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bananaslug

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Everything posted by bananaslug

  1. Very dependent on the context. With friends or family that I've come out to I deffinatly do, but I don't talk about it much at work or school
  2. Yep this is a thing! Personally I find that wearing bulky sweaters (when it's not to hot to do so) really helps when it comes to dealing with unwanted family hugs and such, but if you're in a position to safely set that boundary then that's probably better. If you're looking for more threads on this topic I would actually check out AVEN sense touch aversion tends to be more widely discussed in the ace community
  3. When I was in middle school I made a "rule" for myself that I wouldn't go out with anyone until I was 15. All of my friends knew this. One day one of my guy friends asked me to go to a school dance with him "as a friend" and I said yes. Then, about a day before the dance, I was informed by another friend that he was telling people we were dating so I stood him up and never apologized (he never apologized to me either). Not exactly an awkward way to reject someone, but it certainly wasn't kind, and to this day I think I could have handled it better.
  4. I know of at least on aro/ace meet up group in Germany. Here's a link to their events page https://www.facebook.com/pg/AceAroBonn/events/?ref=page_internal They're in Bonn. Not sure how close that is to you, but it's on the right state.
  5. My partner and I have been together for 5 years so we're sort of past the point of dates, but I guess if I had to pick an ideal date going to a history museum is always a good time
  6. There's ACEapp. As you can probably tell by the name, it's more ace focused and a lot of people on their are alloaces looking for dates, but there is an option to look specifically for friends.
  7. Welcome to the Arocalypse!
  8. I'm finding that the Grammarly chrome extension is no longer working when I try to use it on the forum. Has anyone else been having issues with their extensions working sense the server transfer?
  9. I'm dyslexic... which I guess would fall under neurodivergent on this list although learning disabilities are often classed as there own thing.
  10. I grew up in a poly household, and almost everyone in my friend group and religious community is non-monogamous so well I have a strong preference for non-monogamous relationships that's mostly just because it's the relationship model I'm most familiar with
  11. ACEapp is *technically* an aro inclusive app, and it does let you filter for people who just want to make friends, but in my experience it is still pretty ace centric, and unless you live in a big city it really doesn't have enough users to be helpful.
  12. I... don't get what the problem is? Most queer flags include more specific identity groups in this same way. The trans flag has a stripe for nonbinary people even though enbys have their own flag. The ace flag has a stripe for acespec people even though most aspec identities have their own flag. And similarly, the aro flag has a stripe for arospec folks. We design flags that way so that they're more inclusive. Some arospecs prefer to simply identify as aro because more people know that term. Some people are questioning and don't know where they fall on the aro spectrum. Some people know they're somewhere on the aro spectrum but don't like using really specific labels. If we exclude arospec folks from the term "aromantic" and any flag associated with that term then we end up excluding all of the people above from having a community. So to answer your question, that's why there's no "aro specific" flag. That kind of thing would lead to gatekeeping and exclusion and nobody wants that. Aromantic is an identity but it's also an umbrella term for everyone on the aro spectrum. That's been true for as long as I've been part of the aro community, and I hope it continues to be true for a long time. If that confuses some people then so be it, but I think what's most important is that we make sure all of our community members feel included.
  13. I think it really depends on the person. For me, emotional vulnerability is mostly about expressing feelings even when I'm anxious about other people's response to them. Some people might only be willing to do that with a romantic partner, but other people might do it with friends, family, counselors, etc. So I think whether or not emotional vulnerability is romantic is really dependent on the context and the person.
  14. I have a lot of trouble with this too. I usually just say "I don't get crushes" or "I'm not really into romance". The second answer gets tricky though cus a lot of allo folks interpret that as not liking big romantic actions as apposed to not liking romance generally. I've also tried saying "I don't really date" but a lot of straight allo women in praticular interpret that more as me just being tired of dating men which like... idk there's a lot of assumptions to unpack there
  15. Yes this is deffinatly a thing! I once had a guy in my physics class ask me out, and when I said no he proceeded to buy me a big box of chocolates instead of taking a hint. When I started avoiding him after that he had one of his friends confront me about why I wouldn't go out with him. Thankfully the quarter ended after that and I didn't have to see him anymore but he was persistent enough I'm sure it would have continued otherwise.
