Coyote

Hey folks, maybe y'all can help me out with something. You may have notice that there seem to be a steady stream of questioning threads in this board (no doubt because the board description presents that as one of the main things the board is about -- which is why I think it might be good to split off a separate Personal Questioning board from more of an Issue Discussion board, but I digress). Since people come here for help, I think it would be helpful to have a set of "things to help if you're questioning" resources ready at hand. But also, I think it would be good to standardize some advice for the advice-givers, if that makes sense. So: 1) Do y'all have links to specific things that you think would be helpful to questioning people? 2) What do you think are necessary parts of helping questioning people? What's helpful to say, what's not helpful to say, and what are the ethical stakes and standards?

Both of those sound like what I think they were saying there -- there's different social standards applied to same-gender touching for women vs. men, and I think it may be standard for people to befriend more people of their own gender, while also (if they're straight) only ever getting romantically/sexually involved with men (as women) or women (as men). However, I think there's an additional consideration here, because I was also interested in the part mentioning "both sexes prefer to be touched by women more than by men." That part seems to be attributed to these two citations: Crawford, C. B. (1994). Effects of sex and sex roles on same-sex touch. Perceptual and Motor Skills,78, 391–394. doi:10.2466=pms.1994.78.2.391 Willis, F. N., & Rawdon, V. A. (1994). Gender and national differences in attitudes toward same-gender touch. Perceptual and Motor Skills,78, 1027–1034. doi:10.2466=pms.1994.78.3.1027 I don't have access to these, although it's possible to look up their abstracts. They're probably light on explanation anyway. But if left to guess, I'd figure that in the U.S., even straight women prefer same-gender touch because generally speaking, men don't bother to make themselves seem as safe or approachable. Also who knows how any of these results would look if they bothered to invite or account for nonbinary participants.

@techno-trashcan Ah! An opposition to emotions dogma.

Well, in order to know the answer to that, you first have to take into account that not everyone experiences or uses the terminology of "squishes" at all. See this thread on that. It's a concept that's useful to some, but not everybody. Of the people who do both experience those feelings and label them as something like that -- well, it depend on if you're asking if it's "normal" as in "within the norm" or if you mean "normal" as in "the absolute most common way." If it's the latter, I can't say for sure. I don't think anything like that's been... measured, exactly. But within the norm? Certainly. But if you mean "normal" as in "anything other than this is abnormal"... nah. It seems like it's also pretty well within the norm to have a gender preference in the people you get attached to or hang out with. But in any case -- you don't need to worry about what's normal. There's no stakes to it either way.

You mean in the Flyod article? There's this, as speculation:

+1 but also: can you elaborate?

No, the term "split attraction model" originated just four years ago, as a label for attacking the various concepts it was conflating together and for framing the ace community as homophonbic. The concept of "romantic orientation" is older, originating at least fourteen years ago in the ace community (& arguably older, if you count other ideas as its antecedents, but that's optional, and this is just strictly referring to "romantic orientation" as a term per se). "Split attraction model" was a reaction to romantic orientation terms & attraction subtyping both, treating them as one and the same. Yes, that's because it's relatively new. Although it's a prevalent concept among aces and aros, it's important to understand, the concept of "sexual orientation" is much older, and a lot of people still don't even accept that. This, by the way, is a part of why "split attraction model" was even coined -- people saw others overgeneralizing the romantic orientation model and found that ideologically threatening. This is something I also talked about in the thread on this topic and another post. I don't think "ignore" is exactly right. There's been a lot of discussion about this in the past few months. It hasn't always been productive discussion, or useful discussion, but there certainly has been attention on it. See, that's some of what I mean by not necessarily useful or productive. There's been the creation of oodles of terms and flags and posts saying "you're valid!" but not a whole lot of figuring out how to pinpoint and address the actual problem of compulsory sexual orientation -- which affects more than just aro people, even if it does affect aros in an especially salient way. There are some topics for which "positivity posts on Tumblr, sometimes" is inadequate.

