Coyote

I think there are at least three or so of these out there -- might be worth seeing how they compare. Not sure what all of them are though. @raavenb2619 @running.tally would y'all know?

11 hours ago, The Angel of Eternity said:

1) Does 'mehmantic' mean you're neutral to romance or that you're in between feeling and not feeling romantic attraction? Could it mean something else, even?

You'd have to ask Aceadmiral for the specifics. I don't know of it ever being formally introduced/proposed in the way that some terms are (announced with a definition, you know the drill), but you can see some incidental uses of it here, here, and here. Does the sound of it resonate with you, or are you just curious?

11 hours ago, The Angel of Eternity said:

2) Do you know if a post has already been made about this on AVEN?

Yes.

I'm keeping track of the other places the link has been posted here.

8 hours ago, Holmbo said:

Have you posted this on r/aromantic on reddit? If not, I can post 

I have not. Please do!

1 hour ago, Mark said:

Is this what you meant about personal narratives rather than lists of labels?

Absolutely. But in more styles than just that, too. The main reference point I have -- the thing I think it would be good to have an aro umbrella equivalent of -- is the essays on the Asexual Perspectives page on AVEN. They're linked right there next to the FAQ, so it makes it easy to start reading further when you're just finding out about/first researching the thing. They're about topics like coming out, discovering your orientation, feeling alienated from society, rude responses people have, advice, and so on. I don't know of any collection of similar essays on, you know... discovering the aromantic umbrella, coming out as aro, feeling alienated from amatonormativity, rude responses people have about aromanticism, advice, personal narratives of living single/unpartnered, etc. People have definitely written about these things, I'm sure, I just don't yet know of any places they've been... collected, as such, in the same way.

Now that the Carnival of Aros has started, though, it might be possible to retrofit some of those pieces, if the authors in question would be up for that.

1 hour ago, nonmerci said:

I want to say no because I dis agree that I have no romantic orientation (I understand that as "thinking that romantic orientation is not relevant for me").

Okay. That's a criterion that doesn't apply to you then.

1 hour ago, nonmerci said:

But at the same time if here it means "being on the aromantic spectrum",

No, it does not mean being on the aromantic spectrum. When I wrote "people without romantic orientations," I was thinking of personal narratives like this one, this one, or this one, where the authors talk about not wanting to apply the concept of romantic orientation or romantic attraction to themselves, one way or the other.

It's possible to feel this way and to also identify on the aromantic spectrum, but the two aren't exactly the same thing. Definitely a fair number of people on the aromantic spectrum do consider "romantic orientation" to be a useful idea and do consider themselves to have one.

11 minutes ago, Jot-Aro Kujo said:

Wait, so by "without romantic orientation", are you including or excluding aromantics?

Good question. Really, the answer's up to the individual -- do you (general you), as an aromantic, consider yourself someone "without a romantic orientation," or would you sooner say that "my romantic orientation is aromantic"?

If you're interested in more aromantic-specific surveys, Siggy posted about some existing ones last month. I don't know of any surveys directed at what I might loosely call "the quoiro umbrella," so this was my attempt to initiate one like that. Granted, I don't know how many quoiros or quoiro-adjacent folks there are here on Arocalypse, but -- well, if you come across any quoiromantic discussion forums, please let me know.

Hi folks. I'm trying to get the word out about the Romantic Ambivalence Survey. It's intended for any and all people without romantic orientations, people who identify to any degree with wtfromanticism or quoiromanticism, and people who struggle with the concept of romance, romantic orientation, or romantic attraction. The goal of this survey is to find out more about which labels are popular, what people are using them to mean, and how much these identities may or may not intersect with others. The survey will be open and taking responses until August 20th.

If you have access to any other platforms or community spaces with anything to do with this topic, or if you know anyone who might be interested, please consider sharing the link further and letting me know. 

The results are now posted.

On 7/16/2019 at 12:28 PM, raavenb2619 said:

Well, between New month, same stuff, "Aplatonic is simply a descriptor used by some aro people to explain that they do not experience squishes nor desire to be in qpps/qprs" from Asexuality Blog (Tumblr), the two links from arrtypo, and the following aromantic wikia link, I'd believe that there's a reasonable amount of conflation going on. 

huh. Well, you got me there. What a mess.

I'm gonna see what I can do about that AromanticWikia page, now that I've got an account over there. Recently did a bunch of edits on the quoiro page, if you can believe it.

