Coyote

Hey there Momo. Unfortunately, the original poster of this thread (Alexisaromantic) hasn't been online since February 17, so at this point I have no reason to believe they're still looking for advice here anymore. If what you're saying is that we shouldn't discuss this topic here at all, a person who might need to hear that also is TripleA, the user who just necro'd this thread. If (modding-wise) you're fine with his post, though, then I want to get into my own objections to it.

@Artemis's Aro I can't answer all your questions, but FTR, some of the earliest people to use "queerplatonic" were Meloukhia (whose QP partner went on romantic dates with other people) and Sci (whose partner is alloromantic). So a QPR with an alloromantic is something there's already been precedent for from the beginning. Apart from that: What will work for either of you as people is going to depend on the two of you, as people, not the terminology you use.

I'd encourage you to think through this perspective a little more. How precisely forthcoming is she with you about the exact nature of her feelings to you? Does she go into a lot of detail? Does she express an expectation that you respond in exactly the same way? Your concerns aren't based on nothing, and it's understandable to worry about these things -- especially when you've been encouraged to see the distinction between friendship feelings and romantic feelings as a big, important gulf of inherent difference. It's a point of view that I encounter a lot, even (especially?) in the aro community. My current wonder, though, is -- do you feel like you're already being dishonest? Relating to her the way that you do, even if it's different than what she feels, isn't some crime to be confessed. You haven't been lying to her unless you've, well, told any actual lies. You can never completely control what assumptions other people make about you. Plus, more than that: I'd argue there's nothing wrong with partnerships where the partners don't feel the exact same way about each other, because that's a part of what it means to be different people. People have different love langues, different communication preferences, different affection preferences, different ways of processing emotion itself -- there's always going to be some kind of difference at play between any two people. I think trying to precisely mirror each other in everything, right down to the level of exact emotions, can mean putting a detrimental amount of pressure on yourself, and that goes for this or any other relationship in general. One thing that only the two of you can answer: Do you think she's currently unhappy with the relationship? Has she expressed any dissatisfaction with how you talk to her, how you treat her, how you honor your commitments to her? Has she given you any reason to believe you're not already doing enough? It sounds like you're experiencing some insecurities about making sure she's as happy as you are in the relationship. I don't know her and I don't know what the relationship between you is like, but I figure basically one of two things can possibly be true: 1) either there's something different you could be doing, and she can tell you, or 2) there's nothing wrong, and she can tell you. Have you broached that subject with her before?

Oh boy. A mistake, that's what. It's... complicated to explain because the origin story is just... a mess, but I'd boil down the sequence to 1) the ace community has had terms like romantic orientation, romantic attraction, aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, etc. since the early 2000s, 2) that language started spreading and getting over-universalized, 2) some people were upset because they didn't want that applied to them, and some also felt Threatened by the mere concept of other people using it, 3) in 2015 a band of people on Tumblr started using "split attraction model" for a bunch of different things when modeled as universal, but then 4) people started using it to mean any use of those things at all, not just universalizing it, so then 5) people started to have arguments over whether this-inherently-defined-as-wrong thing is okay actually. And now, because nobody realizes that's where it came from, you've got people using the terms "non-SAM aro" and "non-SAM ace" to mean any of like three or four different things, defining by negation against something that was never properly modeled or created in good faith anyway. Nobody identifies as a "SAM aro" or a "SAM ace." That's not a thing. Anyway I'm an ace who doesn't use the romantic orientation model and I do use the terminology of several attraction types, and that's something this terminology just totally eclipses as a possibility. The term itself is based on this conflation of attraction subtyping (or "split" attraction, eugh) with romantic orientation, like using one necessarily means using the other, and it doesn't. LONG STORY SHORT it's a term that only exists because people are wigged out by aces, aros, and bi people existing. I can't hear the word without thinking about 2015-era Tumblr bloggers screaming about how my community is inherently homophobic, because that's the people who came up with it.

