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Acephobic antagonism in aro spaces


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1 hour ago, Lokiana said:

Just a question for y'all, and this is slightly off topic so pardon me: do you consider agender people to be on the a-spec? I've heard conflicting answers and am curious what y'all's thoughts are.

I am also curious about this. I hadn't heard of this as a thing before this thread.

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11 minutes ago, Momo said:
1 hour ago, Lokiana said:

Just a question for y'all, and this is slightly off topic so pardon me: do you consider agender people to be on the a-spec? I've heard conflicting answers and am curious what y'all's thoughts are.

I am also curious about this. I hadn't heard of this as a thing before this thread.

There’s been a thread on this (EDIT: that got really off topic and contains some identity policing). Personally I’ve never really heard of it incorporating agender and use to it encompass the aro and ace umbrellas.

Edited by kernsing
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Personally I think the best is wondering if agender want to be included or not. I have no objection (I was thinking that it's like the trans being included in LGBT, but specifically the a- here), but do agenders actually feel they belong in the aspec community? Or was it the aspec that decided that wihout asking? I'm just asking, I don't know at all.

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12 hours ago, kernsing said:

There’s been a thread on this (EDIT: that got really off topic and contains some identity policing). Personally I’ve never really heard of it incorporating agender and use to it encompass the aro and ace umbrellas.

I think XKCD may have got there first.
It can seem at times that a lot of "aromantic terms" follow  Unix Standards.

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i feel like gender identity is a bit different than being aro and/or ace spec, it's not about attraction which i'd argue the aromantic and asexual spectrums are about. however, i'm very open to the idea that i might be wrong in thinking this.

and i agree with nonmerci, do agender people want to be included in the a-spec? did we include them without asking them about where they feel they belong?

i personally don't include agender people in the a-spec and i don't see many posts mentioning agender people along with aro and ace people. i'd argue we share the a but not the a-spec? maybe? 

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14 minutes ago, time-is-ticking said:

i feel like gender identity is a bit different than being aro and/or ace spec, it's not about attraction which i'd argue the aromantic and asexual spectrums are about. however, i'm very open to the idea that i might be wrong in thinking this.

Being agender is at least as similar to being aro as being ace is. For me, at least, I experience my agenderness almost exactly the same as I experience my aroness - a confusion about the concept in general. As opposed to my aceness, which I understand fully but just am not into.

15 hours ago, nonmerci said:

but do agenders actually feel they belong in the aspec community?

Honestly? I don't feel like this is up to us (agender people). If the term was created as a grouping of ace and aro experiences then we shouldn't come in and barge into that. If it was created as a way of grouping people who feel like some part of their identity is defined by a "no thanks" then we're already included. Personally, from my experience, the former is the truth not the latter.

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Sounds like the consensus is that it's helpful to use examples, so I'll do that. I've drafted a primer on the "asexual privilege" topic at this point and have set it aside for the moment while I work on other things, but I'll probably post it in the next few days (and then link it here).

@Lokiana I've got thoughts on the "a-spectrum" topic, but I'd prefer to have that conversation over here. Top post includes a link to where it originally came from.

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Asexual Privilege: Revival of an Anti-Ace Idea

Summary:

  • There was a debate about "asexual privilege" that started in 2011
    • "Asexual privilege" is an anti-ace idea
    • because it argues that aces are better off/safer for being ace
    • which means ignoring or writing off the ways in which that's not true
  • Now, today, people are saying some similar things in the aro communtiy
    • Sometimes this is explicitly "aces hold power"/are "oppressors"
    • Sometimes this is more implicit/indirectly said
    • I am asking the aro community to nip this in the bud before this idea becomes any more entrenched
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On 3/27/2020 at 4:18 AM, Coyote said:

 

...Okay, in that case, I will say this: that entails interpreting "ace" by itself as implicitly meaning "alloromantic ace," and I want people to please... not... do that.

Oh God yes please.  As Non SAM ace I die a little inside whenever people imply on its own ace=alloromantic. It kills me. 