On 7/16/2019 at 12:28 PM, raavenb2619 said:

I think there's two things going on here. What arrtypo is concerned about is people using the amatonormative rhetoric of "just friends" and similar to discredit and invalidate QP attraction that allos already apply to their own friendships. Coyote, I think when you say "'queering' the notion of the platonic", you're using the word "platonic" as a much larger, catchall term, whereas arrtypo is using it as a much more specific term (likely implicitly contrasted against other types of attraction like sexual, romantic, sensual, etc). I don't think that worrying that queerplatonic being treated as a subcategory of platonic has to be amatonormative, because someone can interpret the two concepts to be different things while simultaneously working against "just friends" and similar rhetoric. (But I do understand why you would read it that way.)

It'd be cool if the two of us could talk about this directly. *shrug* But oh well.

So, a couple of notes on that: When we're talking about being friends, we can call that "being friends," but when we're talking about the social norm of how friendships are supposed to operate, I like to call that "being 'just' friends," with the quotation marks around "just" being indispensable. It's very important to me to one way or another mark that distinction, rather than treat the two as one and the same. 

So while maybe not everyone who uses "queerplatonic" (as a term) for their feelings/relationships will need to make use of the term "platonic" by itself, it's questionable to me to say that none of those feelings/relationships are "platonic." That's like making a hard distinction between "biromantic" and "romantic." Just because one defies certain social norms for the other doesn't mean they're not overlapping categories. Like I said -- hammering home on that "just" in "just friends" is important. It's not that "queerplatonic partners" and "just friends" are inherently innately different -- it's that the two terms express different attitudes about the meaning of the relationship.

I can't tell if I'm disagreeing here or just putting words in a different order to come at the same goal in a different way, but I have to wonder if arrtypo would agree or disagree with me there.

On 7/16/2019 at 12:28 PM, raavenb2619 said:

If he didn't, it's entirely possible (though not a guarantee) that he'd find the phrases "platonic attraction" and "not experiencing platonic attraction" helpful in describing his experiences.

Who knows. The more salient feature to me is that he was discussing depth of emotional bond and the word "love," specifically, which seem to have been all but omitted from this discussion. I dunno what he's up to these days, but I also know at least one other, currently active blogger who relates more to that perspective than the attraction-based one, and myself, in general, I'd appreciate more space for things to not always be dragged exclusively back to the question of attraction.

22 hours ago, nonmerci said:

Queerplatonic and platonic are close words, and to be honestly I'm not sure if I really get the difference or not

You can read more about it and its origins here. I mostly think of it in terms of defying expectations for how nonromantic or ambiguously-romantic relationships are supposed to work.

22 hours ago, nonmerci said:

I just would like a word to feel my experience. [...] I like to have a word to express how I feel, that's it.

I like the smell of cinnamon, I like to trim my nails short because I don't like like how they feel when they start getting long, I bite the inside of my cheek sometimes, and I like to sit like a frog. All of those are experiences. Presumably, you also have corresponding experiences -- how you feel when you smell cinnamon, how you feel about it when your fingernails grow long, whether you've ever bit the inside of your cheek, and how you like to sit. For all I know, you might want concise, singular words for those experiences too. I won't preclude the possibility. My guess is, though, out of the range of experiences you've had in your life, some of them feel more worth labeling than others.

My thinking is, if so: what are the other factors in what makes an experience feel worth labeling?

22 hours ago, nonmerci said:

One of the first thing you saw everytime you go on a page about aromanticism is something along the line "don't worry, we can have QPR's".

This. This is the very thing that I wanted to talk about with this thread. Where are the places where this is happening? What sites, what posts, what people? We need to track them down and change the story -- and try to circulate even more stories to the contrary.

13 hours ago, bananaslug said:

My dude, saying that terms and such should be preserved for "easier-to-please people" as you put it, is not even a little bit equivalent to saying that other experiences don’t matter, don’t put words in my mouth.

I'm not sure how opaque I was being about this, but when I asked "What about the disappointment and pain of isolation that they feel?" the response I was fishing for was "Yes, that matters too."

13 hours ago, bananaslug said:

I believe we can re-think these lists so that they give people more information and context.

Cool. A thought I had about that, besides links to coinage and any other "general information" type links, was maybe a set of links to "recent usage," if applicable -- anything where someone actually talks about it or uses it, not counting generic validation posts, moodboards, or flag compilation artwork. This would help people to better be able to gauge how "current" something looks to be and also how it's used in practice. "Recent usage" wouldn't have to mean most recent usage, just more generally, something more recent than the initial coinage post and that shows what the "life" of the term has looked like. If there's no available record of the term actually being used anywhere by any real non-hypothetical people, that could also be noted too.

14 hours ago, bananaslug said:

So uh...most aspec terminology lists do mention if there are other terms with the same meaning (including most of the ones in siggy's footnotes).

The example that Siggy used was cupiosexual. Here are two lists which list cupiosexuality. The first one also adds "also known as kalossexual." I don't know how much help "kalossexual" is supposed to be, given that I've seen that word even less frequently than cupiosexual. What's missing here isn't just another synonym, generally, but specifically the synonym that would help connect a newbie to actual relevant discussions.

