Whenever there are discussions regarding good representation in mass media productions, there’s always one clever sod who jams their hand right up in the air and posits, usually in a smug tone, that representation doesn’t matter because people should be able to see themselves in all sorts of characters. These people are usually the first to pitch a fit if a protagonist is anything other than The Usual Archetype of White/Straight/Cis/Male (because of course they are), but in their rush to defend the viciousness of their knee-jerk reaction to the latest person of colour cast in Star Wars they deliberately miss the point that mass media is everywhere, all around us, injected into us at an increasingly intimate angle as algorithms take over the way it’s introduced to us, and ultimately informs our world view – even as it shouldn’t.
Hi, I’m Becka. I’m a millennial, and I’m asexual/aromantic. Let’s talk about the meshing of those things for a hot minute, shall we?
I don’t have any formal qualifications in Sociology or Psychology (English Lit major, me – if you need someone to read Bleak House in under five days without having a breakdown, I’m ya girl) so what follows both below and in other posts is very much just my own personal world view. I’m not trying to impress anything on anyone. I’m not even trying to change anybody’s minds, or lecture, or anything like that. I just want to talk. And if you want to listen, then thank you! If not, the keyboard shortcut is ctrl+w. I can’t remember what the combination is on a Macbook but it probably has something to do with that fancy curly key.
As a child of the 90’s (well, ’89, but babies don’t remember much) I think I’m right in saying that I had a typical upbringing. And by that I mean that I watched a lot of television. Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, the Sci-Fi Channel (remember when we had a dedicated science fiction station? I miss MST3K so much), UKTV Gold, and occasionally maybe even the BBC if Tracy Beaker was on. I also read a lot of books. Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Morpurgo, Horrible Histories, Goosebumps, Philip Reeve, Terry Pratchett, Ann Fine. And I also also played a lot of video games: Heroes of Might & Magic, Tomb Raider, Command & Conquer, Minesweeper (what? It counts), KKND, Doom, Duke Nukem, Unreal. And I also also also watched a lot of films. There are too many of them to list, though, so I’ll spare your eyes.
This is a very nostalgia-scratching way of saying that, like the average child, I was utterly surrounded by mass media every single moment that I wasn’t at school. And even sometimes when I was, although I still think our Year Five teacher’s idea of playing Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds musical to us as a “visualisation exercise” was her way of bullshitting the PTA into letting her listen to her favourite album at work. (Can’t blame her but we never even got to “Thunderchild” so what was the point?). As much as the disingenuous Well Actuallys discussed in the first paragraph of this post would like to gloss over it, the simple fact is that representation very much does matter because if you spend your formative years soaking up as much media as your poor little brain can handle, some of the messages and characters in those medias are going to bloody stick and stay stuck.
For me, what sticked and stayed stucked was the complicated mess of romantic relationships that appeared in most properties around me in some variation or another. (I don’t think Duke Nukem ever did ‘go steady’ in the end). To my tiny-child and emerging-teenager brain, romance followed a very strict series of events that always had the exact same ending, and they went a little something like this:
Like Boy. Get Boy’s Attention. Date Boy. Have Several Minor Misunderstandings That Could Have Just Been Solved With Good Communication But Also Are Enjoyably Angsty With The Boy. Resolve Said Misunderstandings With Boy. Sleep With Boy. Get Engaged To Boy. Marry Boy. Buy House With Boy. Have Exactly Three Children With Boy. The End.
These were the plots that never really interested me (unless the source of the misunderstandings was especially delicious, and even then it could be incredibly tedious) and until I hit around 12 years of age I always looked at them with a detached air of “romance is something that happens to other people”. I liked being a kid because the world really was your oyster: I was convinced that I just had to survive until I was eighteen and then I could have my seven dogs and mansion and everything would be hunky-dory, thank you very much. What could a mortgage possibly cost? £2.50? But as I grew into my teenage years, I began to worry. All of these books and films and TV shows and magazines and radio dramas and songs and television adverts were all very insistent that romance and sex was something that I absolutely wanted, even as it was weirdly forbidden at the same time. But it wasn’t what I wanted. I knew what I wanted, and it wasn’t that. At the same time all of the teenagers around me in the real world were getting into relationships and talking about boys and condoms and the one out-gay kid in our class who we were all, thankfully, quite proud of.
(Seriously, he was the Class Jock who was Very Performatively Heterosexual at all times and then we came back after our summer holidays and he had transformed into a very Emo Gay and to this day I still admire the energy he had when he tricked our whole tutor group into thinking he was a new transfer kid for about twenty minutes).
This is the part of the post where I tell you that I was an ugly fat geeky dork as a teen, and whilst I’ve jumped aboard the body positivity train now and am getting more accustomed to thinking of myself kindly and not fixating on weight as value, I am rather glad looking back on it because it means nobody tried to ask me out and my British “don’t rock the boat” arse wasn’t forced to go along with it because saying ‘no’ is scary and they’ll confiscate all my tea.
Sex Ed happened every once in a while and that was even scarier than all the girls who used to laugh at me in PE because all of the wording the teachers used was “when you have sex” not “if you have sex” or even “if you want sex” and I used to sit there like some kind of spy and smile and nod along and be horrified at the prospect of STDs and put a condom on a banana all the while thinking to myself “oh god, sex is something that is just going to happen to me one day and I really do not like the thought of that. I’d rather get a mortgage.”
