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Coyote

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Everything posted by Coyote

  1. Old thread I created for a different topic veered into this one and got locked, so I got permission to create a new thread. Some ways that people have used this word (aplatonic) before: does not feel friend love/does not use the word "love" for friends does not experience platonic attraction does not experience platonic attraction or form platonic bonds does not experience "squishes" or does not desire a queerplatonic relationship does not desire a queerplatonic relationship or a sexual friendship does not experience "squishes" or does not desire a queerplatonic relationship or a sexual friendship The earliest of these uses is from 2012, where it's proposed by a homoromantic user on AVEN. I'm not actually sure where the uses of it started shifting in the direction of attraction or partnership, but that seems to have started around 2014 at the latest. Are there any other uses/definitions you know of that aren't listed here? Related reading: @Mark's poll on squishes Aplatonic is for neurodivergence? I don't get emotional attraction Origin of the slang use of "squish" Origin of the word "nonamory"
  2. I'm not sure which direction you mean that, but in light of this I'll add -- it's also appropriate to use the cameronwhimsy aro community flag. In the design creator's post about it (continued from here), the first two stripes are explained as representing, quote, "the aro-spectrum (and aromanticism itself represented by green because green belongs to us now hell yeah). this covers every identity under the aro umbrella - demi, grey, lith/akoi, wtf/quoiro, cupio etc. EVERYTHING. even ones that don’t have names yet." End quote. In fact, this is why some anti-grey folks have sometimes objected to this design -- because it is intended to encompass greyromantics.
  3. @pigeonhead I've seen a different variation before, but not that one. FWIW, not everyone likes that design to begin with (see comments).
  4. I don't believe "sociopathy" is a medically legitimate concept to begin with ftr.
  5. Okay. I have edited my post. Thank you. Good news: "I don't like my friends" isn't the paraphrasing I used. It was "I don't love my friends," because "love" (specifically) was what that original thread was about. If you believe I'm paraphrasing that thread poorly, what paraphrasing would you prefer? There's a lot of things going on in this thread. If there's a particular part of your posts you'd like to hone in on and make sure I don't miss when I'm figuring how much of everything to reply to, a good way to do that is with direct questions. Do you have any questions about what I do or don't agree with?
  6. Oh. Currently I do not believe it was poorly worded. I believe the wording adequately matches the thing it was meant to express. I acknowledge it. Now from my perspective, there's been a misunderstanding that's involved other people putting words in my mouth and then asking me to apologize for things I didn't actually say. This strikes me as pretty unfair, and I was operating on the hope that with time and further clarification, maybe folks would realize that and apologize to me for jumping the gun, or at least quit holding me responsible for their own mistakes. While misunderstandings are no big deal, and while it's fine to ask for clarification, I don't believe I'm necessarily on the hook for other people's misreads. I'll go back and take a look at the original text again. "That's the question though, would an alloromantic allosexual have any reason to want to identify with the ace & aro umbrellas like that? I mean, if someone's like 'I don't love my friends,' I don't see what that necessarily has to do with me. I'm not preemptively ruling it out, just asking what the rationale is supposed to be." So the text in question does: ask about grouping the aplatonic identity a certain way with aromanticism and asexuality in a way that would mean including allo-allos who identify as aplatonic give an example of one aplatonic narrative indicate I don't currently see the answer to the question I am asking specifically state "I'm not preemptively ruling it out, just asking what the rationale is supposed to be" The text in question does not: preemptively rule anything out definitively declare what the answer to the question is assert that one type of narrative is representative of the entire identity So that arrangement of words does seem to me to decently match up to what they're supposed to do. If multiple people have interpreted it differently, then multiple people have made a mistake. Ways I would be open to editing the post: adding "for instance" in front of the example given for instance adding more examples of aplatonic narratives, in addition to the one I initially asked about
  7. Does anyone else want to address this? Generally when I ask questions they're intended as questions, not declarations, yes. It could be that some folks are coming from a context where questions are generally not used as questions, which may be why that needs to be said. I'm not even being sarcastic about that, either. I had a whole conversation with some of my PF mutuals once about them coming from a discursive context where people kept using "What does this mean?" to mean "I disagree"/"This is bad" -- which is gravely objectionable to me, as that encodes asking for clarification as itself an attack, and that's just a recipe for trouble. I believe we've discussed what my intentions were,* so.... is the thing you're asking for..... for me to go back and edit the post? *(it was intended as one example of one person, not a universal description of all people who identify as aplatonic)
  8. Hold on, it's "erasure" to talk about one person? ? All sorts of struggles matter. Trans struggles matter, for instance. The question is which groups it makes sense to group together, not a question of making an exhaustive list of which people have problems. This interpretation just sounds like injecting stuff that isn't there by relying on a flawed implicit metric (that declaring someone "a-spec" is the only way to acknowledge their struggles matter).