I'm explaining this because I can't tell what you're getting at, and I'm trying to account for the possibility that the fault may lie with me, in not being more clear. Are you of the perspective that Siggy's criticism there is unwarranted, or are you saying something else?

9 hours ago, Apathetic Echidna said:

Okay, maybe it is because I am spending time in A-spec centred spaces but MOGAI as it has been used semi-recently seemed to exclude ace and aro.

o.o

4 hours ago, Mark said:

I'm wondering if an alloromantic cupiosexual (or sex favourable ace in general) might be rather "invisible". In the sense that a normative romosexual relationship might work well for them, even though their motivation differs from that of an alloromantic allosexual.

I used to think the same thing about romance-neutral aromantic allosexuals, lol. People's realities can surprise you.

Anyway, Talia's post Living as a Sex-Favourable Asexual is about being in a romantic relationships/contexts as a panromantic ace. While the relationship might be described as... romosexual... I don't think their experience is really as straightforward as you might expect.

4 hours ago, Mark said:

With a cupiroromantic asexual  seeking something romantic and non-sexual. Especially if they are sex repulsed. Maybe similar to an alloromantic asexual.

I'm not sure how much the cupioromantics would appreciate you saying that.

4 hours ago, Mark said:

This is a rather complicated model

Yeah don't take the radar charts too seriously lol.

4 hours ago, Mark said:

Obvious difficulty is thinking up a good set of appropriate options.
I may have a go later.

I was thinking the same thing -- it'd be easier if there were checkbox options, instead of forcing people to pick just one. Might have to use another site or googleforms or something instead of the built-in forum polls, if you want to allow that much freedom.

4 hours ago, Mark said:

I'm wondering if this "reinvention" is, in some ways, the result of lack of good first person narratives and communities.

Yeah, that's been a part of my theory too. Another reason why I think there needs to be a resource bank of personal essays, not just word lists.

5 hours ago, nonmerci said:

I thought aplatonic was about queerplatonic attraction

Nope. I'm really confused where people are even getting this. Is it in one of the wikis or something?

5 hours ago, nonmerci said:

But I don't get what platonic attraction is exactly.

I don't either (like, whatever feelings I feel, I wouldn't call it that) -- but when "aplatonic" was suggested, the person suggesting it didn't say anything about "platonic attraction." He was just talking about not bonding closely with friends.

5 hours ago, nonmerci said:

And now, can we name the lack of queerplatonic attraction?

Why would we do that (again)? That's basically what this thread was in response to people already trying to do. And to me, it's like... I don't know, it's like have a word specifically for "not being a Cheondoist." It's just so niche and specific to even know what queerplatonic means anyway. The way I think about it, we have words like aromantic and asexual because of amatonormativity and sexnormativity. Is their a comparable.... queerplatonicnormativity? I mean, geez, if there's anything even like that, it's on such a small scale that I think we should just try and fight the norm directly in our tiny communities, because it seems like this whole thing is just one big misunderstanding.

Like I asked before -- how many people even have QP relationships? I think some people may be getting too many of their impressions of Aro Community Experiences just from looking at word lists. This is, again, a part of why I suggested that AUREA put together some personal narratives on aromantic experiences, so that people would have some real meatier stuff to dig into and feel reassured by.

Also, like, not... everything has to be in the attraction framework. I wouldn't say I "experience queerplatonic attraction," but that doesn't mean I'm deliberately avoiding or personally alienated by the concept, and I sure don't want to be made to say I have a null queerplatonic orientation.

14 hours ago, bananaslug said:

I think you may be looking at history as purly accademic and research based, and while that is one way to look at history, there's another away of looking at history, which is offten more common in queer communites, and that's as a way of telling stories about ourselves and who we are.

Jsyk, telling stories, from my perspective, is something best accomplished using, um, well... stories?

14 hours ago, bananaslug said:

And with Bambi-sexual in particular, a lot of alloace’s saw the term and said, “Hey, that sounds a lot like me, isn’t it cool that people like me existed in the past even if we use different terms now!” and that’s important too because it gives us not just a sense of what was happening then, but a sense of where a certain group was in history.

Finding a term in a glossary and getting excited because "hey look, it's me," is... good for them, truly, but the type of person who responds really easily to short, concise, decontextualized dictionary-style definitions and doesn't need anything more than that is, I'm afraid, a type of person who is being disproportionately prioritized in these settings. 

Going back to the original post, what about the hypothetical person that Siggy described in the first place, who encounters a technically-fitting word in the form of cupiosexual and goes to look up related resources or communities, and can't find a thing? What about the disappointment and pain of isolation that they feel? Why is their experience not worth being taken into account?

