assignedgothatbirth

it's not aro-exclusive, but there is lex, which is a social and dating app for non-men. there are quite a few aros on there, but it can be used for a variety of relationships- ive seen ads for qprs, fwbs, found families, casual friendships, quick hookups, so if you're looking for a variety of possibilities that's probably you're best bet for now. 

5 hours ago, bydontost said:

it should be, but the truth is that someone has to volunteer for it to exist. groups that are for aros specifically (that I know of at least) are in new york and london only

eh idk if that new york one's still around either- i looked into it about a year ago and there was nothing really there. looks like there last event was almost three years ago.

Only a few more days left to submit!

@raavenb2619 I just saw this, sorry for taking so long to respond! The link in the original post should be working now. 

14 hours ago, treepod said:

Yeah I had a feeling that was a case. It seems that general lexicon isn’t usually aware of the split attraction model, so since the words people are already familiar with are terms like bisexual, asexual looks like the corresponding term for somebody who’s interested in nobody (as in one or the other, both/all, or neither/none, where asexual = neither/none).

but that is a correct definition of asexual? not all aces use the split their attraction and saying that if you're not interested in anyone than you have to identify as aroace is erasing a lot of people's experiences. if the creators say that jughead is asexual, than that means that he's asexual. it supposes nothing about his romantic orientation, or whether he has one at all.

Just what it says on the tin! I figured I may as well post the link on here. 

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For those of you who don’t know what that is, the Carnival of Aros is an event where a bunch of different people discuss a theme related to aromanticism every month. Most of this discussion is via long-form blogging, but things like podcasts, videos and more are also options! If you’d like to learn more, see past and future themes, or even volunteer to host yourself, visit the Carnival of Aros WordPress.

At the end of the month, I will collect a master post with links to all of the different submissions with a short summary attached.

This month’s theme is relationships.

Click here for the full post, where you can see a list of prompts and post links to your contributions in the comments! I will also accept submissions that are linked to on this thread, in case the comment section is giving people difficulties.

4 hours ago, NullVector said:

Speaking for myself only: I don't really find I am denied any important political rights as a result of my romantic orientation (or lack thereof). By historical standards, I seem to have an enormous amount of freedom to live my life in the way I choose to.

I do think for younger, financially-secure, and/or abled people there aren't a lot of issues (not that I'm saying you're any of those) but once you consider other factors money becomes a big issue. 

So, for one, kids are expected to take care of their parents when they get older. And I think it's probably safe to say that aros are either less likely to want kids, don't have the proper supports to raise kids as a single parent, or can't adopt because of legal barriers.

Disabled people also have a lot of issues such as having higher healthcare costs and needing more support in general, and while sometimes having a romantic partner can alleviate some of that we also need to make sure that we're providing proper care for all disabled people, not just ones in relationships. 

Then there's the harassment many of us have received due to things like the Tumblr flamewars- probably not the most traditional political thing but considering it was a campaign that was trying to construct us as being fundamentally evil for existing, I'd say that's pretty damn political.

And these are just the ones I came up at a moment's notice.

28 minutes ago, Spacenik86 said:

Soon I've found that there is a leftist echo chamber

listen bud if there is one thing that i can say is true about all leftists its that we love complaining about other leftists. it is a remarkably broad term after all- the fact that anarcho-communists and stalinists both fall under that label is pretty wild. so i wouldnt say that there is a single leftist echo chamber.

31 minutes ago, Spacenik86 said:

Leftist echo chambers will hate you for criticising Islam

again depends on what space you're in. shockingly enough there are still plenty of islamophobic leftists because again, it's a very broad term (though this is going to be true of any group- i dont think that you'll be able to exclude bigots from every group). 

and then there are actually leftist spaces that do criticize islam in a way that isnt islamophobic- generally, from people who are muslim themselves, or once were. you didn't actually specify what those critiques were though, so im not sure i can take you on you're word here. 

27 minutes ago, Spacenik86 said:

Gays are another example of an echo chamber

ah yes the gays are such an echo chamber...in fact we're a hivemind that communicates with each other telepathically and we're all in agreement about anything. we have never had a disagreement ever. all communities are identical to one another, regardless of space and time. 

37 minutes ago, Spacenik86 said:

What right do we have to judge them?