I really wish the term "SAM" and all its variants would just go away actually, but that's a different topic. Aces who don't use the romantic orientation model have been around well before anti-ace/anti-bi bloggers decided to overwrite our language and a bunch of other people just went with that. That's something I would still object to for basically the same reason: by making it into a list where "aro," "aro allo" & "aro ace" / "ace" "allo ace" & "aro ace" are all listed as separate groups, that's still making it sound like not all aros are covered under "aro" and not all aces are covered under "ace," which I disagree with. Anyway, not aro-specific, but arguably relevant to intracommunity issues: How do you talk about sexual norms in an ace-competent way? I'm raising this question here because 1) it's complicated, 2) I'm interested in getting more input on the question from others, since I can only contribute on the aspects I'm most familiar with, and 3) when describing the sexual norms they're affected by, I'd like aros to do that in ways that... are accurate to the real issues, instead of sliding into anti-ace thought patterns. Or in other words (to put this more bluntly): to find ways of articulating those issues that don't involve outright saying things like (for instance) "our culture is anti-sex" or "society wants me to be ace." See more in-depth thoughts at the link.

I'm late to this thread but I wanted to add some thoughts here as another quoiromantic, in case it makes any difference for @Finn or anyone else passing through: Is there something about the relationship that you're hoping to change? What are you hoping to get out of telling her? I think this is an important consideration here because, as you figured, there's a risk of "I don't have romantic feelings for you" being interpreted as "I want to break up" or something along those lines. If you do want to maintain your relationship with her as it is, and if you do want to foreground that/assure her of that, then she might be confused by what you're trying to get at by telling her this. I recommend trying to approach the issue in practical terms: Are there currently any things you've been doing together, things she says, etc. that haven't been working for you? It should be possible to bring up some of those and discuss what your honest preferences are while assuring her that you still want to be together. And if you don't want to change absolutely anything about the relationship, then... you might ask yourself what you're hoping to accomplish with the conversation.

Asexual Privilege: Revival of an Anti-Ace Idea Summary: There was a debate about "asexual privilege" that started in 2011 "Asexual privilege" is an anti-ace idea because it argues that aces are better off/safer for being ace which means ignoring or writing off the ways in which that's not true Now, today, people are saying some similar things in the aro communtiy Sometimes this is explicitly "aces hold power"/are "oppressors" Sometimes this is more implicit/indirectly said I am asking the aro community to nip this in the bud before this idea becomes any more entrenched

..."Back"? =/ ...That frames it like there was some prior tradition of using A for asexual/aromantic/agender and then suddenly people switched to using it for ally, but isn't the A-for-ally use the older one of the two?

I tried looking up uses of "aspec" and "agender" together and found this post, which defines "A-Spectrum identities" as "Asexual, Aromantic, and Agender." This post was made in the year 2015, so... that alternate usage has been around basically for as long as the term has existed. Wait, hold on a second... That post was made on March 5th of 2015, and yet warriorsdebt claims that xe and the others coined it "sometime in November-December 2015"? What? Yeah I'm just snarking about this time-tested pattern of like-- "Here we have a problem. Let's create a new word to address that problem." *makes new term* "Strange, that doesn't seem to have fixed anything." From my perspective all that's changed is that now people in the Tumblr cultural sphere have a whole new word they can foist on me and neglect to consider that not all aces might identify with. I tried to take an amateur "mogai" survey the other day, and the orientation question didn't give me any option to self-describe as ace, asexual spectrum, or even just asexual -- there was only "aspec" and a bunch of other things that don't apply. It's just a really weird situation when someone is evidently aware of the asexual umbrella and yet... still manages not to make it possible for me to answer the orientation question. It's not just stuff like that, though. I've also seen multiple posts criticizing "the aspec community" and "aspec spaces" and so on and I'm like. What do you mean by that? In literal, actual terms, what do you mean? Like -- is it only the stuff specifically headlined as "aspec"? So -- what, some Tumblr blogs with "aspec" in the url and a few Discord servers? Or do you mean that as short form for "the asexual and/or aromantic communities," in which case... why are you conscripting me into this concept? If I run an ace blog or an ace PF comm, is that now an "aspec space," now beholden to what you're saying about what "aspec spaces"? Both interpretations seem so patently flawed that I figure I must be missing something, but the problem is people keep talking like everybody else is already on the same page about what "the aspec community" refers to in the first place instead of ever bothering to explain. It's SquirrelStone, yeah. If she is, she didn't mention it.

