Report-Out from Creating Change: Day 2

Things really heated up during the second day of Creating Change, we find that we might get a real seat at the table to discuss national policy!

Report-Out from Creating Change: Day 1

The first of three report-outs from the Creating Change Conference, the biggest LGBTQ activist conference of the year!

Update on Visibility Work in 2012

Asexuals called Lepers on Fox News

Two days ago Fox News decided to use Tony Bogaert’s new book as an excuse to discuss the ace community:



The clip, while pretty grim, is also somewhat unsurprising. It’s a pretty accurate (if confusingly kooky) representation of the kind of ignorant and dismissive comments that asexuals and grey-a’s receive when we talk about our experience.

Unlike gay, lesbian, bi, pan and trans folks, who get discriminated against with much more direct hate speech, our community tends to get dismissed offhand and told that we’re broken. It’s a different experience than that of many other people in the queer community, but I can tell you from experiencing it firsthand that being told that you’re broken still sucks. It’s why a lot of people out there (especially young people) beat themselves up unless they can meet some cosmo-defined manifestation of sexual desire. It’s why a lot of people are afraid that if they can’t find sexual intimacy they won’t be able to find intimacy, period.

I’ve talked about asexuality a LOT, and noticed that it does a funny thing to many people’s brains. A lot of people out there have so deeply internalized the idea that sex and intimacy are velcroed together that their brain skips around the idea of asexuality like a damaged CD. Something about the idea of asexual people doesn’t fit into their worldview, and so they make up any ridiculous excuse they can to unmake or ignore us.

A great example is this segment on Fox, where the presented asks “do asexual people exist?” and all anyone can do is come up with reasons to avoid the question. They hypothesize that all women are asexual (really?!?), and talk about how we must be lepers that no one wants to touch. Then they talk about how if we DO exist we’d have to be boring and lifeless.

This kind of mental glitching definitely creates problems for the ace community, but I’m not bringing it up because I think that we’re victims. I’m bringing it up because it seems like something worth investigating, a bug in the code of our cultural understanding of sexuality that talking about asexuality lays bare. I have many sexual friend’s who’s understanding of concepts like sexuality and intimacy has been fundamentally transformed by thinking about the asexual community, and they tell me that that’s a good thing.

There’s a petition asking Fox to actually INTERVIEW asexual people next time they cover us. I guess my final thought is this: If people are finding excuses to dismiss us, if their mind immediately jumps to all of the ways that we’re broken, then maybe they should ask themselves why that is.

Asexy Politics: Asexuality and the Law

As part of my ongoing adventures, I just went to give a talk at The Washington University Law School. There's been a wave of interest recently from law schools, asexuality represents unexplored legal territory, and it's a fascinating exercise for lawstudents to hypothesize what that territory might look like.

A couple of examples came up, though interestingly most of them related to romantic orientation more than to asexuality.

1) Discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal. You can't fire someone just for being gay (though in many places you CAN fire someone just for being transgendered.) Does this apply to asexual people? In several states asexuality is already listed as a protected sexual orientation, and in the states where it's not that could oblst an argument for inclusion.

2) Things get dicier when you ask whether this extends to romantic orientation. What if someone is being discriminated against for being aromantic or homoromantic? Right now this is a concept that the law doesn't recognize or protect. Say an ace talks about building an intimate community, that wierds out their boss and they get fired. It's unclear how the law would handle that.

3) Speaking of people getting wierded out, it seems

Iike there may be unclear implications for sexual harrassment law. Under what circumstances does an asexual person engaging in nonsexual intimacy (presumably awkwardly) constitute sexual harrassment?

On to relationship law. Legally, the court can't "discover" whether or not two people are having concentual sex. So long as a relationship between two aces looks outwardly like a sexual relationship the two are indistinguishable to the court. This gets complicated when:

4) There's a question of custody or inheritance. If two people aren't married but SEEM LIKE they're knocking boots (and are straight), then the court has a history of considering them to be more weighty in questions of inheritance, child custody, etc. For aces who are just as intimate but who use less romantic language to describe their relationships, this could create some funky legal territory.

5) If you get deeper into nonsexual intimacy, everything goes haywire. Consider two people who are nonsexually intimate and who couldn't become sexually intimate in a way that the court would approve of. Two sisters can't legally be coparents of the same child, but two unrelated not-sexin' best friends can.

6) Of course, things REALLY get scandelous if you're some degenrate who has intimate nonsexual relationships with more than one person. This is verboden, since the court thinks it could pave the way for polygamist cults in Utah to force young women to marry old men. (Um, are we REALLY drawing the right legal line here?) Say that I'm triangulating with a sexual couple and thhe three of us raise a kid together- there's no way for me to legally be a part of that kid's life. The way around this would be to create something that's a cross between a marraige certificate and a binding legal contract, though we're a ways from this sort of contract being recognized by the state in the way that a marraige or civil union is.

Happy to hear any thoughts/corrections from the legal community!!

Asexy Politics: Report-Out From Creating Change

This is a big deal.

To understand how big a deal, let’s back things up.

The year is 2004, AVEN is a less than a month into its first big media wave in the UK, and Creating Change Conference comes to my hometown of St. Louis Missouri. Naturally, I sign up as a volunteer to check it out, and I’m blown away, BLOWN AWAY, by what I see. Every power player in the national gay rights, trans rights and queer movements are there, along with hundreds of community centers and student organizers, most of the people that we need to have asexuality widely embraced across the movement. I frantically go around to tables and workshop sessions, handing out pamphlets and getting brushed off by one organization after another. The asexual community was still tiny, not even a blip on the political radar screen, and these groups all have more pressing things to focus on. For every year since then I’ve been pushing to get a workshop at the conference, trying to get a platform to reach out to this close-knit community of activists.

Well this year, thanks to the help of Asexual Awareness Week and the (A)sexual documentary we got one, and it landed better than we could have hoped. Here’s a blow-by-blow for anyone interested in the state of ace politics.

Day 1:

I arrive on next to no sleep and meet up with Sarah Beth Brooks of Asexual Awareness Week. Sarah Beth’s a veteran of the marriage equality movement in California, and knows the crowd at the conference like the back of her hand.

