Fox News's Red Eye Spends Three Minutes Ridiculing Asexuals

Details: Category: Cake Recipes; Published on Wednesday, 22 August 2012 22:06; Written by Sara Beth Brooks; Hits: 25732

Early in the morning on August 21 Fox News show Red Eye aired a segment on Asexuality following the release of Anthony Bogaert’s new book Understanding Asexuality. Instead of reaching out to the Asexual community to present the Asexual experience, Red Eye featured a panel of sexual people who chose to make fun of Asexual spectrum people and spread misinformation and lies about the Asexual experience.

Red Eye is watched by almost half a million people according to Neilson ratings. Today, Asexual groups are actively responding. Asexual Awareness Week, one of the largest Asexual organizations in the country, started a petition this morning called “Instead of talking about Asexual people, talk to us”! The petition demands that Red Eye cover Asexuality by talking to Asexual identified people rather than lawyers, comedians, and commentators. The petition has hundreds of signatures in just a few hours and can be found here.

“The segment is offensive and mean. In the middle of three minutes of jokes, host Greg Gutfeld calls Asexuals lepers,” Sara Beth Brooks, founder of Asexual Awareness Week, said in a press release.

“Near the end, guest Bill Schulz asserts that Asexuals aren’t discriminated against. However, it is easy to see how the media is dismissing Asexuals even within the segment.”

“The discussion about Asexuality on Red Eye encourages viewers to meet Asexuality with skepticism and disbelief rather than acceptance,” Brooks said. “Misinformation and tasteless jokes could have severe negative consequences on Asexual people - especially youth -- who are struggling to find acceptance.”

“Asexuality is a rich topic for discussion, but there is no benefit to being inaccurate,” said Jay.

Adressing the inaccurate statements in the Red Eye segment:

1. Brooke Goldstein said that Asexuality is synonymous with being a woman. Statistics show that only 51% of our community identifies as female.

2. Brooke Goldstein said that people were labeled Asexual in a study and that was unfair to them. The study asked about sexual attraction and then assigned categories based on that response. Those who labeled “sexual attraction to neither” were studied as Asexual.

3. Brooke Goldstein said that Asexuality was invented to describe “normal” sexuality in a hyper-sexualized world. Asexuals were first identified by Alfred Kinsey in 1948.

4. Jamie Weistein said that Asexual people were already represented in the media because of an SNL skit.The SNL skit is about an androgynous character, not an Asexual one. (Publisher's Note: Anyone who suffered through the horrible Pat skits when they aired knows that the character is also highly sexual.) Androgyny is about gender, Asexuality is about sexuality.

5. Jamie Weistein said that the LGBT community was too many letters already and shouldn’t add any more. Statistics show that 80% of the Asexual community identifies with the LGBT community or are allies; major LGBT oranizations like the Trevor Project have already announced Asexual inclusion. (Asexual News prefers to use Gender and Sexual Minorities, when possible. It's a much shorter acronym.)

6. Greg Gutfeld said that Asexuals will be treated by the LGBT community as lepers. Asexuality isn’t a disease or something that needs to be cured by a doctor, it is an orientation. (Publisher's Note: It seems that Gutfeld was actually trying to say the LGBT community will treat Asexuals like lepers, but the answer to the challenge still stands.) (Editor's note: Greg Gutfeld did in fact say that the LGBT community will treat Asexuals like lepers.)

7. Greg Gutfeld said that he didn’t trust Asexuals. This is a baseless ad hominem attack on a community that Gutfeld didn’t even represent.

8. Dan Soder said that Asexuality was boring. Asexual experiences are far from boring. We raise fundamental, fascinating questions about the interplay between sexuality, emotional intimacy, sexual identity and human happiness. (The suggested beer commericals might actually sell beer, however.)

9. Bill Schulz said that there was no societal discrimination against Asexual people. Asexual people don’t get discriminated against with hate speech the way that LGBT people are, we get dismissed offhand and told that we’re broken, and we are pathologized by society.

10. Bill Schulz said that there’s no reason for Asexuals to seek recognition.The Asexual community must actively seek recognition in order to counter these myths and more that society holds.

Source:

Asexual Awareness Week Press Release. Some changes had to be made to accommodate the format of the site.