  16. My dude, saying that terms and such should be preserved for "easier-to-please people" as you put it, is not even a little bit equivalent to saying that other experiences don’t matter, don’t put words in my mouth. I said pretty explicitly that I believe we can re-think these lists so that they give people more information and context. These vocabulary lists don’t necessarily have to be lacking in context or links to other resources. So uh...most aspec terminology lists do mention if there are other terms with the same meaning (including most of the ones in siggy's footnotes). For a common example, most of theses lists include both Lith and Akoi and make a point of stating that they’re two different words for the same thing. Like yeah, probably not all of these lists are so helpful, but in my experience the vast majority of them are. Most of the people who have been in the community long enough to collect a glossary are pretty aware of the "reinvention treadmill".
  17. I think you may be looking at history as purly accademic and research based, and while that is one way to look at history, there's another away of looking at history, which is offten more common in queer communites, and that's as a way of telling stories about ourselves and who we are. A great example of this with vocabulary is the term Bambi-sexual. This was a, not super common term, that happened to be included in a few diffrent queer and gay glossaries back in the 80’s. Now would those sources be especially helpful to academic historians trying to find the origin and different uses of the term? Probably not. But when dug up and remembered by community members outside of that field it help inform an understanding and narrative of what the gay and lesbian communities were like in the late 80’s. It show us a way in which this community has changed over time, it gives us some idea of the diversity of experiences within that community and it helps us understand what some social and cultural norms may have been in that time and place (in this case Los Angeles). And with Bambi-sexual in particular, a lot of alloace’s saw the term and said, “Hey, that sounds a lot like me, isn’t it cool that people like me existed in the past even if we use different terms now!” and that’s important too because it gives us not just a sense of what was happening then, but a sense of where a certain group was in history. And yeah, it maybe doesn’t give all the information that an academic historian or linguist would want, but it still informs us. Language builds and reflects culture and preserving language in one form or another, can in many ways help preserve an understanding of that culture and who we are as a group. Now I am certainly willing to have a conversation about how we make these lists and glossaries, and what context should be included with them. For instance the AUREA glossary includes sources to the coining of each word when possible and maybe we should make that more of a norm, but I don’t think having less documentations of terms is super helpful. It is always good to have as much information as possible, and while this is just a personal preference, I would prefer do have half a dozen uncontextualized glossaries than lose all that language completely. Even language without coinage and multiple context can be useful, or at the very least interesting. Well it's worth noting then that a lot of the "glossaries" in those foot notes were not actualy labeled or intended as glossaries. Most of them are tittled "list of aro-spec identies" or something like that. If a glossary is only a glossary when labled as such then we're not actually having a discusion about the right topic.
  18. I think this kind of relates to a conversation that happened a few years back (which seems to have been eaten by time but I will keep looking) about how we preserve aspec terms for historical purposes. The question being, sense some terms will inevitably die off on their own, how do we catalogue our terminology for historical reference. As someone who actually made one of the glossaries listed in the footnotes on that post I will say personally that I find the purpose of stagnant aspec glossaries to be more as a historical paper trail than anything else. Have I actually met anyone who identifies as Thymromantic in the last 3 years? No. But someone, at some point, did find that to be a useful enough concept that they coined a term for it, so I feel that word is worth preserving, at the very least so that some day in the future aspec historians will have a better idea about how we talked and thought about attraction. Same with other dead or uncommon labels, whether we use them or not, if we want to keep a historical record we still need to have them documented somewhere public. I think the issue here is mostly with dates. Most of the glossaries in those footnotes are dated, and you can easily see that they haven't been edited sense 2015 or 2016. In those cases I think it's often up to the reader to think critically about whether or not a glossary is current enough to use. In other cases they're not dated and I really think that's a bigger issue. There's no way to know what's current if there is not date, and especially on social media platforms where things can get picked up and shared how ever many years later, there's not always a good way for creators to come back and say "hey this is actually pretty old and shouldn't be used anymore" when a glossary isn't dated to begin with. I think there is also a question here of how we use those glossaries. If I intend a glossary as a historical record but other people then use it as a reference then how do we reconcile conflicting uses? I don't have great solutions for these things but I think it's worth bringing up and maybe having a conversation about.