SO ANYWAY This topic came up again over in another thread so I'm reviving this one. I am also curious about this. I hadn't heard of this as a thing before this thread. I've seen it only very infrequently, but for instance, it's in the description for the PF community A-SpecUsers: "A place for support and friendship for asexual, aromantic, and agender pillowfort users." I asked the comm creator... why that grouping, and their response was basically "we all get the same crap." I don't really get that reasoning, but there you go. The origin story, apparently, is that "a-spectrum" was originally created on Tumblr in 2015 to mean "the ace spectrum and the aro spectrum" together in one word. This is something that strategicgoat, warriorsdebt, and whes did specifically because anti-ace & anti-aro bloggers on Tumblr kept conflating the two concepts. So their response... was to create a word for both concepts? ...And now we have the problem of that term, itself, inspiring a lot of conflation of the two concepts (where people will use "aspec" when what they actually mean is just "ace"). Great going, everyone. And as @LauraG put it:

Sounds like the consensus is that it's helpful to use examples, so I'll do that. I've drafted a primer on the "asexual privilege" topic at this point and have set it aside for the moment while I work on other things, but I'll probably post it in the next few days (and then link it here). @Lokiana I've got thoughts on the "a-spectrum" topic, but I'd prefer to have that conversation over here. Top post includes a link to where it originally came from.

Thanks for posting this. I've sent this to a PF mutual so it could be posted to the PF Aromantic community and also sent the link to a couple of other friends besides. One of them encountered some issues though, so I'm reporting those here on their behalf: "Do you consider yourself aromantic (on the aromantic spectrum)?" Related to this way of defining "aromantic" as a term, they told me this: "if any kind of arospec descriptor or orientation == aromantic, full stop, and if relating to arospec stuff to the extent that you disidentify with alloromanticism in any way == arospec, then I am unclear what 'partly, relate more to aromantic than alloromantic' is looking for" "Do you consider yourself cognitively/intellectually disabled?" They were confused about separating this from the neurodivergence question. It's unclear what exactly this question is asking about, and it's also unclear whether the conditions covered by this question are supposed to be mutually exclusive with the following questions on mental health issues and neurodivergence. International issues, ex. "learning disability" as a term is defined differently in different countries. "When you asked someone out, have you often felt uncomfortable in a way that felt different from expected nervousness?" Answer options here included always options, usually options, and a never option. No option given for sometimes one way, sometimes another/no particular pattern. Some of the sex questions: "I've had sex with one or more..." "I usually have/had sex with one or more..." "This question applies to a pattern of sex life over an extended period of time, not sex with multiple partners at a time. I usually have/had sex..." Given the last one, they weren't sure what the difference was supposed to be between the first two.

Started compiling notes for the Asexual Privilege post, and I'm at a crossroads here. I'll try explaining in bulletpoint format to kinda take this chronologically, but it concerns the issue of Linking To Examples. To explain how people have used the "asexual privilege" concept, I plan to link to some posts from 2011 that show people saying the things they said. This is so people can understand exactly what I'm using as a reference point and how these conversations unfolded in the past. It's also so people can confirm for themselves that I'm not misreporting/misinterpreting things. Afaik most of the people involved on the anti-ace side of that debate either aren't around anymore or aren't active under the same accounts. To explain how people are reviving a similar concept today, I'm not sure whether to provide a paraphrased summary or link directly to examples. If I didn't link to examples, I would have to just very closely describe what people are saying and say, basically, trust me, this is really a thing that people are saying. If I did link to examples, they would either be examples that 1) people have been given and refused the opportunity to apologize for/have not been retracted or addressed, even when prompted about it, or 2) are not really saying anything wrong, per se, just saying things that help to contextualize and elaborate on the picture. So do I restrict myself to paraphrasing of other's words w/o citations, asking people to just take my word for it, or do I include links to what exactly the contemporary issue looks like? It's also occurred to me that while I know of at least one aro-specific post about how aro aces can support aro allos, I don't think I've ever encountered anybody publicly writing on the flip side w/ an aro specific bent. This post idea would be no replacement for that, but I do think it would make sense to cover the issue and probably link to this as an explanation.