We start working the tables, hitting up the big LGBT political groups and comprehensive sex ed organizations. Pretty much all of them have heard something about asexuality and want to learn more (very different than the situation in 2004.) They get a slightly overwhelmed look in their faces when both of us walk up and hand them different business cards as if to say “The asexual community is ORGANIZED now? Like, with two distinct organizations? Crap...”

We have the same proposal for all of them- distribute information about asexuality anywhere that you do education, and have an educational session for your internal staff so that they can learn more about asexuality. All of the major orgs take us up on the offer except (unfortunately) for GLSEN (we just need to find a new contact there.)

Stash of business cards in hand, we head to our session. We have NO idea how many people will show up, average session size is about 15, and we’re competing with about two dozen other conference workshops. The film’s director, the stellar and badass Angela Tucker, shows up to be nervous with us. As 1:00PM rolls around people start coming through the door.

And keep coming.

All of the chairs in the room fill up, then all of the space along the back wall and in the aisles. In the end there were about 150 people, though the space couldn’t have physically held any more.

The three of us head out for the actual movie (we’ all seen it dozens of times already), and sneak back into the room for Q&A as the film wraps up. The response is incredibly positive. People ask thoughtful questions about how to integrate asexuality into work already being done by the LGBTQ movement, and many many people in the audience mention that they are going to fight to get the film shown at their campus/community center/etc.

The formal session time is over, so we invite anyone who wants to to join us on the floor out in the hall to keep the conversation going. About 35 people join us (remember, average session size is about 15) and it quickly becomes clear that they don’t want to talk about the film. Most of the people sitting in the circle are Ace, and many are struggling to build awareness and find acceptance in their own lives. We quickly break into groups to let everyone share their experiences and trade tips on building LGBTQ allies that we can trust.

Fun fact: many campuses don’t host ace events because they haven’t heard anyone requesting them. When they finally do, it’s not uncommon for dozens of people on a campus to come out of the woodwork and find one another. Really powerful.

Day 2:

We’ve decided to host an asexual/grey-A caucus, so I stop by Whole Foods. Turns out it is (I kid you not) National Chocolate Cake Day:


I get two.

We show up at the conference and head straight for the conference organizers, telling them about our massive turnout and requesting a caucus session. They’re very impressed (clearly they didn’t see this coming), and get busy arranging something for us. They announce our session on the main stage, in front of the entire conference, and a panel of international bigwigs, including Obama’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Huzzah!

That afternoon we grab 45 minutes with Mara Keisling, Trans Lobbyist Rockstar, Jedi Master, and huge ace ally since forever. We focus our discussion on responding to the recent House episode, though it quickly gets into her broader political assessment of the state of the ace community. She’s very impressed with how far we’ve come, and wants to work with us however she can to help us along. An extremely cool and experienced organizer from Denver volunteers to hang out with us and take notes.

She also talks about how shocklingly common it is for people in the trans community to use the word “asexual” to describe themselves, though they only sometimes use the word with a definition similar to ours. Turns out the the trans community has a pretty massive contingent of aces which is (on an organizational level) disconnect from the pretty massive contingent of trans, genderqueer, and nuetrois folks within the ace community.

This makes me rub my hands together a bit. On an organizational level, there are a lot of trans support groups out there that don’t really know that much about supporting aces, and very clearly should. Similarly, the main ace organizations that exist have yet to really effectively integrate resources to support/make a safe space for trans and genderqueer folks (despite the disproportionate percentage of our community that identifies this way.)

Here’s what it might look like:

• A couple folks from the ace community (who may or may not have some student organizing, writing, social media, or web design experience) could form a an Ace Gender Taskforce.
• Right away they could reach out to lower-level staffers from organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality (I know some) or people who serve the trans community in some way (I know some of them too) to either join the team or serve as advisors.
• They could set up meetings with/get elected to/volunteer on the AVEN PT, the Asexual Awareness Week core team, and organizations which do support and advocacy with transpeople. They could take resources from one set of organizations and help integrate them into the other. They could serve as ambassadors, making sure that trans and/or ace issues get meaningfully addressed.
• They could start a kickass blog about it.
• They could then speak about it at conferences like Creating Change (I guarantee we’ll have sessions next year) or at campuses around the country (where there’s a lot of interest in this overlap.)

Back to the conference:

After our power sit-down, we grab our cake and hoof it over to the ace caucus. About 15 people show up, almost all of whom are Ace identified, and we get into a discussion about the future of the movement and about how to more effectively to ace organizing in highschools and college campuses. For those of you who didn’t see the latest AAW census, a 59% of our community is currently in highschool or college, it’s an extremely important place to be doing visibility work.

We finish the cakes and check out for the night, though another rockstar organizer sticks around to help us plan a few amazing things that are still to be announced. At around 10PM Sara Beth and I finally call it a day and go out for celebratory beers. We (finally) check in about our personal lives, both filled with large, complex communities of people who love us. It’s good to get to check in with another Ace about our experience, to talk to someone who really understand the connection between the feeling of impact and the feeling of connection.

Touch

I’ve been thinking a lot about touch.

When I was in undergrad I really craved touch, but had no way to get it. Touch was either something that was fleeting and affectionate, or something that led to sexuality. To desire nonsexual touch in a relationship was either creepy (if the relationship wasn’t sexual) or inadequete (if it was.) I saw my desire for touch as toxic, something that could poison my connections with the people that I cared about, and so I kept it far removed. It waited there, unfulfilled and unconnected from any one person, while my brain raced trying to figure out when initiating touch was ok.

Eventually I did figure that out. In my experience touch helps relationships when it expresses and reinforces emotion, it should occur after some activity (a conversation, a particularely powerul dance party) that generates emotion that needs to be expressed. But that’s not my piont.

A few months ago, I was hanging out with an Ace on a college campus who was exactly where I used to be. I asked him how it felt, and he said that he just couldn’t envision finding a relationship where he could have the kind of touch he wanted. He had that same look of humble sadness and fear that I used to have.

My point is that, as the Ace community, we should really get on this.

I started doing an exercise during my talks where I ask people to come up with as many words as they can for distinct forms of cuddling. I get about three: spooning, hugging, and nuzzling. I ask them to compare that to the number of words that they know for different types of sex.

