OH NO A SNAKE TORNADO: Twitter takes 5/2/20

The Bible clearly states that if you are in a marriage that doesn’t produce children, this is God’s doing and probably in retaliation for some sin of yours (but not if you’re a patriarch, then it’s just to make some kind of Godly point). It makes sense in the context: in Biblical times, unless your family was super wealthy, your retirement plan was to have children who could support you in your old age and carry on your name. Having no children meant that you would die destitute and alone, to be forgotten over time. This is still true in many parts of the world, and still true to some extent even in Western societies for the very poor. If you are very poor, but you have a familial support system, you’re less bad off than if you lack that system.

I’m not ace, but an affectionate, sexless marriage with no children sounds pretty awesome to me.

@Naglfar

Not to worry, you’re totally fine! Your joke made me smile, in fact. It’s funny to think of some fundamentalist who thinks that not having sex constantly is some kind of sin. It’s the kind of joke I would make, if you hadn’t beat me to the punch.

(Honestly, I think it’s more likely that the person saying that asexuality isn’t a sin unless you act on it just didn’t know what asexuality was, and only heard [prefix-that-is not hetero]sexuality and went “oh hell no”. But that’s taking this claptrap seriously and that’s no fun.)

@Snowberry

Thanks for clarifying.

Of course the ace person is much more likely to be blamed in that case because they’re not the presumed default, which wasn’t entirely unfair

I don’t know if I agree with this assessment. In general, yeah, if someone has preferences which are different from the accepted “norm”, then they kind of need to express those, because otherwise people will assume that they follow the norm.

However, given the way that Christianity (especially fundamental Christianity) intersects with sex, I’m not entirely sure that it’s unreasonable for sheltered aces to expect differently. After all, Paul kept writing about how it’s more righteous to forego sex and devote more focus onto God, and Christians tend to subscribe to some kind of exceptionalism or other, thinking that they aren’t like the ungodly. I can see how these messages could be interpreted by an ace person to mean “I will be helping my spouse by keeping us from wasting precious energy on sex, and this will bring us closer to God.”

It’s not a correct assumption to make without actually consulting your partner, of course, but I can see where the logic can come from.

Yeah, I know that for me as a baby asexual I found the ‘abstinence before marriage’ deal to be extremely enticing. They told us about it and I was like “Hot dog, sign me up! I’ll tell everyone I’m waiting until marriage and then just never get married! It’s the perfect plan!” I didn’t identify as asexual then, I’m not sure if I’d even heard of the term, but my lack of desire was clear. (My church wasn’t super fundamentalist, and I eventually got exposed to more of the world and grew into my identity, but some people don’t get those opportunities.)

I can see how some aces might have also been drawn in via a similar thought process, but eventually been pressured into marriage because of established social norms within that environment.

Ultimately, I think it’s a failure of a system that doesn’t have space for people who fall outside of one particular set of ideals, that presses young people to rush into marriage without getting to know each other, and that heavily discourages questioning the system. Tragic and unhappy marriages result from it pretty frequently, even if both parties involved are cisgender and heterosexual.