raavenb2619

Here is my submission: https://raavenb2619.wordpress.com/2020/03/31/musings-on-my-aromanticism-and-gender/

Right now, most queer organizations have little to no resources or information on aromanticism. Seeing as how Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week is coming up, I think it would be great to see positive coverage during ASAW, kind of like how multiple queer organizations (and even CNN) had some coverage about Asexuality Awareness Week this past October. Unfortunately, I don't know how to go about making this happen (and even if I did, I don't have the time or energy). Should this be handled by AUREA? Individual aros? Have I overlooked something that would make this a bad idea?

Ooh, Sophie Labelle!

This is probably the post I was thinking of, and I misremembered so much that it’s not super relevant to the conversation, but it be like that sometimes. (kudos to @Coyote for finding it)

Oh, okay. I thought that meant that you didn’t get squishes on strangers you’d literally never interacted with, but no matter. In that case, the difference in how we think about and describe this might simply come down to the fact that the idea of squishes is/was super important and helpful for understanding myself, and for whatever reason, it is less so for you. (Like I said before, one big figuring-things-out moment was when I realized what I thought were crushes were actually squishes.) Yes. I suppose if you wanted to be pedantic you could say my alterous attraction was platonic-in-a-broad-nonsexual-nonromantic way, but not platonic-in-a-specific-platonic-attraction-slash-squish way.

That's fair. I only half noticed the sleepovers the first time, and probably rationalized it as "having an excuse to do a thing that friends like to do some times" to make it fit with how read the rest of the original post. I get why you want to do that, but I also think it kind of...doesn't matter? In the sense, I guess, that I've had an inherently subjective experience reading through the posts, and I don't think the OP's intentions have much bearing on it either way. Whether or not the additions are in the spirit of the OP won't really change how I read through it. (Which is not to say that the OPs thoughts don't matter at all, just that they don't affect how I read the post. But I am curious to see what the OP meant.)

I get what you're saying, but I think we might be describing different things. I've definitely had at least one (small) squish where me and this other person were on opposite sides of a large room with a bunch of other people and for whatever reason they caught my eye and I felt like they were a cool person? I didn't interact with them in any way, and considering that I ended up leaving the room after about half an hour and never saw them again, it's entirely possible that they didn't ever know I existed because there was literally no interaction, and yet, small squish. There are definitely squishes that develop once I know someone to some degree, but they feel basically the same in character to squishes predicated on literally zero interaction, so I think they're the same experience. The other reason that I call these feelings squishes and not just "wanting to be friends with them" is that I used to think they were crushes. When I figured out I was ace, I mistook my squishes as crushes and thought I was demiromantic for about a year. When I realized I was aro, one big shift in my thinking was realizing that my "crushes" were actually squishes, which also made a lot of things make a lot more sense. To me at least, a squish is different from "this person is really nice" or "this person is interested in the same things as me", which is why I use a specific word for it. Sort of, but not exactly. My squishes on close friends might involve a minute amount of platonic, nonromantic infatuation, in the sense that I want to spend lots of time with them and have philosophical conversations and stuff, but my alterous attraction definitely has a distinctive element of infatuation. The first time I felt alterous attraction (which was after I knew I was aroace), I panicked for a second because the infatuation was definitely closer to the stereotypical romantic infatuation you see in media than anything I'd ever experienced. However, it was decidedly nonromantic in nature, and my feelings for the person I was alterously attracted to were definitely nonromantic. The infatuation was...adjacent to stereotypical infatuation, I suppose. Some element of "their sense of humor is superb, and they can't quite finish their jokes without cracking up, and their smile is just so endearing, and their hair is just incredible" (to badly channel some infatuation-driven comments), but without any connotations of romance. Something similar to, but distinct from, my squishes.