Three words. There are a few more if you really dig for them, but not many. Without more words, how are we supposed to talk about the kind of touch we want? How are we supposed to know what kind of touch is POSSIBLE for us to want? How are we supposed to have meaningful discussions about consent? (Part of why I felt unsafe expressing a desire for touch was that I couldn’t ask people where their barriers were.) How are we supposed to name the kinds of relationships that involve the kind of touch that we want.

Sexual people have lovers, one night stands, fuckbuddies, partners, and books and books filled with positions and tactics that they can’t seem to get enough of. We have, in a few short years, done a fantastic job building an open-source taxonomy to describe the kinds of emotional intimacy that we form. We have biromantics, squishes, squashes, intimate communities, asexiness and ever-present cake. It’s time we spent a little more time talking about touch.

I’m looking at you, Tumblr.

Response to "What Can we Learn from Asexuality"

My friend Rachel White just wrote up an interview we did in NYC at the movie premier there. I wrote up a quick comment on her post, and thought I would post it here.

http://rachelrabbitwhite.com/lets-talk-about-what-can-we-learn-from-asexuality/

First off, my fingernails are NOT cute. They’re a wreck. Honestly, it’s a matter of some embarrassment.

Second- you’ll be glad to know that Dan Savage and I are making peace, we’re setting up a Skype call to hash things out. I’m hoping that he’ll get the overlap between what the Ace community is doing and his interest in pushing the national dialog around nonmonogamy.

I want to call out that moment that you describe, where we sit across the table and realize that there’s intimacy there and realize that it doesn’t have to go in a sexual direction. There’s something powerful there, a skill that most asexuals learn of stopping and saying “There’s the potential for intimacy here, what direction do I want to take it in?” It’s not just that there are nonsexual directions to chose from, it’s that some of those directions can create things that are extraordinary.

On a fundamental level, business is about people connecting. So is art. So is politics. So is social justice. So is science. Drive that sense of intimacy in the right direction and you don’t just get a warm fuzzy feeling, you get a killer startup, a magnum opus, a piece of legislation, a community center, a breakthrough discovery. Get smart with it, and intimacy can create anything.

Asex Notes From A Sex Party

I finally made it to a sex party last night.

Recently there’s been a wave of friends inviting me to sex parties, which (if you’ve never had the experience) is a little like your accountant friends inviting you to a REALLY GOOD conference on depreciation schedules. You wanna go, because bookkeeping is one of those things that’s good to understand and because it’s a rigorous intellectual and social challenge, but somehow it’s just hard to find the time.

One serendipetous hole in my schedule later and there I was, in a room with burning sage, about 15 people, safer sex supplies, free snacks and a conspicuous lack of writing implements. The queerness of the place immediately put me at ease. A few trans people took a break from their cuddling to give me a warm welcoming smile, and I knew that everyone in the room would value me exploring my own experience on my own terms. I’ve had very different experiences in some sex positive spaces, and I sat down deeply relieved.

The facilitator who started us off was a real artist, and I took vigorous mental notes on how he established a space for a deep connection that many people in the room were still a little terrified by. He established a fragmented identity structure, where some people used their given names and some people used chosen names like “Firefly” (I’m making up these pseudonyms to protect anonymity.) This let people either tap into their consistent, centralized notion of self (“I am Paul”), or use a new one created for the purposed of exploration (“I am Prometheus”). Very cool trick. There were some light Ganzian tactics as we each told a quick story about why we had come and how our bodies felt in the moment. We discussed the importance of consent, and practiced the art of graceful rejection. The group dynamics nerd in me was cooing. As we went around, I was the only one to belt out my full name, having long since abandoned the notion that my sexual identity is in any way private. “David Jay,” I said. Look me up on LinkedIn.

After the intros, we were instructed to lie on the ground with our feet facing inward and pleasure ourselves. They probably meant to say “pleasure yourselves sexually,” but that constraint just made the whole exercise a lot less interesting. What would you do if someone asked you to lie on the ground and do whatever you could to make yourself happy? I redied myself for a Zen exercise on the nature of happiness; hands on my chest, slow breaths, deck of joyful memories at the ready. It’s always a challenge to translate sexual language into something that makes sense, but when I do I find the results force me to do some very cool exploration. I let out a little chuckle, like I could take whatever the situation was going to throw at me. Bring it, sex party. I reappropriate more sexual tension before breakfast than most people have all day.

My neatly laid plans lasted all of 10 seconds. Before I could take my first few breaths of Zen happiness, I felt the energy of everyone else in the room pooling around my back like cold water. There was POWER in what they were experiencing, and there was no way I could isolate myself from it. The energy was foreign and forceful, coming off of the people around me in waves that crashed together and rippled. My neck, shoulders, and hands all tensed as I was thrown by the storm. I tried to find a way to level out, tried to ride the group’s energy to wherever it wanted to take me, but despite my training I kept forgetting to breathe or breathing too fast. My whole body felt shattered, and as the rest of the group settled down I lay there, muscles twitching.

We were instructed to stand up and let our desires guide us, which was one again difficult to interpret. I was pretty far removed from any sort of desire. What did I WANT in that moment? To be grounded, to talk, to put myself back together. Part of me knew that finding someone to talk to would be difficult. Everyone else was presumably following their desires in a very different direction, and even if someone DID want to talk my experience would be so foreign to them that I would need to spend the entire conversation explaining the basics. I was in this challenge alone, but that had never stopped me before. I stood up and started to parse the problem as those around me disrobed. The group’s energy was a factor that couldn’t be ignored, and one where the carefully crafted rules of consent didn’t apply unless I up and left. My mind began racing through every model I had of emergent community dynamics, looking for some metaphore that could serve as a guide. Could I rejigger ethnographic technique? The signalling and reverberating pressure reminded me of dynamics in dense crowds and of the kind of open ideation found in really good sustainability workshops, but that was no help in accounting for the foreigness of it all. I raced through memories and models related to the stranger, the outsider, my body and the room forgotten, my mind desperate and alive. All too often the only option in these situations is to either run or square your shoulders and do the fucking MATH.