What about the real, not hypothetical, experiences that I myself and others have had, finding something on a list that looks promising and then not being able to track down zilch in the way of further writing and personal narratives, let alone an active community? Why is that need, that way of approaching identity, not being taken into account? Why does the ache of that experience count for nothing?

What about the reinvention treadmill & how many terms are cousins to others but are never being indicated as such in a way that would help bridge those paths, for those seeking them? Why isn't it worthwhile, for instance, to include a note about cupiosexual also being similar to sex-favorable asexuality, for which there is far more in the way of use and application? Why aren't people bothering to help each other in a way that's as simple as inserting a few lines of text and a hyperlink or two? Why are the people who want that, the people who need that, not worth prioritizing?

I get that you like the idea of making those easier-to-please people happy. Now what about making an even larger number of people happy, too?

15 hours ago, bananaslug said:

16 hours ago, Coyote said:

Quote

If I intend a glossary as a historical record but other people then use it as a reference then how do we reconcile conflicting uses?  

By only labeling it a "glossary" if it's actually meant as a glossary.'

 

Well it's worth noting then that a lot of the "glossaries" in those foot notes were not actualy labeled or intended as glossaries.

If you'd like to talk about things other than glossaries, I'll happily follow your lead, but for reference, the statement you're quoting and replying to here was very much in response to your own statement that specifically used the word "glossary," so if you don't mean "glossary," you can help me out by not using the word "glossary."

If the point here was to criticize a technical mistake by Siggy, though -- it's an open comment section there on the original post. You can let him know.

1 hour ago, Lokiana said:

What I've found is that we don't talk as much about how to deal with friendships, or touch starvation due to no relationships/friends reading it as romo, how to do life when you're not going on dates and don't necessarily have a partner and that kind of thing.

Sounds like good ideas for a Carnival of Aros theme!

1 hour ago, Lokiana said:

Imo, it's a matter of having a vast amount of content to discuss and people to discuss it with,

In the form of actual threaded back-and-forth discussions, presumably. As opposed to what can be accomplished in concise, generic validation posting.

47 minutes ago, Mark said:

I feel there's also a "squish problem" along with a "platonic attraction problem", possibly a few others.

Every time somebody assumes that everyone uses the "platonic attraction" concept (either "experiencing" it frequently or not), I die a little more on the inside.

Quote

There's also questions of what do aros actually want in terms of relationships.

What do aros actually want in terms of relationships? Sounds like a decent premise for a poll.

13 hours ago, raavenb2619 said:

I haven't experienced this personally, but I ran into someone on Tumblr who has, relevant posts here and here. 

Well fry me in butter and call me a catfish.

Thanks for the links. Okay, let's see...

Quote

Yes, there are two definitions to aplatonic. but the one that’s commonly used is about qp attraction. It’s gotten to the point where that’s mainly what ‘aplatonic’ is misunderstood to be.

...commonly? This is all news to me. It would be convenient if people would more often link what they're talking about, but oh well. The second link does include an example of this to me that just reads as one person being weirdly clueless. Can't tell from that how widespread this really is.

Quote

Aplatonic means ‘experiences little to no platonic attraction’

Quote

Aplatonic is the lack of general platonic attraction.

No, it doesn't, and no, it is not.

Or rather, if people want to use it for that as well, fine by me, but it's pretty rude to exclude the coiner's own meaning of the term. In his introduction of it, he makes no mention of the concept of "platonic attraction." I really wish people would cool it about always making everything about attraction all the time.

Quote

My big concern with that, in associating platonic attraction and qp attraction under the same label, was people assuming that qp attraction was ‘just another form of platonic/friendship-ness’.

Is that really that bad of a thing? The "queer" in "queerplatonic" comes from "queering" the notion of the platonic -- operating outside of social norms for relationships that aren't definitively-wholly-romantic. Differently platonic doesn't mean not platonic. Trying to essentialize queerplatonic as some inherent essential specific thing, somehow separable from and totally not a friendship, is worse, in my opinion, than anything they're concerned about there, and can only come from the kind of thinking we saw with alterous, where people are embracing -- rather than disputing -- an across-the-board definition of friendship as a specific and limited status.

In other words, fretting over queerplatonic being viewed as a subcategory of platonic.... feels... amatonormative.

Quote

Yeah, the aplatonic label is a descriptor for aromantic people.

In a followup post, this user clarifies that they're aware it isn't just for aromantics & was in fact coined by a homoromantic. However, they're also saying that it "became" aro-specific (?), and also this:

Quote

I’ll still say that it’s a term largely used by aromantics, but that aspec non-aros/alloros can also find it useful. (I say aspec non-aros/alloros because I don’t see why non-aspecs would need the word ‘aplatonic’.

