pro allosplainer

(a) "Cake ace" or whatever the fuck is not anywhere near as historically and culturally significant as terms like butch or femme, for example, and it's ridiculous to pretend those things are the same kind of term or on the same level of significance

and hypersexualision (top/bottom becoming the new 'whos the girl', being bi is somehow abt being sex and genital obsessed, being 'pure ace unlike those gross allos' (never talking specifically abt straight ppl), transwomen being seem as a fetish and not as people)

both of these show how lgbt peoples relationships w sex and themselves have been warped by our lgbt-phobic society

ace people butting their heads in with weird, out of touch, and incorrect ideas about sex and sexual attraction is not going to be helpful or healthy for anyone

sexual attraction includes wanting to have sex, and if you do not want to have sex, you are either ''allo'' or should not be having sex

You identified as ace when you were younger cause you had internalized homophobia and didn’t accept that you were gay? Not our problem

Someone is using the split attraction model to avoid being “entirely” gay due to internalized homophobia? Not our problem

other ppl presumably: thats ,,, homophobic

Because we live in a society that demands sex as much as it punishes it. That both glorifies and demonizes sex. Sex is only good within very specific contexts but if you don’t like those contexts or act within them, suddenly you are perverse and wrong. Even people with healthy relationships to sex, relationships, and attraction still face pitfalls that complicate matters–partners who don’t have healthy relationships or maybe they can’t get a partner at all. Break ups. Factors that affect their libidos or interest in relationships. Periods where sex and romance don’t matter at all because something else is a priority.

And of course, your gender, sexual orientation, race, class, and every other identity impacts not just YOUR relationship to sex and all that but also everyone ELSE’S relationship and response to your sex, relationships, attraction. And the identities of the people you are and aren’t attracted to impacts that too! From the race of your partner to same gender relationships to people who prefer fat partners to whatever the fuck else… all of this impacts the complications around sex, relationships, and attraction.

And yet it is only people on the ace and aro “spectrums” who are obsessed with pretending their relationships to these things are wholly unique or special. That they have created new social classes. They are obsessed with feeling different because they think there is some homogeneous relationship to sex and love that the rest of the world is partaking in that they are somehow excluded from. When really everyone has something complicated from, their own hyper specific contexts where they do or don’t want sex or love or whatever.

Nothing about your relationship to sex or love makes you more or less LGBT. If you are gay and don’t want to have sex, ever, you are still gay. If you are cisgender and straight and only feel capable of sexual desire for longterm monogamous partners and even then, you only want to fuck on Tuesday mornings and Friday nights.. you’re still straight. You haven’t discovered a new class of heterosexuality that is “queer’ or different. Rather, EVERY person who is heterosexual is different in how they perform or experiecne it. You are the same in your difference. A cishet who doesn’t ever want sex because of trauma is no more or less cishet than one who wants sex all the time because of trauma or a cishet who doesn’t ever want sex because they don’t feel sexual attraction or whatever else.

The validity of something isn’t a measurement worth considering when it comes to being LGBT because at this point anyone can be ~valid~ and that’s where the conversation shuts down. If a label is “valid” then any criticism leveraged towards it will be met with a wall of “but x is valid so this doesn’t matter,” no matter how rightful, no matter how well-meant. It isn’t about whether or not x identity is valid or whether y should/should not be included, because that’s not what the community is about. Questions like those only benefit corporations during pride month to start selling more to us using increasingly specific flags, it’s only to divide the community and hyperfocuses on individuality above anything else.

It is part of a bigger problem here, the commodification of identity and the self because of late-stage capitalism goes hand in hand with distancing yourself from others and any similarity & community you could share with them. The complexities of your own experiences with relation to gender and sexuality will always be unique to you. A lesbian who grew up closeted in a deeply homophobic household in London will have different experiences and views than an openly proud lesbian in Hong Kong. This doesn’t mean either of them are any less of a lesbian, nor does it mean that either of them need to label themselves with some hyperspecific microlabel that “better fits” their circumstances and the way they experience attraction etc.