...the issue with saying 'some peoples sexualities can be forcibly changed' isnt that we're 'judging' people its the very real harm that conversion therapy and abuse cause to queer people.

45 minutes ago, Spacenik86 said:

The aromantic community might have another problem: it's hard to build a community around not doing something. Aromantics don't fall in love. Once one overcomes the anger at amatonormative upbringing, what is left?...Similarly, aromantics should be interested in finding about the best way to have regular sex without being in a relationship, or reconciling yourself to living without sex.

that's not a community thing though, it's individual. and i really dont like the way that it implies that all aros want sex? and id say there are plenty of material realities that aromantics face because of how much romantic relationships are tied into the nuclear family. id say two good goals for the community would be the destruction of the nuclear family as the favored social unit from a legal standpoint, and expanding our social safety net so that people who don't have romantic partners don't have to worry about being homeless, or not being able to pay a medical bills, etc. 

10 hours ago, running.tally said:

I also ask this question out of personal curiosity. So the big/powerful allies I'm thinking of are not AUREA-related (though AUREA will be thinking of partnerships with others too). I'm still thinking big/powerful but not quite on national or international scales. More local. When I come up against locally powerful queer organizations where I live or outspoken LGBTQ+ leaders/groups in my area, me as an individual having to sit down for a several-hour conversation on the intricacies of aromanticism hasn't been feasible. Like @nonmerci was saying, it would have been useful to have something broad or at least understandable in a short version to give before gradually introducing the rest, in order to take me seriously as a queer person (and not just "an attention seeker" or "queer wannabe").

Hm just as someone who was involved a lot with the ace flamewars on Tumblr I'm not sure how much of a difference this is going to make as far as earning respect from other orgs. Aces on there really, really, doubled down on the "asexuality just means no sexual attraction" definition as a response to the claim that aces were just "losers who think they're special just because they don't want to fuck" and "incels". This did nothing to stop the harassment however. Of course, I doubt that queer orgs will be quite this hostile but I think we should maybe take that as an opportunity- why not go the whole way and try and get as much support for everyone in our community as we can?

From an education standpoint too, it will let us give information so that more people may identify as aromantic than would have otherwise.  Just from my own experiences with "graysexual", it took me five years between hearing the term to finding this post that Siggy wrote and this description of a greysexual narrative:

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Experience attraction that may or may not be called sexual, since it shares some characteristics with sexual attraction, but not others.

Which was an experience that I had certainly had, but never thought about in the context of greysexuality- even though I had identified as such in the past! But that was because the only definition I had seen up to that point had been "experiences attraction infrequently". I had drifted away from using that label though, precisely because I thought that I was having the weird in-between feelings of not quite sexual attraction too frequently for me to use "greysexual". I was lucky enough to stumble across a greysexual narrative because I was still a participant in the broader ace community, but what if I hadn't been, and instead felt completely alienated by both asexuality and allosexuality? I think if our definition is too narrow, we risk having people who might have otherwise identified with aromanticism simply not joining the community in the first place- and if participating in our community is the only place where more complex narratives emerge, then I do think we run the risk of alienating many of our own simply because we prioritized certain narratives. 

9 hours ago, Chandrakirti said:

Oh...another site full of aspies and nit pickers.

I'm old enough and ugly enough to laugh at the complexity of youth and move on to better communities. Bye.

lmao you're the one who got so offended when someone pointed that you don't know what you were talking about that you left the site like...that sounds real emotionally mature compared to us 'aspies'.

but to get back to the original point, you used...a principle from physics to discuss the creations of queer communities- two things which have absolutely nothing to do with each other. i know our society is so obsessed with this false notion of 'science' as the only way to derive truth that people will invoke 'science' like its the word of god constantly in discussions that don't need it but i think we should maybe not do it because it's bad rhetoric and untruthful. if you want to learn more about this 'scientism', i'd highly recommend the following paper: https://www.uta.edu/philosophy/faculty/burgess-jackson/Haack, Six Signs of Scientism.pdf

(and, for the record, using disabilities as insults is bad. though i hope most people here already understand that?)

my biggest problem is struggling with living alone, especially as a disabled person. i live in a big city so at least ive been able to avoid the transportation issue (i cant drive either thanks to my disability) but when even leaving my room is a struggle that doesnt really fix much. but things like having a single income, not having anyone to take car of me when im sick, even silly stuff like not being able to open a jar on my own, are the kinds of day-to-day struggles that come from being aro for me. 