  9. huh? If ace and aro were opposites, then "aro ace" would be an oxymoron. So as long as we're talking about this: I don't use emotional attraction as a concept, personally. As a quoiromantic I don't care for the romantic/nonromantic division in the first place, and I don't personally apply the concept of "attraction" to nonphysical things. So I wouldn't say I "experience platonic attraction," either, because that's not how I talk and it's not a model I use. I greatly hope that nobody is implicitly thinking of me as an "alloplatonic" here.
  10. So the answer to "If I take the time to type out a response to that, will you answer it?" sounds like a "no." @VoidArcana If you're wondering why I asked first instead of just going ahead with it, that is why. Twice bitten, thrice shy and all that. No, there are many ways that people use that word. It was a hypothetical example of one person. We can also talk about other combinations in addition to that one, if you'd prefer. I don't.... sssssee if you answered the question there, so I'll break it into two questions: 1) Are you (still) saying that [that use/definition] affects people who identify as aplatonic (ostensibly, negatively)? 2) And if so, how so? If those questions are now irrelevant, then I'm confused and don't know what's going on here.
  11. Thank you. I wasn't trying to get you to apologize for that, but I appreciate it. I hope you will continue to let me know when I've overlooked something. Okay. I will start with summarizing some of what I'm hearing so far, and then I will ask some questions about how those things connect. I'll also use quotation marks instead of quote boxes for this just for the sake of making the formatting more condensed, but I'll reserve these quotation marks for direct quotes only. Here are the sections that I am looking at: "I didn't see Magni's comment as throwing me/people like me under the bus, but rather a request, from someone who identifies as aplatonic, to think more carefully about how that definition might affect those who identify that way, especially when coupled with the example of the alloallo person." "I'm going to be honest, Coyote's example rubbed me the wrong way a little. It hits a little too close to the fictional examples exclusionists pulled out of nowhere to try and prove some gotcha about why aro and ace people couldn't be part of any iteration of the wider LGBT/queer community." "Saying 'I don't see what that necessarily has to do with me' when talking about 1) including a label in general and 2) including a certain combination of identities (in this case alloallo aplatonic) reminds me of both my experiences with exclusionists denying my queer identity because it stems from being aromantic, and conversations I've had where aces have refused to acknowledge my aro identity separate of (and having nothing to do with) asexuality." "The example used felt a little more like saying 'well these people have nothing to do with me, so all aplatonic people can be excluded'." "at the very least, the statement was poorly thought out." "The way I read that post basically amounted to 'why should those people count? They've got nothing to do with me, so why should we include them?'" I trust you to let me know if I have missed anything important. So here are some paraphrasings/takeaways that I draw from the above quotes: You see Magni's comment as a request to think more carefully about how that definition* might affect people who identify as aplatonic. Implicitly: You are asking the same. My example rubbed you the wrong way because it reminds you of other things that people have said. You interpreted my post as essentially saying "Aplatonic people can be excluded" [from ... unspecified] *Phrase in question = "I don't love my friends" It could be that I am interpreting something here incorrectly. In that case, what I ask next may be irrelevant. Otherwise, this is one of the things I am wondering. You implied you would like me to think more carefully about this, and so I'd like you to point me toward which conclusions you hope will come of it: How does that definition ["I don't love my friends"] affect people who identify as aplatonic?
