"I get the sense that asexuality is part of her hippie aesthetic."

24th January 2012

Link reblogged from Hardcore for Nerds with 92 notes

"I get the sense that asexuality is part of her hippie aesthetic." →

marathonpacks:

About one of the most resolutely sexual albums of the last few years. A shame that Grantland’s huge audience is exposed to this level of crude misrepresentation masquerading as coy/self-effacing insight.

I dunno, it might help to include the surrounding paragraph:

“tUnE-yArDs is essentially one person, a somewhat androgynous American woman named Merrill Garbus. This is her second album. I get the sense that asexuality is part of her hippie aesthetic, because I just looked at the tUnE-yArDs Wikipedia page and noticed that the wiki writer put a lot of effort into never using gender-specific pronouns.”

It’s fairly clear that he means ‘asexual’ in the associated meaning of androgynous, or neither one gender (‘sex’) or the other. Of course, unfortunately asexual doesn’t mean quite that, rather implying the absence of sexuality altogether. I’m not trying to save Klosterman’s thesis here (save for objecting to the crude dismissal of it altogether) but the response points up the equally unfortunate fact that sexuality is generally seen in an exclusively gendered form. Really, if you’re talking about tUnE-yArDs being androgynous*, that is in no way sufficient to assume she is asexual (or to assume that is the inference on the author’s part); it’s simply a commentary on gender, not sexuality. Bad choice of words, not a bad idea.

I don’t know if I like tUnE-yArDs at all, but I find Klosterman’s** article a bit more interesting than the panties-twisting/chest-thumping going on around it.

*if anything, she’s acameral

** incidentally, how come people don’t make more of the (probable) fact that ‘Klosterman’ means “man in the monastery (cloister)” in German?