Anon, it breaks my heart that you’ve felt the need to send this in. It breaks my heart, because nobody should feel this way. Nobody should feel so isolated from and discouraged by their own community. This conversation shouldn’t be happening, anon, and that’s not on you–it never was and never will be. It’s on a situation, a shape of the community, and I think it says something profound that a few posts are generating other conversations and frustrations right now–I’ve seen it on this blog and on several others. I’ve seen it on several blogs just today!
I have a sense of a cork that’s been popped off the bottle, a hurt and a pain we’ve been holding in for too long coming out.
And I think that’s a good thing, because it’s time, past time, we had real conversations about the impact. That it isn’t a few aro-specs grinding their teeth and writing ranty posts about aro erasure. That this erasure and dismissal, this long-running amatonormativity and centering of romantic love (how many times have I seen alloromantic aces describe asexuality as “love without sexual attraction”?) has the potential to cause real wounds, real suffering, real isolation, real disconnect from a community that should provide support, real damage. Amatonormativity isn’t just fielding off questions from relatives about when we’re going to get married. Amatonormativity tells us that we are not the kind of humans society considers worthwhile, and you can’t live in this world without that weighing down on you.
None of us, not one of us, are strong enough not to be damaged by that: no human is or can be. It isn’t a failure in us. It’s a failure in everyone else. Some of us are better at hiding it, and some of us channel that pain into ranty posts or spite-motivated creativity, but we are all hurt by it.
Too many alloromantics brush off amatonormativity and the centring of alloromantic attraction as nothing, but it isn’t, and right now we deal with the pain of having our pain dismissed as nothing, even in spaces that are, ostensibly, meant to include us. It hurts worse from alloromantic aces because it feels like they should be better able to understand; ace-spec spaces feel like they should be more welcoming than they are. And I think it’s okay to feel hurt and even betrayed by that. We endure hate from outside together, all a-specs; we have every right to expect support, instead of erasure, inside.
Anon, as someone who deals with suicidal ideation myself, I do not miss the immense bravery it took from you to write about your pain and the way it makes you feel. But I want to thank you, too, for having the courage to be honest and real, to stand up as an example, to shine a real light on where erasure leads us.
I don’t have simple solutions to problems like the pressure of using ace as an umbrella term. (I’ve seen plenty of aro-aces talk about how they’d prefer to ID as aro alone but cannot because it isn’t accepted, and their loathing of ace as an umbrella term. If you feel this, I’d truly appreciate it if you could comment on this post as solidarity for our anon, because I know they’re not alone.) I also know that there are no simple solutions to mental illness and suicidal ideation, and they do not make amatonormativity easier to bear. I do think, though, that pride is the one real weapon we can bring to bear against a socialized worthlessness–pride and community.
As much as I don’t need an excuse to promote the aro-spec artist profiles, anon, I’d like you to go check them out. Read what other talented aros–including several aro-aces–are writing about being aro and creative. Go click on the links to their work–an awful lot of them have works available for free. There’s art and there’s stories, stories about aro-spec experiences, stories about resisting amatonormativity, stories about aro-spec and aro-ace feelings. Stories that normalise. We’re just getting started on building this canon, but it’s already a defiant cry that we are normal, we are wonderful, we are human, and it’s only going to get better.
(Likewise, check out all the fiction pieces submitted and reblogged here. Or the poetry. Or the artwork and visual pieces!)
Anyone who’s following this blog knows I write, that I tell stories. I do it because the world tells me that I don’t get to be the hero, that I am not deserving of being the hero, so I’ll break my hands on my words screaming fuck that. Even better, there’s a whole bunch of other aro-spec and aro-ace storytellers here who are doing the same. But I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learnt: it is easier, so much easier, to survive anything when there’s other people beside you. Stories are that person beside you. Stories are other aro-specs’ hopes and dreams.
I wouldn’t be alive today if not for the hope in the storytelling of others. It’s not enough by any means, but I hope it is the beginning of a feeling that the world, when it comes to aro-specs, is a thousand kinds of wrong and we do not have to listen to what it teaches us. If we can feel that, this kernel of understanding that amatonormativity is not only damaging but nonsensical against a world of wonderful and amazing and loved aro-spec people, it’s a little bit easier to survive it.
Anon, I know the aro-spec community alone isn’t enough for you, and it absolutely should not have to be, but I hope we here, at least, can work on making this space more supportive and welcoming of you. I want you here and I want you to belong here. If you are aro-spec in any way, this community is for you, and if we are not doing a good enough job of being welcoming to our own, come in and tell me, tell us. Because a community that isn’t devoted to celebrating and sheltering all our own, however different your experiences as an aro-spec may be from mine, isn’t one I wish to be part of.
Thank you so much, anon, for trusting me with your story.