I needed to write. I started searching the room desperately for a whiteboard or a pen and paper, but the space was poorly equiped for my needs. At the back of the room there was a large cloth hanging to create a barrier, and behind the cloth there was a small space with a hard, concrete floor and little light. Still no pens, but I stayed back there and started pacing, letting my thoughts punctuate through my body and into the floor. I reached out my arms, as if to shape the concepts in the air and nudge them into one another, a great imaginary fractal stretching out around me. I began to dance.

Dancing felt right. My hands and bare feet struck the ground hard, as I let myself explode and fall with the music and the energy just barely dampened by the curtain. I let my thoughts slowly drift away and just MOVED, slowly and then quickly, leaping into the air with the waves and then holding as they crashed across my back. I was alone still, behind a curtain and invisible, but at least I wasn’t shattered. I kept dancing, beginning to wish that someone would join me but knowing that my experience was too alien to everyone else to expect any kind of companionship. I reached out and punched the cloth barrier, letting it bounce and reverberate. I flew into the air and landed with a loud clap. I started making noise.

About ten minutes later the facilitator came back and began dancing with me, his movements small and uncertain, probably to check in and see how I was doing. I thanked him for joining me, and as we danced I began to tell him about my experience, about translation, and about why I had come. I beamed, letting him know that I didn’t need his support but welcomed his company. Someone else came through the barrier to use the restroom, then stopped to dance with us as he came back. The three of us whirled together, and on my signal we took the cloth barrier and pulled it back, bringing our two spaces together.

I looked out across a floor covered in bodies, and was struck by how SLOW they all were. I felt alive, like I was soaring through the open air, and for a moment I couldn’t understand why everyone else was just lying there. There is a certain beauty in it, of course, in the experience of choosing one person, lying on the ground with them and finding a universe in the smallest of movements. But there is also something to be said for harnessing the community’s power and dancing above it all. As my two fellow dancers descended back to the floor I started noticing all of the things that could only be seen from my vantage point. The way that a sudden burst of laughter would arc across the room, giving others permission to roughhouse like children. I started noticing how certain people contributed to the community, how playfullness radiated from her and a sense of safe intensity came from him. I kept on dancing, giddy with the majesty of it all.

I time became impossible to track. I started dripping sweat and took of my shirt to keep cool. Couples who were relaxing would lean back and watch me, and on occassion they would stand and let their limbs flow or even join me for a short while. I couldn’t quite tell, but it seemed like I was creating permission for a different type of movement, one that people were unaccustomed to in this space but that a few of them explored in small, ginger steps. When members of the group that I had noticed took breaks I would approach them and tell them what I saw, explaining their contribution to the community and appreciating them for things that they had been unable to perceive so close to the ground. They smiled at this, though I couldn’t tell if it was because they enjoyed it or if it was because they found my whole presence there adorable.

Eventually I collapsed on a couch, my muscles sore and satisfied. I glanced at my phone to see that I had been dancing hard for almost three straight hours. I was a half hour late to an event that some of my MBA friends were hosting, so I notified the facilitator that I needed to pack up and leave. I would have liked to stay, of course, to close out the night and hear what others thought of my strange practice, but in the scheme of things this night was just my own little experience. I had no real relationships here, no connections to the power that comes from finding shared passions and working in the world. The bigger thing, the more powerful thing, has always been the community where those things happen. And it was calling.

My Worldview in a Nutshell

Pretty much everything worth talking about, from global civilization to a human relationship to an individual thought, is an example of a complex system with emergent properties. [Oh noes! Math!]

These systems are driven by the evolutionary algorithm: differentiation, selection, and exploration. When differentiation, selection, and exploration happen you get thinking, relationships and cool civilizations, when they fail you don’t.

Exploration is about going down a path and discovering a punch of other paths. It requires the time, energy, and information to properly explore.

Differentiation is about understanding which options are worth pursuing. It involves looking at a bunch of options and saying “these few are the interesting ones.” It’s often about understanding, expressing, and absorbing emotion. If you don’t pay attention to emotion, you’ll go down a path that makes people cranky.

Selection is about making plans to explore an option or a set of options. It involves good planning, solid commitments, mobilizing resources, and having the necessary expertise. Selection requires tasklisters, trust and training.

The evolutionary algorithm tends to operate across scale. An evolving highschool is made up of evolving groups, which are made up of evolving relationships which are made up of evolving conversations which are made up of evolving thoughts. This creates a fractal-like structure. It also creates “Black Swan” uncertainty in which big, totally unexpected events happen out of nowhere.

Our brains are tribe machines. (If I’m reading Dunbar right.) We evolved them to think about relationships with other people, not to do abstract algebra. This means that we’re much, much better at thinking about the way that human relationships evolve than we are at thinking about anything else.

Unfortunately, the way that we talk about relationships fundamentally limits this power. The concepts that we use to describe relationships (“finding the one,” “just friends,” “networking,”) tend to prevent meaningful connections from forming. They get in the way of the evolutionary algorithm doing its thing. Someone could probably find a nifty way to blame this on something, but I don’t really care.

This means that in most human situations the evolutionary algorithm is somehow being suppressed. If you know how to identify and remove that suppression, you can create disruptive self-organization pretty much anywhere.

Hot Pieces of Ace! Coming out, and Romance v Friendships

I've been officially recruited as a vlogger on the phenominal Hot Pieces of Ace. Hopefully this will finally get me off my butt and generating Ace-relevant content. (I've been giving my love to my other blog.) Here are two videos, I'll post more as the weeks go on.

The Art of Mind-Blowing Conversation

Let’s face it: as Aces, conversation is what we’ve got. Cuddling is all well and good, but when it comes to creating close relationships with others we can basically figure out how to have soul-touching, mind-blowing conversations or we can get busy feeling bored. I want to talk quickly about how conversations work and how to reliably make them powerful and interesting.
A conversation is an animal. It’s created by the people who start it, but it has its own life and it’s own heartbeat. You can’t really control conversations without breaking them, but you can learn to tame them, feed them, and lead them in interesting directions. Outright control of a conversation is manipulation, and it’s a nasty business that tends to preclude the really interesting possibilities. What I’m talking about here is facilitation: gently nudging conversations into more and more powerful territory, without really understanding what will happen beforehand.