....I don't understand the objection. Yes, thank you. That's what it was meat as, at least. Hm. Thanks for the rundown. Would you (or anyone) happen to know how strong the followings are for the AUREA and ASAW blogs? Conceptually, those seem like they'd be the closest Aro Tumblr has to a general "aro community space" -- in terms of where to go for this purpose -- but I'm not sure if that's necessarily the most efficient tactic in practice, in terms of reaching the most aros all at once. (Tangential, but to me the term "discourse blog" remains the blogging equivalent of "this is a area," and I'd probably be less resentful if that weren't a word I have to use professionally at my job.) (Also tangential -- I'm curious about what you mean by flags & terms as a big indicator of when people began to identify with the community.) Or more willing to address misinformation, too. Speaking of, I'm not sure what exactly to send/ask them to post in the first place, either.

Um, thank you, I think. Anyway, I had a thought earlier -- I suspect that some people might not be aware of how the concept of "asexual privilege" has been used against aces before ("before" here meaning, like, before 2015), so I'm thinking of putting together a primer on the subject, in case it could help. Granted I haven't seen the exact phrase "asexual privilege" itself in an aro community context, but as I discussed earlier, some of the language seems to operate off the same basic idea, and so at the very least I'd like people to understand.... what exactly that's reminding me of.

Sennkestra you keep making good points but the Arocalypse software doesn't let me hit "like" on guest posts. ;-; [EDIT: whoops, I took way too long to post this apparently. Failed to refresh the thread and check for new posts first.] Anyway -- that "attraction is cancelled" meme didn't strike me as homophobic, just careless, in that you'd think the poster would be aware some people have started using "cancelled" to mean "bad." But if that's not what they mean, then... Well, it's not clearly spelled out, but I figure is it's expressing a sentiment similar to the stuff I want to say as venting on other topics sometimes -- kind of an... assertive giving-up-on and pushing-away of a whole concept. I assume a similar sentiment is experienced by aros who don't experience any attraction or who don't care for the "attraction" model as a way of talking about their experiences -- I've definitely from aros who get sick of attraction talk in the aro community. If we're interpreting the message as an attack on attraction-experiencers, then that would include people like me, an ace, because I definitely experience physical attraction. But it didn't occur to me to feel attacked by it so much as just like... annoyed... that people are publicly posting declarations like that without being clear about what they mean by it. I figure this could work as a passable vent post in a select context -- just "I'm sick of this thing, get rid of it, it's cancelled" -- if everyone understood that it was being said in the register of non-serious venting, but... That's the thing: that calls for a culture of distinguishing your "emotional equivalent of vomiting to get something out of your system" posts vs. posts that are actually meant to be shared and circulated as general proclamations. For example, in a small private group chat, or a non-rebloggable viewlocked post, or on a niche subreddit... That would be a more responsible way to share those kinds of jokes, if at all. Tumblr doesn't really allow for any of those options, though, which causes a problem when people keep wanting to use it as a community "home base" (so to speak) for sensitive subjects. People end up caught between "this is my blog, I should be able to talk about my own experiences on my own blog" vs. "literally anything I say here could be reblogged beyond my control, taken out of context/encountered out of context, and get someone angry with me, so I have to be careful to always be perfect and impersonal and unobjectionable at all times." The best way to resolve that tension, I figure, is to diversify community access points (ex. with places that actually allow for some privacy or limitations) and reserve using public Tumblr posts for when that's actually an appropriate tool. As for what should actually be done about the specific case... well, those are the things that I'd want them to understand, conceptually, although good luck telling someone on Tumblr via Tumblr to stop posting certain things to Tumblr. Yeah, I get what you're saying. And in that case: I think in order to address that goal, what the aro community needs to do right now is start soliciting the attention of reporters and researchers for interviews. I don't have much experience with this kind of thing myself, but there are people who do, and if you track them down and ask how they did it, then you might be able to take a page from their strategies. You also might put out a call for aros in academia/aros with academic connections/aros in journalism/aros with journalist connections to see if anyone's looking for a new project -- it's not like these kinds of things necessarily need to come from outside the community, after all. Who's in a position to be able to forward these goals right now? That's what I'd look into.

