Masochism for the Asexual

sexual experience ≠ maturity

people reblogging this with “I agree except for when it’s xyz type of character” are also missing the point. there is no “type of character” asexuality can infantilize if we agree that asexuals are not inherently immature. if someone is infantilizing characters already for being autistic, for example, and they make all those characters asexual and only those characters, you’re right that that is a worrying pattern but the thing is—

How it feels to discuss HGSN fr

Alright, I'm gonna get the ball rolling below the break

I think it is important to remember that queerplatonic (and related terms like alterous) is still basically a neologism, so its meaning is still actively being shaped, even compared to the malleability of already established language. So, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is best to focus on how the term is being used in context; looking at its connotations. And we currently have tremendous freedom in deciding how we want to use it, and we should be thoughtful about how we use it. As I have argued (see below), I view queerplatonicism as a philosophy of relationships instead of a defined relationship type. Because if it is going to be called queerplatonicism, then it needs to be queer in the fullest sense of the word!

Anti-essentialist identity: In queer theory, queer as a personal identity may be "defined by rejection of binary categories of gender and sexuality, and inclusion of any sexual or gender identity that is non-normative, disrupting categories such as man and woman, and gay and straight."  Queer theorists such as Judith Butler approach queer not as a fixed identity, but as an anti-essentialist label of affiliation grounded in opposition to normative constructions of gender and sexuality. Robin Brontsema describes queer as "a kind of anti-identity".  According to Brontsema, the use of queer as a simple synonym for gay or lesbian "betrays the radical intent of self-identified queers and queer theorists" by equating queer "with the very terms against which it rebels."

Defining queerplatonic relationships as a type of "committed intimate relationship between significant others" places us in the same spot as the platonic/romantic binary we are trying to escape: What is the difference?

The evolution of romantic and platonic love as concepts is, intellectually at least, very interesting but also very long and intricate, and I don't feel like doing the full research project (at the current moment). But it is striking how much Plato--where the platonic part comes from--described it very differently from today's understandings:

Lee 1973, pp. 52–53: "Somewhere in history a misinterpretation arose by which 'Platonic love' came to mean sexless love, or at least love in which sexuality was thoroughly sublimated. Most dictionaries define Platonic love as 'devoid of sensual feeling,' which is certainly not what Plato had in mind. On the contrary, it was sensual feeling for the beautiful body of another person which first evoked an awareness of eros as the ancient Greeks understood it. Their culture was permeated with an appreciation of the beautiful in its human bodily form."

But for the abridged version, for a while, platonic equaled "no sex" and romance equaled "yes sex". But then, the split-attraction model comes along and blows up this distinction. Now, we have sexual love, romantic love, and platonic love.

Now for science! My favorite paper on this, and not just because I actually had her as a professor, is Dr. Lisa Diamond's "What Does Sexual Orientation Orient? A Biobehavioral Model Distinguishing Romantic Love and Sexual Desire," which is a great breakdown of how sexual desire and what is here called affectional bonding are distinct processes. The main idea is that sexual desire is related to mating and sexual partner selection, but that affectional bonding is based more on how infants need a lot of care. Having an emotional attachment to a child ensures that the child lives to adulthood, and that's evolution. This then spread out to all of our other social relationships. So we have clear reasoning to differentiate sexual desire and emotional attachment/bonding, but do we have the same for platonic and romantic, seeing as they are both currently conceptualized as types of emotional attraction/desire?

I have yet to find anything compelling to point to any material difference between platonic relationships/feelings from romantic ones, other than cultural connotation, which can be genuinely felt, but is also context dependent on said culture saying they are different. This makes me question if there should even be a difference. Because once sex is removed from romance, all that I have been left with is the idea that romance is a more intense version of platonic love. However, this premise appears to be at odds with the experiences of plenty of aromantic people and people in QPRs, and also potentially conflicts with the ideas of relationship anarchy--that all relationships can be valuable. Without sex, without priority, does anything anchor romance to the material world?