Conversations are like animals in that they evolve over time. This is great news, because even though science still doesn’t understand conversations that well, we do understand evolution. Recent research in a field called emergence or complexity theory has demonstrated that systems which evolve have a surprising amount in common: from ecosystems, to economies to cities to the development of the internet. In all of these systems, and in conversations, the same basic process happens over and over again. If you understand that process it’s possible to nudge it along, to take the slowly grinding wheel of evolution and give it a few extra shoves.

It turns out that internets and conversations and fungal spores and social movements are all just doing the same three things, over and over and over. Pretent for a second that you’re a DJ, looking out over a packed club that’s just beginning to move. You’re swapping beats in and out, trying to figure out what gets the crowd moving. As you swap songs and watch the crowd, here’s what’s going through your head:

Differentiate- Some types of music get the crowd moving and others don’t. Do they want hip hop or reggea? Top 40 or mid-90s? How do they respond when you up the bass?

Select- Of all of the musical choices at your fingertips, you want to identify just the ones that get the crowd moving.

Amplify- Now queu up more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn’t.

Repeat- Now you’ll be able see how the crowd responds to your new, amplified music and refine it even further. As the crowd shifts over the course of the night, you’ll be able to shift with them. You just keep repeating all night long: differentiate, select, amplify, differentiate, select, amplify, until the crowd is going wild.

The same basic principle is true for conversations. In conversations you’re not (necessarily) trying to get people on the dancefloor, you’re trying to create emotional resonance. Believe it or not, when you have a good conversation a certain part of your brain, called the limbic system, actually syncs up with the brain of the person you’re talking to. Like, if both of you were sitting and chatting in an MRI machine your limbic systems would sort of pulse in unison. Dogs have limbic systems that are bigger than ours, which is why you can make eye contact with a dog and instantly feel like you’re having a conversation.

Limbic systems sync up when you are feeling the same thing as someone else. The connection gets stronger when the feeling gets stronger, and when you become more accutely aware of the fact that someone else is sharing it. If DJs want to get people moving on the dance floor, adept conversationalists zero in on shared, strong emotion.

The Opening

Uncovering this sort of emotion can be tricky. Most people don’t talk about strong feelings easily. Once polite tactic is to meander around conversation topics that both people are emotionally attached to (“how about that local sports team?”), but that rarely goes anywhere unique or interesting. Instead it’s best to listen for topics that contain little blips of emotional energy, select them, and amplify.

For example: how should you open a conversation with someone that you don’t know? Let’s take a look at some standard openings:

“It’s hot out today!”- You’ve just expressed a strong feeling, way to set the bar. But you’ve also made the conversation about the weather. They’re sure to feel SOMETHING about the weather, so you’ll have enough emotion to string a conversation on, but those emotions probably won’t get too intense. You’ve just set a template for mediocrity. Next.

“How are you doing?”- Gutsy. You’ve just pinged their overall emotional state. If they are particularly open and they’re particularly open they may talk about something that they have strong feelings about in that moment, and you’ll have a conversation topic that you can take you far. If not they’ll say “Fine, how about you?” and you’ll have to take another shot.

“What do you do?”- Asking someone about their work brings up whatever emotions they feel about that work. All too often this is a mix of boredom and frustration, not the most interesting wavelength to hop on with someone. Like the weather, this conversation topic is low-risk (they probably have some feelings about what they do all day) but low-reward (the strongest of those emotions are probably ones that you don’t share in a precise way.)

“What do you do for fun?”- This is my personal favorite, because it’s got a great emotion to latch onto. It gets people reliving a bunch of positive memories, which makes let’s you take the conversation in a direction that’s interesting and upbeat. It also gives you important information about how to have fun with someone, which is the backbone of most good friendships.

From Good to Mind-Blowing

Say you’ve struck up a good rapport and found a topic of conversation that’s got someone excited. You’re probably both having fun, but you wouldn’t call it mind-blowing. The difference between a good conversation and a mind-blowing conversation is that good conversations are entertaining and mind-blowing conversations are transformative. People walk out of them different than when they walked into them. That’s the kind of conversation we’re going for.

In good conversations we recount things that we’ve experienced before, and have some good, clean fun reliving the emotions involved. In mind-blowing conversations we experience powerful emotions for the first time, which makes them much messier and much more potent. Once someone feels safe enough you can nudge conversations toward these unique, emotionally powerful experiences. You just need to know how to listen.

Most of the time, most people talk about things that they’ve talked about. If you’re talking about the game next Friday, chances are it will be like the game next Friday. If you’re asking someone about their hometown, they’ll probably give the same schpiel that they’ve been giving since they left. Where this isn’t true is around major points of transition in people’s lives: big changes that are happening or that people want to happen. Points of transition can be obvious, like having a baby or starting a new job, or they can be subtle, like a nagging sense of spiritual uncertainty.

If you get whiff of a transition point, steer the conversation towards it and learn what you can. Parts of the transition will be picked over, things that the person you’re talking to has already talked about ad nauseum with friends and relatives, but if you listen closely you can find patches of conversational territory that are still fresh and unexplored. These are the areas where the conversation can become more powerful; where new, unexplored emotions sit waiting in the reeds.

When people start to delve into these powerful unexplored places, tap into your sense of empathy. Most humans are surprisingly empathetic. If we see someone get poked in the arm we don’t just imagine the pain, the part of our brain that connects to our arm actually experiences pain. There’s a whole section of our brain that does nothing but keep track of which feelings come from us and which come from the people we’re looking at. When this part of the brain shuts down, people actually physically feel pain then they see it inflicted on others.

This powerful sense of empathy means that when you see someone going through a strong emotional experience for the first time it’s easy to match their wavelength. Armed with your sense of empathy and compassion you can feel what they feel, pushing the conversation to places that are steadily more powerful.

Video on Asexual Relationships

I'm graduated!! And will hopefully have some time to give love to this blog (in addition to my other one.) I want to start with a response to the awesome stuff that's going down over at Hot Pieces of Ace, the asexual collab YouTube channel.

The Power of Talking about Intimacy

I think I've broken the ice.

I've been ranting about intimacy for a while now, despite the fact that it's pretty embarrassing, socially awkward and professionally detrimental. I do it because I've had this overwhelming sense for the past five years that the asexual community is onto something, that somewhere latent beneath the everyday assumptions that we make about intimacy there's this ocean of unmet need just waiting to burst out, hit oxygen and and change things.

