As anyone with a social media account has noticed lately, the word "privilege" has been thrown around a lot -- unfortunately, a lot of people who have some specific form of privilege often are completely unaware of it. That's what happens when you come to expect something as the standard and assume everyone is on the same page.
Privilege is sneaky like that.
On paper I'm a white, married, middle-class female, and I know I've had advantages in life (thanks for Catholic all-girls school, grandpa...*sigh*). In between the lines on that paper, though, I'm a queer-type person who falls somewhere in the space between cis and trans, who happens to be in an open quasi-companionate marriage with my best friend. I've felt varying degrees of "outside an acceptable range" in regards to almost everything for my whole life, which is why it was so strange to realize there are things even I take for granted.
A few months back, I was looking on FetLife (trying to find somewhere to fit in...which didn't quite work) and kept seeing ads on the sidebar featuring a heavy amount of ball torture. That was only one of many graphic pictures littering the site, but it was one that made me cringe the most -- I'm all for people doing things that work for them, but it'd be lying if it didn't squick me out a bit. It's just not my thing, and I'm okay with it being of interest to other people.
But to get away from the ball torture -- what about the other ads? Why did only that one bother me?
Oh. Because I'm more okay with the other images because they cater more to my interests and desires.
Oh.
Well, shit.
I asked Mike a few days later, "Do the ads on FetLife bother you?" and without any hesitation or need for me to explain further, he emphatically responded, "oh, yeah."
It was the first time I really sat down to think about how unfriendly the world is to the asexual crowd, to say nothing of non-straight white folks. Never before had I felt so much a part of the problem.
I had previously recognized that my own sex drive and interests caused some stress for Mike, which I handled mostly by stopping things like dirty texting and sending risque photos to his phone -- the timing was never right so it just seemed to be a waste of time -- but it had never occurred to me that society in general did a far better and more pervasive job of keeping my own partner outside his comfort zone than I did. So while I could apologize and take action to stop "forcibly rubbing my vagina all over him from a distance" (I'm great at saying I'm sorry), society just can't "take it all back" and stop making everything boil down to the state of one's erogenous zones.
The realization that I was one of the people these marketing traps were for certainly knocked me down a peg or two, and I wish I could do more than watch what I talk about or do. I mean, I *did* make sure to thumbs-up petitions on Fetlife to have better options for ad-choices...but it was just before I deleted my account, possibly negating the whole thing.
I don't know.
To everyone in the world more like Mike than me, I'm sorry that life in a lot of societies can sometimes make you feel like you're being slapped in the face by a sentient man-sized penis with breasts. I know what it's like to not be a target audience, and I'll do what I can to get people to stop assuming we all think about sex the same way or with the same frequency. It won't be much, but every little bit helps.
I hope so, anyway.
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