Thoughts About Aromanticism

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

The framing here is of a binary between industrial, transgressive, nudity-free erotica and profit-oriented studio pornography; when most of the porn being made today sits entirely between those two axes. Sex workers who are making the shit studios would never do, the ones who are doing it for rent, and yeah even ones who are making lame boring shit. That's "regular porn". Those are the people who fucking lost to tumblr porn ban. Brazzers didn't lose a dime.

I think unless we are able to express our bodies without shame or censorship, you're not actually challenging anything. Videos of machine eating paint cans isn't transgressive, it's allowed. Tumblr and it's shareholders are perfectly happy for you to get off to goop because that's not what stops their advertisers from pulling out.

I don't think adding "we need regular porn" to posts is funny. it's annoying and uncreative. But more importantly I think it's completely wrong in the idea that the bizarre and sensual only develops in (or as a consequence of) an absence of other outlets. In fact I'd argue its worse. We were almost on the cusp of recognising that pornography isn't defined by big studios, I remember it! and then tumblr annihilated anything but them from their ecosystem. And look at the culture here since then, its dry, puritanical, and utterly hostile. We've been set back almost 10 years of gross, esoteric weird fucking porn. Or at the very least, it wasn't and isn't happening here.

Characters that people don't want to accept as asexual

Fan favorite

Part of a popular ship (especially if they're a man and the ship is gay)

Conventionally attractive (especially if they're a woman)

Literally any character that they relate to

Characters that people accept as asexual

Gets very little screentime

Only fat character in the main cast

Non-human but only if they're considered unshippable

That’s 1972

29 years before AVEN was started online,

and 47 years before the present.

And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.

We’re implicitly told that we should consider characters who aren’t canonically aromantic or whose aromanticism is never shown in the source material to represent us. Unless, of course, we want to actually engage seriously with an aromantic interpretation of a character who isn’t confirmed aromantic in canon (people love to recommend Saiki K. as aromantic representation, but if you openly talk about interpreting him as aromantic within fandom spaces, other fans will go out of their way to find examples from the source material of behavior from him that proves you wrong).

Or unless, of course, we want to have a serious conversation about arophobia in fiction. If a character being “unable to understand love” is used to explain why they’re evil, if a character’s apparent disinterest in the gender that they are expected to be attracted to is used to highlight that they are callous and cruel and “psychopathic” (which, I’m sure there’s something to be said there as well about how ableism towards people with personality disorders, especially pwASPD, overlaps with arophobia, but that’s outside the scope of this rambling mess of a post), if a character enjoying sex without romantic attachment is used to paint them as heartless, depraved, manipulative, and impure — these are all things we’re told aren’t arophobic. Because those characters aren’t REALLY meant to be aromantic. It can’t be arophobic if a character isn’t confirmed as aromantic, if they don’t say “I experience little to no romantic attraction” onscreen, if they don’t have a little aromantic pride pin on their shirt. None of this has anything to do with aromanticism, actually, and we’re all just overreacting.

Fatness, like singlehood, is seen at large as a state of failure. Everybody is supposed to want to be [thin / partnered], and if you are not, that is a personal failure on your part, and you are pathetic and mock-worthy. The popular idea is that of course everybody wants to be [thin / partnered], and everybody is striving towards the goal, and anybody who is not [thin / partnered] is either temporarily inconvenienced on their way to correctness, or has something fundamentally wrong with them. And because [fatness / singlehood] is something that is treated as fixable, if you have not fixed it, then there is something wrong with you—and thus discriminating against you is acceptable, because your [fatness / singlehood] is based on your own bad choices.

The world is, in some cases quite literally, not built for fat or single people. If you are fat or single, the world is much more difficult or expensive to live in, because it is structurally designed for the assumption that you are thin or that you have a partner. The normative Person, after all, is thin and romantically partnered. If you are not thin or not romantically partnered, there is something fundamentally less human about you.

[Fatness / singlehood] is something embarrassing, something worth mocking others over, something that reflects your fundamental unworthiness. Every fictional hero is thin, every fictional happy ending ends with romance. Everyone in your life is either quietly or not-so-quietly worried about you.

Her and Grandpa were in a relationship with their best friends

The four of them have been in a relationship since they were teenagers

They flipped a bottle cap to see which girl the boys would marry

Their children could have either man as their biological father but their biological mother is the mum that raised them

You wanna ship canonically aspec characters because “aro/ace people can still date/have sex”? Okay, then. LET’S DO IT.  I wanna see an aromantic character with an alloromantic love interest. I wanna see that confession of undying love and the moment when the aro character says they will never feel the same way—not romantically.

I wanna see the asexual character with their allosexual partner. I wanna see that moment when the ace characters tries sex with their partner for the first time because they want to make them happy only to realize that they are 100% sex repulsed.

I wanna see the two demiromantics who don’t even know if what they feel is romantic attraction, but they adore each other and just want to make healthy snacks together and destroy each other at Mario Kart.

I wanna see the two aces who love sensual affection and are figuring out what they define as sexual or not.

I wanna see the romance + sex neutral aroace who happily and consensually does whatever makes their partner happy…but their partner still struggles with feeling undesired. 

I like that my partner chooses to be with me, not because of fate or whatever, but because he just likes living with me. We compliment each other well as far as personality, interests, etc. goes, and if we weren't together... we'd be entirely fine, actually. We could have happy lives without each other. But we're choosing to do life together because this is also a good and happy way to live, and right now we prefer it to the also valid and happy alternatives.

That, to me, is more compelling than the supposedly romantic idea that there is JUST ONE PERSON that you MUST BE WITH or else you'd be MISERABLE FOREVER.