Little Jenny is ace
Girl Guides? Really? Really?
What does this have to do with Girl Guides? (In the US called Girl Scouts.) Nothing nothing nothing nothing.
I suppose this nonsense is Stonewall yet again.
Yes that sounds like Stonewall all right. What does having no interest in sex have to do with making everyone feel welcome? What does having no interest in sex have to do with making everyone feel free to be themselves? What does having no interest in sex have to do with making everyone feel an equal sense of belonging? In the Girl Guides specifically?
The Beeb has a moronic article about it from last May. Has to be Stonewall.
Why are so many adults asleep at the fucking wheel?
Updating to add:
Just horrific.
You know who else isn’t interested in having sex with anyone?
Children.
Is the law onto these operators?
I don’t know but people were tagging the law in on replies to this lunacy.
There’s no such thing as an “asexual community.”. If people are not interested in sex, then there is, by definition, no community of interest for them to belong to. What about “It’s not important!” don’t you get? There’s nothing to unite around. Other people’s interest in sex, of whatever kind, just doesn’t matter; it doesn’t affect them in any way, and it doesn’t even make a blip on the radar. “Not interested” means not interested.
Such people have many other diverse interests, and other actual communities to belong to.
In previous eras or in other lands, where women were and are considered little more than cattle for producing men, milk, and more cattle, there was and is indeed a deep taboo of a woman remaining unmarried and unbred for too long. “Spinsters”, women who’d either been rejected for marriage or actively resisted the institution until they were considered worthless to their fathers, feature heavily as the villains of medieval European morality tales, and they were subject to all manner of abuse and neglect and disrespect.
Virginity was valued in young women, because of the value it brought their male guardians through marriage, but once the appropriate “marriageable age” had come and gone, there was only one refuge left for a woman who could not somehow secure a groom. This was, of course, the nunnery. In the medieval context, devotion to God outweighed duties to the father, and thus becoming a nun offered a refuge against the social cost of being an unmarried adult woman, with the benefit that anyone seriously criticising this decision tempted the wrath of the Church coming down upon them.
Asexuality is a recapitulation of this in the Church of Woke Identitarianism that has sprung up in the last decade or so. It is a way for people (usually women) to secede from the brutal social expectations of them to be ever-more kinky and available and polyamorous. And, of course, it offers a refuge against that worst of all accusations, being a frumpy cis straight woman who just doesn’t particularly enjoy sex that much. Karens can’t be ace, by definition.
And those interests are much more likely to make them interesting. Being asexual is fine; proclaiming it doesn’t add any specialness to you, it just makes you look like a goof. Same with all the other sexual identities, and for that matter, orientations. I have a number of gay friends, and they don’t go around announcing “I’m gay”. They do the same things the rest of us do, and talk about the same things the rest of us talk about, and they are interesting or boring according to their own merits. Most of them are interesting, but that’s because I prefer to hang around with people I find interesting. They, like my heteronormative friends, have a life that involves more than just being gay. And they are deeply interested in those other things.
Of course, they are older, some of them as old as me or older (archaic), and don’t feel the need to be the center of attention every minute and to have everything focused on them, even things that have literally nothing to do with them or their sexuality. In short, they are grown ups.
Where are the boundaries? I’d be furious if I had children and the people who are supposed to do outdoor activities with them suddenly started shoehorning talking about sex into the program. Especially with young children – they would have to know what sex is to start with, before being able to understand what asexual means. Sex education is important and it has been neglected in the past (often still is), but it’s to be done in an age-appropriate manner and shared by parents and schools. Making children think that it’s normal for all the adults in their lives to initiate conversations about sex is a recipe for disaster.
Catwhisperer:
Yes, that is a basic, essential safeguarding principle that everyone used to know. When people pretended not to know it, that was a giant red flag. Now you’re not only allowed to pretend you don’t know it, you’re thrown out of the Girl Guides if you don’t.
latsot – on a related note, and a thing that has bothered me for much longer: Talking about small children having “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” as opposed to just friends who are boys or girls. Eww. “Have you got a boyfriend” was pretty much the opening gambit of those blokes who hung around playgrounds despite having no children of their own when I was a child.