Internalization and Oppression

Oppression doesn’t just consist of how other people treat you. It’s also about the way you think and act as a result of the ideas you have internalized from society. It means that you have been taught to view yourself as lesser, defective, or even deserving of the bad things that other people do to you. You are taught to identify with the people who hurt you, and to feel ashamed of people like yourself.

Society does not just oppress us; society teaches us that we deserve to be oppressed, and to oppress ourselves even in the absence of an outside force.

When I realized I was aromantic, I felt lost and sad. I was not happy to think of myself as aromantic. Why did I feel that way? Because society had taught me that people who can’t fall in love deserve to be pitied, and should be “fixed” by someone else’s love if possible. I had gone my entire life believing that I needed romantic love in order to be successful, fulfilled, and happy. I identified with romantic people, and I expected to eventually “meet the right person.”

The fact that I had never seen anyone say bad things about aromantic people did not matter. The fact that no one ever harassed or attacked me for being aromantic did not matter. What mattered was that I felt there was something wrong with me, and that my life was of lesser value, because I was aromantic. I felt this way because I grew up in a culture that is hostile to aromantic perspectives, ideas, and lifestyles.

This marginalization was so effective that even the concept of aromanticism was never recognized as a phenomenon. It had no name, and therefore could not be understood as distinct from romantic people’s experiences. Since I had no name for my feelings (or lack thereof), I was denied even the ability to recognize that they were different from most people’s. I continued to judge myself by romantic standards and expectations because I never realized I had any other option. Those expectations were unfeasible, unnatural, and unhealthy for me, and if I had tried to act on them I would have only wound up hurting myself and others.

The fact that nobody I knew intended to hurt aromantic people does not matter. Because I was hurt, and I am still hurting, and so are many other aromantic people.

I am still in the process of detaching myself from those harmful ideas. I have to actively seek out, explore, and validate aromanticism and aromantic perspectives. I must be consciously aware of my thoughts and determine which of them are “natural” and which of them were “programmed” into me by my culture. I must teach myself when not to relate to romantic people or relationships. If I do not do these things, I will end up falling back on a worldview that is self-destructive.

In a way, these things also apply to my asexuality. But I did not feel the same sense of shame or loss with asexuality, as I did when I identified as aromantic. Instead, I had always felt different from most people when it came to sexuality. I had accepted long ago that I didn’t think about sex or attraction in the same way most people did. I rejected compulsory sexuality long before I knew there was a word for it. I have learned many things since identifying as asexual, but I have not needed to unlearn many things.

But in this respect, I seem to be different from most asexual people. There are so, so many asexuals who felt broken or inferior because they did not feel sexual or attraction or desire sex, in the way that society had taught them was “normal.” They internalized ideas about sex in the same way I internalized ideas about romance.

The marginalization of asexual people is very similar to that of aromantic people. For both groups, the chief weapon against us is not violence, but erasure. We are erased so thoroughly that we do not realize people like us exist, and therefore have no choice but to identify with the people and social conventions that hurt us. From there, we come to believe in the ideas about love, sexuality and relationships that society teaches us. Our self-esteem and relationships suffer because those ideas simply do not work with our feelings and needs. We learn to oppress ourselves.

Both aromantic and asexual people are often told that we are not oppressed, and therefore do not need any form of activism, recognition, or connection with the queer movement. But what is oppression? Does oppression only exist when people deliberately, specifically, visibly target it at you? Does it not count as oppression if your suffering is a side-effect rather than the goal?

I have been told countless times that it does not matter whether a person intended to be bigoted or oppressive; what matters is the effect that their words or actions had. You can be transphobic without knowing what trans people or transphobia are. You can be sexist even if you believe you are a feminist. You do not need to be aware that asexuals or aromantics exist in order to hurt us.

We do not need to wait for hate groups to denounce us in order for our problems to be real. We do have problems, and one of the biggest ones is internalization of social standards that harm us. When thousands of people grow up feeling isolated, abnormal, and broken, and feel the most beautiful relief and new self-esteem from discovering that asexuality and aromanticism exist, it is a sign that there are serious issues in our culture that need to be addressed. And it is not possible to effectively address these issues without the leadership and input of the people who are affected by them, asexuals and aromantics.