Dear non-aro people, especially non-aro people who don’t actually know aromanticism is a thing,
I know you don’t mean me any harm. I know you are not purposefully being arophobic.
But could you, maybe, stop making posts and writing stories and singing songs about romantic love as a universal constant, about monsters being humanized through their romantic love, about romantic love as the ideal relationship or life goal, about villains whose villainy is illustrated through their inability to feel romantic love?
I am aromantic. I don’t feel romantic attraction. Please stop leaving me and my community out. Please stop casting us as villains.Please stop making little aro kids think there’s something wrong with them because they look around and see romantic love as the norm and nothing that reflects them and their feelings.
Sincerely, Babs
(bolding and italicization mine to illustrate my point)
So this post is making the rounds again and I feel a desperate need to address something:
A fair few of the people reblogging this have interpreted as a blanket ban on romance in media, as “Babs wants us to stop creating all romance media ever!”
To be honest, I am not entirely sure where they’re getting that idea. Like. Go back and read those bolded/italicized statements again. Look at what I’m asking.
Hint: It’s not “stop writing romantic fiction,” it’s “stop writing amatonormative and arophobic fiction”
Some of these misinterpreters have told me my wording is confusing. But honestly, I don’t think it’s a wording issue.
What kind of issue is it? I don’t know. But there’s a problem when we aromantics ask for more aro-friendly media, and alloromantics respond with “you can’t just erase romance from media just because you don’t feel it!”
The fact so, so many people interpreted a post that very clearly states “stop using your media to harm us” as “you’re never allowed to write a love story again” just goes to show how vast this problem is.
For one, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them actually can’t think of a love story that avoids those harmful tropes. The extent to which the worth of romantic love is hinged upon how much better it is, how little life is worth without it, how life never really began before meeting that romantic partner, etc. etc. is staggering—kind of like that absurd “platonic kisses shouldn’t be allowed because they make romantic kisses less special” post going around. By asking them to remove those ranks of romantic love being superior, they act as if they’re being robbed. By asking that people start respecting aromantic people, or even to simply stop actively harming them, they suddenly lose a significant amount of the language commonly used to celebrate romantic love. Amatonormativity is really that embedded in the way people talk and think.
And along the same lines as this, this is just another textbook example of privileged groups acting victimized if you ask them to stop doing harmful things. It all becomes about “oh noes you’re abolishing hte greatest stories in the world” without a thought spared for the children that grow up hating themselves and wanting to die (*raises hand*) because they’re told the only reason worth living is something they can’t have, or the people forcing themselves into relationships (*raises hand*) and trying to convince themsleves they want them because that’s what defines humanity and if they don’t ignore their own feelings and push past their own boundaries they’re disqualified.
But sure, let’s all fret about all the imaginary attacks on your precious [het] love stories instead.
A good thread on whether “queer” is a slur and if it should be used or not.
“If I am unashamed of being queer, you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur.”
you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur
EVERYBODY WHO CAME OUT BEFORE YOU HAS TAKEN THE ROCKS AND BOTTLES AND MADE THEM INTO SHIELDS AND WINDCHIMES
Holy motherfucking shit. Don’t fucking come at me about Queer is a slur. I FUCKING KNOW IT IS. It was hurled at me like a fucking spear all through my youth. I know it’s a god damn slur. And it’s mine. You don’t get to take it away from me because you can’t take also away the scars it gave me while I was standing in front of my younger queer siblings in this community.
always, always reblog this one.
If my enemy swings a sword at me and I take that sword away from them, it’s my sword now. And the person telling me I can’t use it because it belongs to my enemy and I have to give it back to them sounds quite a bit like an enemy themselves.
Being an aromantic asexual is weird. We defy not one, not two, but three societal norms; heteronormativity, compulsory sexuality, and amatonormativity. It gets even weirder when you’re indifferent (even favourable!) when it comes to sex and romance because you think your experience is universal, that everyone feels the way you do. It’s not feeling wrong and broken and out of place. It’s feeling normal, and then realizing that you aren’t.
Thinking (read: assuming) that you’re straight for most of your life and then finding out you’re not is weird. Mostly because once you realize you’re not straight, it dawns on you that you feel the same way about boys that you do about girls and non-binary people. And then you wonder if you’re pansexual because they’re attracted to all genders, and you have to be attracted to someone, right? And then that thought is immediately dismissed because you don’t feel attraction, at all. But it doesn’t stop you from contemplating every other sexuality and romantic orientation, because you’ve been taught that everyone wants sex and romance.