An aside isn’t it  “Fun” how Aroaces/non Sam aro/aces feel so unwanted and reviled in what’s supposed to be our “community/ies”.

Also instead of saying aros,aces and Aroaces, which isn’t inclusive of non Sam aros/aces it reads as ace=alloromantic, Aro=allosexual and the adulterated, fakes Aro/aces get regulated to the Aroace identity ghetto. I much prefer saying either Aro/ace which’s short and sweet or when we’re getting into diversity of identities Aro,Ace,Allo Aro, Allo Ace and Aroace. That way nobody gets left out it’s inclusive.

 

 

Edited by Space Android
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  • 3 weeks later...

I really wish the term "SAM" and all its variants would just go away actually, but that's a different topic.  Aces who don't use the romantic orientation model have been around well before anti-ace/anti-bi bloggers decided to overwrite our language and a bunch of other people just went with that.

On 4/5/2020 at 11:15 AM, Space Android said:

I much prefer saying either Aro/ace which’s short and sweet or when we’re getting into diversity of identities Aro,Ace,Allo Aro, Allo Ace and Aroace.

That's something I would still object to for basically the same reason: by making it into a list where "aro," "aro allo" & "aro ace" / "ace" "allo ace" & "aro ace" are all listed as separate groups, that's still making it sound like not all aros are covered under "aro" and not all aces are covered under "ace," which I disagree with.  

 

Anyway, not aro-specific, but arguably relevant to intracommunity issues:

How do you talk about sexual norms in an ace-competent way?

I'm raising this question here because 1) it's complicated, 2) I'm interested in getting more input on the question from others, since I can only contribute on the aspects I'm most familiar with, and 3) when describing the sexual norms they're affected by, I'd like aros to do that in ways that... are accurate to the real issues, instead of sliding into anti-ace thought patterns. Or in other words (to put this more bluntly): to find ways of articulating those issues that don't involve outright saying things like (for instance) "our culture is anti-sex" or "society wants me to be ace." See more in-depth thoughts at the link.

Edited by Coyote
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28 minutes ago, The Angel of Eternity said:

I wonder if there are aros who are arophobic, and aces who are acephobic.

Yes. Along with transphobic trans people, homophobic gay people, etc, etc. Just because you are part of a group doesn't mean you necessarily have the best view points on that group especially in queer circles where we often grow up in generally queerphobic environments.

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13 hours ago, Coyote said:

I really wish the term "SAM" and all its variants would just go away

 

On 4/5/2020 at 11:15 AM, Space Android said:

As Non SAM ace

What's SAM?

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5 hours ago, Guest Wren said:

What's SAM?

Oh boy.

A mistake, that's what. It's... complicated to explain because the origin story is just... a mess, but I'd boil down the sequence to 1) the ace community has had terms like romantic orientation, romantic attraction, aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, etc. since the early 2000s, 2) that language started spreading and getting over-universalized, 2) some people were upset because they didn't want that applied to them, and some also felt Threatened by the mere concept of other people using it, 3) in 2015 a band of people on Tumblr started using "split attraction model" for a bunch of different things when modeled as universal, but then 4) people started using it to mean any use of those things at all, not just universalizing it, so then 5) people started to have arguments over whether this-inherently-defined-as-wrong thing is okay actually. And now, because nobody realizes that's where it came from, you've got people using the terms "non-SAM aro" and "non-SAM ace" to mean any of like three or four different things, defining by negation against something that was never properly modeled or created in good faith anyway.

Nobody identifies as a "SAM aro" or a "SAM ace." That's not a thing.

Anyway I'm an ace who doesn't use the romantic orientation model and I do use the terminology of several attraction types, and that's something this terminology just totally eclipses as a possibility. The term itself is based on this conflation of attraction subtyping (or "split" attraction, eugh) with romantic orientation, like using one necessarily means using the other, and it doesn't.

