January 2023 Carnival of Aces Roundup: "The Advice You Wish You'd Had"

A typewriter printing a page that say "Advice to my younger self". Image source.

I'm hosting the January 2023 Carnival of Aces, and the topic I picked was "The Advice You Wish You'd Had." 

There were posts submitted by Sildarmillion and me. If anybody else wrote a post and I missed it, please leave a comment :)

From Sildarmillion:

An Essay That Gave Me A New Perspective "The point is that before reading Saah’s piece, I had subconsciously thought of physical intimacy as an all-or-nothing, that the whole point of it was penetrative sex, and reading her piece opened my mind to other possibilities."

The Advice I Wish I’d Had "If I could go back in time, the advice I’d give myself is to view all of these words (sexual, sensual, aesthetic, romantic, alterous, platonic, attraction, desire, love, lust, chemistry, compatibility, erotic, crush, squish, infatuation, limerence) as tools used to convey personal experiences, and not as robustly defined constructs being used in a consistent manner by everyone using them."

From me, Perfect Number: 

Bucket List (a post about being a sex-favorable asexual) "Okay, so the summary of what 'sex-favorable' means to me is: If I could do it all over again, I would have the perspective that 'I would like to figure out sex, and masturbation, someday. Like, that is one of my overall life goals.'"

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This topic- about how to do asexuality 101, how to teach sex ed in a way that's inclusive of aces, how to give relationship advice in a way that's inclusive of aces- is super interesting to me. I grew up in purity culture and had a lot of HUGE misconceptions about what sex even is, which made it impossible for me to realize I was asexual. It seems like a lot of aces spend years not even realizing that asexuality is a possibility, not even realizing that you don't "have to" have sex, etc. I definitely plan to blog about this topic more.