Yep. Quick recap, I use platonic attraction/squish to refer to when, for no discernible reason, someone I’ve never met seems super cool and I want to be friends with them. I also use platonic attraction/squish to refer to when I want to spend more time with a close friend (and sometimes go from being comfortable with platonic and physical affection to sometimes wanting to initiate it). I use alterous attraction to refer to when I have a specific feeling of attraction that’s neither platonic or romantic. It’s involved some of the stereotypical infatuation associated with romantic crushes, but had a friendship/nonromantic component. And in all of those cases, I haven’t wanted A Relationship (TM) (although I used to think I maybe sort of did want A Relationship (TM)). And also what friends means, I think. I can see the two examples you give as resulting from a miscommunication/discrepancy on what friendship/platonicism is.

Sorry, I guess I should clarify. The way I read the original post was two mischievous aros who, among other things, "got married because it gave us an excuse to ask for toasters from people as wedding gifts", but not necessarily as two aros who were in a QPR or some sort of Named Important Relationship (TM). Which isn't to say that the aros in question couldn't be, only that I read it as two aros that decided to get married primarily to get the benefits married people get. There isn't anything wrong with posts about QPRs, and posts about QPRs and nonromantic marriage don't have to use the term QPR, it's just that I feel kind of like there was a bait and switch. I started with a post that I interpreted one way (i.e. aros not in a Relationship (TM)) but by the end it became something else (i.e. aros in a Relationship (TM)). Does that make sense? Nope. Just what felt like a bait and switch. And it's definitely not clear cut/objective by any means, I was just wondering what other people thought. I would say this reblog (the one with HALF AS MANY CHORES, if you're on the first link I sent) because it started being activities with a much larger and regular time investment, compared to previous stuff (although I'd say there's hints of it in the reblog before it). Again, it's a subjective call, but I'd say the next reblog, talking about various financial benefits (and also walking dogs) pushes it again more towards a Relationship. But I'd say the long text reblog by vaspider, which talks about how marriages don't need romance but they do need platonic love, and in particular, is probably the most...amatonormative? I'm not quite sure what it is, I just know I have a negative reaction to it.

Yeah, it felt like it went from aros playfully hijacking the institution of marriage to aros conforming to it. And it kind of felt to me like it was saying the latter was better/more virtuous than the former.

Reviving this thread again because I found this post on Tumblr, I’m curious if other people read it the same way I do (my thoughts are in the last reblog) or differently

Not really. It might have been titled something like "the case against arospec" and went through three or four reasons why arospec was a bad term. I think it made reference to ace community politics, probably talking about how people used various terms like "ace", "asexual", "acespec", maybe "ace umbrella", and noticed that since something about policing language or making graysexuals and other """non-gold star asexuals""" feel unwelcome or second class had happened, it was likely to happen in the aro community and that using arospec would facilitate that bad thing. It might have been something along the lines of "acespec becomes briefly popular, people start using it more and more as a replacement to graysexual/graysexual umbrella, acespec starts to refer exclusively to those subgroups of the ace community, acespec starts being seen as """gold star aces" + a spectrum of acespec, acespec ends up being a way of separating """true aces""" from other aces and leads to value judgement and hierarchies instead of being an umbrella term." Another reason might have been "saying arospec is just performative allyship and lets people feel like they're including and supporting grayromantics, demiromantics, etc when they're not. But I could also be completely making one or both reasons up, I'm not sure. I know that there was a push a few years ago to move from "Aromantic Awareness Week" to "Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week", does anyone have information on why that happened? Maybe there's a comparison to be made with why (AFAIK) the ace community hasn't done the same? And does anyone have any complaints or concerns with the popularization of arospec as a term?

No worries, my explanation is a poor substitute for the actual article/writing. I tried to find it, but I can't. @Coyote, do you know what I'm talking about? I think it was a Tumblr user, and I think you linked to them either in the body of one of your Wordpress articles, or in the comments. IIRC the page had a mostly black background, and pointed out 3 or 4 issues with using "arospec" that the aro community would likely run into in the near future, based on what had already happened within the ace community with a different umbrella-ish word. (Or it might have been problems that the aro community was already facing?)

