The history of Cake in the Asexual community

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney. I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today I am finally bringing you the oft-promised cake episode. I’ve been meaning to do this for a very long time.

Royce: Yeah, you’ve mentioned it several times, but you couldn’t make the episode right when you wanted to at first.

Courtney: Yeah, well, you see, I wrote an article for Bon Appetit about how cake became a symbol for Asexual Pride.

Royce: And vastly exceeded the word count.

Courtney: Of course. Is anyone surprised? Well, listen, like they paid me very well, they accepted my pitch, they published it during Pride Month in 2022, and even got me an ace editor to work with, which was fabulous and above and beyond. I didn’t even preemptively request that, they just provided, which was phenomenal. But, as I’m sure none of you are surprised, I say a lot of words and I know many things, and I do a lot of deep dives. And when they hired me to write 1000 words, I was like, oh, this is going to be really tricky. I’m going to have to make this as short and condensed as possible. And trying my damnedest to make it as short as possible. My first draft was still over three times the word count limit, so I was in trouble.

Courtney: And, as a result, I mean, I had to leave out a bunch of things that I wanted to include, and so I thought, well, I’ll write the article at about 1000 words, I think I was still a little over the word count, they let me fudge a tiny bit. I thought, well, we could just do a podcast episode and I can talk about the rest of the things that didn’t get into the article itself. But then I had to sign a non-compete saying that I wouldn’t talk about cake and asexuality on any other platform for, like, several months after the publishing of this article.

Courtney: So I went, oh no. And what we really should have done was just record an episode then and held on to it until we could officially publish it. But me being me, I thought, well, no, this is a great opportunity to take even more notes and do even more research and try to find the bottom of that rabbit hole I was chasing before I realized I was over the word count anyway.

Courtney: And so my desire to make this the best possible episode, heavily researched, very educational, ended up being we’re just never going to record this because I don’t have the time to sit down and continue researching this forever. And really, we forgot our roots. Our podcast roots are low effort. Low time, low effort. And unfortunately, over time also, I’ve started to notice a lot of the links and resources that I was previously referencing are not as easily accessible anymore, so that’s too bad. I will put a link in the show notes and the description to the Bon Appetit article if you would like to read it, although I’m looking at it right now, and I’m just just a little ticked off, because I’ll give you three guesses what ad I’m looking at, right at the top of this page.

Royce: It’s been so long since I’ve commonly seen advertisements. I mean the common one, the stereotypical one would be – what – like some sort of libido medication?

Courtney: It’s Addyi, it’s the female viagra. It’s specifically the one I have griped about before, because I started getting flooded with these ads on facebook the day I signed up for, like, asexual groups. I didn’t even know they were still advertising. I thought they got, like, proven to be bogus. They probably did anyway and they’re still going. So, yeah, that’s not great. But at any rate, let’s get into cake, because I– Another episode I’ve been wanting to make is just asexual symbols, ace culture, and I still imagine we will just go through some of the common ones, some of the older ones that maybe you don’t even see as often anymore. But cake is such an enormous, long running, pervasive one that most everybody knows about, so I would say it is the most recognizable symbol of Ace Pride within the community at this point in time. So it very much does deserve its own episode.

Courtney: And I would say there are a lot of reasons why cake has become such a huge symbol for us, overshadowing many of the others that might come and go or be less recognizable. Because cake, I mean, first and foremost is very often seen as a symbol of pleasure, it’s a symbol of celebration, and we all know the old stereotypes about ace people that we’re prudes, that we’re stuffy, we don’t have fun, we can’t form any meaningful human connections, that we are completely emotionless. So I think it’s only natural that, given these horrible stereotypes, that we collectively cling to a symbol of joy and pleasure. And food and sex, not only amongst aces but even against allosexual people, is a very common parallel. Because you can think of both as a type of hunger. And I’ve seen old early 2000s AVEN forums where everyone’s talking about cake, everyone’s celebrating with cake, but oftentimes people ask like, why is cake an ace thing? Where did this come from?