So, with all of this in mind, that is why I advocate for queerplatonicism to be understood not only as a "secret third thing" or any other additional relationship type, but the thing that exposes the arbitrary nature of all these categories and how useless they are at a sociocultural level. Treating QPRs as their own distinct category just adds another level to the question of what makes platonic and romantic love different. And I am almost convinced that such questions are unanswerable. It becomes circular and self-referential: Platonic is non-romantic, romantic is non-platonic, queerplatonic is in between romantic and platonic. There isn't anywhere to go. Consequently, Yoshikaru being unlabeled/undefinable is queerplatonicism as I understand it because they are unlabeled/undefined.

There are always personal idiosyncratic preferences for other similar terms, such as alterous, and that is to be expected in social settings. So I again state that the main thing to focus on is the way words are being used. (Otherwise, now it is what is the difference between alterous and queerplatonic and platonic and romantic.... I've seen those threads. They don't go very far.) The fact that there are currently terms that can work in similar ways shows us where we are right now: We are reinventing reality as we speak. And this is a subjective process. This is not to say our subjective decisions do not have good reasoning behind them, but there is still no objective final discovery we can find to make everything make sense. Calling Yoshikaru queerplatonic is a practical decision, not a realistic one. It helps spread the ideas around the internet, it highlights the various themes of the story, it is a shorthand for everything I just talked about, a way of countering people who want to stick to the easy categories anyway, because they struggle thinking otherwise. Queerplatonic is a stepping stone. The point is less to be the most accurate and instead make sure we are doing the work we want to do--that our language is doing the work we want it to do. Queerplatonic = alterous = relationship anarchy. As long as it comes back to relationship anarchy. That should be our main focus, at the end of the day.

I want to help build a world where taxonomies of relationships don't matter, where we decide what each relationship entails in ways that actually foster communication about them, not needless concern about what we are actually feeling or what one is supposed to be doing. (Queer)platonic and alterous is a way to break apart our assumptions around romantic/platonic love--it is tilling the soil so new crops can grow. It is not the crop itself. Similar to this post:

My idea was that queerplatonic relationships were sort of the ‘mix and match’ of relationships, which is why it’s so hard to define and articulate. If you ask twenty aro spectrum people who experience these feelings what this word means, you will get about twenty different answers. With romance, even though some of the things may vary within specific relationships and everyone has a different experience with it, there is still a narrative that is generally followed and things that are expected in a romantic relationship. For example, bed sharing, hand holding, cuddling, kissing, etc. One or two of these things might not be present in the specific relationship, of course, but there tends to be certain things that are expected in a romantic relationship before it is simply considered platonic. Likewise, there are certain things expected in strictly platonic friendships - in most friendships, if you kiss or share a bed with them, it would generally be considered unusual. Queerplatonic to me means the breaking down of narratives. It means no rules. It means doing, essentially, whatever you are comfortable with. If you want to be best friends for all intents and purposes but also get married, that’s okay. If you want to kiss sometimes but don’t want to feel obligated, that’s okay too. This is why every person in a relationship like this has a different definition of it, because there are no rules. Queerplatonic means forging your own definition, saying “neither platonic or romantic is right”, and just doing whatever feels comfortable in the moment. It means making your own structure, mix and matching what you and your partner feel comfortable with. And I think trying to strictly define a queerplatonic narrative defeats the whole purpose of it. The purpose of it is to forge your own definition, to say “none of these words fit, so I’m going to make my own”. Queerplatonic is the breaking down of boundaries, or at least, that’s been my experience. It’s uncharted territory that has no societal bounds, that has no one making a strange face at what you do or don’t do in your relationship (or at least, not from people who understand the concept). Queerplatonic means mixing and matching, saying “I want to do this platonic thing, and this romantic thing, but not this romantic thing”. That is, fundamentally, the most important part of a queerplatonic relationship. Breaking down boundaries, blurring the lines between platonic and romantic. The specifics may be different depending on the specific relationship, but that’s one thing I’ve found that all have in common.

I think this should be how all relationships are constructed, not only the exceptional ones. It certainly appears more practical than using overarching categories. It is a process, an activity. Queerplatonicism is not something you are, it is something you do. Yoshikaru are not a QPR because that is the category they fit, they are queerplatonic because that is what their relationship does by upsetting categories.

But all that said, I'm finding myself nodding along to your whole break down of QPR and what it means to you. Relationship anarchy is exactly the way I've interpreted it as well, but I just didn't have the eloquence to define it so succinctly. You are a smart cookie!