(If folks are looking at starting spaces specifically for the support of aro-aces who feel alienated by the ace-spec community, please let me know and I’ll signal boost here. I may not be around a lot over the next week because I have a personal situation with my family that is unexpectedly on the precipice of being very awful, but I’ll get to it as soon as I can.)
Hey, to my fellow aces, can you please read this?
There was a rift forming between the aro and ace communities several years ago, pre-diskhorse. It came from a lot of these same frustrations; many aroaces felt like they weren’t be heard, and allo aros were tired of being shoved under the ace umbrella. There was a large push for the aro community to separate itself complete, and with the “aro renaissance” it seems like we’re asserting our independence more than ever. Yet it saddens me to think that even in a post-diskhorse world (not to suggest that it’s over by any means), we cannot strike a balance of uniqueness and unity.
If the aro and ace communities are ever to reconcile this and begin to heal, the ace community needs to be held responsible for its amatonormativity and its arophobia. Wanting to discuss and raise awareness for non-sexual romantic relationships is important, but the rhetoric surrounding those conversations can NOT continue to dismiss aroaces as a small, secondary minority and erase the experiences of allo aros altogether. “Still being able to love” doesn’t make you more human, it makes you more palatable. When you say “I’m asexual but I can still feel romantic attraction/can still fall in love!” aros here an unspoken “I’m still human” tacked on to the end.
Please stop making aroaces feel like an inconvenience for not fitting that agenda. When I tell people I’m asexual, they don’t assume I’m aromantic. The one time somebody followed up by asking what my romantic orientation was, and I told them, they looked at me with pity and disappointment.
Please, ace community, check your arophobia. It has real, dire consequences for aroaces as well as allo aros. Follow aro blogs and listen to what we are saying. As an aroace, I want my ace community to be there for me. All parts of me, not just my asexuality.
If you’re alloromantic and asexual can you reblog this? And change this behavior, if you’re guilty of it? Thanks.
@fuckyeahasexual I’m tagging you because you’re a huge ace blog, mostly. But also partly because you’re (the blog) guilty of what is said in this post – being arophobic and actively centering alloro aces.
I’m sure you want to do better, and you can begin something by sharing this post. But you’ve shared posts about those issues in the past while distancing yourself from it, as if you weren’t responsible when you actively erase aros.
So please, explore your posts, the way they push your followers to talk about aros, and please consider the ace community’s arophobia. There are a lot of posts about it on tumblr, the tag is often “arophobia in the ace community”.
I want us – aros and aces – to be better to each other, but the ace community has a responsibility towards the aro community (including allo aros, yes), as it’s the the bigger place and umbrella term. This responsibility stems from our shared history, and this shared history can’t be erased.
This is a difficult subject, but I wish alloro aces would question their behaviour and try to understand and change the reasons aroaces often feel so much closer in the aro community. Why we tend to abandon the ace community ship after some time. Hint: because you are excluding aros.
Tag: lgbtqia
A Better Explination for Queer Platonic Relationships
This post is gonna be very 101, so if you’re already pretty familiar with aro terms and don’t want to sit through all the definitions and explanations I have another post here that’s basically a very condensed version of this one.
Anyways, I think the reason that a lot of non-aromantic people don’t understand queerplatonic relationships is that qpps as a concept are not just a type of relationship, but also a response to amatonormativity.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, amatonormativity is the societal view of romantic monogamous relationships as both the most important relationships you can have and as the end goal for happiness. While this norm disproportionately affects aromantic and non-monogamous people, it also has some very negative effects on people outside of these groups. If you’ve ever experienced peer or familial pressure to get a romantic partner when you didn’t want one, lost touch with a friend because they got a partner and stopped putting as much time into maintaining your friendship, or been told by a romantic partner that you needed to stop interacting with a close friend because they felt threatened by your friendship then you’ve experienced the negative effects of amatonormativity. This is not an aromantic specific issue, however, in this post, I will be discussing it within the context of aromantic terms and experiences.
For many aromantic people, there is a fundamental fear that all of their close friends will pair off into romantic relationships and they will be left alone. This fear comes from amatonormativity. If there was no expectation that people would prioritize romantic relationships over friendships then there would be no real need for people who don’t want/can’t have romantic relationships for whatever reason to fear being left alone and isolated from the support of other people.
I think this fear is one of the main reasons queerplatonic relationships exist in the first place. Sure, there are different types of platonic relationships with varying degrees of intimacy and commitment that aro people could participate in, but I think that if you look at how queerplatonic relationships are talked about you’ll find that aromantic people lean towards qpps because they are more then just another type of platonic relationship.