Courtney: And it kind of surprises me that not a lot of people understand why and how this happened, because it was – at least in terms of becoming a community symbol that’s widely recognizable – it did primarily start on the AVEN forums. Because, although AVEN was not the first online asexual community ever created, it is, as of now, the longest running one. It’s very large, it’s very well known. AVEN is the organization that is almost always the one that’s going to be quoted when discussing asexuality. But comparing sex and cake goes back just culturally, even outside of ace circles, at least a couple decades before it got so pervasive on AVEN forums. And there’s really no better example than the Better Than Sex cake. This is a type of cake recipe.

Courtney: It’s something that at least in the US, in the Midwest, like in the 90s and 2000s, a cake like this really frequently showed up at potlucks. This would be something easy to bring and share because it starts with boxed cake mix, normally Devil’s Food cake, and it’s just baked in a rectangular pan, really easy for cutting up into squares and sharing, and it usually consists of some whipped topping, caramel and crushed Heath bars on the top. That’s one of the most common versions of this and of course there have been some that have changed out a little bit if you want a slightly different flavor profile. And I believe the origins of this cake probably date back to the 1970s, which is– it feels right. If you look at just the layered nature of it in the type of pan it was, that’s a very 70s kind of recipe. But the earliest name and iteration of it, as far as I can tell, was originally the Next Best Thing To Robert Redford.

Royce: And Robert Redford was considered like a sex symbol of the time?

Courtney: Oh, absolutely.

Royce: That’s a name I’m only familiar with because of this rabbit hole.

Courtney: Oh really? And yeah it was, it was very– It was smaller scale, probably spread by word of mouth. You know, Next Best Thing To Robert Redford cake, and that sort of just got switched over the years to something shorter and punchier called Better Than Robert Redford Cake. So now we have instances of, truthfully, probably mostly allosexual people, just statistically, who are taking a very good cake recipe and saying this is better than a well known sex symbol of our era. And then it really really started taking off in the early 1980s where a lot of food writers and newspapers, especially a lot of newspapers publishing this cake recipe, started making the rounds and getting out into the wider public. And more and more people could try this at home without having had a friend or a neighbor make it for them first. And once this reached a larger audience, it was no longer Better Than Robert Redford cake. It became Better Than Sex cake.

Courtney: And not only– I guess anything that can be seen through the lens of an appetite, whether it be sex or food, is always inevitably, in some instances, going to be seen as sinful. Sinful and seductive. And these are the words that people use for very good, very sugary desserts. It’s also words people use for sex. You know, neither of these things are literally sinful, but when something – you know – feels just so good, humans have this – you know, at least in our very passively Christian society, if not actively Christian society – you know, giving into your desires and not depriving yourself of a good thing is seen as sinful.

Royce: As well as things that are seen as bad for you in some way, whether they actually are or not.

Courtney: And I– I would make the argument that this could potentially be seen as a food fad because it began in the 70s but really started exploding in the 80s. But the thing about fads before the internet as we know it today is that it took longer to spread and get to more people and therefore it kind of at times had a longer shelf life. So even though lots of newspapers were talking about this cake in the 80s, there were still food columns talking about it in the 90s. And once the internet did start having – you know – recipe websites in the early 2000s, this recipe was still being published. People were still talking about Better Than Sex cake. And I can attest that I was seeing Better Than Sex cake at potlucks in the Midwest in the 2000s. Sometimes it would even be at, like, church gatherings for children and youth groups and they just call it Better Than Everything cake.

