Labels must be allowed to die (Link)

[Coyote]

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?

 

[Lokiana]

An interesting perspective....but I'm not sure I entirely agree with it. (Although the notes on Rabger's model are very true.)

 

Personal bias playing in, but I've always been fond of hyperspecific labels, regardless of how used or unused they are. A good personal anecdote is the time when I identified as omniaromantic. It's by and far an underused label and is probably one of the ones categorized by this article as a label we should let die - but it certainly helped me through a time where I was questioning /a lot/ of things. 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.

 

I do also question the idea that we shouldn't necessarily keep our labels around. Even in the case of Rabger's model, the documentation was not removed - simply moved and re-categorized. I'd be curious as to suggestions: how do we keep a record of terms used previously, so we can understand previous posts and conversations, but still indicate, respectfully,  that the terminology in question is dated? Further, when do we decide that a term is "dated" or "not used" enough to be categorized as such? 

 

I know the system I use, when sorting the glossaries I work on, but I'm curious to hear further thoughts on how to resolve these conflicts.

[raavenb2619]

Re: respectfully indicating that a term is dated, maybe you could mark terms with some signifier (maybe an asterisk before the term) and have an approachable note at the top of the page along the lines of "This term is included for historical records and isn't in use today. If you think this is a mistake, please let me know"? In an ideal world, if you ever accidentally marked a term that's still in use as being out of use, someone would feel comfortable correcting you, and you'd periodically review the in-use terms to make sure they're still being used. The downside is that this could be abused on both sides; someone who doesn't understand or care that labels can be allowed to die might indicate that all of the terms are in use even when they aren't, while someone who doesn't like neolabels could mark them all as out of use even when they aren't (which also might lead to identity policing). 

[Apathetic Echidna]

I think quite a few of the labels in the glossaries were created as linguistic exercises (so the people who might use them are hypothetical to the label creator) or the simple need for  questioning people to get their most specific idea across, which has led to many terms that are variations on a theme.

 

Questioning people can sometimes be laser focused. I know that I had to find something super specific before I was willing to relax more into greysexual. I know I said it somewhere before but Cupioromantic is used by a few people for a while before they get a better understanding of Aromantic possibilities (like not all aromantics are romance repulsed relationship haters*). 

I do agree with what @Lokiana says. I think people should feel free to adopt labels and let them go, but should not be told to do so by other people (those people who would declare things 'dated' or 'too small'). 

 

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, with the MOGAI labels being a sort of ....use at your own risk of not finding a community specific to this thing. 

 

*yes, someone said to me not long ago: "Aromantic? that is where you hate everyone and want to be alone all your life."

[BlueKumul]

16 minutes ago, Apathetic Echidna said:

*yes, someone said to me not long ago: "Aromantic? that is where you hate everyone and want to be alone all your life."

 

Same as the stupid term "significant other", which implies friendships and family ties are insignificant.

 

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. A prophetic generation like boomers preferred to say things like "I am my unique self".

[Coyote]

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).

[aro-fae]

47 minutes ago, Coyote said:

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

I know on Tumblr (and I'm sure a few other internet spaces) MOGAI is short-hand for "anything that isn't the L,G,B, or T" and the boundaries of what is MOGAI depends on the person you're talking to. Some people consider all non-binary identities MOGAI, whereas others think "non-binary" is fine but more niche genders are not. MOGAI literally means "Marginalized Orientations, Genders, and Intersex" and is to be used as a synonym of LGBT+, but it has developed a new connotation/meaning over time. 

As to the general topic, as @Lokiana said, it would be nice if we could keep these terms for historical purposes but also note that they aren't frequently used and why it may be redundant. As mentioned with cupioromantic, it seems to boil down to another way to say "non-romance repulsed aromantic", so a lot of the community that may feel cupioromantic is relevant may actually be found using the term aromantic. This way people who relate to the label aren't just left out in the cold, so to speak, and still have somewhere to go and find like-minded individuals. 

[Coyote]

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.

[Lokiana]

11 hours ago, Coyote said:

23 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?

 

Sure thing!

