Also.Also.Also: In News Surprising Zero Asexuals, Many Asexuals Do In Fact Masturbate

Hi! I’m going to be radically honest with you, my mental health has been crappy the last two days. But today I ate a sizable block cheese and watched Crazy Rich Asians while I worked, and that seemed to help.

Queer as in F*ck You

Yes, Some Asexual People Masturbate. No, We Don’t Need To Explain Why. This is such a perfect paragraph of writing:

“I don’t need to picture having sex to have an orgasm, I just need to focus on what I’m trying to achieve, and I like that. I enjoy the fact that my sexuality isn’t dependent on anyone else; it doesn’t need to be fulfilled by anyone else. It has been a constant throughout my life and — quite literally — an act of self-love. I think we could all do with more of that. We could all do with disentangling our sexuality from others and focus more on our relationship with our own body.”

Dove Cameron Dedicated Her Best New Artist VMA to Queer Youth

Bad Bunny Isn’t Queerbaiting & Those Claims Are Missing the Point. One of my least favorite things is when (usually white) people take a word that is still useful in some contexts — such as “queerbaiting” or also recently, The Bechdel Test — and then uncritically and uniformly apply it to people of color creating art in ways that don’t make sense. It’s frustrating, a lil racist, and undercuts whatever value those words had to begin with. That’s a hot tip from me to you!

Rodrigo Ventosilla, 32, Transgender Harvard Student Dies in Police Custody While on Honeymoon in Indonesia. I’ve been thinking so much about Rodrigo and keeping his family in my heart.

Saw This, Thought of You

Surprising no one, I don’t follow tennis. But even I looked up how to watch Serena Williams play this week, in what will be her final tournament. She’s also on the cover of Time, What Serena Williams Gave the World. And then this one is from Jemele Hill for The Atlantic — who’s pretty much the only person I could imagine wanting to read about Serena right now, Serena Williams Faces Another Challenge

This is URGENT! If you haven’t taken care of it yet, please do: Biden Administration to Stop Sending Free At-Home COVID Tests Friday, so order your last batch now.

Flo Milli Wants You to Twerk in Your Car to Her New Album

And while we are talking about rappers, Don’t Mess With Megan — Ashley Thee Ford profiling Megan Thee Stallion, for my money a must read of the night.

Also, for the love of God, Leave Lizzo And Fat Black Women The F*ck Alone

This Messy Moment. “Living inside a museum of yourself.” This is for everyone living in clutter, for whom “label maker aesthetic” will never ever apply.

Political Snacks

Mississippi’s Jim Crow-Era Felony Voting Law Is Constitutional, Federal Court Rules. “The Law, passed in 1890, was tailored ‘to exclude the Negro’ but appeals court says tweaks in 20th century ‘cleansed … discriminatory taint.'” HAHAHAHAAA

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Carmen Phillips

Carmen Phillips is Autostraddle's former editor in chief. She began at Autostraddle in 2017 as a freelance team writer and worked her way up through the company, eventually becoming the EIC from 2021-2024. A Black Puerto Rican feminist writer with a PhD in American Studies from New York University, Carmen specializes in writing about Blackness, race, queerness, politics, culture, and the many ways we find community and connection with each other.  During her time at Autostraddle, Carmen focused on pop culture, TV and film reviews, criticism, interviews, and news analysis. She claims many past homes, but left the largest parts of her heart in Detroit, Brooklyn, and Buffalo, NY. And there were several years in her early 20s when she earnestly slept with a copy of James Baldwin’s “Fire Next Time” under her pillow. To reach out, you can find Carmen on Twitter, Instagram, or her website.

Carmen has written 716 articles for us.

5 Comments

  1. Serena had me shouting in her Monday night match, can’t wait for tonight’s match. She is the GOAT without question forever.

  3. Love the ace paragraph above. Lately I have been questioning whether I might be on the ACE spectrum. I felt that piece of writing so hard: um, a bit literally! 🤭🤩 I can’t decide if I’m truly ace or just have trust issues.

  4. The headline is funny to me because I am in fact an ace person who was once quite surprised that ace people masturbate.

    I think it’s a stage of relationship to the community kind of thing more than anything, probably, or just what you’re exposed to, like there have been times when women of any sexual orientation were surprised to learn that women masturbate just because culturally we weren’t hearing about it. Whether it was part of my aceness or other things, it didn’t actually occur to me that masturbation was something I could do or be involved in until I was almost 27, and I hadn’t considered what All Ace People do or don’t do, but I did kinda assume my aceness was related to how foreign the concept felt to me. Masturbation hasn’t personally worked out for me, but I’m certainly very aware now of how common it is and the ace masturbation guides that describe something I haven’t been able to access.

  5. Love how some random person (who seems to identify as lgbt) in the facebook comments went off because they thought the headline was just ace people trying to be “edgy” and “special”. As someone who’s ace and queer, it’s really disheartening to see other queer people sounding like my judgy straight parents.

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