An Aro Ghost Being Aro (and having Adhd)

They contact you saying they have important info to say about your account and then proceed to explain that they reported you because they mistook you for someone using your icon and username. They will make it sound urgent, time sensitive, and really scary! They will act like they’re so sorry but you need to act NOW or your account is gonna be deleted and maybe even legal action will happen. They may include fake screenshots too. This is all a lie.

Aromantic Bisexual

I am

Aroallo

Aromantic Bisexual

“what about the poor little white kids just trying to have fun?” what about the poor little kids of color made to feel unsafe and unwelcome in a space that was supposed to be fun?

“why can’t poc just make their own redesigns and we can keep these ones” why cant you realize that your actions have consequences and that you should maybe try to not enforce racist stereotypes??

like ofc its ideal to have VARIETY among both villains AND protagonists, its when your characters look like this

that the issue arises

I was heartbroken and felt tossed aside. I didn't understand why our friendship wasn't worth anything to him if he couldn't have me romantically or sexually. I felt betrayed and dehumanised, like I didn't matter to him as a person but only as a romantic prospect.

When I told other friends about it, to my surprise they all sided with him. "He is heartbroken, it's hard to get rejected" even my THERAPIST said this. It's not like I didn't empathize with him, but wasn't I rejected too? No one else could see that but me, they placed me as some sort of villain that had power over him in that situation, when all I did was set a boundary between friendship and romance. All I did was not consent to the terms he wanted for our relationship, I rejected them, my terms were different and he rejected those.

I've had my heart broken by friends over and over and it hurt the same, if not more, than any romantic heartbreak. Why is friendship undervalued next to romantic feelings?

i desperately need people to stop avoiding what this post is actually about. stop derailing and trying to make it be about something else instead.

THIS POST IS ABOUT ROMANTIC CONSENT.

even if the person in question didn't want to fuck them, even if he just wanted a wholesome, purely romantic, nothing sexual at all relationship, it would STILL be fucked up to BLAME someone for rejecting that.

similarly, if someone really wanted to just fuck, but they were honest and clear about that, and handled rejection gracefully, there would be literally no issue with that.

you'll never believe. whose main blog that post was from. hi, it's me, tumblr user radioactive-yuri, formerly known as thermodynamic-comedian. this is my side blog. and a good few years ago, i made that very post on my main blog.

it would be so awesome

when it's framed as a "so just get married for legality reasons" and im like. you mean like how gay people married/marry people of the opposite gender for legality reasons? and that's considered to be a symptom of a problem, not the solution? you want people to "just" get married against their will because it's the only solution this system has available?

if people cannot or will not get married for whatever reason -- not just for being aromantic, but, say, due to inefficient disability support measures within marriage, because of having had bad experiences with marriage in the past, because of being polyamorous, because some element of marriage is ineffective, unwanted, limited, discriminatory, or hell, because you can't find somebody to marry or nobody wants to marry you, or maybe because you just plain don't want to without there being a distinct Reason -- then it's a problem that this is the only framework in place for people to be afforded certain legal and social protections.

i am glad for others that more people can get married, but it's a flawed institution with gaping holes that isn't for everyone and builds social structures that leave so many people behind and unsupported. this is abundantly obvious in the way that we saw why people pushed for the need for equal marriage in the first place.

that's what's said when making a point that it's a social construct. and also what's meant (partially) when pushing against the idea that "love" as concept isn't at the core of queer (amongst others hinted at in this post) activism, because it's about building better structures. if the only people we care about are those we "love" within a family unit, or those who successfully manage to pretend that unit without actually really wanting it, and if not being in that unit for whatever reason means that care isn't going to be/is no longer afforded, then are we really doing any better than heteronormativity?

As someone who has had to actively unlearn things from the benign and kind of funny to the truly harmful, I can say that most times my immediate response is "I'm sorry. I didn't realise that was bigoted." Then I go home and spend 7-12 business months unpacking what I've just learned, how it was woven into my life, and how I'm going to reframe my identity given that taking out that one thing has caused a whole lot of stuff I thought I knew to shift sideways.

Then AFTER I've finished unpacking and reorganising my brain I still need to actively police my thoughts and interactions in light of the new knowledge. Particularly with language where something that was not fraught when I was young has moved on and now has implications that I had no idea even existed. (Tranny anyone? depending on your generation and location it could mean anything from "bloke likes wearing lingerie with his wife" through "drag" to "transgender" and could be anything from affectionate to violently homophobic)

I am trying and I do actively attempt to not be a dickhead but I'm in my 40s and have a LOT of unlearning still to do. At least 3 times per year I get smacked in the face with a thing that "everyone should know" but I don't because I'm simply not interacting with this particular group of people regularly.

op is talking about how exhausting it is for people of colour to deal with the way that discussions about racism and the effects of racism end up being recentred around white feelings & the impact of the discussion on the perpetrator at the expense of those trying to discuss the racism in the first place. in light of that, this is probably not the place to talk about how long and complicated and arduous the journey of unlearning racism is.

like, do you see how this response does exactly what op is calling out? we've gone from "it is very hard to bring up racism with white people about racism because we will end up being forced to manage their feelings about it" to "but it's really hard for white people (and any other privileged classes) to unlearn racist attitudes (and other bigotry), please have patience and grace for the time it takes to learn better" — which is centring the struggle of the perpetrator and putting responsibility on the victim/marginalised person in the dynamic.