Symbols and How You Can Help

I decided to start reviewing articles tomorrow as I have received a few inquiries about things the community can do to help raise awareness of asexuality and the asexual community.  I am still brainstorming on this issue myself, so this post may be a little shorter than the others.

First and foremost, asexual awareness is all about visibility.  Being a relatively new community, asexuals rely heavily on word of mouth.  Telling your friends about this blog would be of great help.  If you would like to go the extra mile and put up a few fliers around campus, I would be more than happy to email you the fliers that I created.

There are also some other symbols associated with asexuality, which you can use to show your support for the asexual community.

Asexual Triangle

David Jay, founder of AVEN, used this symbol when he was starting the asexual forum.  It is based on the Gay Pride pink triangle.  The top line represents the Kinsey scale and the third point represents how strongly one is sexually attracted to people.  The gradient (and the triangle) represents the fading between sexual and asexual.  It is not the most popular symbol and is more used as a metaphor nowadays.

Asexual Flag

The asexual flag was adopted in August 2010 and has since been used in a number of areas and events such as Pride parades to help bring greater visibility to the asexual community.  The black stripe is representative of asexuality, the gray stripe is for gray and demi-sexuals, the white is representative of sexuality, and the purple stripe is representative of community.

Cake

This symbolizes the notion of "cake is better than sex" and also the general feel-good and welcoming notion that is attached to cake.

The Ace

 

The asexual community frequently use the Ace of Hearts and Ace of Spades (playing cards), a play on words ("Ace" is frequently used as shorthand for asexual).  There is no preference for one or the other, but unofficially, the Ace of Hearts can represent asexuals with a romantic orientation and the Ace of Spades can represent asexuals that identify as aromantic.