 

So, I found this label as I was doing flag cleanup for a glossary I worked on, and it just...fit. I had that moment of "oh my god that's me". And for a brief period there, I was able to use some of the language from the definition ("aplatonic", for example) to find communties of aplatonic people, if not necessarily omniaromantic people. I found people who were in a similar experience vein to mine, if not my "exact" experience, because the language used in the definition pointed me to further inquiry and helped me understand who I was relative to....everyone else.

 

It also helped me because I tend to be the person who likes to hyperspecifically label myself, and to be able to broadly categorize "nope", was a nice experience, especially in a community that so specifically discusses QPRs and partnering relationships without romance. 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". So it helped me contextualize myself into the aromantic community.

 

It also helped describe a sitch that wasn't quiiiiite romance repulsion, but also not quite neutral....rather, somewhere in the middle. 

 

11 hours ago, Coyote said:

not just people proposing or suggesting at term initially in the abstract (so many people seem interested in "coining" terms on other's behalf)

 

this drives me up a wall. Honestly. I understand the intent sometimes, but coining terms for other people is just....argh.

 

21 hours ago, raavenb2619 said:

Re: respectfully indicating that a term is dated, maybe you could mark terms with some signifier (maybe an asterisk before the term) and have an approachable note at the top of the page along the lines of "This term is included for historical records and isn't in use today. If you think this is a mistake, please let me know"? In an ideal world, if you ever accidentally marked a term that's still in use as being out of use, someone would feel comfortable correcting you, and you'd periodically review the in-use terms to make sure they're still being used. The downside is that this could be abused on both sides; someone who doesn't understand or care that labels can be allowed to die might indicate that all of the terms are in use even when they aren't, while someone who doesn't like neolabels could mark them all as out of use even when they aren't (which also might lead to identity policing). 

 

I'm a fan of marking old terms with identifiers, and that's how I've traditionally found the best way to include them but also inform people that they may not be as frequently used.

 

How does everyone feel about doing the same thing with relatively new terminology, after it gets some use? Including in glossaries with a note like **this is a developing term coined recently, and change is based on current community discussion or some such? 

 

But I do see the problem here with people who don't like microlabels spamming. Unfortunately, tends to be a problem no matter what you do.

[BlueKumul]

15 hours ago, Coyote said:

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

 

All periods have all types of individuals, true. But microlabels were hardly as prominent before the 2010s or at least late 2000s. You could say it's because of social media, but again the widespread adoption of this technology tells us something about the generational character of current young adults.

[Tagor]

In my opinion, the rarely used terms do have a reason to exist as they can be useful when discussion inside one community/on one site. I for example identify broadly as aromantic, but if I talked about it with someone I would specify it to be romance indifferent aro/cupioromatic. In order to prevent keeping old labels alive I think the best option would be to make it standard to include (often used synonymous to .... ) and (rarely used) in the discription. I'm not a fan of an asterisk as this seems to be quite black and white and depends on the glossary being up to date all the time.

[Coyote]

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.

[Lokiana]

5 hours ago, Coyote said:

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

 

Aren't we always? 

[Coyote]

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?

[NullVector]

16 hours ago, Coyote said:

Is this something that could be addressed by using "nonamorous" more,

 

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

 

If we're looking for a more general purpose term then 'amatodivergent' is one suggestion (I just made it up). To contrast with amatonormative (similar in usage to how neurodivergent contrasts with neurotypical).

[Coyote]

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?

[bananaslug]

I think this kind of relates to a conversation that happened a few years back (which seems to have been eaten by time but I will keep looking) about how we preserve aspec terms for historical purposes. The question being, sense some terms will inevitably die off on their own, how do we catalogue our terminology for historical reference. 

 

As someone who actually made one of the glossaries listed in the footnotes on that post I will say personally that I find the purpose of stagnant aspec glossaries to be more as a historical paper trail than anything else. Have I actually met anyone who identifies as Thymromantic in the last 3 years? No. But someone, at some point, did find that to be a useful enough concept that they coined a term for it, so I feel that word is worth preserving, at the very least so that some day in the future aspec historians will have a better idea about how we talked and thought about attraction. Same with other dead or uncommon labels, whether we use them or not, if we want to keep a historical record we still need to have them documented somewhere public.