Courtney: And what’s funny to me is that, in asexual culture, we can see a phrase like better than sex, whether it’s pertaining to cake or any other thing, we can see it as a validation of some form. We can see this as, yes, there are things that enrich our lives in non-sexual ways and these are also worthy of celebration. These are also important to us. And sex is not the end all be all, pinnacle of human existence, best thing that could ever happen to anyone, as it’s often talked about within our culture. But when allosexual people say better than sex, it’s usually under the guise of a like willful exaggeration. Like they’re trying to be a little sinful, a little saucy. And there’s also, like, sort of inherently a debate around it in an allosexual crowd. Like, could this possibly actually be better than sex? I doubt it. Because nothing’s better than sex, right? So where they’re seeing it as sort of an irony, that also lends itself really well to have, like, the saucy conversation starter with the buzzy name Better Than Sex, and it’s a good recipe and lots of people are trying it.

Courtney: That sort of allo lens puts it more on the level of a fad, something that will come and go and fizzle out, but it can sort of connect on a deeper level to the Asexual Community, because now we aren’t trying to stir the pot or start a conversation or make it a debate. We’re taking it very literally. But many people take it a step further and can connect to that phrase – better than sex – on an emotional level. And since it was already in the cultural zeitgeist, like the phrase ‘better than sex’, the concept of cake being better than sex was already pervasive so it wasn’t just a tiny little niche thing that started in – you know – little infant budding ace communities that we were then trying to expose to more people. This was us reclaiming something that was already more widely said and known. So it makes perfect sense to me that aces started talking about cake and making it our symbol.

Courtney: And especially around that period of time too. Because this, this was how far I went and this was like in my first draft of my article, before a lot of things had to get cut. I went to like Allrecipes and tried to find like– I went to several different early recipe websites from like late 90s, early 2000s and tried to find the earliest examples of Better Than Sex cake being published on the internet. Because I managed to find lots of archives of newspaper articles from earlier than the 90s or throughout the 90s. But around the time that AVEN was really starting to take off and get membership, we’re getting into the early 2000s now, but this is also when recipes are being shared and food is starting to be talked about a little more online. And, in fact, a Better Than Sex cake recipe was published on Allrecipes in 2003, which is exactly the same year that AVEN officially adopted cake as a symbol and even created an emoticon for the forums that was a slice of cake. And I just love that little tidbit and I think that’s so fascinating.

Courtney: Well, I should say 2003 was when AVEN forums started talking about cake and using it in a recurring fashion and conversation. It was 2004 that it had gotten so common that they decided to then create the emoticon. But yeah, anyone who does want to just poke around some old AVEN forums, it’s very fascinating when you think of it through the lens of just asexual history. Because, as I said, it wasn’t the first, it is certainly not the only, but it was an early online forum and is still around today. So we do have all these old archives of conversations that we can look through. And there was a user who went by the name Live R Perfect who is the one who created that cake emoji, and it was officially adopted by the community on June 23, 2004. And from there, of course, as you can well imagine, now we’ve adopted an official image of a slice of cake that we can use on our forums.

Courtney: From there, you know, discussion of cake within these circles just rose exponentially. And a lot of these days haven’t stuck around, unfortunately. These were things that also were in my original draft but because they didn’t really stick, you know, long before International Asexuality Day, which is still very recent within our history, there were other grassroots attempts at creating sort of an asexual day, a celebration day, a Pride day, a visibility day. And one of the earlier ones that I could find didn’t get a whole lot of reach, but the proposal was that it be called Cake Day. And I found a really, really fascinating study from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, which examined the history of language in online asexual spaces. And just sort of, you know, combing these forums and seeing what words were used most commonly, they grouped these words into eight categories.

Courtney: One was sex and sexuality. Two was attraction, emotions and undesire. Three, relationships. Four, gender. Five, interpersonal contact behaviors that may or may not be sexual. Six, websites and website related terms. Seven, greetings. And then eight was miscellaneous. Now, greetings, the words listed as common greetings are welcoming, welcomes, welcome, hi, hello, greetings, and cake. And there’s a table in here of keywords, which I find fascinating, because they broke down the top 200 keywords for asexual discourse, and of all the words that were grouped into the greetings category, cake was the most commonly used one. On this list of top 200 words, cake was 83, which comes in before hi at 97, or hello, at 120.