Well, this thread didn't get any new posts since I was last here, but an unspecified member(s) of AUREA recently published this post about it. For anyone keeping track: I posted my thoughts about that here (see comment section also). Short version: 1) interpreting "tender" and "affectionate" as equalling "romantic" deserves to be called into question, & 2) as a historical account, this is overly cautious in all the wrong places and not enough in others.

@fae Darn, I missed out on this by just a few days, or else I could have included it as an option in the Romantic Ambivalence Poll.

Yes. "Split attraction model" comes from non-aces criticizing ace community language. It usually went hand in hand with calling us homophobic. Besides that, as a concept, it's a mess and has a bunch of problems, because what "split attraction model" ostensibly is supposed to refer to actually conflates a bunch of different things. Using the term "split attraction model" in the way that it was originally and is currently used is no more fair or justified than using "asexuality" to mean "aromanticism." "Oriented aroace" comes from someone who deliberately designed the term around an attraction-centric anti-gray definition & has tried to police that. "Angled" was proposed solely and exclusively to fill in the gaps that "oriented" deliberately excluded on arbitrary grounds; there's no reason for "angled" to exist outside of "oriented"'s own original problems, which I think deserve to be addressed in their own right.

Oh god, please don't tell me these are already spreading.

Some research articles related to this, if anyone's interested: Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a Hand: Social Regulation of the Neural Response to Threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01832.x Field, T. (2010). Touch for socioemotional and physical well-being: A review. Developmental review, 30(4), 367-383. Light, K. C., Grewen, K. M., & Amico, J. A. (2005). More frequent partner hugs and higher oxytocin levels are linked to lower blood pressure and heart rate in premenopausal women. Biological psychology, 69(1), 5-21. Kory Floyd (2014) Relational and Health Correlates of Affection Deprivation,Western Journal of Communication, 78:4, 383-403, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2014.927071 Field, T. M. (1998). Touch therapy effects on development. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22(4), 779-797. Krahe ́C, Drabek MM,Paloyelis Y, Fotopoulou A. 2016 Affective touch and attachment style modulate pain:a laser-evoked potentials study.Phil.Trans. R. Soc. B371: 20160009.http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0009 von Mohr, M., Kirsch, L. P., & Fotopoulou, A. (2017). The soothing function of touch: affective touch reduces feelings of social exclusion. Scientific reports, 7(1), 13516. Liljencrantz, J., Strigo, I., Ellingsen, D. M., Krämer, H. H., Lundblad, L. C., Nagi, S. S., ... & Olausson, H. (2017). Slow brushing reduces heat pain in humans. European Journal of Pain, 21(7), 1173-1185.

Paging @arofrantics. Also, somewhat related -- to add on to the links from last time: you can find a few things under the keyword of "quoisexual" for not having a sexual orientation. Some of it's just jokes or snippets, but there's also a few multi-paragraph short reflection pieces here and there. And some of what you described -- wondering if there's some "true" hidden orientation not yet uncovered, or sensing that people think "ok you're giving me incomplete information" -- feels really strongly like my experience of being quoi, especially with how the a-vs.-allo binary feels like an imposition.

Is there any particular umbrella term for these things? Those are the ones I'm most familiar with, too, but I know there are also those who use these identity terms (like "bi") in a way that's not just about the physical, either. I wouldn't, lol, because I'm miffed both at the choice to call it that* and the way that the particular person spearheading that term has talked about splitting the umbrella. *"Oriented," as if aro and ace aren't themselves orientations. >> Sheesh. But more generally -- yeah, that's exactly the problem I'm getting at. Like for someone like Elizabeth @Prismatangle for example, -- she's a bi ace, but the bi doesn't stand for biromantic. So does "bi" go in the Romanticism line or the Sexuality line? Neither one is right.

Relationships, maybe? I think talking about "it's detrimental that people restrict themselves to doing these things only in romantic contexts" is plenty on-topic.