The definition of alterous is...complicated, from what I can tell. Everyone is talking about vaguely the same thing, but the minute details can make a big difference. I prefer this definition because it avoids describing it as “between” platonic and romantic, whereas “between” can suggest a hierarchy of romantic > alterous > platonic. I don’t want a qpr, but non-alterous doesn’t really resonate with me, because I have on occasion experienced alterous attraction (and also, when I did, it didn’t make me want some kind of relationship). One thing I can’t tell, are you using “non-alterous” to be different from “analterous”? I’m familiar with “analterous” being analogous to being asexual or aromantic, specifying that one doesn’t feel attraction in some way, but I don’t think I’ve seen other of them used to refer to a person not interested in a type of relationship.

I also use arospec as synonymous with “anyone falling under the aro umbrella in some way”. However, I remember reading some writing somewhere about how the asexual community uses “ace” and not “acespec” as their umbrella shorthand, and for similar reasons the aromantic community should use “aro” and not “arospec”, so I’d like to revisit that and reconsider its reasons. (My explanation is poorly worded and makes it sound like the main argument was “aces did x so aros should do x” but that’s not what it was. This also gets complicated with the whole “aspec” is/isn’t a synonym to “acespec” and it does/doesn’t cover all aros kerfuffle on Tumblr at the moment)

It’s good that you’ve been listening. (I don’t have any evidence that this is actually true, but it can be hard in general sometimes to prove that a statement like this is true, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.) But that still doesn’t give you the right to identity policing. That’s why everyone is unhappy with you, and I think I speak for everyone when I say that I’d appreciate if you apologized for the policing, and then stopped policing people.

I’m not grayromantic, so I can’t speak from personal experience to answer your question, but if you’d like to understand why a lot of people disagree with you on this and/or you want to support grayromantics, I’d recommend you try listening to grayromantics when they talk about their experiences instead of talking over them.

Yes, but you're also telling someone what they are/how they should label themselves. There's a difference between saying "if I had those experiences, I would call myself x" and saying "if I had those experiences, I would call myself x, therefore you should call yourself x". The first is fine, because you're the only person who has the agency to decide your own labels. The second isn't fine, for precisely the same reason: you're the only person who has the agency to decide your own labels. Why not? How do you know? Did you come to that conclusion after examining every single possible relationship that every single possible person could have with the complicated concept that is attraction, taking into account every single way that every single possible society could influence that relationship and how we think about attraction? I'm guessing that the answer is no, and instead that you simply don't understand how someone could have a particular experience and use a particular label. It's okay if you don't understand, but it's not okay if you try to police someone's identity and experiences.

I haven’t gotten a chance to yet, but I’d love to respond by saying I’m a non-romanceable npc.

I’m echoing Crystal Gris here, but dysphoria doesn’t always make sense. My dysphoria will sometimes just appear or disappear without any rhyme or reason, completely disconnected from how I feel at the moment. (I’m also genderfluid.) All of that to say, you shouldn’t let how your dysphoria works prevent you from IDing as genderfluid if you think the label fits you otherwise. (You haven’t mentioned this, so I doubt this is the case, but if you notice the intensity/strength of your gender changing, you might look into genderflux as well)

I...wow. I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not I want/would want a qpr, and I feel like you’ve read my mind. Everything makes a lot more sense now. Thank you.

? yeah I like the Disney Renaissance movies but a bunch of them are love stories that don’t exactly hold up under much scrutiny. (And Beauty and the Beast is definitely the most arophobic)

I second The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, and add Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault. I can’t remember if the text explicitly says “alloaro” or “allosexual aromantic”, but it is made very clear that the MC is alloaro (and also genderfluid). And there’s representation of a lot (like a lot a lot) of other queer identities too.

Yeah, Googling “queerplatonic relationship” gives me mostly articles like “X signs you’re in a queerplatonic relationship without even knowing”, which feels icky and amatonormative, but very little that criticizes amatonormativity and relationship hierarchies. Which makes me wonder, do the non aspecs writing these articles know that they’re harmful?

I recently came across a very romance-heavy song from my early childhood that I secretly disliked while everyone else loved it. Even after hearing this song for a bit and remembering quite vividly that I’d disliked it, it took me quite awhile to put all the pieces together