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Intimate Partner ViolenceGabby Petito
I'm sure most of us have heard about Gabby Petito by now. She was a young woman who was traveling with her boyfriend Brian Laundrie. Laundrie returned home without her under very questionable circumstances. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened. Well, maybe it does actually.
Shortly before Gabby was reported missing, her and her boyfriend got pulled over by the cops. Brian had visible scratches on his face and hands. He was calm cool and collected while talking to the cops where he casually dismissed Gabby as being crazy because she has anxiety, tells the cops she just started hitting him and picking a fight. The cops then go talk to Gabby, who is in the back of a police car, where she is crying (Brian never gets put in a police car). They ask her if she is on medication and if she has anxiety, very victim blaming if you ask me. She is very polite through it all.
Anyway, the cops talk and joke around with Brian about triple the amount of time they spend talking with Gabby. Even though she is the one in distress. They even talk about charging her with assault, which makes Brian very happy and he starts laughing.
All of this seems like really fucking textbook abuse to me. Even the cops behavior is very stereotypically how they react in DV situations. Firstly, Brian spends more time talking about how crazy Gabby is than he does explaining what happened. The police believe him and don't seem to spend any time digging into what actually happened. Gabby is the one placed into the police car and she is the one they want to charge with assault. The cops believe, and we are supposed to as well, that Gabby randomly started physically attacking Brian for no reason right as they started getting pulled over. The cops believe, and we are supposed to as well, that Gabby was just crazy and unhinged because of her anxiety.
Well I don't fucking believe it. What I also have a hard time believing is how in the hell these cops fell for classic textbook abuser behavior. They played right into Brian's hands.
And now Gabby's body has been found. Her boyfriend Brian is on the run. And reports are circulating that Brian was very possessive and jealous during their relationship. Any one of us could have seen that coming. But somehow the police were fooled, and the world seems to be fooled as well. The comment section on this video is full of people saying Gabby is crazy, she probably killed herself and her boyfriend panicked, she probably just picked a fight and wondered off by herself and got lost and died. Don't judge Brian, you have no idea what that crazy bitch did to him. You get the picture. Some of the top comments are about how kind and sweet the police officers were as well. It makes me sick.
If they're sexually involved it does seem silly to "identify" as asexual. Plenty of older people, especially older women, will tell you that their sexual needs taper off at some point and they don't masturbate or create erotic art on a regular basis, but I don't think they'd call themselves "asexual" either, bc it's just unnecessary. It always used to be considered fairly normal for old married couples to eventually relax their sexual activities.
But then we invented viagra and normalized botox, and pushed the idea that everyone should try to be 25 forever. With porn available everywhere and even most ordinary entertainment far more explicit than it was a couple decades ago, the expectation is that everyone must be having sex constantly from their early teens until they die. I can imagine that people who feel like their interest is lower than what's perceived as the norm may find it useful to label themselves "ace" or "demi" just to clarify that they don't fit into that demographic, even though that is a manufactured concept of what is normal.
To me it seems like the concept of being asexual developed very much as a response to the increasing sexualization of our culture, largely through tech & internet changes. The more kinky, pornographic, explicit, and constant sexual action & reference is expected, the more there's a defense of some kind, which may be more extreme than the truth. Plenty of young people who identify as asexual may just want to have a normal level of sexual interest and live in a culture that doesn't put sex at the forefront of everything, but they end up exaggerating the case in order to push back. It's easy to see just by looking at fashion, movies or even educational activities how much norms have shifted, so that plenty of people who call themselves "asexual" now would probably be perfectly comfortable a generation or two back.
I remember when we used to discuss if "going all the way on the third date" was slutty. Or when it was considered a little bold to wear a skirt without tights.. Stuff like anal sex wasn't even on the radar. Sex for young people now has shifted & a lot of people are trying to define themselves in relation to that.
One of my "asexual" friends currently has a fuckbuddy with no feelings attached. I'm pretty sure a huge majority of people who claim to be asexual just want a free pass into being LGBT (I'm not saying LGB because, from what I've seen, most of them support the T)