Okay, technically maybe this should go under the Site Comments board, but I figured people might be more likely to read this if posted here. I've been thinking about how some aro aces identify as bi, gay, etc., and currently, the sidebar bio setup on Arocalypse isn't very geared toward multiple-axis labeling like that. There's just "Romanticism" and "Sexuality," with no particular place to put any other info -- and I imagine that for someone whose additional orientation is very nonromantic and nonsexual, figuring out how to work with this might pose a bit of a problem ( @Apathetic Echidna I think we talked about this once?). So I checked with Blue Pheonix, and he confirmed that it's possible to add more text box options. 1) Do y'all think another text box type should be added to the sidebar bio? 2) If so, what should it be called?

I sometimes used to joke with my roommate that we were "friends with benefits" because they let me use their store rewards card. Orientation doesn't have any direct bearing on it. But anyway -- on the one hand, I'm not sure if "higher in commitment" can be said to be an inherent part of the meaning of queerplatonic. The word "commit" doesn't appear anywhere in the original post/comment thread or S.E. Smith's followup explanation. A QPR can be high-commitment, but I don't operate under the understanding that it needs to be reserved as such. In another post, S.E. Smith explicitly expressed a wish for it to become a fluid umbrella term. I don't think it's amatonormative to offer "high-commitment" as an example of how QPRs "queer" the "platonic" -- one of the Societal Rules around these things is that Only Romance does Commitment, so personal peer commitment in a relationship that's not-specifically-romantic is one way of breaking those Rules. I dunno at what point the "high-commitment" example ended up becoming part of people's ideas about the One Way to do QPRs, though. I guess most likely because it's an example that just got reiterated often. Dooooo you have a blog somewhere that you could post this rant to? Or possibly a willingness to create a new thread?

I would have said QPR, if you mean "really affectionate" in a way that's "more than is considered normal," since QPR was originally supposed to be an umbrella term. But I dunno if the poll options here are supposed to be making a distinction between "QPR" and "Purely platonic friendship."

Weird. Let me get you a different one. This should be the google scholar result page. Here and here are its links. This should give you the PDF.

Did somebody say research? Here's something I found on marriage and friendship: Carbery, J., & Buhrmester, D. (1998). Friendship and need fulfillment during three phases of young adulthood. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 15(3), 393-409. doi:10.1177/0265407598153005.

Ohh, okay. Now I getcha. You're using platonic in the true general/technical sense. The only reason I got tripped up there is because I'm so used to seeing people use "platonic attraction"* to mean "platonic emotional attraction," seeming to omit that "sensual attraction" and "aesthetic attraction" can technically also be "platonic." *Generic reminder that not everything is about attraction and I don't even find the term "platonic attraction" to be useful, personally.

Any particular suggestions?

It doesn't look like anybody else has said it yet, so I'll say it: You don't need to. "Romantic" and "platonic" are words for those who find those words useful. There's nothing wrong with not finding it useful, either. I don't care for the distinction much myself -- that's why I identify as quoiromantic. Then that's the important thing, from my perspective. Not necessarily. It's different for everybody. I would never tell someone, "no, what you're describing is too big of an emotion for you to call it platonic." Okay, now I'm the confused one. Are you saying "platonic attraction" isn't a kind of emotional attraction?

Alright so here's the story. I've been looking over the aro wiki a little bit, and I noticed that several of the romantic orientation pages have/had notes like, for example, "a greyromantic person can be romance-repulsed, romance-indifferent, or romance-favorable." So it seemed reasonable that there should be a page explaining what any of that really means. Right now, there isn't one. It'd be simple enough to just create one. Here's the problem: I'm not sure where to find anything that could actually be cited on this topic, and I'm also not even sure how much these terms even get used. I mean, I can reason and extrapolate to understand what they mean, obviously, but I'd also like to hear actual accounts from the actual people who use them. Do any of the people here self-describe in these ways? If so, why? If not, why?

What symbols do you think should be added? Besides the flag. It looks like there's no Aromanticism page, but searching "aromantic" does bring you to the Aromanticism subsection on the Romantic Orientation page -- apparently as a result of @DavidMS703 trying to make a page? ...So it could be helpful if people could compile some sources and ideas for what to put on the page, besides just a definition. What do y'all think could be added to expand it?