  19. Hmm, so for me personally adoption is a really big thing that I see having political challenges with in the future, and I think what will really allow us to change and work on that problem is coalition building. You mentioned working with the poly community on marriage, but we should also be working with poly folks on adoption. Monogamy is just as much of a prerequisite for adoption as marriage often is, and that’s another place where these two groups could work together. I also think with adoption, at least in the U.S, it would be important to do coalition building with non-christian religious groups. A lot of courts and adoption agencies are unwilling to send children to non-christian households, and that bias affects a lot of people. I know that personally as a children's class director at a Pagan place of worship I’ve had to do a lot of work to make services “acceptable” for pagan foster kids to attend because our cultural norms are so different. We’ve also had a lot of potential foster parents and adopters in our community turned away by agencies because they’re not “promoting christian values within the home”. And that’s just my experience with paganism, I know that a lot of other non-christan faith groups face similar problems when trying to adopt, and I think that given the opportunity, non-christain religious organizations are some really big, already organized, groups that could really help us with political activism around this issue.
  20. So I work in child care and usually when I talk to kids about aromanticism I don't actually use the label "aromantic" Kids have a lot of questions about relationships so usually I instead say things like "I don't get crushes" or "I don't want a boyfriend/girlfriend". The point isn't so much to teach kids the word as it is to open kids up to other ways of thinking about romance, and I think with children's media that would also be the best way to do it. When I tell kids I don't get crushes they tend to come back with questions a few days later. "Won't you be lonely?" "Who will you live with?" And "can you marry a friend?" Are some of the more common ones. I think there are definitely ways a program like Disney could address these questions through an aro character, especially sense those questions are ones that aros frequently have to grappel with themselves. But yeah I think Disney has enough personal growth and exploration stories that this wouldn't be to hard to do, but I think having an affective aro character also means addressing the questions kids have about it.
  21. Hi @Coyote Our PR Team is getting to all the emails as fast as possible. We are an all volunteer team and we are trying to give equal time to all feedback so unfortunately response time is a little slow, but we have received your email and are working on addressing your feedback. Thank you for your concern, you should be receiving an email back before the beta period is over.
  22. @raavenb2619 Tumblr can be a little hectic when it comes to tracking down peoples feedback, so while we aren't putting an open link to the beta on Tumblr quite yet we do have a select group of Tumblr bloggers that we're asking to look over the site while it's still in beta. If you know a few Tumblr users who you think might want to look over the sight you're welcome to share the link with them, but we want to finish the beta period before posting the website link there. Currently, we are looking for aro's of color and aro men in particular who would like to give feedback since those experiences aren't as prevalent within our core team. Thank you so much for your support and willingness to signal boost, it's greatly appreciated and we definitely encourage it once we're out of beta! We'll make another post when the website goes into Alpha so that it's easy for people to keep track.
  23. Hi there @Solfege, I’m one of the website building team members! Thank you for your feedback and I hope I can address some of your concerns. Yes, we recognize that website design and building experience is a necessary part of this project and while we haven’t been working with AVEN or asexualsurvivors specifically, we have been consulting with community members that have web building experience. This is understandable. We listed a broader goal as part of our fundraising, but our more specific goals include: Creating an extensive aromantic glossary with coinage and variation in definition listed Providing accessible online and printable resources, as well as a listing of in-person aromantic groups Creating an aro community contact point for media outlets and researchers Maintaining a community feed with information on events, surveys, and news articles Many of our team members already run or mod for aro specific blogs, so our goal with this website was to create something more formal than a subdomain. While we did consider using wordpress self-hosting, we also looked at a number of other hosting platforms and decided that squarespace provided the best website building tools for the lowest cost, so we are using it instead. As for having a beta version for feedback, we are planning to accept feedback on the website once it’s live. I appreciate your concern on this point. We have been consulting with other community members on various topics and are working hard to make sure we have accurate information on aromantic history and sources for different terms and concepts. We would not be doing this project if we weren’t all willing to put in the work. While diversity was considered when picking team members, we were not trying to fill any diversity quotas. As a result, we do have some gaps in experience, but we will make a point of consulting with other community members around topics that require more diverse viewpoints. As for things like web design, we are designing the website with an eye towards accessibility. I can say that personally as a dyslexic person with a background in graphic design, that’s definitely something at the forefront of my mind when making this website, and I know that my other team members have put a lot of consideration into that as well. I agree that logistics are important. Every member in our group has an official assigned role to make sure things get done and we will be posting those roles when the website goes live. Thank you very much for your feedback. It does give us more things to consider when creating our website and we really appreciate that and will discuss it.
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