Welcome to "The Asexual Geek"! - An Introduction

Image caption: The famous "live long and prosper symbol" from Star Trek, edited with the colors of the aromantic pride flag, on top of the asexual pride flag

If thirteen-year-old me could see me now, I think she'd be pretty astonished.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my blog, The Asexual Geek! This is a project I've wanted to undertake for a while now and I am so thrilled to finally see it coming to fruition. My name is Rachel and I'm an aromantic asexual nerd in my mid-twenties - I've been a nerd since I was about eight and I've been identifying as asexual since I was about sixteen. Writing, fangirling, and talking about asexuality are the three things I do best (along with loving cats and getting excited about history), so a blog seemed like not just a good idea, but an inevitability.

Like many asexual people, I slowly began discovering my truth when I started to see that I wasn't in step with many other people my own age. While my classmates started to experiment with dating and have their first kisses, I found myself largely apathetic. This started at around age thirteen and I thought surely something must be wrong with me or that it would pass. I often felt incredibly misunderstood, unwanted, and alien. As I hit my high school years, I began gravitating towards anything that made me feel like romance or sex didn't have to be the norm, but even then I didn't fully understand the hint of truth underneath all that.

And then I discovered the term "asexuality".

I first heard about asexuality as an identity through Tumblr and other internet platforms, and it intrigued me. A good friend of mine encouraged me to explore it, to see if it fit. And it did. It fit so much that even just discovering it and realizing it spoke to the depths of who I am made me burst into tears the first time I read the definition on the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. Finally I knew how to describe myself. I no longer had to live with the definitions of other people - "prude" or "just a phase" or "fake". Do I still hear those things to this day? Yes. Do I sometimes have days where being asexual in modern Western society makes me want to scream until I'm hoarse? You bet. Do I occasionally still feel misunderstood, unwanted, or alien, especially in fandom? Of course. But whereas once I took those things to heart and carried them around in dejected silence, now I have a voice.

That, more than anything, is the reason why I think thirteen-year-old me would be gobsmacked to peek over a decade into the future and see the present day me. I think she would be surprised to find that this is not just something that I've long since accepted, but something for which I feel an immense amount of pride, that I identify this way as easily as I breathe. I think she would be shocked to know I'm not just proud of it, but I write about it and talk about it and that people respond.

In 2017, I had the opportunity to contribute to the blog run by one of my favorite podcasts, Women at Warp, which analyzes Star Trek through a feminist lens. Getting to write my post, "Asexuality in Star Trek", was an honor and the response to the post so wonderful - I even had someone quote me in an article they then wrote for another website, for which I am so grateful.

In 2018 and 2019, I gave a presentation on Asexuality in Modern Media at the anime convention Zenkaikon. The response to these panels has been humbling and overwhelming and it's meant the world to me to connect with other people who are just as hopeful for better asexual representation in media. I hope to potentially host this and other panels at other conventions in the near future.

The 2019 "Asexuality in Modern Media" panel at Zenkaikon, hosted by myself (on the right in purple) and my good friend Laura (on the left). If you need or want a transcript of this video, please let me know by commenting on this post and I will make sure it's available to you.

Asexuality has been a journey. It started online and spread outward into the four corners of my life. I slowly learned about my asexuality, then discovered my aromanticism, then discovered I am sex-repulsed - meaning, I personally am repulsed by sex; I am perfectly fine and supportive of other people's healthy, safe, consensual sex lives... as long as I don't need to hear about them or see them. (I'm sure you can imagine how much fun I have even just trying to watch television in this day and age. I'm the life of the party, you guys.) Slowly, I have learned how these things can exist and balance with the rest of my life - that, for instance, I can love writing romance and be the avid shipper I am and not care at all for romance in my regular life. It's still an ongoing process; the process of living your true authentic life always is. And often times it's not easy, but it's always worth it.

And now that process, that journey, that quest for truth leads me here to begin a new and exciting project - to analyze asexuality in media, something I've already been doing, and hopefully bring that analysis to people who will appreciate it and connect with it. Over the course of this blog, I will explore some of my favorite (and not-so-favorite) media and explore how media in the future can include better representation for the asexual and aromantic spectrums. Representation matters to those still trying to find their way and those, like me, who want to see our experiences reflected in the things we love. We'll talk about everything from Star Trek to Dragon Age to YA books with canon asexual characters. As the blog description states, we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to non-sexual characters in media and hopefully in doing so, we can help each other find the ways to talk about our own experiences and our own hope for representation.

I'm excited to be on this journey with all of you. I hope you'll find your time here with me fun, informative, thought-provoking, comforting, and maybe even a little inspiring. Join me every other Friday to explore the ups and downs of the asexual life in fandom and learn from the places we've been. Because that's the amazing thing about the asexual community, another thing I think my thirteen-year-old self would be delighted to see - we're not alone.

Live long and prosper, my nerds. Let's boldly go where no one has gone before.

With platonic love,
- Rachel, aka The Asexual Geek