and there's no guarantee of pairing off happening if you're het of LGB anyway.

So the whole "I'm asexual, so it's bad form to ask if I've got or want a partner" thing almost suggests it's fine to badger het or LGB people about that. What occurs to me is that if you're asexual and don't have a partner, the most irksome thing about that question is just people asking. If you're het or LGB and people ask, they're also possibly reminding you that you're lonely and wanting a relationship. So, to be perfectly honest, in a highly sexualized society, where even 'Asexual activists' post pics of themselves and boast about how 'hot' they are, asexuals are probably relatively privileged.

Mind your own blimmin' business should really be the next 'awareness movement'.

my FB says I'm married.
To my husband.
(I'm straight.)
Somebody mentioning they're gay, bi, pan or ace, is just doing the same surely.
Or should they just keep quiet and not mention it on there.