What is this based on? Do we have any particular survey data on who does or doesn't use "aplatonic"? How can we be sure who it's "largely" used by, besides just whoever you've been running into, personally?

This user says they "don't see why non-aspecs would need the word," presumably meaning "people neither on the ace nor aro spectrums," but in fact, the Twitter account Aplatonic Agenda was run by someone who considered themselves an alloromantic allosexual at the time.

On that note... if people are attached to this idea of the term "aspec," for a general "a-spectrum," then... why wouldn't that include "aplatonics," inherently? Regardless of their sexuality or romanticism? I mean, what's the justification for the framework here?

Quote

Yeah, aplatonism originated from the trauma and/or ND community. 

...huh? No, it originated on AVEN, in the ace community. The original thread mentions abuse but doesn't frame itself as a conversation in "the trauma community" at all. I don't understand framing it that way. If you want to say that's a group that's really picked up on it, then you can do that without misrepresenting where it "originated."

Quote

Many don’t like it when qprs are compared to ‘just friendships’ because qprs are meant to be a queering of what’s traditionally acceptable in platonic relationships. The two aren’t the same.

See, this is what I was talking about. It's not that they're "not the same." It's that "friendship" doesn't have to be "just."

Anyway hot dang is there a lot of misinformation out there about these two terms, even among people trying to clear up the misinformation. It would be cool if Tumblr offered folks absolutely any option for redacting this sort of thing once it's already been circulated.

@bananaslug

Speaking as someone who's done synthesizing research/reconstructive work on ace & aro community discourse & frameworks in both informal and professional settings before.... Huh? 

We seem to be coming from vastly different perspectives on both 1) what methods historians use/what kinds of documentation is useful to them, and 2) what topics they're interested in in the first place. Believe me, I don't expect an exhaustive list of rarely-used neologisms to be useful to anyone trying to retroactively learn about "how we talked and thought about attraction," especially given that, if a word isn't really being used at all, then by definition it's not a part of "how we talked." In any case, I think there's more than enough of our terms documented already to show how trigger-happy we are with neologisms. Don't worry, we got that covered.

But even if you're very interested in, say, thymromantic being documented and preserved -- a glossary is not at all a good way to accomplish that. A good historian wants dates, authors, metatextual details, context, comparability to other sources -- there should be a way to trace back where a term actually came from, what other authors it was used by (in real sentences, not just dictionary definition form), and basically any kind of proof that this one particular glossary maker wasn't just pulling stuff out of their butt. If you're trying to futureproof or preserve things for posterity.... please, choose some method that makes any amount more sense than creating a glossary, of all things. That is not a paper trail.

2 hours ago, bananaslug said:

If I intend a glossary as a historical record but other people then use it as a reference then how do we reconcile conflicting uses?  

By only labeling it a "glossary" if it's actually meant as a glossary.

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

Social media became mainstream about 2006 but the profusion of politics started later.

Prove it.

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

I disagree with it. If you wonder why, you could be interested in the following essay:

https://thecriticalrationalist.weebly.com/blog/the-personal-isnt-nessecerily-political

Oh, you're one of those people who call themselves rationalists. It's all coming together now. 

Thoughts on your blogpost:

• "As such, the problems that politicians and political scientists concern themselves with are what define politics."
  And so then how do you define politicians and political scientists? This seems recursive.
• "The meme 'the personal is political' states that all personal problems are political and all political problems are personal"
  Did you know? Engaging with arguments in bad faith -- that is, deliberately misrepresenting or misapprehending them -- is not a good way of debunking them. Or I guess maybe you're just ignorant of the context of the phrase and how it was actually used in practice? Otherwise can't see why you would think picking a breakfast cereal is a relevant counterpoint.

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

The second is closer to my definition of politics.

Thought so.

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

Quote

Who's "we"?

Citizens of Western democracies.

I don't count myself among your "we," then. I'm not a citizen of a country that "already has the necessary human rights." I'm from the United States.

8 hours ago, NullVector said:

The question here is whether those ways disproportionately impact aros in a way that makes aromanticism itself a political issue. For me, they don't. For others, they might.

Is that the question? Because I think that might be a bad question to start off on. I think it makes more sense to ask, ex., What is amatonormativity, how does it manifest materially, what would it look like to advocate against it beyond the realm of the lexical and the symbolic, etc. rather than to, say, try to figure out a perfect Average Aromantic to measure any given question by. There is no one singular aromantic experience, after all. It's hard to say what does or doesn't disproportionately affect aromantics. It's not like there's large scale survey data on that. The most we can do is draw a connection between certain material dynamics and amatonormativity, which we might decide it's in the aromantic community's overall best interest to fight -- that is, identifying issues on which to mobilize the aromantic community, not necessarily "figuring out what issues are aro-specific." That's what I kind of assumed was Magni's thinking there. But maybe I'm wrong.