Qpps come in all shapes and sizes. They can be monogamous or polyamorous, involve lots of physical intimacy or very little, include lots of romantically coded things like dates, marriage, and living together, or be closer to the traditional view of friendship. The spectrum of what counts as a qpp is in fact so big that the term becomes almost impossible to define. The one unifying thread that I can see among all these different types of qpps is that they’re platonic relationships that still involve a high level of commitment.
Essentially the only agreed upon factor here is that the relationship is platonic, but a commitment has been made somewhere along the lines to not abandon one another for a romantic partner, everything beyond that is pretty up in the air. This isn’t the definition you’re likely to get from those “what is a qpp” posts, but spend 5 minutes scrolling threw some popular aro blogs and it becomes incredibly apparent. I’ve seen people joke that “queerplatonic partners are like friends that don’t abandon me for their boyfriends” or that “all my friends got dates so I had to find a qpp”. These statements, while kind of morbidly funny on some level, do point to a larger trend. While most relationship categories are defined by level of intimacy, qpps are more of a commitment to break amatonormative social norms with someone you’re close to.
And if we’re going to agree that that’s what a queerplatonic relationship is, and for the purposes of this post we are, then it suddenly becomes very clear that the aromantic community is doing ourselves a huge disservice when we try to define qpps without talking about amatonormativity, or in some cases, even mentioning the aromantic community at all.
There is a reason that queerplatonic originated in the aromantic community. There is a reason that qpp is an aro term. Non-aro people simply don’t have the same experience with relationships that aro people do, so they don’t have the context necessary to understand why we would need qpps in the first place.
I think this is where a lot of the “aren’t qpp’s just friendships?” questions come from. Sure, there are people out there who just want to make fun of every aro/ace term and identity, and that is part of why the ‘don’t you mean friends’ response has become so popular, but in this case I really think a lot of it’s due to the fact that we’ve explained qpps so poorly. Someone who isn’t aro, and who hasn’t felt the devastating effects of your friends drifting away into romantic relationships while you can’t have one/ don’t want one, isn’t going to understand why aro people would need a whole new type of close, emotional, platonic relationship when just plain old friendship has worked fine for them. Without the context of amatonormativity and the experience of being aro, qpp’s becomes almost nonsensical, and when we leave those things out of our definitions of qpps people aren’t going to understand what we’re talking about.
We need to do a better job of explaining queerplatonic relationships because otherwise, people are going to continue misunderstanding what they are.
Yes!
Also it’s probably been said before, but on the “aren’t qprs just friendships?” thing…this is a “me” thing, so not everyone’s gonna agree, but I would personally love it if our society accepted friendship being a life-long commitment.
Amatonormativity prevents that. If you get married, even if you explain you’re friends, no one’s gonna believe you. No one’s gonna believe you made any kind of commitment to a friend. So yes, qprs can be a simple, classical friendship, just a committed one. But society wouldn’t accept friendship as an important relationship. Hence, the term “qpr” that also applies to friendships.
@ les mis fandom why are you all so insistent on erasing what is arguably Grantaire’s canonical bisexuality? The dude likes girls. He’s also got the mega angsty hots for Enjolras. Everytime I see a headcanon or post where he’s described as gay I’m like??? But??? He talked very clearly about liking ladies??? Why do you have to erase his bisexuality? Him having had a Thing with Floreal for example doesn’t somehow undermine his love for Enjolras? Generally I say headcanon however you like but given it’s practically canon it seems less like ‘this is my interpretation of him!’ And more just. Shady bi erasure. >
Chill, fandom. Let R be bi.
Yes, but I think that the same point could be made for “erasing” Grantaire’s arguably canonical heterosexuality.
(I, personally, don’t think either can be erased, because nothing ficwriters do could ever change canon, so even in cases a character is stated to be something or other in canon, they can be written literally opposite in a fanwork, and it still won’t be erasure, because it doesn’t affect canon in any way.)As for Grantaire, I think the case slightly more complicated – he is described as having no understanding of what his feelings for Enjolras are. Like, he can’t even wrap his head around the concept of him being attracted to a man, in any way.
But he is also a libertine, which might indicated that he’s been around to some lovely parties where everyone sleep with eachother, and he arguably knows that same-sex attraction and action exist.
It’s just that he couldn’t even imagine it applying to him.But then, Grantaire is no master in self-awareness and reflection – he doesn’t think he can be attracted to men, but he’s drawn to Enjolras, for his character, and perhaps for his beauty also.
It’s been 3 years, and I’m still on the fence about Grantaire – either he is straight, but confused, or he is gay, but repressed and confused.