 

I think the issue here is mostly with dates. Most of the glossaries in those footnotes are dated, and you can easily see that they haven't been edited sense 2015 or 2016. In those cases I think it's often up to the reader to think critically about whether or not a glossary is current enough to use. In other cases they're not dated and I really think that's a bigger issue. There's no way to know what's current if there is not date, and especially on social media platforms where things can get picked up and shared how ever many years later, there's not always a good way for creators to come back and say "hey this is actually pretty old and shouldn't be used anymore" when a glossary isn't dated to begin with.

 

I think there is also a question here of how we use those glossaries. 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? 

 

I don't have great solutions for these things but I think it's worth bringing up and maybe having a conversation about.

[Coyote]

@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.

[bananaslug]

1 hour ago, Coyote said:

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

 

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. 

 

A great example of this with vocabulary is the term Bambi-sexual. This was a, not super common term, that happened to be included in a few diffrent queer and gay glossaries back in the 80’s.

 

Now would those sources be especially helpful to academic historians trying to find the origin and different uses of the term? Probably not. But when dug up and remembered by community members outside of that field it help inform an understanding and narrative of what the gay and lesbian communities were like in the late 80’s. It show us a way in which this community has changed over time, it gives us some idea of the diversity of experiences within that community and it helps us understand what some social and cultural norms may have been in that time and place (in this case Los Angeles).

 

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.

 

And yeah, it maybe doesn’t give all the information that an academic historian or linguist would want, but it still informs us. Language builds and reflects culture and preserving language in one form or another, can in many ways help preserve an understanding of that culture and who we are as a group.  

 

Now I am certainly willing to have a conversation about how we make these lists and glossaries, and what context should be included with them. For instance the AUREA glossary includes sources to the coining of each word when possible and maybe we should make that more of a norm, but I don’t think having less documentations of terms is super helpful. It is always good to have as much information as possible, and while this is just a personal preference, I would prefer do have half a dozen uncontextualized glossaries than lose all that language completely. Even language without coinage and multiple context can be useful, or at the very least interesting.

 

 

1 hour ago, Coyote said:

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. Most of them are tittled "list of aro-spec identies" or something like that. If a glossary is only a glossary when labled as such then we're not actually having a discusion about the right topic. 

[Lokiana]

On 7/13/2019 at 10:31 PM, Coyote said:

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?

 

I'm not sure that the use of nonamorous is going to help ( as evidenced by like, our entire community ), and the implication that personal narratives have little value or aren't useful is somewhat annoying. 

 

As for the question of how it's happening...

 

It's relatively easy to figure out. On one hand, many aromantic people enjoy sexual relationships, committed or nah. Many others are involved in romantic relationships, and still more are involved in queerplatonic relationships. These relationships, per societal norms, are considered "beyond" or "more complex" than typical friendship, and thus, merit a lot of discussion on how to approach and deal with them within our community. And we do! We talk a lot about how to function in relationships, how to approach our partners, etc etc so on and so forth until the end of time.

 

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. When we do, we don't talk about it as much - I've seen a couple glancing posts that touch on it, but in comparison to the vast amount of content available on QPRs alone, it can feel kind of overwhelming.

 

I don't necessarily have an excellent solution, but the problem isn't a lack of language or even a single narrative being promoted. Imo, it's a matter of having a vast amount of content to discuss and people to discuss it with, vs. a smaller section of the community with different needs that aren't being addressed on an equal level.

[Mark]

On 7/12/2019 at 11:17 PM, Coyote said:

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

Looking at this I'm wondering if the issue isn't about the labels. Though some of them are very messy.
So much as the "default assumption" itself or maybe that there is one.

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

 

On 7/14/2019 at 4:31 AM, Coyote said:

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?

23 hours ago, NullVector said:

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

It's meaning "sexual" is the regular meaning.
With using it to mean "romantic" being either neologism or jargon.

 

21 hours ago, Coyote said:

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

Which needs to be a neologism. Since terms like celibacy and chastity do exclude sexual relationships.

Possibly what's needed is a term (or several) for non-romantic sexual relationships...