And of course, I still firmly sit on the side of the bench where whatever Yoshiki and "Hikaru" got going on is QPR and not some secret unlabeled thing.

In fact, I know a lot of the text is about how humans shouldn't try to label things, but then the text immediately turns around and disproves itself.

Tanaka: "Hikaru" is an unknowable, uncategorized being.

Yoshiki: That's my friend, you asshole.

Asako: He ("Hikaru" in monster form) sounds sad :'(.

Rie: (While holding Yoshiki's and "Hikaru"s hands and seeing the full extent of how inhuman "Hikaru" is) These are good kids (too bad I'm gonna tear them apart).

Tanaka (later): Whoa! An illegitimate!? Ah, no it's "Hikaru".

Like, even in the drawings we have, we can read emotion from "Hikaru"s goop. We can see him cry from his big eye. We can see his goop reach for people. He's not unknowable. In fact, I'm willing to bet that he's very knowable if you approach it from the correct angle.

In Vol 7, Tanaka says that labeling things is not itself a bad thing, and that it's not something humans can just stop doing.

Sure, we can read "Hikaru" and his emotions but is that the same as fully understanding them? Part of his unknowability comes from the sheer scale of him—he is an entity that exists outside of the cycle of reincarnation. It's like an iceberg: We can see the top parts at the surface, but we cannot comprehend the totality of his existence.

And we are not able to actually feel the feelings "Hikaru" is feeling. We can see him cry, and we can approximate the emotions, but can we feel the way "Hikaru" is feeling these emotions?

In the Vol 3 Q&A, Mokomokoren compares the sensation of Yoshiki putting his hand into "Hikaru's" chest cavity to pleasure, but what kind of pleasure that is might not be one we can fully understand, only approximate. Because "Hikaru" has a different substrate—a different basis for all of his sensation and perception. We can compare—we can label—but we cannot actually experience what "Hikaru" does with all its intricacies and vicissitudes.

This is also something that happens in between humans as well. We have language to describe and communicate our inner feelings, but we cannot actually transmit the real felt emotion. (See the inverted spectrum problem, or "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?")

The inverted spectrum is the hypothetical scenario, pertaining to the philosophy of color, of two people sharing their color vocabulary and discriminations, although the colors one sees—that person's qualia—are systematically different from the colors the other person sees. It invites us to imagine two individuals who perceive colors differently: where one person sees red, the other sees green, and vice versa. Despite this difference in their subjective experiences, they behave and communicate as if their perceptions are the same, and no physical or behavioral test can reveal the inversion.

The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing. Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

The experiences I might label as sadness can have a tremendous amount of variation that is incredibly hard to describe. And the fact I am not able to describe it—label it—might mean I am not recognizing even more variation.

But back to TSHD: The whole Nounuki-sama arc is also informative. It is really funny to have a whole arc devoted to trying to figure out what "Hikaru" is and learning all this folk history only to then just go "actually, Nounuki-sama doesn't exist!" And of course we still learn about "Hikaru" being an 'illegitimate' (itself a label presumably coined by The Company), but seeing how this attachment to the label of Nounuki-sama prevented the village elders from actually gaining better understanding about the entity. But that knowledge will still always be incomplete. It's like the philosophy of science, the point is not to find the objective truth of reality, it is to continually rule out the incorrect hypotheses. Science, at least good science, is always aware of the understanding that accepted knowledge could be eventually disproven (see the pessimistic meta-induction).

And it's also like I said in my original post about Yoshiki bouncing back and forth between ideas about "Hikaru" being a huge part of his inner conflict but also is the thing that allows him to avoid the bad endings. He is able to learn more about "Hikaru" because he doesn't follow one fixed assumption the entire time (even if he could integrate those juxtaposing assumptions better so he's not stressing himself out as much—get this boy some dialectical behavioral therapy {although I guess "Hikaru" is Yoshiki's DBT}).

Everyone here will have to excuse me, because I am probably going to end up repeating points that have already been covered since this is a long conversation with too much going on. But to start with:

The author said their relationship isn’t a QPR.