6 hours ago, DeltaV said:

the enlightened president Putin

Wow.

1 hour ago, NullVector said:

Not such a fan of that, as 'amorous' can refer to sexual as well as romantic.

Problem being, you're concerned about wanting to state specifically-romantic-singlehood without precluding sexual partnership?

1 hour ago, NullVector said:

we're looking for a more general purpose term then 'amatodivergent' is one suggestion (I just made it up).

huh. So how would you define that?

Bumping this old thread again to ask if there's anything anyone can contribute to reconstructing the history on this. To rehash, this is what Belowdesire managed to dig up for me/what we have so far:

On 3/19/2019 at 12:29 PM, Coyote said:

• "i got a prollem w ppl splitting a complex sociocultural influenced ting like attraction into only two distinct experiences that ppl present as inherently unrelated all the time." (approx March 25, 2015)
• "stop this hyper-progressive (romance and sexual attraction are completely different so lesbians can still date men!!) shit which just circles riiiiight back to being your run-of-the-mill bigot" (approx April 23, 2015)
• "in the past few days i have alluded to the idea that the split attraction model plays into homophobia and particularly lesbophobia but i have not explained that in depth. i have discussed in the past how 'allosexual' is an alienating term and how it potentially hurts non-ace gay/bi people who are already hypersexualized, particularly sex-repulsed gay/bi people (me!!!). but i dont know where these posts are and my position on this is also not fully developed i think." (approx May 10, 2015) (note: this user says tumblr user medicine "is smart af and has definitely talked about split-attraction model before" -- I believe user medicine is the same person as user pure, up in the first link I've listed here)
• "the split attractions model encourages the maintenance of internalized homophobia" (approx June 24, 2015)
• "Again, the split attractions idea does apply to some people. But the model in which sexual and romantic attractions are intrinsically different is not. That difference does not apply to everyone. Trying to apply it where it does not exist is harmful, and reflects many types of homophobia." (approx June 24, 2015)
• "split attraction model is the idea that every single person experiences romantic/platonic/sexual/aesthetic/sensual attraction entirely separately and identifies every single LGBT+ person using that as a guide " (July 22, 2015)

On 7/12/2019 at 6:17 PM, NullVector said:

Sure, I'm interested in learning more if you have some links to stuff, book suggestions, etc.

Oh man I don't even know where to start. Just googling "private public feminism" should get you a lot of stuff. "Criticism of rights" should too. For now I'll just say that the "human rights" or "natural rights" framework is pretty classically Liberal (in the philosophical sense, "Enlightenment" thinkers and John Locke and all that) -- and I think you can get a good basic introduction to Liberalism if you try watching the the "What was Liberalism?" series. Alternatively, here's a more essay-style treatise on the topic from a Critical Legal Studies perspective (which weirdly enough presents feminists as taking the opposite stance, which I don't think is a good summation, but whatever). Might raise more questions than it offers answers, but. This is one of those more long journey to understanding types of things morseo than something I can clear up with a quick simple answer. I can't even remember where I first saw this stuff critiqued.

On 7/12/2019 at 9:19 PM, assignedgothatbirth said:

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. 

You can say that again. Amatonormativity and the isolation of being single started feeling a lot more pressing to me after I lost my family and lost my job, knowing that without a social fallback network or much in the way of financial security, it wouldn't be hard for me to end up homeless in a year. Now I feel a lot more pressure to find somebody to latch onto, if only out of necessity. Whereas, honestly, that kind of thing bothered me less back when I felt like I had good foundations and that there would always be people I could turn to if I needed them.

20 hours ago, NullVector said:

Having kids for elderly care strikes me as less of an issue to be honest. [...] In practice, the children are often so busy with their own families and financial troubles that the duty of care is passed on to institutions (e.g. nursing homes).

Privatizing the care of the elderly, for profit, in a way that's notoriously susceptible to abuse and substandard care? Sounds like an issue to me. The expectation that adult children take care of parents may not always play out that way in practice, but the same could be said of the expectation that a romantic relationship will make people happy -- i.e. just because in practice many people are miserable in their romantic relationships... doesn't mean that that pressure is irrelevant as a social issue. If anything I'd say this is still pointing back to the issues with privatization and individualism (and exploitative jobs and exploitative debts) breaking up the possibilities for more communally-interwoven living, again connected back to the norm of the nuclear family.

I mean, in the history of human society, we haven't *always* had nursing homes. What kind of a society makes nursing homes relevant?

23 hours ago, Lokiana said:

Aren't we always? 