Royce: What was highest on the list? Was this just word frequency? So it would be just common English words that are in practically any sentence?

Courtney: I mean they’re, they’re keywords, so it’s not like ‘the’ and ‘and’ or anything like that. Like top three, top four, like, is: AVEN, asexuality, asexual, asexuals, sexuals.

Royce: Okay.

Courtney: Then aromantic, demisexual, attraction, ace and repulsed, are the top 10. But of these 200 keywords, cake is the only one that has anything to do with food. So that to me just really shows how important this symbol was in this online community setting. And really cake, just as a symbol, makes all the sense in the world to me because it’s recognizable by other folks. And even if someone doesn’t understand asexuality, if you say, “Well, I think cake is better than sex,” you might get a chuckle out of it. They’ll probably think it’s charming. They– they might not empathize with it on, like, a deeply tangible level, but that is such a quick, shorthand way to get some level of basic understanding.

Royce: Yeah, it helps to start from a point that people have at least heard of before or understand to some degree. Because I mean, like you said, going back a few decades prior to this, this was going around so frequently that you may have heard of the name of the cake mentioned on television or around family members or at, you know, a potluck or a family gathering or something like that. It’s– the phrase is familiar, even if you haven’t heard anyone say it more seriously before.

Courtney: Yeah. And even if removed from the better than sex connotation, think of how many cultural touchstones we do have related to cake, even in more niche communities. Gamers know the cake is a lie, which I’ve absolutely seen that phrase reworked in Ace Colors to say the cake is not a lie.

Royce: Cake is just referenced in a lot of aphorisms and various things of that nature. I mean having your cake and eating it too…

Courtney: I tell you, my pitch for this article was so cheesy I had so many cake references, or puns, or jokes. I was like, if this is what I have to do to get people to care about cake as a metaphor and then bait and switch them into asexuality, I will do it. But luckily the – you know – editors I was working with, the people putting together this, you know, Pride And Food package, actually genuinely cared about the symbolism in ace culture specifically. But I mean, you know, paradoxically, I’ve heard so many people use cake to try to explain asexuality to people, or demisexuality, as if like, well, asexuality is kind of like everyone in the room loves cake and they’re they crave it all the time, they talk about how great it is and you just don’t like cake. Or even you know, sex neutral asexuality, like, yeah, I might enjoy cake if I had it, but I never crave it, I never go out of my way to have it. You know, there’s no shortage of metaphors that you can use with cake as imagery. And I’ve seen so many asexual papers written that reference cake, even if they aren’t talking about it.

Courtney: At least the language study I mentioned was literally talking about words and cake was a very high up keyword. I know I’ve seen, like, a study that was talking about – you know – ace inclusion in the broader queer community and it was phrased as in like, “Asexuality, to include or not include a slice of cake?” Or I’ve seen studies that are literally called, like, Cake Is Better Than Sex: AVEN and asexuality, talking about AVEN as an online community hub. And we’ll probably talk, like, a little bit more about – you know – the much newer iteration of garlic bread within the community, which is newer, but it’s also kind of the same idea. It’s like garlic bread is better than sex. It’s the same idea, it’s just a new version of it and it gives us a savory version of it, which is nice for people that like food but don’t like sweets, admittedly so. And that one also kind of started the same way. It was just like an irony laden allo who was like, “Garlic bread’s better than sex,” and all the aces are like, “You are so right, you don’t even know how right you are.”

Courtney: But prior to garlic bread becoming a thing, I remember in earlier iterations of, like, the Ace Community Survey, they’d have like demographic questions, lifestyle questions, but there’d always kind of be like a fun one at the end, and the debate used to be cake or pie. Because, with cake being so pervasive on these forums, occasionally inevitably there would be people here and there that are like, “Oh, you know, I prefer pie, actually.” And that’s just– That’s fun to see that evolution. Because where it used to be like, “Oh, do you prefer cake or pie?” In these conversations, most people would usually say cake. Me, literally in my real life, I usually prefer pie to cake, but as a symbol of Pride, I’m very much cake ace. I think the symbolism behind it is very rich, I think there’s a lot you can do to play with it, and I think there are reasons it’s got a lot of staying power.