That is not what she said. What MMR's post was clarifying was that there was no authorial intention from her part to particularly give any kind of word such as queerplatonic (or ANY other) to Yoshiki and 'Hikaru's relationship, which is consistent with both the narrative and past statements. That post isn't "MMR said it's not a QPR", and doesn't say "It's not okay for people to think, talk, or speak about it as a QPR" either. Those are completely different statements that were not actually said. A certain faction of the fandom reacted, as per usual, by treating that post as a blanket ban and a gotcha moment, but it was never that: it was just a reiteration of what the story has been doing all along, which not only is the same stance that Corvid explained in the post right above in relation to Tanaka bringing up that giving a name to things so we can recognize them is just human nature, it also makes sense from a Watsonian perspective:

Boys deserve to be boys. Not tiny men. For the last day of the FLY campaign I wanted to touch on a topic near and dear to the heart of the story. An innocence we must protect. It’s your last chance to back FLY on Kickstarter! Don’t run, don’t walk, fly! Help us keep soaring. 🪽❤️💫

How it feels to discuss HGSN fr

Alright, I'm gonna get the ball rolling below the break

I think it is important to remember that queerplatonic (and related terms like alterous) is still basically a neologism, so its meaning is still actively being shaped, even compared to the malleability of already established language. So, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is best to focus on how the term is being used in context; looking at its connotations. And we currently have tremendous freedom in deciding how we want to use it, and we should be thoughtful about how we use it. As I have argued (see below), I view queerplatonicism as a philosophy of relationships instead of a defined relationship type. Because if it is going to be called queerplatonicism, then it needs to be queer in the fullest sense of the word!

Anti-essentialist identity: In queer theory, queer as a personal identity may be "defined by rejection of binary categories of gender and sexuality, and inclusion of any sexual or gender identity that is non-normative, disrupting categories such as man and woman, and gay and straight."  Queer theorists such as Judith Butler approach queer not as a fixed identity, but as an anti-essentialist label of affiliation grounded in opposition to normative constructions of gender and sexuality. Robin Brontsema describes queer as "a kind of anti-identity".  According to Brontsema, the use of queer as a simple synonym for gay or lesbian "betrays the radical intent of self-identified queers and queer theorists" by equating queer "with the very terms against which it rebels."

Defining queerplatonic relationships as a type of "committed intimate relationship between significant others" places us in the same spot as the platonic/romantic binary we are trying to escape: What is the difference?

The evolution of romantic and platonic love as concepts is, intellectually at least, very interesting but also very long and intricate, and I don't feel like doing the full research project (at the current moment). But it is striking how much Plato--where the platonic part comes from--described it very differently from today's understandings:

Lee 1973, pp. 52–53: "Somewhere in history a misinterpretation arose by which 'Platonic love' came to mean sexless love, or at least love in which sexuality was thoroughly sublimated. Most dictionaries define Platonic love as 'devoid of sensual feeling,' which is certainly not what Plato had in mind. On the contrary, it was sensual feeling for the beautiful body of another person which first evoked an awareness of eros as the ancient Greeks understood it. Their culture was permeated with an appreciation of the beautiful in its human bodily form."

But for the abridged version, for a while, platonic equaled "no sex" and romance equaled "yes sex". But then, the split-attraction model comes along and blows up this distinction. Now, we have sexual love, romantic love, and platonic love.

Now for science! My favorite paper on this, and not just because I actually had her as a professor, is Dr. Lisa Diamond's "What Does Sexual Orientation Orient? A Biobehavioral Model Distinguishing Romantic Love and Sexual Desire," which is a great breakdown of how sexual desire and what is here called affectional bonding are distinct processes. The main idea is that sexual desire is related to mating and sexual partner selection, but that affectional bonding is based more on how infants need a lot of care. Having an emotional attachment to a child ensures that the child lives to adulthood, and that's evolution. This then spread out to all of our other social relationships. So we have clear reasoning to differentiate sexual desire and emotional attachment/bonding, but do we have the same for platonic and romantic, seeing as they are both currently conceptualized as types of emotional attraction/desire?