  12. So it seems trying to take one thing at a time here is... just resulting in a more quickly amassing backlog. Your phrasing it this way tells me something important. At the time, I figured the best approach was to address Magni first, prioritizing things in the order they happened, and put the rest on hold in relation to that. I didn't realize you were raising issues that you wanted me to address separately. Now I see that that left you feeling ignored, so I will apologize for that. I made a wrong call about how to prioritize all the different things to reply to. I really don't know why Laura and Sennkestra are doing that either. I'll let them speak for themselves, of course. Since you prefaced this part with a reminder that you're new here, I'd like to please ask that you not tempt me with this kind of irony. In any case. Let me make sure I understand the grievance, since I think I mistook it for something else the first time. Will you answer some clarifying questions?
  13. Okay. Atm I'm unclear on which of those is something people would still like to discuss, so if someone else would like to make a new thread (on either or both), they can be my guest.
  14. @Magni If I take the time to type out a response to that, will you answer it?
  15. !!! I tried to raise a question about something like that on one of K.A. Cook's posts, once, and the comment's still marked as awaiting moderation, but here's a part of what I wrote: Because, to be honest with you, one of my hangups with that statement (to take things one at a time here) is actually… what is an “a-spec space”? Personally, I don’t call myself that word and havhaven't fully bought into it as a concept, but… for your purposes here, am I supposed to? …I mean, when you say “a-spec spaces,” can you give me a specific example? What should I be looking at here? I had to ask because ze was talking about listening to aro allos, and if we take "a-spec space" to mean "any kind of space that centers on either aces or aros," then that's an umbrella broad enough to include ace-only stuff too. So we can rule that out for not making sense. But if we rule out that interpretation, then what's the alternative? Dedicated, merged "a-spec"-specific "spaces"? So... what, the Tumblr blogs that have "a-spec" in the URL? What am I actually supposed to be thinking of?
  16. Thank you. Do you have suggestions? Something I was thinking about earlier is how, at different times, when discussing the concept of having "a-spec" as a term, people have emphasized convergent aroaces, especially the folks who want to leave the ro/sex part unspecified (as with terms like "bi" and "gay"). So that's one use case. But the term is also clearly getting thrown around all the time just to mean "aces and aros both," as a completely different use case. Which I resent, as an ace who doesn't identify with it. huh. That's interesting, because I was thinking about atheism here just earlier (and even brought it up back in September, as another a-word), but I didn't realize that people had actually discussed that connection before on panels. I agree though, I think that connection is more conceptual than something that would translate community-wise.
  17. That would not be the case, no. Certainly I see aces and aros doing that more (while using that term, anyway).
  18. For that reason I think unless any one such person would like to speak up about it (and I'll leave the door open for that), for the time being, I figure lumping these allo-allo folks in with aros or aces doesn't make any more sense than, say, grouping us with people who don't experience empathy, or something. It just seems arbitrarily based on etymology over the practical realities, since "experiencing a lack of something" covers way too many groups that aren't getting equal consideration. Again, leaving the door open for folks to draw other connections I haven't thought of here. This is a three way conflation. With seven demographics involved here. Unlikely that this will be helpful to more than one of those groups of people. Quite likely to help none of them. I mean yeah last I visited it (and based on checking it just now), it mostly gets used as an ace and aro group. I'm not even sure if anything agender-specific has been posted there more than once. So if it's meant to cater to non-ace and non-aro agender people... it's... not really doing that.
  19. Magni stoops to addressing me directly, eh. For anyone who's interested to know: the "I don't love my friends" paraphrasing comes from the first use of the word "aplatonic" in a 2012 AVEN forum thread, based on this quote from the first post: "Sure, the people I've 'friended' are nice, and I'd want nothing but for them to be happy, but I don't really have a bond with them. The only people in my life that I've bonded with are those I feel romantic attraction to. So, don't get me wrong, I have friends and care about them; but love is a powerful word, and one I cannot apply to them." i.e. "I don't love my friends." That's a thing that happens and an experience to take into account wrt intercommunity dynamics, and I think that's the relevance of that -- as a provocation to address certain intercommunity dynamics among aros and aces that overemphasize loving close friends. Maybe. So far this talk all feels very hypothetical, so I'm wondering -- what are these narratives, in practice? I mean, does anyone have any links? If we're going to model these things this way I'd like to go a step beyond abstract thought experiments. Yeah, and presumably you'd have an answer for them based on something more than hypotheticals, right?
