Livejournal Asexuality

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The LiveJournal Asexuality Community is a discussion community on the long running blogging and social networking site LiveJournal dedicated to the subject of asexuality.

The community is active with an average of five or six posts a week and regular discussions of between 10 and 40 comments per post. The community has accumulated over 2200 members since it was founded in 2002.

Members often make use of LiveJournal's 'locked post' feature, allowing for posts to the community and the comments that follow to be visible only to LiveJournal users who have also joined the community. More than half of the community's recent posts are locked to community members only.

The community is unofficially affiliated with AVEN, linking to AVEN as its 'homepage' and directing readers of the community profile to many AVEN FAQs and Wiki pages.

The current community moderators are LiveJournal users green_elf and batshua.

Community Rules

The community is intended to be laid back with 'hands off' moderation. Rather than rules, there are a set of guidelines. These guidelines ask that criticism of sexuality (anti-sexualism) and suggestions that asexuals are superior to sexual people are kept out of community discussions. They also ask that LiveJournal's 'lj-cut' system, which places parts of a post behind a link and is commonly used in other communities for hiding 'spoilers' or 'triggers', be used as 'Squick Cuts'. This means that all descriptions of sexual activity should be kept behind an lj-cut link so that other members may avoid them if they wish.

There are also guidelines relating to tags, memories and crossposting, as is common for LiveJournal communities.

The moderators explain that most of their 'policies' boil down to two aphorisms; "Don't be a dick" and "Be excellent to each other".

History

The LiveJournal Asexuality Community was created on the 28th of April 2002 by LiveJournal user 36 aka AVEN member Paranoid Gynandroid. The community pre-dates the creation of the AVEN forums by a month and was the first overtly sex positive asexuality discussion community.

At the time of creation there was already a LiveJournal community using the term 'asexual', the Asexuals Commnunity. However, this was an anti-sexual community aimed at sexual people who were celibate by choice (which at the time was one of the many different uses of the term 'asexual'). Many asexuals were members of the community due to the name, but found it an uncomfortable fit. It encouraged and often contained attacks on the behaviour of sexual people (such as the last post before the Asexuality community was created). In reaction to this, the Asexuality community put positive attitudes towards other people's sexuality front and centre in its profile, introductory posts and announcement on the rival community.

The community was created independently of AVEN and as such initially used descriptions such as 'little or no sex drive' and 'living without sexuality' as often as the more AVEN-accepted definition of 'no or very little sexual attraction to others'. Paranoid Gynandroid identified as queer and genderqueer and was involved in online third gender communities, as well as the UK LGBT and bi communities, so was already using similar language defining asexuality in terms of sexual orientation independently of David Jay's early AVEN content.

By July 2002 the community had become unofficially affiliated with AVEN after David Jay contacted Paranoid Gynandroid, who soon after became involved in the development of AVEN site content and the early forum community. After this point the LiveJournal community's 'homepage' link was set to asexuality.org and the AVEN 'big FAQ' (also written by Paranoid Gynandroid) was recommended in the community profile.

The motivations behind the creation of the LiveJournal Asexuality community are explained in greater detail in this Apostive forum thread.

By late 2004 the community was no longer actively moderated but discussions continued.

In May 2005, after spam became a problem on the community, moderation was passed over to green_elf (announcement post).

In November 2005 green_elf called for help with moderation, as a result the LiveJournal users anikotevet and batshua became co-moderators.

Links

Asexuality Community profile

Asexuality Community archives