eatingcroutons

I'm still baffled by it, to be perfectly honest. I don't understand what's unclear or insufficient about saying, "I want to be better friends with that person," or, "I think they're great, I want to spend more time with them," or any of the countless ways we already have to describe liking and wanting to be friends with people.

In my case I'd say, "I experience love as a single coherent emotion, which I feel in varying degrees towards different people in my life, but which is qualitatively the same emotion whether it's for friends, family, or anyone else."

I was raised in an environment where this was never the case. Nobody ever told me consensual sex of any kind was shameful, and I know both of my parents had many other sexual partners before they got married. My school had a healthy sex education programme, and I found university to be a healthy and sex-positive environment. I'm afraid I can't offer much advice for breaking out of internalised shame about sex, other than to repeat the fact that there is nothing shameful about consensual sex of any kind. I honestly can't remember ever being insulted because I have casual sex. Maybe surrounding yourself with like-minded people is the answer? ?

I feel no need to describe myself with any of these terms.

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That... seems like it'd be even less useful? There are plenty of awful misogynist films with women in speaking roles.

To be honest, I think if you try to put together a list of criteria that will exclude any content that might not appeal to every aro person, you're going to end up with a reclist of precisely zero media. I think it'd be a lot more useful to come up with a list of criteria that would be important to many aros, and then put together an assessment of each piece of media based on each of those criteria. So criteria might include diversity, violent content, sexual content, etc. And then rather than decide which of those criteria should matter most to others, you simply let people know how the piece of media does in terms of each criterion, and let them decide whether they want to avoid violent content, or sexual content, or media with poor diversity. FWIW, the point of the "Bechdel Test" and the comic that spawned the term was to highlight how at a systemic level, women and relationships between women are vastly underdeveloped in films compared to men. It was never intended to be a test of how feminist individual films are. Literally from the Bechdel Test Fest website: The test is not a measure of how good or ‘feminist’ a film is but it does highlight just how male-dominated cinema really is. Passing the test doesn't make a movie feminist. A movie doesn't have to pass the test to be feminist. I'd be all for having a criterion along the lines of how women and their relationships are represented in a piece of media, but the Bechdel Test shouldn't be it.

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So in some recent discussions on the Arocalypse Discord server, the concept of "online queer culture" was brought up. I was told that there are some generally accepted principles and norms expected of people who participate in online queer culture, and that it is assumed that members of Arocalypse know about these, since most members of Arocalypse come from other queer communities. I don't come from any other queer communities. The only identity-related communities I've ever been part of are aro ones, and apparently this means I'm ignorant of a lot of unwritten rules that are assumed to be understood by people involved in online queer culture. But if Arocalypse is being run by standard online queer culture rules, it'd be really helpful to me to have those rules explained, as someone who has no experience of any other online queer culture. This mainly came up on Arocalypse in the context of forbidden topics of discussion. One thing I was told was that online queer culture does not allow any mention of certain topics; rape fantasies and incest were given as examples of things people are not allowed to discuss. I know the Arocalypse mods are working on putting together a list of things we're not allowed to talk about, but in the meantime I'd really appreciate any guidance on other things that are typically forbidden topics of discussion in online queer culture. I was also surprised by the keeping of permanent records of every message ever sent on Arocalypse, including every edited or deleted comment. This definitely isn't something I've encountered in other online communities, but one Arocalypse mod told me they wouldn't feel safe in an online queer space where every detail of conversations was NOT permanently recorded in this way. Since I'm clearly out of sync with standard online queer culture practices in this regard, I was also wondering: Are there any other safety-related practices typical of online queer culture which I should be aware of, and may not have encountered elsewhere?

Are these the same "breatharians" who were in the news about 20 years ago when multiple people died following their ideas?

Arodynamics has a majority alloaro mod team, just sayin ? FWIW to the organisers, I'm happy to sanity check or proofread/comment on content, I just can't commit to being formally involved with everything else I'm doing in my life right now.

"Well, if I ever run out of new places to see, or new adventures to pursue, and find myself truly desperate for inspiration, I guess I might try pressing my face against someone else's. But this is a pretty big planet."

@bydontost is alloaro. I know her well, and can absolutely vouch for her dedication to the aro community as a whole, and inclusivity for alloaros specifically. She and I hosted the second Carnival of Aros precisely because we wanted to build something positive out of the dog's breakfast it started with.