Now, when the real world is really Harshing Your Vibe one of the best things you can do is lose yourself in fiction. But therein also lay my problem: not only was there nobody like me anywhere in real life, but all the characters in medias who were my age and not in relationships were treated with pity. I didn’t want to be treated with pity. I just wanted to be left alone – and to have even a single character say “oh, you’re single? That’s fine, you do you”. Because there was a klaxon sounding in my head, growing louder and louder and louder, insisting there was something wrong with me because the TV was really very adamant that I should have a boyfriend by now – or at the very least a pack of condoms in my bag just in case – and that as I didn’t I was clearly missing out on something.
Fortunately due to the aforementioned Lack Of Attractiveness keeping all the dudes at bay, the issue never really came to the fore and I was left to my own devices until I hit the age of 23 and discovered Tumblr. I’d been online in fandom circles for a little over eight years at this point (RIP LiveJournal, you introduced me to so many cool people) but a lot of discussion about sexuality was centred around characters being Gay Or Straight And That Is It, What Is Bisexuality Anwyay. I did have a friend whose mum had become her second dad and she talked about trans issues and that was very cool to learn about, but all of the discussion around sexuality was very much rooted in the fact that people were still having sex with one another. It didn’t matter what configuration it was: The Sexytimes were happening. Which is absolutely, 100% fine – except if you’re an asexual who had absolutely no idea what asexuality was, and who was increasingly becoming convinced that she was alone.
And then, Tumblr happened to me. (That sounds a lot more ominous than it actually is).
I wish I could remember and link the specific post, but I’ve had two laptops die on me since then and I’m not the most organised of people at the best of times. Anyway, Tumblr taught me what asexuality is. I can’t even remember the context of the post itself but it was the asexual pride flag and a brief description of what asexuality is that had been reblogged onto my dashboard by a mutual and it left me reeling. I remember sitting on my bed, eyes like 0_0 (hey, remember 0_0?) and then I was off. Google. Wikipedia. More Tumblr posts. I read for hours and hours and at the end of my binge I cried. I’m not broken. I am asexual. People can be asexual. There are even some academics out there who believe Lawrence of Arabia was asexual. Lawrence of Arabia! He was famous! Peter O’Toole was in his film and everything! And he was maybe asexual? Why had nobody ever told me this?!
There was not a single goddamn adult who had used the word around me in my entire life. My parents had no knowledge of asexuality. My teachers didn’t. My friends didn’t. None of the fictional worlds I had spent countless hours – whole weeks – in even had a sniff of it. The word was nowhere. There was no-one to teach me.
If I’d had just one character – just one – as a teenager who was like “hey, sex? No big deal. And I don’t mean that in a pretending to be cool way, I literally mean that it doesn’t have to be a big deal to you. You’re not broken. Live your life the way you want to live it” then I would have saved myself a lot of sleepless nights, and I cannot tell you how happy I am to finally see asexual characters openly declaring themselves as such over the past five years or so. Because, as I said, I couldn’t rely on any of the adults around me to tell me the word. None of them knew it either. And there was no way for them to naturally learn it.
But I learned other things from fictional characters.
I learned about pollution from Captain Planet and a couple of episodes of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. I learned about animal captivity from Free Willy and Fly Away Home. I learned about learning difficulties from an episode of Hey! Arnold. I learned about racism from Fresh Prince of Bel Air. I learned about loss from Tom’s Midnight Garden. I learned about religion from The Bromeliad. I learned a whole lot from things that we now dismiss as “just a TV show” or “that film, you know, the one with whale with the rude name”.
Stories inform our world. We have always told one another stories, and those stories in turn are created from the world in which we live. We have cave paintings. Oral histories. Gods and legends. Novels told through newspapers. Black and white films. Video games. These stories, no matter who makes them or what format they’re told to us with, will always mean something to somebody. There’s a kid right now who has lived the last couple of years through the eyes of Steven Universe, and hopefully learned to become a kinder, more compassionate person because of that lil’ ol’ cartoon with the catchy musics. That’s a win in my book.
And ultimately this is why representation, no matter what anyone says, is important. The people in our real world lives can’t tell us everything because they don’t know everything. (And even, tragically, do not want to know everything because the things they do know are telling them that the things they don’t know are Bad And Wrong. I was lucky at least to have very open-minded parents). But stories? They can tell us so much, even as we laugh and cry along with them. Even if we don’t realise we’re being taught. Nobody sat down to watch Captain Planet for the environmentalist message. We watched because the power rings were cool.
And right now, today, if there’s even just one teenager who plays The Outer Worlds and sees themselves in Parvati Holcomb then that’s just incredible to me. I just wish I could have gotten to know her sooner too.
As it is, I’ll stick with building a time-travelling police box so I can zap back in time to Sex Ed class and loudly ask Mr. Smith why the hell we’re learning to put condoms on bananas. We’re not impressed, Mr. Smith. We know what a willy looks like, there’s one in our textbook.
AROFAN 