Either way, Grantaire being confused is my only fixed opinion about him.‘Either straight but confused or gay and confused’ ??? Or just. Bi? No offence but the ‘either straight or gay’ mentality doesn’t sit well with me and is exactly what I’m talking about here. Bisexuality is an option here you know? He could like women and men (and I never see him imply otherwise in canon – I don’t see where your ‘cannot possibly wrap his head around being attracted to a man in any way!’ Thing comes from. He seems pretty accepting of his feelings towards Enjolras; it shows in how he’s always described as talking to him ‘tenderly’ and ‘sweetly’. He’s regularly compared to figures with questionable sexualities. He’s literally introduced as in love with Enjolras and all that he is. That doesn’t strike me as a man repressed. Also the idea that a 19th century Parisian artist is unaware of same gender attraction even existing is pretty amusing to me)
Grantaire is arguably one of the only characters in the brick who can almost canonically be discerned as LGBTQ. And one of the only characters who has canonical evidence hinting towards bisexuality. To reduce him to straight or gay without ever exploring this is insulting.
Regardless of your in depth analysis though you’ve sort of missed my point entirely. This post is aimed at a very specific part of fandom who like to erase all the evidence that Grantaire has ever had any interest in women and make him gay due to biphobia and some weird fandom notion that bisexuality will get in the way of their ships. This wasn’t a discussion about Grantaire’s sexuality; it is about erasure of bisexuality in fandom, as an act of biphobia (whether conscious or not) – not about erasing this particular character’s sexuality. Grantaire is my example here because there is very obvious evidence for him being attracted to both women and men.
I’d like to add that the idea that Grantaire is either “straight, but confused, or he is gay, but repressed and confused” (as you say) is also a form of bi-erasure.
Especially since, following
’s theory that he doesn’t understand his feelings for Enjolras, it’s only more likely he’s bi. What makes gay people question whether they are gay? Attraction to the opposite gender. A man in the 19th century won’t have access to labels like bisexual, gay and straight, not to mention all the other labels, so he’ll be more likely to think it’s hella weird that he likes men and women. If Enjolras is the first man he’s ever been in love with, he would be slightly confused.
Our poor, confused, possibly bi little bab.
(that is to say, the OP should also keep in mind that just because R likes two genders doesn’t mean he’s bi. Pan-erasure is also a thing. There are so many labels modern!Grantaire could pick. Gay or straight just aren’t the most recommended when you look at canon)
gentle reminder to all ace and aro peeps:
the majority of the lgbtq+ community sees you and accepts you as a part of the community and in queer spaces. i know seeing all the hate on here from within the community can be incredibly disheartening and exhausting, but aphobes are just a loud and angry minority, they are not the norm in actual queer spaces.
you are valid. you are loved. you belong.
sometimes aromanticism is soft. it’s the gentleness of cuddling with your best friend, just existing together quietly and peacefully, knowing that there is no feeling that could possibly be better than this.
sometimes aromanticism is angry. it’s staring defiantly in the face of a society that expects things from you, things you don’t want, and when they swing a knife at you, you bleed bright green.
sometimes aromanticism is sad. it’s the feeling late at night, when you’re alone and afraid that you will always be alone, the fear that you will never be anyone’s top priority because you don’t know anybody who wants what you want.
and sometimes, well. sometimes aromanticism is proud. it’s the adrenaline in your body as you hold that green flag up over your head, clinging to that word, that identity, and knowing that you are home as you yell, “I’m aromantic, I’m aromantic, I’m aromantic!”
you’re right. not all characters are gay! some of them are bi and ace.
IM LAUGHING SO HARD I DIDNT THINK SEXUAL DESIRE WAS A REAL THING LIKE I ALWAYS SAW PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY WANTED SEX BUT I THOUGHT THEY WERE JOKING OR EXAGGERATING OR SOMETHING THATS WHY IT WAS SO HARD FOR ME TO REALIZE I WAS ACE BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT WENT WITHOUT SAYING SEX ISNT THAT IMPORTANT IM 19 YEARS OLD I CANT STOP LAUGHING LITERALLY 99% OF THE POPULATION EXPERIENCES SEXUAL DESIRE AND I THOUGHT IT WAS A JOKE
This is pretty much the definition of being an ace person, tbh, and I’m so glad.
#I thought it was an exaggeration for literal years (via sonickitty)
this is literally the #that sounds fake but okay meme im dying
Rey being repulsed by shirtless Kylo is ace culture
hey if an aroace talks about their experiences of asexuality and conflates being ace with being aro that’s not bad. It can be hard to tell which label affects what, and some people who experience no sexual or romantic attraction only id as ace anyway. The SAM isn’t universal. Basically if an actual aspec seems to be ‘confusing’ asexuality and aromanticism it is far far more likely that their aromanticism is part of their experiences with asexuality, or that they don’t distinguish between the two. Please don’t step in to ‘educate’ aroaces on how asexuals can ~still feel love~ since we know that already. We’re very tired of hearing it.
Thor Ragnarok is prime asexual-bisexual solidarity; good-looking men and good-looking women, with zero in-your-face romance or sex.
TRUE
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 