LONG STORY SHORT it's a term that only exists because people are wigged out by aces, aros, and bi people existing. I can't hear the word without thinking about 2015-era Tumblr bloggers screaming about how my community is inherently homophobic, because that's the people who came up with it.

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8 hours ago, Guest Wren said:

What's SAM?

Split Attraction Model.

Now, different types of attraction have always been differentiated (stock example: Aphrodite Pandemos vs. Urania). But still, the idea that sexual attraction is necessary, though not sufficient for romantic attraction, is and was extremely popular. Which is a connection.

From the pure wording, calling it a model makes it very ambitious. And using split hints at the claim that they simply are split, as a matter of fact. We don't just differentiate, we observe that they are objectively split. Any connection is just a contingent, statistical thing.

So it could perhaps be understood as the claim that humans have two completely separate "brain modules" for romantic attraction and sexual attraction, which some future neuroscientist might discover.

I like to compare it to color vision, where our subjective experience leads to wrong assumptions about how our vision is organized.

Without any physiological knowledge (that the retina has cone and rod cells) we would assume that we cannot see "Stygian Blue": a color that is black and blue at the same time. Hue and lightness are strongly connected in the sense that for any object we've ever seen being black excludes having a hue - so our eyes' organization should mirror this reality.

But with some tricks, we can surprisingly experience such "chimerical colors". So lightness and hue are separate for our eyes.

I'm not so optimistic, though, that this is easily translatable to human psychology and the brain. Compared to that the eye is "extremely simple" and research is "extremely straightforward".

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  • 1 month later...
On 3/31/2020 at 6:55 AM, Lokiana said:

Just a question for y'all, and this is slightly off topic so pardon me: do you consider agender people to be on the a-spec? I've heard conflicting answers and am curious what y'all's thoughts are.

@Momo @kernsing @nonmerci @time-is-ticking @Coyote

So I just tagged everyone here who mentioned being interested in this. If you are talking about my comment in the other threat where I mention aro, ace and agender being a-spectrum that was a flow on thought from a vicious private conversation on the meaning of the A in LGBTQIAP+. I brought the idea of triple A people (aro/ace/agender) and the A-spectrum to that conversation and that is what was riding my thoughts when I wrote that. Then I never came back and explained anything because there were 2 death in my family and the Australian bushfires and I couldn't deal with heavy conversations then I forgot I ever wrote it. But no, I don't think agender is  assumed to be a-spectrum. It may be linked for some people in how they experience things, and now arogender is bringing gender into the previously sexual/romantic a-spectrum anyway. 

I'm going to edit in this explanation to my original comment to clear that up too. Sorry for any problems I caused. 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 3/27/2020 at 4:05 AM, Tarantulapaws said:

The problem isn't even that ace or aspec alone in a post in non aro inclusive, it's that for a community with a history of getting covered up or equated to another, I wish people would be more careful about how they handle that. There would be no problem if most people didn't equate aromanticism to asexuality. But I can confirm that anyone I've ever met and came out to had assumed I was ace- and or asserted I was ace after I corrected them. Tag policing isn't about trying to put down aroaces for feeling a connection with their asexuality but pointing out that something is perpetuating a common myth.

Conflation between aromantic and asexual, along with the more general conflation between romantic and sexual orientations, predates any asexual, aromantic or aspec community.
The current situation is the ace implies aro meme has been weakened the aro implies ace meme is still going strong. 
There's far more awareness that asexuals can be of any romantic orientation than there is that aromantics can be of any sexual orientation.

This conflation is far more than just about tagging posts on one social media platform.
 

On 3/27/2020 at 4:05 AM, Tarantulapaws said:

Edit: I understand that we share a history and community. Hell, as far as many people are concerned aromantic may as well mean the same thing as ace. What I'm getting at is that this is making it difficult for aros to try making aro specific spaces for the aros that do see a distinction. And saying this very concept alienates aroaces is unhelpful.

I think that shared history is part of the problem here. Including in relation to vocabulary. as well as "aspec community" idea.

Edited by Mark
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