paporomantic

THERE SHOULD BE LIMITATIONS ON THE USE OF THE QUESTION MARK IN GENERAL. TOO OFTEN, I SEE IT USED IN AN AFFIRMATIVE OR NEGATIVE SENTENCE THAT THE AUTHOR IS JUST NOT TOTALLY SURE OF. I WONDER WHERE THIS FASHION OF QUESTION MARK USE CAME FROM.

HEH. LIKEWISE, ONE DOESN'T NEED TO PRESS 'SHIFT' TO COPYPASTE A SMALL LETTER FROM ANOTHER THREAD

I WAS TRYING TO PROMOTE '[E]' ON AVEN BUT IT DIDN'T TAKE ROOT. I GUESS '1' IS ALSO A FINE REPLACEMENT FOR THE EXCLAM. AFAIK, @OptimisticPessimist'S STYLE IS TO END EXCLAMATORY SENTENCES WITH FULL STOPS.

Have you folks ever thought that romantic and platonic fantasies are a result of social conditioning and, if there were no 'cult of love/friendship', a crush or a squish would be just a swish and/or a lush? I.e. would people just want to see or touch (or bang) each other without wanting to 'share their lives' (which would definitely be my case if I hadn't been brainwashed by amatonormativists)? Or does the desire to be each other's confidants exist independently of the culture?

TO AVOID PRESSING 'SHIFT' ON THE KEYBOARD, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE SPIRIT OF CAPSLOCKIA. THE TRADITION OF USING '[Q]' WAS BORN AT THE START OF THE AVEN CAPS LOCK CLUB.

@Vega CONGRATS ON TAKING PART IN THE HELSINKI PRIDE [I'VE NOTICED YOU BRAG ABOUT IT ON AVEN.] HOW MANY AROS HAVE YOU MET THERE [Q]

WELL, I DON'T SURF ON THE PHONE AT ALL, HAHA [IT'S 10 YEARS OR SO OLD]. I MOSTLY SIT AT HOME, THOUGH, SO I CAN STAND THIS INABILITY. MEANWHILE, A PORTION OF 8 SMALL POTATOES IS BEING BOILED IN MY KITCHEN [/CYBERSPUD] A-A-AND I'M LOSING COUNT OF ASTROPHYSICISTS AND AUSSIES ON AROCALYPSE... MY SUSPICION THAT THE LOVE FOR ASTRO IS CORRELATED WITH AROMANTICISM IS GROWING. THAT SAID, ONE OF MY FAVORITE SEXUAL GIRLS IS AN ASTROPHYSICS GRADUATE TOO.

ALAS BEING UNDESIRABLE IS ABOUT THE ONLY POSITIVE [FOR AROS] SIDE EFFECT OF OBESITY. THE ADVERSE HEALTH EFFECTS ARE SO SERIOUS THAT OVEREATING SHOULD BE AVOIDED ANYWAY...

I CAN'T EAT BOTH IN THE SAME MEAL - I'D GET TOO FAT OTHERWISE.

CALL ME A RENEGATE, BUT I KEEP BUYING VEGETARIAN PIZZA INSTEAD OF ICE CREAM LATELY WHENEVER I WALK NEAR A SUPERMARKET FRIDGE

I'M ABOUT TO BOIL THE REMAINDER OF MY SPUD RESERVE [3 HUGE ONES]. I'LL HAVE TO DO FOOD SHOPPING TOMORROW TO RENEW IT. I HATE ERRANDS SO MUCH

NOTE TO SELF - DON'T BUY BAGGED POTATOES 'SORTED FOR BOILING' IN A SUPERMARKET. EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE WASHED, THEY HAVE MORE EYES AND ARE MORE ROTTEN ON AVERAGE THAN POTATOES SELECTED MANUALLY FROM A DIRTY HEAP IN A MARKET.

Speaking of, does anyone else here prefer 'biting' each other's necks to lip kissing?

I have to squish too many times daily

Thanks for the answers! They're quite a conundrum to me. It looks like I experience the kinds of spontaneous urges similar to what the sexual respondents have described, except that, because of my neurodiversity, I've never come close enough to being intimate with anyone to test whether I'd have new ideas and start actually imagining sex with that close person. I'm tempted to attribute the fact that I id as ace and two of you id as sexuals solely to the difference in our backgrounds - I applied the 'aro' label to myself long after I joined AVEN (was trying to find to a common denominator with romantic aces in the meantime). I'm probably not even aro, but I found the aro ace labels a more comfortable explanation (than celibacy, neurodiversity or, ice cream forbid, incompetency) of my romantic and sexual inactivity.