  

24 minutes ago, Lokiana said:

It's relatively easy to figure out. On one hand, many aromantic people enjoy sexual relationships, committed or nah. Many others are involved in romantic relationships, and still more are involved in queerplatonic relationships. These relationships, per societal norms, are considered "beyond" or "more complex" than typical friendship, and thus, merit a lot of discussion on how to approach and deal with them within our community. And we do! We talk a lot about how to function in relationships, how to approach our partners, etc etc so on and so forth until the end of time.

 

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. When we do, we don't talk about it as much - I've seen a couple glancing posts that touch on it, but in comparison to the vast amount of content available on QPRs alone, it can feel kind of overwhelming.

There does appear to be an overfocus on QPRs.
There's also questions of what do aros actually want in terms of relationships.
 

Even non sexual touching can be highly romantic coded.

[Coyote]

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.

[bananaslug]

5 hours ago, Coyote said:

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?

 

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 said pretty explicitly that I believe we can re-think these lists so that they give people more information and context. These vocabulary lists don’t necessarily have to be lacking in context or links to other resources.

 

5 hours ago, Coyote said:

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?

 

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). For a common example, most of theses lists include both Lith and Akoi and make a point of stating that they’re two different words for the same thing. Like yeah, probably not all of these lists are so helpful, but in my experience the vast majority of them are. Most of the people who have been in the community long enough to collect a glossary are pretty aware of the "reinvention treadmill".  

[Apathetic Echidna]

I really need to check back here more often....

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. 

On 7/12/2019 at 2:47 AM, aro-fae said:

MOGAI is short-hand for "anything that isn't the L,G,B, or T" and the boundaries of what is MOGAI depends on the person you're talking to.

So I have been hearing it as 'anything that isn't L, G, B, T or A'. MOGAI covering queer, spectrum terms, and microlabels. But yes, I should have been clearer when I wrote my comment before. 

[Mark]

11 hours ago, Coyote said:

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?

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.
Similarly  a cupioromantic (or romance favourable aro) allosexual could find a normative relationship to be "good enough" for them.
Ditto for someone who's cupioromantic and cupiosexual.

Whilst an aromantic cupiosexual might seek relationships which are sexual and non-romantic. Especially if they are romance repulsed. Maybe similar to an aromantic allosexual. (Where there's, also, a lack of suitable resources.)
With a cupiroromantic asexual  seeking something romantic and non-sexual. Especially if they are sex repulsed. Maybe similar to an alloromantic asexual.

 

13 hours ago, Coyote said:

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.

In looking up the Primary vs. secondary sexual attraction model, falsely attributed to Rabger, I found the radar chart model of attraction.
With, yet another, definition of "platonic attraction".

Quote

Platonic - wanting to communicate, share ideas, be friends. You don't have to experience platonic attraction to enjoy having friends; in this context it measures a directed desire to get to know a particular person.

The definitions of several of the terms being different from those common now.

Quote

Primary Sexual - wanting to do something sexual because it'll feel good.

Secondary Sexual - wanting to do something sexual to express love or to enjoy the other person's sexual pleasure.

Primary Romantic - wanting to be in a romantic relationship with someone in particular, "falling in love".

Secondary Romantic - wanting to be in a romantic relationship in general, being open to options should someone pursue you romantically.

Then it gets changed to add "sexual desire". Also changing the definitions of "Sexual Attraction" to those which are more familiar. (They probably should have done the same with "romantic attraction".)

Quote

Primary Sexual Attraction: Sexual attraction to someone based on information you get instantly, like their looks or smell.

Secondary Sexual Attraction: Sexual attraction to someone based on the relationship you have with them.

Primary Sexual Desire: Wanting to do something sexual because it'll feel good to you (physically or emotionally).

Secondary Sexual Desire: Wanting to do something sexual because of your partner's pleasure, or for some other motivation such as conceiving a child.

This is a rather complicated model without considering the following:
Where does "quoi" fit on the 0-7 scale? (Maybe -1 or i.)
Is "Physical" the same as "Sensual".?
Can "Aesthetic", "Platonic","Physical", etc. be meaningfully divided into "Primary" and "Secondary"?
Are the categories comprehensive, mutually exclusive and exhaustive?

Is there consensus about the definitions? 
 

14 hours ago, Coyote said:

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

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

14 hours ago, Coyote said:

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?

No obvious response exactly "Well that sucks!".
 

14 hours ago, Coyote said:

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