Courtney: Because, whereas, we were used to– we used to be having conversations of cake or pie, now the conversation is cake or garlic bread. Cake is the through line, cake is the one that has remained. But yeah, and come to think of it, here is yet another, even older example of why I think, even amongst desserts or food that is fairly universally thought of as good despite obviously not everyone likes everything, the staying power of cake. Because early 2003 on AVEN, the first, like, mention of cake that anyone seems to have been able to find– and, mind you, some of these older forums just don’t exist anymore, so we can’t see absolutely everything that ever existed. Maybe someone can, somewhere. I don’t know where those records go. But there was a forum that started about ice cream in early 2003, like February 2003. In the context of talking about ice cream, someone was describing a really good ice cream sundae that they wanted and then was like, “And also some cake to go along with it.”

Courtney: And yet over 20 years later, people aren’t talking about ice cream as a big asexual symbol. Cake is what took over. And it was funny, I had to learn a little bit about British culture looking through some of these old forums too. Because in 2003, when people were talking about cake quite a bit but they hadn’t yet established the emoticon, there were some British members who were, like, talking about brands I’m not familiar with. Like offering them to one another. I want to say it was Mr Kipling’s. I have to look this up now. Yes, Mr Kipling, people were offering each other Mr Kipling’s cakes back and forth. And, from my limited knowledge, is this like the British Little Debbie?

Royce: That looks like it would make sense. When I try to search for the differences between Little Debbie’s and Mr Kipling’s, the first thing that came up was a food challenge: US versus UK cakes.

Courtney: Uh. But yeah, returning to these forums is very fascinating because near the end of December 2003– I found the forum where they were talking about and like offering each other Mr Kipling cakes and the creator of the emoticon was one involved in this conversation. And they even said, like, “Oh funny you should ask me that,” the question being like, “Would you like a Mr Kipling?” “I picked up the nickname Mr Kipling in my third year at uni because I do make exceedingly good cakes. AVEN seems to be taking a very cakey theme of late, doesn’t it?” And then the conversation continues and is like, “Yes, we do seem to have cake on the brain.” And a third person chiming in saying, “From what I remember, AVEN has always been very cake friendly, which is nice. I suppose something has to replace the sex crave, might as well be cake.” So there it is! Right there. It was destined to happen. It was always inevitable.

Royce: Reading through that thread, were there timestamps for the conversation? Like, when was this happening?

Courtney: December 2003. December 1st 2003 even. And then by December 12th, we have instances of people offering new people cake. Someone would come on and be like, “Hello, I’m new here, here’s my story, here’s why I think I fit here.” And we’d have someone saying, “Hi, welcome to AVEN, feel free to take a piece of cake or two.” And then that just became the thing. You offer cake to people who are essentially coming out, entering the community. But yeah, and then, as I said earlier, June 23rd, 2004 was the day of cake emoticon. And it started when one user, Davey, just said, “I figured it out. The thing that AVEN needs more than anything in the world. Ready for it? A cake emoticon!” And then everyone just picked it up and ran with it. Literally that exact same day, Live R Perfect came back with like, “How does this look? Do we like this one?”

Royce: You keep saying emoticon and occasionally emoji. Let me see what this actually looks like.

Courtney: Is there a difference? I mean, emoji was not a word in 2003 and 4.

Royce: Kinda. The distinct definitions, I’m not sure if I’m even sure on, and I don’t know how much they matter because they probably changed over time. But I was wondering what the implementation was. Because there were like very old cases where someone would just have a copy-paste bit of ASCII art essentially that may be different in size. There were examples of images. If what you had up was an accurate representation of what the site was back then, it looked like they implemented handling for a specific Unicode character purely on their site. Which is how– I don’t know how people typed it in unless they just copy pasted it here and there. But that’s how emojis work nowadays. It’s just– There are standards. There’s like a standard Unicode table for all of the regularly supported icons. And in this case, with you saying emoticon sometimes, when I hear the word emoticon I tend to think things that are composed of a few different, like, keyboard characters.