Hi @Korbin -- you already got some responses already, but I'll just add: I left my comment vague because I knew some of the people here were already familiar with the things I meant, and I figured if anyone wasn't familiar, they could ask. Thank you for bringing up the topic so that others could elaborate. I agree that ideally, the aro tag on Tumblr would only display relevant results -- and I don't think that's a bad thing to want, morally speaking... but unfortunately, I don't think it's a reasonable expectation to have for an unmoderated space, in practice. Or in other words, by expecting that, people are setting themselves up for disappointment. Irrelevant posting is what always ends up happening with big unmoderated spaces, which is why I made that point #1 in my case for how Tumblr structurally undermines communities. Of course, people get justifiably irritated at the irrelevant posting, but unfortunately the vigilantism on that topic has taken a bad turn. What I myself meant by the term "tag policing" was a reference to those situations where aros get yelled at by other aros for tagging their aro posts as aro because their aro posts are judged not aro "enough." In other words, people's expectation that the Tumblr tag search serves as a "community space" means that aros are getting yelled at to get out of the aro community. In order to stop this, people would have to entirely rethink how they approach Tumblr as a platform and find a more effective way to meet their community needs. *gestures at this* I mean, I have my hunches as to the answer, but. *gestures to this again* You shouldn't have to feel this way, because it doesn't, and it's extremely unfair that this is happening. Unfortunately, this thread isn't the first time I've aro aces disclose feeling like this. I have some further thoughts on that -- which might not be reassuring, I don't know, but I think it deserves to be said: What shows up in Google Scholar results isn't necessarily a good representation of "what people think," and not just because Google Scholar doesn't have everything. People don't just publish an academic paper on something just because it's a thing that's true. Speaking as someone who's going into a PhD this fall -- what gets published academically is largely a function of 1) available funding and 2) what people are already talking about. There are all sorts of things I'd like to write papers on, but if you're going to do that, you can't just write something the way you'd write a blogpost. Imagine if publishing a post or making a thread required you to first cite and link to at least like seventeen other things on the same topic, and then you had to make a case for why your thread is relevant to existing conversations that people are already having, and only if a committee agrees that your contribution is relevant to existing conversations, then your post or thread can go live. It's kind of like that. But I'm not just saying all this to say "it's hard and complicated." I'm saying this because if you want better Google Scholar results, then think in terms of what a potential aro researcher would have to work with. Aromantic research can't follow the exact same trajectory that asexual research did. Unlike sexology, there's no psych field of like... romance... ology. There's psych lit on married couples and stuff, sure, but it's not a perfectly parallel situation. I don't expect psych lit to be very useful to draw on for the purpose. So if someone's trying to publish something focused on aromanticism, at this stage they'd probably need to cite anything in the academic literature that so much as mentions the romantic orientation model in order to establish precedent.... which.... means..... Do you see where I'm going with this?

hm. I think (?) I see what you're saying, but I don't consider that analogy to be perfectly parallel -- a closer analogy would be saying "trans people, nonbinary people, and trans nonbinary people." ...Okay, in that case, I will say this: that entails interpreting "ace" by itself as implicitly meaning "alloromantic ace," and I want people to please... not... do that.