Sure, I'd just ship that to AVEN, Asexual Outreach and Arocalypse so that they put me on a lifetime pension and buy everything that I need for me (and, formally, I'd never buy anything myself). They'd become very influential, help all the latent aces and aros in the world come out and eventually find a bunch of companions for me You get $1M as a consolation prize in a lottery whose main prize is $100M because the vendor made a misprint in the numbers that you told them to pick, and the sequence that you wanted them to print would have won the $100M. You get a unique kind of PTSD as a result and the only shrink in the world who can fix it charges $450K and their services aren't covered by insurance, plus you pay $500K in tax.

The million would be gone too fast this way and I'd remain broker than now, so nope. On a side note, can I haz $50K on a bit lighter conditions? You get a million dollars but have to live in a marriage with a person you hate (not a criminal, though) for N years (specify the maximum N where it's still a bargain for you).

Speaking of responsive desire, what exactly triggers it in you, (gray)sexuals? Just the sight of someone who's already your intimate friend? Cuddling? Fetishes that are present on the partner? Suggestive speech? Some set of social indicators of that 'sex is about to happen', e.g. the sight of your partner lying in the bed?

Of course the question about how sexual attraction feels like has been asked on AVEN many times, e.g. here, but the sexuals who were answering it were mostly (maybe even always) romantic, and in the answers that I remember, 'spontaneous attraction' (if it was felt at all!) sounded like a mix of romantic and aesthetic attraction, and they had a hard time 'isolating' raw sexual attraction from other attraction modes. Furthermore, one of the most influential thinkers on AVEN - Skullery Maid - has drawn attention to Dr Emily Nagoski's research telling that, for 80-90% of sexual women, responsive sexual desire is the primary mode of desire, as opposed to the spontaneous one, and ~30% of sexual women feel spontaneous sexual desire never or very seldom. That generates even more doubt about what sexual attraction actually is. It would be useful to read about what happens specifically in aro (gray)sexuals' minds when they're attracted sexually because, in their case, there's no romantic 'noise' and it's easier to discern raw sexual attraction. In particular, is it common among those aro (gray)sexuals who do experience the spontaneous form of sexual desire to actually visualize a potential sexual contact with the other person, as opposed to just admiring their appearance and behavior? For comparison, as a highly libidoist male-bodied ace (tentatively), I get 'turned on' (experience a 'dirty' kind of aesthetic attraction) in a way that some of you may find weird. Basically, when I encounter a person (or a group of people), my sensory organs scan their appearance and behavior for fetishes. Then the sensory processing center of my brain makes a nonverbal report like, 'Instances of fetishes #2, 4 and 7 detected. Mental snapshots taken for future use. The absorbed dose of human beauty radiation has exceeded the critical level. Get into your pants asap to dump the dose.' That triggers a delayed (in the form of anxiety) or, in the case of a severe beauty poisoning, instant physiological response. What brain processes make you, aro (gray)sexuals, desire partnered sex? (Some of you don't post on AVEN regularly, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to collect some extra testimonials anyway.) TIA!

@ArodynamicallyFavored In order not to out your real name (or online pseudonym, idk), I offer to call you Ami because it's a pangender name that also means 'friend' in French (alas masculine only) and it would be punny if your forum display name contained your 'human name'. Anyway, it would be lame to dedicate the thread only to guessing users' real names because so many have outed them already and it's boring to pretend to be guessing them. A less confusing title for the thread would be 'Invent a human pseudonym for the above user'.

Sorry, I didn't notice that it's off-topic because the thread title is too generic and I thought it was meant as a catch-all thread like the 'A(gender)vengers Assemble!' thread on AVEN. I'll try to formulate my questions better in a separate thread after I figure out what exactly I need to ask. ( @ArodynamicallyFavored, what's the intended scope of this thread?)

I have no idea because my ASD makes me less observant of the body language To begin with, what constitutes stereotypical male appearance (apart from facial hair and excessive hair outside the head) and male manners in the Western culture? Before familiarizing myself with NB genders, I thought that males are expected not to care much about their appearance and that most 'inconspicuous' appearance features would be masculine, not genderless, whereas most 'attention-drawing' features would be feminine.