I have yet to find anything compelling to point to any material difference between platonic relationships/feelings from romantic ones, other than cultural connotation, which can be genuinely felt, but is also context dependent on said culture saying they are different. This makes me question if there should even be a difference. Because once sex is removed from romance, all that I have been left with is the idea that romance is a more intense version of platonic love. However, this premise appears to be at odds with the experiences of plenty of aromantic people and people in QPRs, and also potentially conflicts with the ideas of relationship anarchy--that all relationships can be valuable. Without sex, without priority, does anything anchor romance to the material world?

So, with all of this in mind, that is why I advocate for queerplatonicism to be understood not only as a "secret third thing" or any other additional relationship type, but the thing that exposes the arbitrary nature of all these categories and how useless they are at a sociocultural level. Treating QPRs as their own distinct category just adds another level to the question of what makes platonic and romantic love different. And I am almost convinced that such questions are unanswerable. It becomes circular and self-referential: Platonic is non-romantic, romantic is non-platonic, queerplatonic is in between romantic and platonic. There isn't anywhere to go. Consequently, Yoshikaru being unlabeled/undefinable is queerplatonicism as I understand it because they are unlabeled/undefined.

There are always personal idiosyncratic preferences for other similar terms, such as alterous, and that is to be expected in social settings. So I again state that the main thing to focus on is the way words are being used. (Otherwise, now it is what is the difference between alterous and queerplatonic and platonic and romantic.... I've seen those threads. They don't go very far.) The fact that there are currently terms that can work in similar ways shows us where we are right now: We are reinventing reality as we speak. And this is a subjective process. This is not to say our subjective decisions do not have good reasoning behind them, but there is still no objective final discovery we can find to make everything make sense. Calling Yoshikaru queerplatonic is a practical decision, not a realistic one. It helps spread the ideas around the internet, it highlights the various themes of the story, it is a shorthand for everything I just talked about, a way of countering people who want to stick to the easy categories anyway, because they struggle thinking otherwise. Queerplatonic is a stepping stone. The point is less to be the most accurate and instead make sure we are doing the work we want to do--that our language is doing the work we want it to do. Queerplatonic = alterous = relationship anarchy. As long as it comes back to relationship anarchy. That should be our main focus, at the end of the day.

I want to help build a world where taxonomies of relationships don't matter, where we decide what each relationship entails in ways that actually foster communication about them, not needless concern about what we are actually feeling or what one is supposed to be doing. (Queer)platonic and alterous is a way to break apart our assumptions around romantic/platonic love--it is tilling the soil so new crops can grow. It is not the crop itself. Similar to this post:

My idea was that queerplatonic relationships were sort of the ‘mix and match’ of relationships, which is why it’s so hard to define and articulate. If you ask twenty aro spectrum people who experience these feelings what this word means, you will get about twenty different answers. With romance, even though some of the things may vary within specific relationships and everyone has a different experience with it, there is still a narrative that is generally followed and things that are expected in a romantic relationship. For example, bed sharing, hand holding, cuddling, kissing, etc. One or two of these things might not be present in the specific relationship, of course, but there tends to be certain things that are expected in a romantic relationship before it is simply considered platonic. Likewise, there are certain things expected in strictly platonic friendships - in most friendships, if you kiss or share a bed with them, it would generally be considered unusual. Queerplatonic to me means the breaking down of narratives. It means no rules. It means doing, essentially, whatever you are comfortable with. If you want to be best friends for all intents and purposes but also get married, that’s okay. If you want to kiss sometimes but don’t want to feel obligated, that’s okay too. This is why every person in a relationship like this has a different definition of it, because there are no rules. Queerplatonic means forging your own definition, saying “neither platonic or romantic is right”, and just doing whatever feels comfortable in the moment. It means making your own structure, mix and matching what you and your partner feel comfortable with. And I think trying to strictly define a queerplatonic narrative defeats the whole purpose of it. The purpose of it is to forge your own definition, to say “none of these words fit, so I’m going to make my own”. Queerplatonic is the breaking down of boundaries, or at least, that’s been my experience. It’s uncharted territory that has no societal bounds, that has no one making a strange face at what you do or don’t do in your relationship (or at least, not from people who understand the concept). Queerplatonic means mixing and matching, saying “I want to do this platonic thing, and this romantic thing, but not this romantic thing”. That is, fundamentally, the most important part of a queerplatonic relationship. Breaking down boundaries, blurring the lines between platonic and romantic. The specifics may be different depending on the specific relationship, but that’s one thing I’ve found that all have in common.