Courtney: Colon and parenthesis.

Royce: Right.

Courtney: Yeah, I get that too. But like to be clear, on the forums, the word that was being used was emoticon during this era, because the word emoji did not exist yet.

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: But yeah, and even in this conversation, when everyone was looking at like a couple of design options and saying, “Yeah, this looks fantastic. Yes, we definitely need an emoticon.” There was one little comment here I like from Kate Perfect: “What the hell kind of asexuals are we without a cake emoticon, sheesh?” So it was already determined by 2004 that cake is a necessary symbol of the community. But, yeah, and you can see what the icon looked like on the AVEN wiki, if you’d like to look it up yourself. It’s very tiny so you can’t see it all that well, but it does appear to just be a white cake with white frosting with a little bit of red on the top like red sprinkles. So it’s really not too terribly different from the common cake emoji today. That’s like a white cake with a strawberry on the top. But we did it first. That is ours, that is for the aces.

Courtney: But yeah, I was really happy that Bon Appetit wanted to do a series of Pride articles that were talking about Pride and food. When I heard that, I was like of course you have to have an article about cake and asexuality. You can’t leave that out. Because that’s such an enormous symbol of our community. So I was glad that they agreed to take my pitch. A lot less glad to see that Addyi is advertising on my article now. That’s acephobic. But yeah, and even though I didn’t win, it was pretty wild because Bon Appetit actually submitted me, nominated me for a James Beard Award for food writing for this article. Which was a fascinating experience. Especially for such a short little article that I really wanted to be longer and even more detailed and I had to cut even more than I otherwise would have for the word count. Because once I got down, finally, to about a thousand words, my editor was like, “We need something with your personal connection here. We want you to talk about yourself.”

Royce: Ah, the hardest thing for you to do.

Courtney: I didn’t want to, but they were like, “We want you to end on a personal note.” And I was like, “Why. Why can’t I just talk about the community and other people?” Because of quotes– of course, I had some quotes from, like, an AVEN board member. If you’ve listened to our interview with Marshall Blunt, you know I mentioned how he and his mom have just, like, a habit of making cakes during Ace Week and IAD. Because it’s true, if you are on social media on days when big Ace events are happening, you will see a lot of people mentioning cake. Either people drawing pictures of cake in the Ace colors or just a post here wishing cake to all the aces out there. But you’ll also see people just baking cakes and sharing their photos of it, and I think that’s wonderful.

Courtney: We’ve certainly baked cakes on occasion, but we’ve also like ordered really fancy custom cakes from, like, one of our favorite vegan bakeries. And it’s always fun to see what they come up with. Because I’ll just give them like a color palette and maybe a thing to write on top and see what they come up with and it’s like a little bit different every time. The first cake we ever ordered from them that said like Happy Ace Week was maybe the most beautiful cake I’ve ever seen in my life. It was truly a work of art.

Courtney: Oh yeah, I’m looking back at my actual pitch now and, mind you, I was delirious with exhaustion and grief as I was writing this. That’s another component. Our snake had an episode the night before I pitched this and it was horrible and devastating, and the only like emergency vet that would see exotics was– I don’t even know how big of a drive is that.

Royce: I think it’s two hours in one direction.

Courtney: Yeah. So it was like driving two hours away with an ailing snake in the middle of the night and he unfortunately did not make it. But by the time I got home it was dawn, the sun was coming up and I was exhausted but could not sleep, and I was just devastated. And I was just mindlessly scrolling Twitter, I think, while you were sleeping. And I just happened to find an editor at Bon Appetit saying: I’m putting together a Pride package about, you know, food and queerness for a couple months from now. Send me your pitches. And I was like, well, I’m not sleeping. Might as well.

