Let’s say you’re a vegetarian. Ok? Not because of an allergy or an aversion to animals being eaten – just because you really can’t see the attraction of meat. Bear with me here. So you’re a vegetarian, and you figure out that you are hungry. However, the internet is not working and you don’t know any recipes off the top of your head. The only option here is to go borrow a cookbook from a friend of yours. They may not be vegetarian, but they have a vegetarian-only cookbook, you know. So you pop over to your friend’s house to pick up the book. They give you it, and you get on home because, you know, you’re really hungry. You’ve waited ages to get this book.
However, when you get home, you realise there’s been a mistake. The book you have has cooked chicken on the front – not the most vegetarian-friendly dish. Confused at this, you call up your friend and ask them about why they gave you a non-vegetarian book. Your friend replies “but it is vegetarian. The cover just looks like that because roast chicken looks really good.”
So, as a vegetarian, you are expected to read a cookbook (which, you find out, does actually have no meat-related recipes) with something you have no interest in on the front cover. The chicken is on the cover because it looks aesthetically pleasing to non-vegetarians.
Thank you for staying with me through that extended metaphor. You see, I needed a severe rant about something I saw, and the best way to explain the idiocy of it was that little story above. As some asexual people may know already, a small publishing house has called for asexual short stories to compile into an anthology.
This sounds great – really, it does. Asexuality is horrifically underrepresented in the written word scene. I only have on problem with it. The cover.
Remember that metaphor at the beginning? It involved a vegetarian cookbook with meat on the cover. Ok, well replace the words “vegetarian cookbook” with “asexual romance book”; and “meat” with “over sexualised picture of two nearly naked women”. When they revealed the cover picture, I looked at it and thought that, while the women were pretty, I really didn’t care.
Scantily clad women are an advertising staple for many different brands and companies. They sell, frankly. Objectification of women aside (although I seethe with rage at every advert like that), putting a near naked woman onto an advert will sell a product, because consumers think – however unconsciously – ‘that person is pretty, I would like sex with a pretty person, I will buy this’. Yes, I oversimplified horrifically, and usually it’s only to a very small degree, but that is the reason for it.
This sells so well because the majority of the population is non-asexual. So the majority of the population are more likely to look at the advert and buy the product.
Can’t see where I’m going with this? Well, the only reason I can see to put this as the cover would be to sell it better. The people that would read the stories and enjoy them would be (generally) asexuals. The people that would look at the cover and want to buy it would be non-asexuals. At the end of the day, nobody’s going to be happy.
The one thing I never expected to be, as an asexual, is fetishized. But that’s really what the cover is trying to do. Everything is pale, in some sort of homage to purity, and they are holding hands and looking away from each other. It gives the picture a look of “we are so pure, so we don’t even care about each other enough to look happy”. It’s irritating. And, as someone stated on the Tumblr post about it, “They barely seem to notice each other, the held hands are almost an afterthought.”
If anyone is still uncertain as to whether or not this image is appropriate as the cover, a quick reverse google image search shows where else this image has been featured. The list goes: a forum for posting pictures of hot “babes”; at thismakesmehorny.tumblr.com; at another site collecting eroticized portraits of women; in a thread for beautiful pictures of women/men that are mildly and/or not clothed; on what is basically a straight up porn site. I won’t post the links I’m afraid – if you want the google search it is here.
Essentially, every site in that list is for erotic images. Personally, I don’t think that that is the right idea of a cover, especially considering the subject. I don’t want people’s first thought to be of those two hyper-sexualized women when they hear asexuality. I don’t want people to associate asexual romance with something so emotionally bare.
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