The human need for intimacy is a deeply, deeply powerful force, from our actions as people right on up to our actions as a species. It drives everything from our family drama to our purchasing behavior to gang violence to the rise of megacities. We don't spend nearly enough time talking about it. The flippedness with which most people conflate intimacy and sex is strong evidence of that fact. And even though I've spent years ranting about it to people, I've had almost no luck getting other people to see intimacy as the fundamental, game-changing force of nature that my gut sees it as. No luck, that is, until this year.

See, a few times a year I give talks on college campuses about the asexual community, 90 minute orientations to how we work and what we stand for. Because they consist of safe, friendly and contained audiences I use these venues to test messaging that can later be delivered to the press, and in the past few months I've switched things up. Specifically I've switched up the way that I talk about intimacy in the asexual community. The results have been staggering. Twice now, multiple people in the room have gone through something akin to a shift in worldview. At a precise point in the lecture something in them shifts, and they start to view their own life experience from a new and profoundly empowering perspective. They thank me profusely and gush about how things suddenly make sense that have been murky for them for years.

It sounds egotistical to write this, and to some extent it is, but I also think I've struck a vein. The last time I got reactions like this it was the start of the asexual community. Now it's in the broader population (sex-positive undergrad students so far, but I'll have to test and see where else this model for talking about intimacy is applicable.) Here's how it works:

I open my lecture giving the definition of asexuality and talking through the specifics of our identity and our breed of sexual politics. Then I delve into three stories from the asexual community, all stories about intimacy.

The first is a story about Winter and Paul. Two asexuals from New York, Winter and Paul met when the community was just starting and meetups in Manhattan were just getting off the ground. They hit it off as fast friends, and as they spent more time together something blossomed. To people who equate intimacy with sex it might be difficult to get what exactly changed, but their relationship suddenly started to feel different. They started spending more time together, more and more of their feelings started bubbling to the surface, the plans and promises they made started creeping skyward. It made sense to call the relationship something else. After dating for a few years they got married, making them the second wedding on AVEN, and settled into a life together.

That's the first story.

The second story is about a monk named Dave. Now, Dave became a monk long before the asexual community was established, starting as a US Navy Chaplan and never looking back. He bounced between the Vatican and far-flung adventures in exotic locales, devouring life experience as avidly as he devoured books and intellectual argument. Eventually he decided to quit the church, and settled happily into the DC gay community where he applied his considerable intellectual muscle to the gay rights discussions of the day. He grew a monumental beard and got busy building himself a house with a generously proportioned library. As Dave settles into his library he'll look back across the journals from his travels, across the dog-eared books that he's spent his life tromping through and the clean, crisp ones he's still ready to devour. Dave is happy.

That's the second story.

The third story is about a girl named Ann and her punk band. Ann is in highschool, but that's ok because Ann loves punk music. She's got this band that tours regularly, and the band vibe couldn't be better. When they get together they can really tap into something, really put a part of themselves out there together and build something powerful with it. That experience trumps most of what Ann has experienced in her life so far, and the same is true for many of her band mates. They've got something. It's deep, it's powerful, and it's build relationships that are just as deep and powerful. The band is together all of the time for practice, and because of that they've become one another's support network. It's always tough to say how these things will go, but for now Ann's punk band is giving her a lot of what she needs in life.

That's the third story.

Now, the important thing to understand about these stories is that in the asexual community they're all seen as equally valid ways of getting at the same thing. The word "single" doesn't really get used in the asexual community, because it implies that if you're not in a romantic partnership with someone you're somehow isolated and your human need for intimacy isn't being fulfilled. In the asexual community you can't really be single, because it's equally valid to fulfill your need for intimacy by focusing on your relationship with yourself and the world around you, the way that Dave does, or by focusing on a close relationship with a community, the way that Ann does. Intimacy still matters. There's no getting away from our need for it, and in the asexual community we challenge ourselves vigorously to pursue it. We just don't think that romantic relationships are the only path.

At different times in our lives it makes sense to focus more on intimacy from a partner, from ourselves or from our communities, but we'll always need a little of all three. Think about these stories. Which resonates most with you and why? Does our culture value these types of intimacy differently?

A Nonsexual Intimacy Playbook

I'm on winter break, and am trying to get back into blogging. This past semester has been fantastic, both in terms of my connection with the Presidio community and in terms of the development of my ongoing ranting about relationships and intimacy. I'm entering the new year a lot more focused on partnered relationships than I have been in the past, and before gearing up and heading into romance land (wish me luck!) I'd like to review some of the tricks of the trade that I've picked up over the years.

I've already discussed in depth a lot of the underlying theory behind my approach to relationships, here are some of the ways that I've applied that theory to do things in relationships that most people at least don't talk about doing.

Greying

Sometimes I'm in a relationship with someone that has great energy but feels like it's not going anywhere. We want to spend more time together but it doesn't quite happen, and things feel like they're stagnating before the relationship's full potential can be realized.

When that happens I focus on two things:

1. Being more emotionally expressive about the relationship, and subtly pushing the other person to do the same.
2. After emotions are out there, being aggressive about proposing new directions for the relationship based on those emotions.

Emotion doesn't just mean "I like you," it means an honest assessment of how I feel about them, what I respect, what I want to challenge and how I feel about what we spend our time doing together. When done right this pushes relationships into the "Grey Area" between friendship and romance, which is a fun but sometimes disorienting place.

Spidering

Sometimes I'm spending time with people and enjoying it, but I feel like I've lost perspective. I don't really know what I'm getting out of my relationships and I feel like I'm responding to the things that are getting thrown my way rather than making things happen on my terms.

When that happens I like to take a step back mentally and really assess what the major relationships in my life are, what I'm getting out of them, where I want them to go and what the major gaps are. For me this literally involves drawing a web, labeling the main relationships and looking at how and why I'm spending time on them. I come out with a clear decision of how the pieces fit together and where I want to go with each relationship.

Triangulating

Sometimes I have great chemistry with someone but they're already in a committed monogamous relationship. I honestly don't understand why this is such an issue for sexual people. If you like one person, then they're significant other is probably cool too right? Extra person! Bonus!