And then you remember: you like sex and romance in fiction. You like seeing your friends in happy, healthy, consenting relationships, and you’d always assumed that one day, you’d be in one too. But you’ve never pursued one. You never had more than a fleeting interest in boys, and lingering but still platonic affection for your female and non-binary friends. Those “crushes” that you had in elementary school? Maybe not crushes after all, because God knows you haven’t had one in nearly eight years. The most powerful feelings you’ve had for another person have been squishes so intense that you had to look back and question if it was actually romantic attraction (spoiler: it wasn’t).
And then there’s that epiphanic moment when things start to fall into place. Why you were always so vehement that soulmates could be platonic too. Why the idea of loving someone more than your best friend is incomprehensible (because romantic love is always shown as being more. Hello amatonormativity). Why when you ship fictional pairings, there are people you want to get together romantically, people you want to be friends so bad, and the ships that you like the most are the ones that could go either way. Why you desire emotional closeness and intimacy with the people in your life, but that had always been conflated with sex and romance so you wondered if what you wanted was more than friendship. Why you want to take the expression “more than friends”and burn it to the ground because there is no vocabulary for friendship that exceeds “best friend” without crossing over into romantic and/or sexual territory.
You realize that your ideal relationship isn’t necessarily romantic. It’s best friends who cohabitate and snuggle and hold hands and go on adventures to the library together. Kissing and sex? Well, that’s more of an afterthought. A “yeah, that’ll probably happen somewhere in there.” An assumption, because you’ve been taught that primary, monogamous relationships are always romantic and sexual. You reflect and see that there are very few things that you see and inherently romantic, and that there is a lot of cross-over between things you consider platonic, sensual, and romantic. A grey area that you can’t define.
Being an aromantic asexual is weird, because while I’ve always said that you don’t need romance and sex to be happy, I now realize that it applies to me too.
______________________
Note from mod fitz: This has to be one of the most moving descriptions of this I have ever read. This exactly describes how I felt coming to the realization that I was not straight, and I think had I read this when I first began questioning it would have made things go a lot smoother for me. Thanks so much for submitting!
Reblogging this because this is one of the few posts that matches my experiences of figuring out I’m aroace exactly and somehow manages to put it into words
If part of you “defending” asexual people involves anything similar to “asexuals fall in love just like normal humans” then you’re doing it wrong.
Like I get the sentiment, I really do, but what that is implicitly saying is that proof of asexuals’ humanity lies at least somewhat in their ability to fall in love. The implied meaning is that if ace people didn’t/couldn’t fall in love then they wouldn’t qualify as normal humans.
This is bad for lots of reasons.
So really if you’re gonna try to argue for ace humanity, the best way to do that is to say something along the lines of “Ace people are people because they’re people.” They’re humanity in no way lies in their ability or inability to do anything. They’re just people.
This extends to any discourse surrounding the humanity of minority groups. These types of arguments are inherently problematic for many reasons, the main one being that it really just boils down to trying to prove a group’s humanity by demonstrating their proximity to the majority. So the more things a group does that is the same or similar to the majority, the more human they are.
This is bad for lots of reasons.
So basically let’s just agree to stop enumerating the “reasons” why ace people (or anybody) is human and just let peoples’ humanity be the only relevant proof for their humanity.
A recently published study by John Pachankis and Mark Hatzenbuehler has substantiated what’s called the “Best Little Girl in the World” hypothesis, first put forward in 1973 in a book by Andrew Tobias, then writing under a pseudonym. It’s the idea that young, closeted women deflect attention from their sexuality by investing in recognized markers of success: good grades, athletic achievement, elite employment and so on. Overcompensating in competitive arenas affords these women a sense of self-worth that their concealment diminishes.
…Deriving self-worth from achievement-related domains, like Ivy League admissions, is a common strategy among closeted women seeking to maintain self-esteem while hiding their stigma. The strategy is an effort to compensate for romantic isolation and countless suppressed enthusiasms. And it requires time-consuming study and practice, which conveniently provide an excuse for not dating.
Best of all, it distracts: “What love life? Look at my report card!”
…But the study does show that the longer a young woman conceals her sexual orientation, the more heavily she invests in external measures of success, potentially leading to undue stress and social isolation
Another of the study’s findings is that girls who grow up in more stigmatizing environments are more likely to seek self-worth through competition. I spent my first 18 years in a rural, religious town in North Carolina, a state that recently passed a constitutional amendment barring same-sex unions by a wide margin. Now here I am, a metal detector scanning for golden prizes. That’s no coincidence, the research suggests.
Sorry, I don’t swing that way. I don’t swing the other way, either. I’m not even on the swing, actually. I’m just lying on the floor, face down, probably crying. Definitely crying.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 