| Founder(s) | David Jay |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2001 |
| Focus | Asexuality |
| Website | www.asexuality.org |
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN)[1] was founded in 2001 by David Jay with two distinct goals: creating public acceptance and discussion of asexuality and facilitating the growth of an asexual community. Since that time it has grown to host the world’s largest asexual community, serving as an informational resource for people who are asexual and questioning, their friends and families, academic researchers and the press. AVEN members throughout the world regularly engage in visibility projects, included but not limited to distributing informational pamphlets, leading workshops, arranging local meetups and speaking to interested press. The AVEN community centers around the web forum, which provides a safe space for asexual and questioning people and their partners, friends and families to discuss their experiences.[2]
Contents |
AVEN's official website, asexuality.org, has five main sections. These are
The static content and wiki carry general information about asexuality, including asexual perspectives and several FAQs. The community forums are places for asexuals and their sexual friends, partners and allies to congregate, discuss issues, socialize, and find ways of spreading asexual awareness.
AVEN is run by two teams, both elected by the general membership. The site's founder David Jay retains several responsibilities that have not yet been adopted by these two teams.
The AVEN forums are patrolled by a large number of administrators and moderators. It is their job to keep the forums civil and to ensure that topics are in their proper forums, as well as to lock threads that are duplicates or that have degenerated into personal insults. Some moderators take care of a specific area of the forums, while administrators take on more general and sweeping duties such as deleting spam accounts. The term 'admod' is occasionally used on the forums to refer to the administration and moderation teams as one group.
New moderators are elected by the whole of AVEN on a case-by-case basis when a new position becomes available or an old moderator resigns. They are initially elected to a single section of the forum, but are often moved around to different ones as the need arises. New admins are chosen by the admod team.
In addition to administrators of the forums, AVEN also has a Project Team - a group of members dedicated to overseeing AVEN's many efforts to bring education and visibility to the outside world.
Asexuals have always existed, but until the invention of the Internet, they seldom had ways to connect with each other and share their experiences. In the early and mid 90s, asexuals would occasionally post on sexuality-related newsgroups expressing their disidentification with sexuality, but search functions weren't good enough and it was hard to locate like-minded people.
AVEN was created by David Jay in 2001. At first, it was simply a front page giving a definition of asexuality and asking for e-mail from those who understood. One e-mail directed Jay to the Haven for the Human Amoeba, a Yahoo group on asexuality that had existed since 2000, but was only just starting to take off in terms of posts.
Due to the structure of a Yahoo group, every comment someone made was emailed to everybody else, and as membership and activity in the Haven for the Human Amoeba grew, this became an awkward way to do things. There was demand for a website on asexuality with a better community structure, and several websites emerged with competing ideologies. Some websites catered to antisexual views. Others held that the only real definition of asexuality was nonlibidoism. AVEN was reconstructed in the hopes of becoming a more inclusive option, based in sex-neutrality ("sex is great if you're interested, but if you're not interested, you don't have to worry about it") and the belief that anyone who identifies as asexual is validly asexual, regardless of sex drive or other factors.
The first AVEN admin who wasn't David Jay was chosen when Jay took a trip to Ghana. The forum at this point had about 100 members. The first moderator elections were held a few months later.
There is no litmus test to determine if someone is asexual. According to AVEN "asexuality is like any other identity-at its core, it’s just a word that people use to help figure themselves out."
Importantly, according to the AVEN website, AVEN does not consider asexuality to be a problem-the problem is that society does not understand it as a core identity, something which can be a source of implicit misunderstanding between sexuals and asexuals. Asexuality itself can be a free of problems. Indeed AVEN states "People do not need sexual arousal to be healthy, but in a minority of cases a lack of arousal can be the symptom of a more serious medical condition. If you do not experience sexual arousal or if you suddenly lose interest in sex you should probably check with a doctor just to be safe." Many asexual people indeed experience attraction "but we feel no need to act out that attraction sexually. Instead we feel a desire to get to know someone, to get close to them in whatever way works best for us. This can even be done in a sexual way (in a broad definition of asexualism) but not out of necessity so. "Asexual people who experience attraction will often be attracted to a particular gender, and will identify as lesbian, gay, bi, or straight." [3] For asexuals, sex and sexuality somehow goes against the grain of who they are. Asexuality in and of itself is considered a profound difference between asexuals and sexual people.
A popular AVEN slogan is "it's OK to be A." Currently asexuality is just beginning to be noticed by society and also is starting to be a subject of research.[4]
AVEN has over 30,000 registered members on the English site alone. Of these members, more than half have posted at least once, and a tenth of these have posted more than 125 times. Among more experienced AVENites, especially in the Just For Fun section of the forum, traditions have sprung up such as offering cake to new members. Some of these traditions can be difficult to understand for an outsider, or even an experienced AVENite who does not spend a lot of time in Just For Fun.
There is also a subsection of AVEN culture known as chat culture. There are many dimensions to chat culture that include but are not limited to: the main chat, tinychat rooms, chatzies, yeechats, games that have chat functions, msn, and skype. It is a well known fact that Fae, Arca, and Tyki are usually on all of them. Many chat terms and inside jokes have popped up such as: lariening, foppeling, faeling, facepawing, and spageggi.