I think this should be how all relationships are constructed, not only the exceptional ones. It certainly appears more practical than using overarching categories. It is a process, an activity. Queerplatonicism is not something you are, it is something you do. Yoshikaru are not a QPR because that is the category they fit, they are queerplatonic because that is what their relationship does by upsetting categories.

But all that said, I'm finding myself nodding along to your whole break down of QPR and what it means to you. Relationship anarchy is exactly the way I've interpreted it as well, but I just didn't have the eloquence to define it so succinctly. You are a smart cookie!

And of course, I still firmly sit on the side of the bench where whatever Yoshiki and "Hikaru" got going on is QPR and not some secret unlabeled thing.

In fact, I know a lot of the text is about how humans shouldn't try to label things, but then the text immediately turns around and disproves itself.

Tanaka: "Hikaru" is an unknowable, uncategorized being.

Yoshiki: That's my friend, you asshole.

Asako: He ("Hikaru" in monster form) sounds sad :'(.

Rie: (While holding Yoshiki's and "Hikaru"s hands and seeing the full extent of how inhuman "Hikaru" is) These are good kids (too bad I'm gonna tear them apart).

Tanaka (later): Whoa! An illegitimate!? Ah, no it's "Hikaru".

Like, even in the drawings we have, we can read emotion from "Hikaru"s goop. We can see him cry from his big eye. We can see his goop reach for people. He's not unknowable. In fact, I'm willing to bet that he's very knowable if you approach it from the correct angle.

In Vol 7, Tanaka says that labeling things is not itself a bad thing, and that it's not something humans can just stop doing.

Sure, we can read "Hikaru" and his emotions but is that the same as fully understanding them? Part of his unknowability comes from the sheer scale of him—he is an entity that exists outside of the cycle of reincarnation. It's like an iceberg: We can see the top parts at the surface, but we cannot comprehend the totality of his existence.

And we are not able to actually feel the feelings "Hikaru" is feeling. We can see him cry, and we can approximate the emotions, but can we feel the way "Hikaru" is feeling these emotions?

In the Vol 3 Q&A, Mokomokoren compares the sensation of Yoshiki putting his hand into "Hikaru's" chest cavity to pleasure, but what kind of pleasure that is might not be one we can fully understand, only approximate. Because "Hikaru" has a different substrate—a different basis for all of his sensation and perception. We can compare—we can label—but we cannot actually experience what "Hikaru" does with all its intricacies and vicissitudes.

This is also something that happens in between humans as well. We have language to describe and communicate our inner feelings, but we cannot actually transmit the real felt emotion. (See the inverted spectrum problem, or "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?")

The inverted spectrum is the hypothetical scenario, pertaining to the philosophy of color, of two people sharing their color vocabulary and discriminations, although the colors one sees—that person's qualia—are systematically different from the colors the other person sees. It invites us to imagine two individuals who perceive colors differently: where one person sees red, the other sees green, and vice versa. Despite this difference in their subjective experiences, they behave and communicate as if their perceptions are the same, and no physical or behavioral test can reveal the inversion.

The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing. Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."

The experiences I might label as sadness can have a tremendous amount of variation that is incredibly hard to describe. And the fact I am not able to describe it—label it—might mean I am not recognizing even more variation.

But back to TSHD: The whole Nounuki-sama arc is also informative. It is really funny to have a whole arc devoted to trying to figure out what "Hikaru" is and learning all this folk history only to then just go "actually, Nounuki-sama doesn't exist!" And of course we still learn about "Hikaru" being an 'illegitimate' (itself a label presumably coined by The Company), but seeing how this attachment to the label of Nounuki-sama prevented the village elders from actually gaining better understanding about the entity. But that knowledge will still always be incomplete. It's like the philosophy of science, the point is not to find the objective truth of reality, it is to continually rule out the incorrect hypotheses. Science, at least good science, is always aware of the understanding that accepted knowledge could be eventually disproven (see the pessimistic meta-induction).