When this happens I'll do a couple things:

1. Emotionally engage the person I'm into without hesitation. I'll be open, smiley, and even slightly flirty (though I'll suppress physical affection if it begins to develop a lot.) I'll be very clear about the fact that I'm asexual as I do this.
2. Emotionally engage their partner just as much. Even if I don't know my friends' BF/GF as well I'll assume a high level of respect for them (after all, someone I respect loves them a lot) and extend them the same level of friendliness and excitement that I extend their significant other. This helps to temper feelings of jealousy a bit, though the relationship will still start out lopsided towards the partner I know better.
3. Listen for things that the relationship is struggling with, and try to add something that soothes those struggles over. This can mean serving as a soundboard for one or both parties, but it often is about introducing something that lets the two partners get to emotionally and intellectually engage with another in a way that they wouldn't otherwise. Once I'm integrated enough to do this I begin to form a relationship with the couple, rather than two relationships with the two people in the couple. It's this relationship with the couple- a contribution to the bond that keeps them together- that ultimately keeps things in balance and is most rewarding.

Breaking out

I've written before about how my breakups are never as showy and dramatic as they seem to be on TV or in the stories of my friends. For me breakups are sad but rarely heated.

That's because on a fundamental level I don't believe that a relationship can stop working. The expectations that underpin that relationship can stop making sense, but the relationship itself probably formed because the people involved have business in one another's lives, and it's always worth seeing whether there's still some of that business to be done.

When expectations stop making sense it can be hurtful, and that makes expectations hard to get rid of. The important thing is to see how the relationship can evolve in new and interesting directions without old clunky expectations bogging it down. It's hard to stomach "breaking up" to be "just friends" if your romantic relationship is worth a lot and friendship is worth a pittance, but if you have faith that that friendship can evolve (or grey) in totally new and fascinating directions than the drama of a breakup is less pronounced. It becomes easier to shed a tear for the old expectations while keeping focused on the future.

Detoxing

Sometimes relationships develop sexual tension, or at least what reads as sexual tension. Even though I'm Ace I'm not immune to it. I'll click with someone, and the sparks will be pronounced enough that we'll begin to express them physically, and as soon as we're expressing them physically the question of whether SOME SORT of sexuality will enter the relationship looms large. This can be toxic. Tension about sexuality can overshadow the good things that give the relationship its energy in the first place, and while it's fun sexual tension can begin to detract from the relationship's larger and more interesting purpose.

When this happens I try not to let the tension linger to long. I'll introduce some light sexuality into the relationship (usually kissing), and see how things fall out around it. On occasion the sexuality fits in seamlessly with what makes the relationship click and it becomes a more common occurrence, but it's far more often for both of us to realize that sexuality isn't really what we wanted. We come out of the experienced focused on what really works about the relationship and are usually much closer as a result.

This seems counterintuitive- introducing sexuality as a way to (3/4 of the time) DEsexualize a relationship, but it works surprisingly well. It's only once sexuality is no longer a question mark that you can see the nonsexual intimacy in a relationship clearly.

Listening to the Ground

Sometimes I like someone a lot but can't get access to their time. They may be a mentor or someone I have a crush on, but when I hang out with them I wind up feeling pathetic and small and questioning why they would want to spend time with me.

When this happens I start by realizing that my own insecurities are blaring a lot more than their actual opinion of me. I'm a person deserving of their respect, though not necessarily someone worth a lot of their time. In order to make a bid for their time I need to know that I have something to offer, so I do a little research and a little thinking and try to figure out what major transitions the other person is going through. When people go through transitions (new job, new city, retirement, applying to grad school, etc) they tend to have a whole host of issues and no existing support network to deal with them. If I can make myself part of that new support network then I can approach them confident that I have a good reason to be in their life, and that confidence and focus makes all the difference.

Wingmanning

Sometimes I love people, but the things that they ask of me are more then I can offer.

When that happens I think about how my community and the other person's community can fulfill that need. I'll very directly and honestly tell them that I can't provide what they're looking for and take some step to connect them with a resource that can. These connections often pay off in the long run- my friend is more integrated into her community and we both reap the benefits of that integration.

Community Intelligence: How well do you understand your community?

Still busy with grad school, but I'm coming up with tangentially relevant stuff from time to time:

Relational Economics

I'm on vacation, which means I get to spend some quality time nerding out with my brother. We just used a big chunk of beach as a chalkboard to explore this question:

Can relationships be meaningfully described as a series of rational decisions?

My mom's immediate answer, when she walked by to see what we were up to, was "don't be silly." First off, looking at the decisions that get made in a relationship doesn't really tell you about the heart and soul of that relationship, the emotion and subtlety that make that relationship work. Second, anyone who has experience with these things will tell you that relationships can be anything but rational. There's no rhyme or reason to love, and we had all better get used to it.

Despite the fact that she's my mother, and therefore always right, my brother and I persisted. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that relationships can be described that way. That means that a relationship can be thought of as a series of decisions that people make, and each of those decisions can be broken down to a sort of cost/benefit analysis that has one logical conclusion. This kind of a theory isn't meant to be practical, like most real world examples of physics most real world relationships are far too complicated to be predicted with any precision. (Physics can't, in any practical way, tell you how a teapot is going to shatter.) It could be interesting in thinking about overall trends in the ways that people connect with one another and communities come together.

Because, irrational as relationships seem, the decisions that we make in them almost always ARE rational (or at least as "rational" as our decisions to purchase things, and that hasn't hurt the field of economics.) To test this my brother and I decided to explore the following scenario:

Bob has called Alice and invited her to play golf on Saturday. Will Alice say yes?

As I've mentioned before in this blog, decisions about time are particularly important to understanding what makes relationships tick. A quick poll of the beach seemed to hint that this was, in fact, a problem with a rational answer. When presented with the scenario, people immediately sought to define factors which would define a rational decision.

"I think she would," said a passing six year old "because girls like golf."

Her friend, eager to contribute to the problem, added another condition "She might stay home if she was sick though."

The response of these two girls was telling. If the decisions that we make in relationship were completely irrational then they would have simply shrugged their shoulders, as they would if I asked them whether it would rain in a month. Their guts and life experience told them that the situation with Bob and Alice COULD be understood if the right initial conditions were known. That is, if we know enough about how Alice feels about golf, enough about how she feels about Bob, enough about her other options for that Saturday and a few other tidbits of information then we can predict her decision with at least the theoretical certainty that economists predict real-world economic behavior. My brother and I had fun for the better part of an hour mapping these criteria on the sand, but I won't bore you with them here.