On 6/19/2019 at 10:37 PM, Apathetic Echidna said:

and those flags are all mixed in with bigender and lesbian and aromantic flags. *sarcasm*and don't you just love a gender that melts given the same attention as the trans flags*sarcasm*

er, im fine with that actually? if gender is a construct than 'weirder' nb identities should be just as valid as the more well-known ones like 'agender'. also....the trans flag gets way more attention than any of the ones you listed because it is far, far more well-known.

the biggest problem i have with the plethora of microlabels is how people just coin them and then make a flag and don't do anything else- there's no community or really any discussion about how being that identity affects someone. ive identified with some of these terms in the past! but there's no community for it, so i just kinda forget they even exist. 

1 hour ago, NullVector said:

Yep, that's how I understand it as well.

 

In fact, isn't this just the standard usage of 'Platonic' in the context of inter-personal relationships? I just googled it and this is the top hit I got: 

 

adjective

1. (of love or friendship) intimate and affectionate but not sexual.

   "their relationship is purely platonic"

   synonyms:

   non-sexual, non-physical, chaste; spiritual, intellectual, friendly "our relationship is purely platonic"

So it seems very confusing to me to coin 'QPR' as a term to inculde sexual relationships. When that usage flatly contradicts the common usage of 'Platonic'...

 

I dont think so- for example, "friend" generally is taken to mean "not romantic or sexual" but "friends with benefits" is still considered a type of friendship. 

and I think just because platonic attraction by itself is not sexual doesn't mean that you cant also have sexual attraction along with it, or a platonic relationship that is also sexual. like, romantic attraction and sexual attraction are two different things but most romantic relationships are also sexual.

and honestly I dont think pointing at a dictionary is the best way to make this argument, especially when comparing the definition made by an amatonormative society versus how these terms are used with in aro spaces.

On 6/19/2019 at 8:56 PM, Coyote said:

I voted "something else" because my answer would have been "I don't use the word 'squish.'" Nothing against other people talking that way, to be clear. Just saying that for myself, it's... not the way I talk.

Same. I definitely have had things in the past that could be described as "squishes" but I personally don't like the way it (or any of it's derivatives like smush or lush) sound. And if I were ever to talk about having one to non-a-specs I feel like it would require too much explanation- I'd use "friend crush" instead just because it feels more self-explanatory. 

23 hours ago, Scoop said:

 I think I'm simplifying this down a fair amount but its safe to say all our community building is happening online and that’s not bad thing but it is clearly limiting atm. 

So what you're saying is less vocab, more praxis.

Really though, we have a huge lack of meatspaces and its an issue especially for more material matters. I live in the NYC area and on meetup.com I was only able to find one aro group that from what I could tel only had a few members and hadn't really done anything before it got deleted a few months ago. Unfortunately I'm not really sure what we can do to avoid this, since meatspace activism and organizing takes a lot more time, energy, and money than online activism does. I think the best thing we can do for now is try and work aro causes into other LGBTQIA+ orgs- we're probably not going to be able to create a specifically aro org for a while. I know AUREA has just started up, but they're main focus seems to be visibility (Coy's discussed the issues with that here) and it's just a website at this point so that doesn't address the meatspace issue. I wrote a bit more about this issue here- do mind it was more of a rant so it's not edited at all, but it's the general idea that I think is important.

I agree with Coyote- I also don't think that it's our place to be coining terms for alloromantics when we aren't them. Why should we be inventing terms for other people? 

i'm not super-thrilled about how the author listed familial relationships as being considered lesser than romantic ones when id say they're seen as being equally important in our society, especially as someone who does not have a great relationship with their family. i think this is because the two are so heavily intertwined- romance is supposed to end in marriage and kids in our society, so romance and the nuclear family are difficult to separate from each other in that respect.

im also not keen on them saying that friendships "don't rely on the crutch of sexual attraction" bc it seems to be reinforcing a binary between sex and friendship that i dont think exists. (not to mention that language seems a bit ableist".

the rest of it is fine. nothing particularly new that i haven't seen discussed already in the community but it's always nice to see people from outside our sphere talking about this stuff.