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I'd say that what people call "romantic attraction" is part physiological phenomena, part subjective conscious experience of physiology, and part social framing of subjective conscious experience. There are hormonal changes that are correlated with "romantic attraction" - these have been studied and observed. They fundamentally mimic obsession/addiction states: Low serotonin, high dopamine, oxytocin as well. These are physiological changes that can be triggered or influenced by a variety of stimuli or circumstances. Then there's our subjective conscious experience of what our hormones are doing. It's been studied and observed that subjective experiences of similar physiological states vary from person to person: The same cocktail of hormones might result in significantly different feelings or experiences in different people. On top of all that is social context. We're all raised by societies that give us certain frameworks within which to understand and interpret our subjective experiences. Society, for example, may tell us that "love" is a thing that can be categorised into qualitatively different types, leading us to look for ways to categorise any love we feel according to society's framework. So in terms of whether "romantic attraction" has always been around, I'd say that the addiction-like rush of hormones almost certainly has. And that some people have probably always experienced that hormone cocktail as a deep, emotional desire to permanently bond with another person. Framing that desire as "romantic attraction" may be new, and whether or not society as a whole recognises and values emotional desire for a permanent bond varies. But it's highly unlikely that humans have changed so much in <200 generations that the ancient Egyptians never felt a deep emotional desire to pair-bond.

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I don't think it's particularly sensible to refer to other people as "SAM-using" or "non-SAM". The SAM isn't an identity, it's an optional framework which people may or may not use to conceptualise their patterns of attraction. As for the "original" definition: 2015-era definitions of the SAM that involve forcibly applying it to everyone come from the time that exclusionists were using the SAM to discredit and attack aspec communities. These days it is well-recognised that the SAM doesn't apply to everyone's experience, and that it is deeply harmful to try to force it on people. I'm on holiday and not about to go digging up posts as examples, but I can promise you my experience of aro communities here, on Tumblr, several Discord servers, and elsewhere, is that they have all long since rejected the "original" definition (which, again, was created and spread by exclusionists) in favour of the understanding that the SAM simply means that some people experience distinctions between different forms of attraction.

Are these the "concepts" you mean when you say the SAM refers to multiple concepts? Because that might be where we're talking across each other. Like @Apathetic Echidna, I understand SAM itself to mean literally nothing more than the concept that "a person may feel many attractions and they may not all be similar". What kinds of attractions exist, and how they are defined, is an entirely separate question.

One of the things I struggled with most when trying to understand concepts like QPRs was precisely that explanations seemed to be contrasted against a much more restricted understanding of "friendship" than my own. It wasn't until I found the original discussion where the term "queerplatonic" was mooted, and discovered that it was explicitly defined in contrast to a fairly conservative USAmerican view of limitations of the term "friendship," that I felt I understood where people were coming from with it. I have no problem with people calling their relationships queerplatonic if that feels right for them, but am also very, very much in favour of standing by the idea that "friendship" encompasses far more than that narrow, conservative definition of what's allowed between "friends". My "friends" include the person with whom I've been wearing matching rings for over 15 years as a symbol of our promise to stay connected forever. They include the married couple I've been discussing buying a house with. They include quite a few people that I regularly have sex with, including one partner from a different married couple that I have an open-ended agreement with. In my view the definition of "friendship" absolutely extends to every one of those situations, and an awful lot more.

Yeah, I agree that's where this discussion has ended up - and I agree that how people define different types of attraction is a separate topic to the SAM itself (which is just the concept that attractions can be distinct).

Ah! That's a different statement then. You realise these two quotes were replying to entirely different things, right? In the first instance @bydontost says that she believes the statements "there's more than one or two types of attraction" and "romantic orientation can be different from sexual orientation" are both part of the same concept, and explicitly clarifies her understanding to be, "There's more than 1 or 2 types of attraction, so romantic attraction can be different from sexual attraction." In the second instance tost is replying to your comments about "split attraction" and "romantic orientation" being "interchangeable/indistinguishable" which... as far as I can tell literally nobody in this thread believes? (I don't know who Laura is but if you have a problem with what they've said elsewhere maybe you should be talking to them about it?) ETA: lol whoops, didn't notice page 2 on my phone.

Summer holidays

I'm saying that in my experience, the "split attraction model" refers to the concept that different kinds of attraction can be distinct/split, and I've never met anyone who has found that concept ambiguous once explained in those terms. ETA: I just tested this out on a friend who has zero connection to queer communities, zero knowledge of aspec identities, and has definitely never encountered the concept of split attraction before. It took me all of ten seconds to say, "If I told you some people experience different kinds of attraction as distinct - like they might be bisexual but only romantically attracted to one gender - does that concept make sense to you?" and he was like, "Yeah, why?" I asked if there was anything ambiguous about what I'd said and he was like, "I reckon if you said that to Fred on the street he'd think it was pretty weird, but nah, the idea is straightforward."

It seems to me that Elizabeth was saying "non-SAM" can have multiple meanings and is confusing - possibly because that term was only mooted in the thread you linked to. I can understand how someone who doesn't "bother with" any of the communities where the term "split attraction" is used might be unfamiliar with it. I've also met plenty of people who've never come across the concept of split attraction. But in my experience it takes about five seconds to explain that it means "different types of attractions can be distinct (split)". The meaning is literally in the term itself. The fact that some people are unfamiliar with the concept doesn't make the concept itself ambiguous. Of course not. Only an individual can decide whether split attraction as a concept meaningfully describes their own experience.