And it's also like I said in my original post about Yoshiki bouncing back and forth between ideas about "Hikaru" being a huge part of his inner conflict but also is the thing that allows him to avoid the bad endings. He is able to learn more about "Hikaru" because he doesn't follow one fixed assumption the entire time (even if he could integrate those juxtaposing assumptions better so he's not stressing himself out as much—get this boy some dialectical behavioral therapy {although I guess "Hikaru" is Yoshiki's DBT}).

Sexual violence is the most prevalent form of victimization experienced by individuals on the asexual spectrum (Weis et al., 2021). With a global sample of 10,648 participants, Weis et al. showed that a significant majority (82.2%) reported experiencing at least one type of sexual violence in their lifetime. (...). Similarly, Mollet and Black (2021) found that more than 70% of asexual college students reported unwanted non-contact sexual experiences, over 50% experienced unwanted sexual contact, and almost 25% were raped by coercion or physical force. Parent and Ferriter (2018) also revealed that asexual individuals were 2.5 times more likely to report experiencing sexual trauma in the last year compared to their allosexual counterparts.

Based on global data from individuals on the asexual spectrum, the study showed a high prevalence of lifetime sexual violence victimization. Over two-thirds of the participants indicated they had experienced at least one form of sexual violence. The most common form of victimization was sexual assault, with 57.4% of participants being sexually touched by other people without their consent. Sexual harassment was also frequently reported, with 43.3% being exposed to other people’s sexual body parts or sexual photos. It is worthwhile to note that a significant proportion of participants had experienced sexual coercion (28.9%) or even rape (15.8%). The prevalence of sexual violence among individuals on the asexual spectrum was much higher than that reported by LGB individuals in the United States (Chen et al., 2020).

Sexual Violence, Victimization and Substance Use among Individuals Identifying on the Asexual Spectrum: Differences between Asexuality, Graysexuality, and Demisexuality.

Wilfred, who was married for several years, discusses how he often felt obligated to have sex in the context of the relationship: “[Sex was] mostly to please another person, you know. Mostly because of that, and especially yeah, if it’s your wife, you know. Like, in a sense, I wanted these other things in a relationship other than sex that are more important to me, but after a while, I felt like sex is the most important thing.” Sex was, in a sense, the price he felt he had to pay to maintain his marriage and the aspects of the relationship that he enjoyed, such as “holding hands, hugging… just like being together, being alone together.” He thus engaged in unwanted sex due to both relational and social pressures.

Likewise, Wilfred details that as an adolescent not interested in sex and girls, he “felt like an outcast” and was questioned on “whether or not [he’s] male.” The participants thus draw a direct connection between sex, sexual performance, and what it means to be a man. When not having sex and not performing a desire for (hetero)sex, the men’s very masculinity and manliness were called into question.

Wilfred and Billy both undertook unwanted (hetero)sex with their partners, while Antony has difficulty finding a romantic companion or partner. They also each engaged in taxing performative work, trying to “be a (real) man” and feigning sexual attraction and desire to belong and avoid questions as to their sexuality and manliness.

Best case scenario, we find a way around this issue and the number of people in prison is 0 (a way around that doesn't involve killing people, I will clarify). Worst case scenario, we don't, but the vast majority of people who would be in prison now most likely did not act in the way that originally got them in trouble and, in the scenario they still did, had ways of making up for that and doing better that does not involve punishment (which exasperates the issue). Its a win-win either way, but since prison abolitionists don't have a magic solution for every problem people are willing to throw away the whole concept, even when working towards that goal will only lead to benefits even if it is never 100% achieved.

I feel like this sort of thing maps over (nearly) identically to psych abolition, mainly because psychiatry is a carceral in itself. It is an extension of the prison system.

"What about the ~violent evil schizophrenics/murderers/rapists/sociopaths/etc~" has never been a productive question, because it misunderstands the whole concept at its very basis. "Restricting autonomy is inhumane, we should work towards a world that does not restrict autonomy as much as possible" has always been the thesis.

Another example (aside from the favorable/ambivalent/indifferent/averse/repulsed scale) would be microlabels. For example, someone who is demiromantic and demisexual might call themselves demi aroace, or demirose.

I absolutely adore the rose shorthand, it just sounds so pretty and rose flowers often represent romantic and sexual stuff. Like idk it just works so well together, and it flows nicely.