I think so. I'm on the fence about it, just because some people seem really committed to the idea and I'm not sure I've evaluated their arguments properly, but I have no particular objections myself. Yeah, I've been wondering about that...

This thread might be irrevocably derailed at this point, but if anyone wants to confront me about anything that isn't the actual topic of this thread, please PM me or ping me in a more relevant thread. Here are some more thoughts I had related to what @pressAtoQUEER brought up earlier: In a bunch of cases, I've seen people rattling off a string of categories in the from of "aces, aros, and aro aces" -- this would be an example of treating "aces" and "aros" as if those categories don't already include aro aces, which is just baffling. I think another factor here -- although this is far more minor, relative to everything else -- may be the term "aspec" itself. A lot of people are already familiar with the problem where people will say "aspec" when what they mean is "ace," but I figure the problems go deeper than that. The tag policing. Just.... the tag policing.

So you are serious. I guess I could go into a whole spiel about why me trying to have that type of conversation with someone via an anonymous ask message on Tumblr would feel like trying to wash cotton candy, but instead I'm going to leave it at: No. What I could do, conceivably, is send someone an ask message going "Hey, I'd like to talk; what's your contact information?" -- but in most circumstances, to be honest with you, I'd expect a message like to be regarded with suspicion. Maybe you're more optimistic about how that would pan out and will tell me to try it anyway, I don't know.

...Alex. Please tell me you're not serious.

Then my apologies to Tost for this thread going off topic already. I have some more specific questions then, beginning with: How? I mean -- literally -- is your preferred contact method PM via Arocalypse, or something else?

Well then at the very least I'm glad we're in agreement that there's more than one factor involved. Before I respond to the rest, would you be willing to take this conversation to the original thread in question? I figure we're getting off topic for this one, although it's up to you, really.

I was going to say something about that too. Basically, I have a hypothesis about some of this -- and y'all can dismiss this if you want, I'm not that attached to the thought -- but my hunch is this: One of the factors involved here is that some folks are really, really immersed in a discursive regime where the only way to talk about hurts and harms between groups is in terms of the oppressor/oppressed framework. Therefore, in order to say that your own hurts are real and deserve to be taken seriously, you need to position yourself not just as a victim, but as a victim being categorically oppressed by a comparably favored class. The idea that you can say "hey, stop attacking that group" and "it was wrong for some of them to attack you too" at the same time is treated as... unthinkable, basically. A concession to one feels like a betrayal of the other. I also have another hunch about the term "aspec" and its role here, but I'll set that aside for a moment. On that note, that's another thing that I would classify as anti-ace: when people treat "aro" as a term that doesn't include aro aces unless otherwise specified (and sometimes vice versa, like "aces" necessarily means "alloromantic aces" unless otherwise specified). You would think that sounds ludicrous and it should be a really easy mistake to avoid, but I've seen it happen plenty. And the end result is a lot of aros feeling like they need to check their asexuality at the door if they're going to be allowed to engage with the aro community or talk about their aro identity. Yes, I can say more about that. Just certain aros; I'm not laying a charge against all aros as a whole here (far be it from me to treat the aro community like a hivemind). I'll also add that this is admittedly colored by what I personally happen to run into, and therefore I may be missing a significant part of the picture, and complicated by the fact that this doesn't necessarily involve anything that, as an isolated statement, is specifically wrong per se. It's more than some of it just raises questions for me in terms of what's being said vs. what isn't. Keeping this brief, so leaving out examples for now: what I'm talking about is a disproportionate emphasis in discussions of aro-ace allyship, where implicitly, some aros speak as if there is a certain hierarchy in place that only needs to be addressed in one direction, ex. by positioning aces as people who need to be allies to aro allos, while omitting any reciprocal expectation. This doesn't actually mean that aro allos benefit more in practice, naturally, since that talk can be very superficial (as Alex has talked about before). Again, it could be more stuff out there that I'm just not happening to encounter, which I would welcome as good news. This is something of a loose impression right now, not something I'm confident I could build a solid case about. Thank you. I have a question about this. ...That, exclusively?