This is getting to be genuinely concerning. How is this happening? Why does that keep feeling like the most common aro narrative to so many people? Is this something that could be addressed by using "nonamorous" more, or is this something that can only be addressed by proliferating more personal narratives?

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

There always were some political maniacs, but this sort of attitude wasn't so prominent before social media and full-time TV news channels.

Do you also think that social media and full-time TV news channels weren't a thing until the 2010s?

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

But aggressive activism [...] should be kept outside the workplace.

Oh wow do I have some bad news for you about workers' unions.

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

If I wore a conspicuous badge with the aromantic arrows: How would it be different from wearing a conspicuous religious emblem?

Are you asking me to differentiate between them? Because I don't really care to and I don't see what point that's furthering.

13 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

Only in a totalitarian state politics permeated every aspect of life.

I take it you're either not familiar with or vehemently in disagreement with the 50-year-old slogan "the personal is political," but for frame of reference, I think that's more or less the school of thought @Jot-Aro Kujo is coming from here (correct me if I'm wrong, Alex). Since this is a point of contention, would you care to explain what your own operational definition of "politics" is here? I'd have guessed earlier that you were thinking of "politics" as only strictly delimited to "electoral politics" or perhaps "directly pertaining to institutional government authority and policy," but now I'm not so sure.

14 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

We already have the necessary human rights

Who's "we"?

13 hours ago, Mark said:

Also why the "alcohol free" bit?

Access for youth and recovering alcoholics, I presume.

1 hour ago, NullVector said:

You can make the case that existing legal frameworks privilege marriage and aren't good at legitimising other relationship archetypes, sure.

Yes, I think there's a very good case for that.

1 hour ago, NullVector said:

But she wasn't exactly calling for revolution on all fronts in that book! More like liberal reforms/tweaks to an existing contract law framework that already grants people the core political freedoms, but is currenly a bit inflexible in the inter-personal space.

Is that... a criticism? I can't tell what you're getting at. You're replying to Alex, who was saying that everything is a political issue, and here you're acknowledging a political issue, but then qualifying it with "but Brake wasn't exactly calling for revolution." Are you saying that political issues aren't political issues unless there's a call for revolution involved, or are you saying something else?

In any case, I think the previous posts here in this very thread demonstrate a couple of things already -- in order to get anywhere with "aro activism," or more generally, a movement against amatonormativity, you will face at least two cognitive hurdles: one in the form of "private sphere" individualism, & another in the form of the "legal rights" framework. People may be generally inclined to think of activism & advocacy in terms of gaining the "right" to something (like the right to marry), which doesn't really apply to well to something like, say, dealing with mistreatment by a therapist who views romance as inherently healthy. Then, like I said, you've also got people used to thinking in terms of a divide between "public" and "private" life, where (a)romanticism is something to be relegated to the private sphere, alongside sex and religion.

There's a long rhetorical precedent to look into of feminist and LGBTQ+ activists dealing with these same hurdles, if you're interested.

18 hours ago, Lokiana said:

I was able to use some of the language from the definition ("aplatonic", for example) to find communties of aplatonic people

Okay, so part of it was that additional labels used within the definition helped you find communities of people using those labels.

18 hours ago, Lokiana said:

It helped lead me to a place of "hey, the aro community discusses qprs a lot but it's okay if that's not relevant to my experience, some people may experience other attraction or love than romantic that I don't and that's fine too".

Ohhh, we're back to the queerplatonic problem again.

On 7/11/2019 at 1:39 PM, Mark said:

Even with different antonyms to "platonic attraction" and "queerplatonic attraction" there's still the problem of huge ambiguity.

So what are the consequences there? Has anyone been in a situation of, say, calling themselves aplatonic,* then getting mistaken for not-experiencing-queerplatonic-attraction, and having to clarify, "no, wait, I do experience queerplatonic attraction, just not platonic"? I mean, what? I won't presume to know for sure, but that would surprise me if so. I kinda think of queerplatonic as a subcategory of platonic, in some ways -- the difference is to what extent its manifestation is normative, in contrast to the delimited "just friends" expectation, not some inherent essential difference unto itself.

*Sticking a pin in here as a reminder that the original introduction of the word aplatonic didn't even involve the concept of "platonic attraction" -- that's a retroactive interpretation based on the asexual-as-lack-of-sexual-attraction definition, and people apparently like to interpret these things as a parallel set.

3 minutes ago, aro-fae said:

I know on Tumblr MOGAI is short-hand for "anything that isn't the L,G,B, or T"

which is something that bothers me, when I think about it.