Courtney: I’ve never written about food before, I’m not a food writer and Bon Appetit is a huge publication to just pitch cold out of the blue. But I did it and it worked. But he requested in the pitch like ideas for headlines, and I had so many of them and a lot of these are very corny, and they didn’t take any of them. Like, they ended up titling it: “For asexual folks like me, cake is actually better than sex. How dessert became a symbol for Asexual Pride.” And that is fine. I am not mad about that title. Rarely does a writer get to pick their own title.

Royce: Do you have some favorites from your pitches that you want to read off?

Courtney: “Let them eat cake: the cultural significance of food in the online Ace Community.” “The cake is not a lie: The invisible orientation and creating community through food.” I had one that referenced, like, “Is it cake?” Because that was huge in 2002. 2022 even. My head has been in the early 2000s for so much of this episode, I just shaved 20 years off. Can I read [laughs] this opening paragraph that I wrote in my first rough draft before it got scrapped? I’d completely forgotten about this.

Royce: So what’s the timeline here? At this point in time, the pitch had been accepted already and you knew the word count.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: Okay.

Courtney: This was like my first– Oh, I can’t even say it’s my first rough draft, because my first one was well over 3,000 words, but this is my first trying to pare it down to a little over a thousand words. [reading] “In this, the year 2022, with the help of TikTok and Netflix, there is one question on everybody’s mind: Is it cake? We scroll our social media feeds as we gawk in sheer awe at the talent of hyper-realistic food artists, while other times we watch in horror as a rogue baker plunges her knife into a turtle, only to reveal that it is in fact cake. Phew. Needless to say, this trickster cakery is giving us all trust issues. However, as an asexual woman, or ace, I knew that if there was one thing I could trust on April 6th, it was that my feed was going to be cake all the way down.” So, needless to say, we went through a couple of tone changes.

Royce: That was workshopped a little bit.

Courtney: We workshopped it a little bit. They were like, “Yeah, let’s cut the exposition. And how about you tell us about you and your life and your spouse, and how and when and why you eat cake?” And I was like, “Damn it. I’d rather be silly than talk about myself. But fine.”

Courtney: So I think that is going to be all for today. Hopefully, even with my very heavily delayed and low effort research and time preparation, you still learned a little something new and gained a new appreciation for this symbol that has become so ubiquitous in the Ace Community. And, as always, we’re gonna leave off with a featured MarketplACE vendor and I’m so excited for this one. I love this vendor. I have recommended this vendor to so many people over the years. And I knew this was the vendor I wanted to shout out for the inevitable cake episode, so I’ve been keeping it in my back pocket.

Courtney: We’re giving a shout out to Sugared Sunset, where you can find food shaped jewelry and stickers made by a Black ace artist. And the absolute greatest thing on this shop for anyone looking for just Pride accessories, there are Pride cake earrings. Just dangling little earrings with like clay cake that is beautiful. Looks like a beautiful tiered cake and each tier is a different color of the pride flag. So of course you can get an Asexual Pride flag colored slice of cake earrings. But they also have several other Pride colors if you want the aromantic flag, trans, non-binary and so on and so forth. And you can even get a couple of styles if the tiered one that looks exactly like the stripes of the Pride Flag isn’t your jam. There’s also a checkerboard ace cake.

Courtney: You can get some Pride cake stickers if you’re not one who wears earrings. And, of course, if cake isn’t for you, there’s other food. There are slices of pizza, there’s tacos. If you’re feeling really feisty lately, like so many of us are, there are guillotine earrings, which also 10/10. Gotta love that. So, as always, our featured MarketplACE vendor, we will have links where you can find them, in the show notes on our website and the description box on YouTube. As always, thank you all so much for being here. We’ll talk to you all next time and until then, I hope you get to eat a slice of cake. And I myself will also go get a slice pretty much the minute we cut this microphone, because we do have cake in the fridge. Goodbye.