  20. That's the question though, would an alloromantic allosexual have any reason to want to identify with the ace & aro umbrellas like that? I mean, for instance, to give one example, if someone's like "I don't love my friends," I don't see what that necessarily has to do with me. I'm not preemptively ruling it out, just asking what the rationale is supposed to be. So you're talking about like... questioning-aro and questioning-ace?
  21. I'd probably still just use monogamous or monoamorous for that. If you say platonic, most people will probably figure you mean without sex. Anyway, that's going to depend some on the specifics of each conversation, I think. I doubt there's any one-size-fits-all explanation that's guaranteed to work for everyone, as with any topic. It sounds like one of the objections you've been encountering so far is the idea that nonromantic sex is categorically bad. From what you've described, it's unclear if people are saying this in general or specifically when combined with sexual exclusivity. Regardless, one thing I'd be inclined to highlight, myself, is the matter of compatibility -- i.e., these are preferences that make you compatible (or not) with individual other people, so if someone else's preferences are different, you're choosing not to partner with each other. It's not like you're dragging people into an arrangement that they don't want. You're identifying which arrangements you don't want.
  22. Apology accepted. Thanks for listening. Really? huh. I don't hear that every day. I've been kind of unclear on how aromanticism makes a point of commonality that way. Can you say more?
  23. @LoveIsZaxlebax It sounds like you're talking here both about aro monogamy and about issues/conflict with other people about it. Out of those two, was there one you were more interested in hearing advice/perspectives about? Because I have some different thoughts on each.
  24. This is not the topic I meant to raise by asking about the term "a-spectrum," so I'd like to draw a distinction here between 1) questioning "a-spectrum" (and what it refers to and why) vs. 2) questioning the aromantic and asexual spectrums themselves, as two separate topics. Since you brought it up here, though, I will talk about it. The asexual spectrum is necessary to me. I am gray-asexual. You can't spell gray-asexual without "asexual." This is what makes it useful to me as an identity term and concept: an amended, fuzzier version of/cousin to asexuality. I suppose if you forced me to I could just identify as "gray," but I also identify as "ace," as the short form of "asexual spectrum," because my relationship to the ace community is central and important to me in defining/understanding/conceptualizing my gray-asexuality and where I stand in relation to societal norms. That's for them to say -- and maybe you should try looking up more demiromantic narratives -- but obviously, some of them do. Demi folks can be varied, of course, in how they do or don't relate to aromanticism/asexuality, so I'm not too surprised about your demisexual roommate. At the same time, its origin story lies with the asexual community, which is what set the precedent for it being thought of in terms of that connection. And even before that, asexuality was already understood by a number of folks as an umbrella identity that could hold cover a variety of different experiences, which is a part of what led to the terminology of the "spectrum." There have been various intracommunity fights about this and how exactly to draw the lines, but that's the long story short. It's really not your business to go telling certain aces that they're not really ace. On the aro side of things, if you're unfamiliar with demiromantic narratives and experiences and unsure how demiroms feel connected to you as an aromantic person, one thing you can do is 1) look up demiromantic info for yourself, or 2) ask for help, i.e. "Hi, I'm looking to learn more about demiromanticism and how it's related to aromanticism. Are there any demiromantics here or anyone who can link me to more info?"
  25. Bump/update: It's still relatively common for people to use this term without knowing where it came from/what it entails ideologically, so in the interest of helping with that, I'm updating this post with some more condensed notes The term "split attraction model" is no older than 2015 comes from outside the ace and aro communities comes from the same crowd who thinks "allosexual" is a bad word is linked to anti-ace, anti-aro, and anti-bi ideologies For more detailed info, see here and here and here If you're looking for alternatives, ask yourself what you're actually trying to get at For orientation stuff, consider: aro quoisexual, unit aro, aro neu, varioriented, etc. For attraction stuff, consider: attraction subtyping, differentiating types of attraction, etc. For treating attraction as the same thing as orientation, don't
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