Instead, I'd like to talk about the possible implications of this rationality. Let's pretend for a moment that the statement at the beginning of this post is true. If it is, then the process by which relationships form and thrive can be mapped in a new sort of theoretical detail. Rather than bitching about dating, we could tease the process of dating apart and ask ourselves whether a better system could be designed for producing intimate human relationships. Rather than trying to build professional communities by throwing 500 people with business cards in a room together we could begin to build a real set of knowledge about what makes relationships happen and what doesn't. The art of community building seems stuck at the developmental stage of medieval medicine; a conglomeration of pet theories, wives tales and one-off solutions. It seems like we can do better.

I'll leave it here for now, and solicit people's responses to the questions above. Can relationships be described as a series of rational decisions? When (if ever) can't they? And if you had to map the criteria influencing Alice's decision to play golf with Bob then how would you do it?

Asexy Pride Video

I made an incredibly cheesy video about this year's AVEN Pride contingent. Check it out:

The Power of Smalltalk

I'm playing with video again!

If you like it, please digg it. Thanks!!

A/Sexy

There's nothing sexy about starting a band.

Talking about starting a band is sexy. Playing in a band, once everything is said and done, gets you laid like the Mattress Giant off I-270, but the process of starting one is anything but. It's just you in a room with a bunch of other dudes fumbling around to try to find a sound. Things are not quite clicking yet, your styles and personalities haven't quite figured out how to fit together. But there's something thrilling in that, the possibility that it all COULD come together, and that possibility is what keeps you at it, keeps your failing and trying again and growing closer as a group. Starting a band is asexy.

If sexy is about being alluring and desirable, asexy is about being unapologetically true to oneself and one's passions. According to the urban dictionary:

An adjective used to describe an asexual person showing intelligence, confidence, style, physical attractiveness, charming personality, baking skills, or any other combination of sufficiently positive and unique characteristics.

DJ is one asexy amoeba. I hear he can bake a three-layer cake in thirty minutes flat.

While Dictionary.com defines sexy as:

–adjective, sex⋅i⋅er, sex⋅i⋅est.

1.	concerned predominantly or excessively with sex; risqué: a sexy novel.

2.	sexually interesting or exciting; radiating sexuality: the sexiest professor on campus.

3.	excitingly appealing; glamorous: a sexy new car.

Something about the interplay between these two terms is fascinating to me. In the eyes of many of my friends, the two are one and the same. Being true to oneself and one's passions make you desirable, hands down. In my geeky queer hometown of San Francisco doing your thing, whatever that thing happens to be, is incredibly hot. Typeface nerds are hot. Drag queens are hot. Line-dancing biophysicists are hot. In open and accepting environments focusing on being asexy almost always leads to being sexy. The opposite is not necessarily true. Going out of ones way to be sexy means following the crowd, grasping for things that seem to make other people glamorous and appealing at the expense of genuine self-expression. Being asexy makes you sexy, but being sexy does not necessarily make you asexy.

This has not always been true. When the term "sexy" was in its cultural infancy it meant anything but a two-stepping, thrift-store clad graduate student. Some googling reveals that the term "sexy" first cropped up in publications like the LA times around the early 1920s. World War I had just ended, and the most advanced propoganda machine known to man, headed by Frued's nephew Edward Bernaise, was retasked to sell consumer products in what became the birth of american consumerism. People were realizing that people brought products not just becuase of their functionality, but because of much subtler social drives.

In Hollywood, where the barriers between the mainstream film industry and the porn industry were still paper-thin, people needed a way to describe the fact that stuff with "sex appeal" had a way of flying off the shelves and selling out at the box office. "Sexy" emerged because sex sells. Sex appeal became so ingrained in consumerism, and consumerism so engrained in our culture that what started (possibly) as a tagline for soft-core porn has become intertwined with the way that we think about all sorts of desire. Heirloom tomatoes are sexy. Green jobs are sexy. iTunes apps are sexy.

If "sexy" came to us from consumerism, "asexy" comes from a reaction against it. In the 1960s and 70s, a massive backlash against consumer culture led to a nationwide epidemic of unsexy behavior. Feminists gave sexy Hollywood starlets the finger, shaving their heads and rebelling against a society which defined them in terms of a sexual role in which they were fundamentally uninterested. Gay liberation followed suit, laying the groundwork for a politics of sexual identity founded on self-determination, self expression and unapologetic celebration of any and everything (so long as no one got hurt.) It was with these ideals that the asexual community first began to hobble together, much like the band in the first paragraph, around 2002 and 2003.

This early asexual community was full of people looking for a place to just be ourselves. We didn't want to be alluring or desirable, we just wanted to be validated and celebrated for who we were and to escape from a culture where the mandate to be sexy was often overwhelming. So we got busy celebrating. We busted out the cake and started partying about all of the nonsexual desires that made our lives hum. "Asexy" was our way of giving one anothers' passions an unjudgemental nod. Fly fishing is asexy. Fuck You Penguin is asexy. Your 76-page paper on the composition of medieval brick is asexy.

All of this makes me wonder if it might be time to bring asexy back. Todays hot trends aren't like the Hollywood producers and starlets of the 1920s. They look like steampunk, DIY, the viral YouTube remix and fighting climate change. What's sexy today is sexy precisely because it had the guts not to be. What's appealing isn't showing some skin or flashing some glamour, it's having the chutzpah to have fun keeping it real. More and more people are realizing that living life chasing what's sexy makes you anything but. With any luck, the juggernaught of sexy may finally be grinding to a halt and people may start looking, quietly, for a word to take its place.

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Caveats & footnotes:

• I fully acknolwedge that the majority of bands out there are not just a bunch of dudes, and that in many circumstances a bunch of dudes together in a room is totally sexy. For the purposes of this exercise we're assuming a straight, all-male band totally in it for the chicks.
• Oh god. If you look up "asexy" in the dictionary is my name really there? That's terrifying.
• As my friends will attest it takes me, like, forever to cook anything.