On 3/25/2019 at 1:55 PM, Prismatangle said:

But... I feel like, if there is going to be a new term, how about we focus on what all of these types of attraction have in common? That can be a good guide for coming up with a term that is more agreeable.

 

So far from this discussion I am seeing this group of attractions referred to as: under-discussed, less well known, less "visible", less acknowledged, and perhaps more complex/nuanced/specialized.

 

What else do they have in common? Can you think of any other words to describe that? Brainstorming session!

 

hmm, i definitely agree that as a political goal at least its good to recognize that there are other types of attraction that don't get recognized as much, but im not so sure about using it as an identity word. if you're going off of those qualities, most of those are functions of our current society, not necessarily 'inherent' to the types of attraction that we typically think of. (and im not a huge fan of describing them as 'more complex/nuanced' either....like personally i feel like my sensual feelings are a lot more straightforward then my sexual ones).

this point is probably moot on here but i think its good to keep in mind that these 'tertiary attractions' are generally included romantic and sexual attractions for most people so if we do have more political discussions about these kinds of attractions we should probably specify that its a-specs with these other attractions that tend to be affected by this stuff more than allo people... i think the a-spec community's gotten over the more obvious kind of applying the "split-attraction model" to everyone but just in case.

On 3/26/2019 at 12:22 AM, running.tally said:

From what I understand, the purpose of this term is to describe a set of attractions that are not the "mainstream" (for lack of better term) romantic or sexual attraction,

maybe we should call it hipster attraction

On 3/26/2019 at 12:22 AM, running.tally said:

Sometimes, when people describe alterous and platonic and sensual and all those other types of attraction other than romantic/sexual, others can't relate to those separations. 

that's a good point. its the same issue you run into with aroaces not really seeing those (non-)attractions as separate and wanting just one orientation instead of having to split up their identity like that. i think there are probably more than one umbrella terms for these though- like, alterous, platonic, and queerplatonic could all go under "emotional" attractions, and aesthetic attraction could already be considered an umbrella term that includes aesthetic attraction. there's still more combos that could work too though- like, i personally experience queerplatonic and sensual attraction separately but linked to a certain degree, and even though im okay identifying as both i can definitely see a scenario where people would want a way to link the two. maybe "emotional-sensual attraction"? (of course, romantic and sexual attraction could also fit into any of these categories i mentioned, but i still think its useful for like...personal discussions, just not as much for political ones)

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Other options (my faves) include:
ANREA (Arospec Network for Recognition, Education and Advocacy), ACARE (Arospec Community Alliance for Recognition and Education), AURA (Arospec Union for Recognition and Advocacy), ACURE (Arospec Community Union for Recognition and Education)

i like aura and acare most. 

acure sounds a bit like an ableist autism org though, so id rather not do that one.

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Hmm What about AAN which would stand for aro advocacy network it’s not as wordy and it’s short if people like short acronyms

yeah, i like this one too

Yeah so, the definition that @Apathetic Echidna gave for sensual attraction-

17 hours ago, Apathetic Echidna said:

Sensual Attraction –

When you're attracted so someone through your senses (other than looks). This may mean that you're attracted to the smell of a person or you want to be touched or hugged by a person. “I want to hug/kiss you”

was really different from the definition I used, and it prompted me to Google it just to see how much variation there was in definition.

3 hours ago, bananaslug said:

5 hours ago, Mark said:

I'd definitely consider sensual to be non platonic.

Sensual attraction is generally defined as the "desire to interact with others in a tactile, non-sexual way such as hugging, kissing, cuddling, or hand holding"

And after looking into it, the confusion here isn't surprising. Just from a quick Google and digging around on my Tumblr for the definition I used, I was able to find four distinct definitions- who knows how many more there really are!

3 hours ago, Mark said:

I see sensual attraction as distinct from, but not unrelated to, sexual attraction.

Funnily enough, sensual attraction was actually coined by an asexual as a way to describe how their relationships were still romantic. Not that I agree with that, and I think as time as worn on sensual attraction gets to be it's own stand-alone thing that can be felt in conjuction with other attractions.

I made a whole post about it here, if anyone is interested.