I'm not attached to the term, personally, but given that it was supposed to stand for "marginalized orientations and gender alignments + intersex," and given that lgbt people are people of marginalized orientations and gender alignments, MOGAI technically should have been an umbrella term that covers and includes LGBT. A significant number of people didn't like this, it seems, and started using "MOGAI" to mean "MOGAI but minus the LGBT subsection," and... everybody else just went with that, I guess. Kind of a shame, if you ask me.

9 hours ago, Magni said:

1. Marriage: [...]

 

2. Adoption: [...]

 

6. Support Networks: [...]

A lot of these are intertwined with combating the norm of the nuclear family, I figure. You've mentioned the polyamorous community and "the queer community" as communities with overlapping goals and aims here, and to that I'd also add decolonialists and anticapitalists.

8 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

In the 2010s everything is politicized,

lmao, is that something that started in the 2010s, or is that just when you started paying attention?

8 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

Anyway, people should not advertise their private life at work.

Do you think people are being inappropriate when they wear wedding rings or mention their spouses at work?

11 hours ago, Lokiana said:

I didn't expect to find community with a microlabel, especially not one I dug out of a glossary, but it was useful to me nonetheless.

Can you elaborate?

11 hours ago, Lokiana said:

Further, when do we decide that a term is "dated" or "not used" enough to be categorized as such? 

That's a good question. One of the measures that Siggy mentions in the comments (not as an absolute determiner, but as a factor for consideration) is census data -- cupioromantic and lithromantic, for instance, are showing use... adfecturomantic, not so much. And yes, granted, that was the asexual community census, so that's not going to be a perfect measure of niche romanticism labels -- just an example.

But also? I'd say until you have examples-of-use that you could link to -- not just people proposing or suggesting at term initially in the abstract (so many people seem interested in "coining" terms on other's behalf), but actually writing out stuff like "I'm X, and here's why" or "here's a group of ours you can join if you're X" or otherwise showing that people are actually identifying with it -- then there's no cause to add it to any of these big grand lists. 

8 hours ago, Apathetic Echidna said:

On another point I always thought 'MOGAI' was a warning in of itself. When something is 'micro' surely people realise that there probably aren't many people out there, let alone an active community. I think what needs more clarification is the diversity of the grey- umbrella and that MOGAI probably means there are labels out there that are same-same-but-different. 

 

Rather than letting labels 'die' in prompted obscurity it might be better to reform glossaries to a 'Major Labels' and a 'MOGAI Labels' section

I'm confused. It sounds like we might have different impressions of what the "M" in "MOGAI" stands for.

8 hours ago, Spacenik86 said:

As for microlabels - some of them are funny in their precision. Strauss and Howe with their generational theory would explain it - millennials as a civic generation are looking for teams to join.

I'd hardly expect that's true of just "millenials" (itself a funny neolabel).

Labels must be allowed to die

Quote

Have you ever seen one of those asexual or aromantic glossaries?  If not, I have many examples in the footnotes!¹  These glossaries often serve as repositories for all the identity terms that one person or another has advocated at some point in time.  Many of these terms are called “microlabels” or “neolabels”, because they’re relatively new, describe something rather specific, and are used by only a small group of people.

 

The idea is that someone may read one of these glossaries, and find a label that is useful.  And if you don’t like the neolabels, nobody is forcing you to use them!  And if a particular neolabel is used by nobody, then, I guess it’s at least not doing any harm? Or is it?

On 7/7/2019 at 9:15 AM, Mark said:

Searching for "definion of aplatonic" returns only definitions of "platonic", which isn't useful at all.

I can't tell if you're saying "yes, it is too confusing" or if you're saying something else.

On 7/7/2019 at 8:04 AM, LizBri said:

And as for the logo, it is on my to do list to sort out, but not being particularly computer creative it will take time.

I could maybe help with that.

This one, right? (I tried clicking your link in an earlier post, but without a facebook account it wouldn't let me see it)

On 7/7/2019 at 10:56 PM, Magni said:

On 7/3/2019 at 5:54 AM, LizBri said:

I would call it Liverpool and Wirral A-Spec social group but that doesn't help anyone searching (and potentially could be mixed up with autism spectrum).

Firstly, it wouldn't be mixed up with the autism spectrum, a-spec has been used specifically for ace & aro,

FTR a more legitimate concern would be people not knowing what "a-spec" even means or that it's intended to include the aromantic umbrella. Terms like "asexual" and "aromantic," while unfamiliar to a lot of people, are at least words that you can kind of guess at -- whereas "a-spec" is completely opaque unless you're already familiar with it (tbh if left to my own devices, I wouldn't have even guessed that "spec" was supposed to be short for "spectrum"!). So, even if someone does identify as aromantic and asexual already, if that someone is more oldschool and/or doesn't read any Tumblr blogs, I wouldn't expect them to remotely recognize the term "a-spec."