Aro/Ace Positive

Okay everyone, right now I’m setting up the new blog over at @cupids-aro2 . [I will be switching names and such once everything is setttled]

I’m running the new posts on a queue at the moment, 5 times a day to get through anything on this blog that wasn’t time sensitive.

I’ll update everyone once the queue has caught everything up so your dashes don’t have to be flooded if you don’t want them to be.

So when I started this blog I wasn’t ready to be out anywhere, so to avoid cross posting mistakes I set up this blog with a different email address. This means that to blog here I either have to log out and log in on my phone or log on on a new device.

To say I’ve been lazy about this would be an understatement.

What I’d like to do is go through the blog from the beginning and set it up on a queue that would save all my current posts, I’d get all the links set up, and leave this blog here but inactive with a post indicating where the new blog is.

This would hopefully mean I’d be posting every few days rather than like once every 2 months.

Holy shit. Holy fuck. I got my little sister the book “sex is a funny word” because she’s at that age where she’s reading a lot of puberty books and I’d heard that this one was lgbtq+ friendly, but I was checking it over for accuracy and I gotta say, even with the totally gender neutral language they were using to talk about body parts and the really respectful way they talk about gender and their portrayals of same sex couples I was so fucking sure that I would have to mention that not everyone gets crushes or feels attraction separately. Because these books never talk about that. But here it is. The one thing I was so absolutely sure wouldn’t be included.

https://www.corysilverberg.com/sex-is-a-funny-word/

It’s weird that I do this because I’m not even bisexual really, I’m bi for other reasons… But like.. fighting people’s tendency to erase ace bi people (and ace gay people etc) would be soooo exhausting because soooo many people talk like that and I can’t do it.

So w/e I’ll reblog stuff about bisexuality and act like I fit under that even though I don’t.

I’m going to talk about some of what I saw growing up, because it’s different than what I see now. This isn’t nostalgia. This isn’t “those were the days.” This is, things were different, and while in some cases I think that the changes were positive, some people are getting thrown under the bus in the tendency to treat sexual (which includes romantic) organization/taxonomy as some sort of universal constant rather than what we used to understand ourselves and each other.

And this isn’t ancient history. I’m not that fucking old. I’m 34. Some of you were alive when these things were the case.

When I grew up, heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual were explicitly not specifically sexual. “It’s not about sex!” was a battlecry. This was emphasized frequently as people would sit there trying to come up with some gotcha that meant that you couldn’t be gay and a virgin at the same time. Or — and this is important: that you couldn’t be queer if you weren’t interested in sex. While it’s not necessarily the same as explicitly affirming asexuality, this was a way in which the asexual experience was made intelligible under the mainstream organization of sexuality.

There was a lot of rhetoric that emphasized this point. In particular, that the fixation on the sexual part of homo/bi-sexuality was actually a form of heterocentrism in which hets would try to strip queers of the capability for romantic attraction.

Yes, there are problems there. Yes, there’s the privileging of romantic attraction as better and more pure than sexual. And it’s worth talking about. But that’s not what I’m getting at right now.

What I am getting at, is that in the models I grew up with, among the queers I grew up around, both aro and ace people could qualify as not just bi, but bisexual. Or any other sexual orientation, really.

And I mean explicitly qualify under the relevant heading:

There was a 2 (or more?) point kinsey-like scale used among me and my queer friends in HS. It had a numerical range which translated to homo->bi->het.* One scale was sexual, or “Who do you want to sleep with?”. Another other was romantic, or “Who do you want to marry/date?”. (The third, if it existed — and I feel like a third did — might have been aesthetic. Possibly “Who do you think looks hot?”)

If you were in the middle for either/any of them, you qualified as bisexual. It was even theorized that if you were on opposite ends, for example, if you had exclusively homosexual romantic attraction** with exclusively hetosexual sexual attraction then you were probably bi, although you could also probably identify along the lines of the attraction that was most significant to you. Null values on a scale just meant that that particular scale wasn’t relevant. Move on to the next one.

Which does present a problem with aroace people. Where would they fit? If I’m right about the third scale being aesthetic, probably according to aesthetic attraction, as it’d be the last one left, and take priority. But I can’t remember that part clearly, and anyway, the point isn’t about the model being perfect. There are good things about the shifts, both in what it allows us to articulate insofar as experiences, and how it allows us to mobilize.

And, really, that’s the important part. The ability to articulate lived experiences, and in the case of sexual/romantic minorities, organize and mobilize under.

So, here’s the million dollar question:

During a time in which being aro or ace (or aroace) was even less intelligible to the mainstream — or even the mainstream queer community — than it is now, where were the ace and aro bi people? Where did they organize under when trying to deal with monosexism? Where did they vent their frustrations over LG exclusion? Where did they openly talk about their attractions? Who were they fighting alongside?

Bisexuals.

They were with the bisexuals.

They were bisexuals.

It was vital, and necessary, and I’m not about to throw them out now. Seriously? We’re supposed to ditch them after all that?

And to be clear, this is not about abandoning aro-ace terminology — it’s also vital and necessary. For organizing. For articulating experiences. For support.

So that’s the thing about how we taxonomize “sexuality.” It changes — and pretty quickly — just through common usage.  It always has. It’s changing now, and we have a choice about the direction we want to push it. Not by putting up charts and graphs about who gets to be what, but just in how we use the terms. Who we, individually, include and exclude.

So here’s the deal for me:*** If you identify as bi, and you feel comfortable under the heading of bisexual, I’m not going to kick you out just because you’re not sexually-bi. I’m also not going to shame you out  to keep our “good name” if you’re aro-bi. And if you’re aro-ace, but identify as bi? I’m not about to throw you under the bus either.

You don’t have to identify as bisexual, but imo, that door shouldn’t be closed. Doing that can be devastating to anyone who before now found solace and support there.

*It was a STEM magnet school. We were a bit nerdy like that.

**Does that sound weird now? Kinda my point re: different taxonomy and meanings.

you are not obligated to fight discoursers on the internet. you are not obligated to find dozens of obscure sources to prove them wrong, which they might not even read, or believe. you are not obligated to defend your sexuality from constant invalidation, or other asexuals from bullying

Pride snakes are finally available!! I can make a pride snake version of every pride gecko or dragon I have. The ones pictured above are just examples.

LGBTQ+ Pride Snake Amigurumi Crochet Toy (Choose one)

pride icons

stickers here

Spectrum outfitters is a new UK BASED company that is about to start selling binders

I know this damn website is so Americanised but PLEASE reblog this! Transmasculine people in the UK have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for shipping from America. This could change all that.

Ideally second-generation Pakistani-American or Canadian, of any gender, to read a M/M BDSM erotic romance. The book contains scenes of an explicit sexual nature and some involving mental domination/restraint, but no pain or extreme kink.