cookie run is aro culture

Good question! In theory, yes we would all be covered by the aro flag and that would be enough (and then you ask why aroaces need 5 different flags when it should be enough to just split the two flags vertically and use them in edits.... right?)

So allosexuality, when paired with alloromanticism, isn't a marginalized identity, inherently yes. But because it's paired with aromanticism in this situation, the story changes. A lot of aspec spaces are geared towards aces specifically, and a lot of arospec spaces are made specifically for aroaces.

So where do alloaros go? There's a lot of arophobia coming from aces and a lot of alloarophobia from aroaces (obligatory disclaimer that no, I don't, in fact, hate aces or aroaces).

Alloaros get shoved to the side in our own community, with aro tags being something like 50% aroaces, 10% alloaces (yeah, BIG PROBLEM), 35% general posts that may or may not be tag spammed posts, and 5% posts about alloaros. If we're lucky.

There's a lot of "ew sex is gross" posts in aro tags, even though aromanticism isn't an asexual identity. Or people who go to alloaro blogs and say aces can't be arophobic but alloaros better stop being acephobic and tearing the community apart. Or people who still assume that we're all predatory because we "want sex but not romance" even though alloaro experiences aren't all the same and some of us don't even want sex, we just experience attraction.

Friendly reminder that you are not encouraging toxic masculinity by being aromantic.

Friendly reminder that you're complete and whole. You don't need a romantic partner (particularly a woman) to fix you.

Friendly reminder that it is okay to want friends who you can have sex and nothing "more". Friendly reminder that there need not be a more. Friendly reminder that friendship can be everything.

Friendly reminder that you will have meaningful relationships. That you have meaningful relationships. That meaning in relationships is transcendent of language. It is something you create.

Friendly reminder that you're a good man.

Friendly reminder that you are loved for who you are. Whatever love means to you. And if love means nothing to you then you are cared for, respected, safe, whatever it is you want.

Friendly reminder that masculinity transcends the rules we've laid out for it.

Don’t put an aro person under the ace umbrella unless they say you can.

Don’t put the entire aro community inside the ace community. They are not just a subset of asexual.

Aros and aces share the aspec community, not the ace community.

Being aro does not automatically mean you are ace.

Do not say acespec and aspec are interchangable, because they’re not.

Originally, I wasn’t going to say anything, because I have a significant audience and I didn’t want to put a spotlight on something if nobody was paying attention to it. But I’ve seen more and more about this, so I decided to say something.

I am not going to boost the original post that’s going around that seemed to start all of this, because I think it’s disingenuous and I don’t want to spread it around any further. In fact, I may regret bringing this up at all, but I digress. For context: some folks have recently learned that Moses Sumney, who wrote the album “Aromanticism”, does not explicitly self-identify as aro. Many are upset about this, and feel that by invoking the name of aromanticism as his album title and leading people to believe that he identified as such, he is profiting off of the aro experience in some way, or using us for his aesthetic.

I deeply understand the frustration I am seeing re: Moses Sumney right now. It is incredibly disheartening to see that a celebrity you thought shared your identity doesn’t, and I think people’s discomfort with Sumney using the title of Aromanticism and leading people to believe he was aro is warranted. While he never explicitly identified himself as aro, naturally people are going to assume as such when you allude to those experiences so heavily and name your album after it. I think all these feelings are valid and I don’t want anyone to feel like they aren’t allowed to feel pissed or let down.

However: I would strongly caution us against this kneejerk reaction some folks seem to have had to cancel Moses Sumney over this. The original post I alluded to frames Sumney’s actions as exploitative in some way, as though he were intentionally profiting off of the aro community somehow. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. The aro community is not exactly in a position right now where talking about us really earns you any clout. Regardless, Sumney has stated that he turned down opportunities meant for queer artists because he does not identify as queer. I believe him; it’s certainly okay if you don’t, but to suggest that he has profited off of being perceived as aro seems unsupported to me, given that many critics and reviewers of the album have willfully misinterpreted it anyway. There are very few interviews with Sumney, to my knowledge, that seem to entertain the possibility that he might be aro as anything positive.

2. While it is understandable to be upset with Sumney for not being clear about whether or not he identified as aro when the album was released, it is unfair to expect him to use the labels we would like him to if he does not want to, even if the experiences he has described are tangentially similar to our own. This is particularly important given that Sumney is a Black man, and as he himself has stated, Black folks are often not given the same agency over their identity and orientation that white people are. Especially when he is a public figure–Sumney is a Black artist who deviates from the heteronormative standard, regardless of how he labels himself (something he himself has explained), and thus he was always going to be boxed in and picked apart by media outlets looking for someone or something new to sensationalize for clicks. At the end of the day, while being a celebrity, he’s still just a person, and he doesn’t owe anyone constant corrections or explanations of his identity or the use of labels he does not want to use.

3. “Aromanticism”, the album, was deeply influential in the aro community at the time of its release in 2017 and remains as such for many to this day. Many arospec folks resonated with it in some way or another, and frankly just seeing someone in the public eye acknowledge the very existence of aromanticism and create art related to aro or aro-adjacent experiences was groundbreaking for many of us during a time when the word “aromantic” hadn’t even been added to the dictionary yet. And that’s something else important to note–even if Moses Sumney doesn’t identify as aromantic, the experiences he talks about in interviews and alludes to on the album are aro-adjacent ones. To that point:

4. I understand that many feel like their identity has been used as an aesthetic. Even if that wasn’t Sumney’s intent, I think it’s valid to feel that way. But if we don’t allow anyone who doesn’t explicitly self-identify as aro to even invoke the name of aromanticism in their art, we will be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to talk about us at all. Maybe I would feel differently if we were in a place where talking about aro issues was the latest trend and Sumney could truly profit off of us, or if the album was a complete willful misrepresentation of aro experiences. But I don’t think either of those things are true, and I am troubled by the fact that an album that has been lauded as a piece of iconic aro media is suddenly being cast aside as exploitative and bad simply because Sumney doesn’t actively share our identity labels (a fact that was publicly accessible long before this, just for what it’s worth, though I don’t blame anyone for not knowing that).

Again, I want to reiterate that I don’t intend to invalidate anyone’s feelings on the matter. I share some of those sentiments myself. But Sumney’s work (both on the album itself and in interviews and statements he has given surrounding it) to challenge amatonormativity should not be discounted. Personal feelings about Sumney’s handling of the situation notwithstanding, the release of the album was in and of itself a net positive for the aro community. I personally don’t think him not identifying as aromantic discounts that in any way, and I fail to see the issue with that.

Frankly, I would push back even further on this: i’d argue that Moses Sumney was very, very careful never to position himself as aromantic or queer in a way that was incredible obvious to me when reading his interviews at the time of the album’s release, and i think knowing how to read for that kind of statement-by-omission is an important one.

Frankly, I think a lot of the backlash comes from the fact that a lot of aros got excited to see someone talking about aromantic-adjacent experiences in a way that resonated with them, assumed his orientation was aromantic without asking, told other people he was aromantic without fact checking, and now those people are finding out that the reality doesn’t fit what they assumed or heard from somebody else, and instead of learning about the importance of asking instead of assuming, some people are now taking out their frustration and anger on him for not living up to the misleading information they heard elsewhere. In more recent interviews, he has explicitly pointed out how this was happening with regards to people assuming he was queer instead of actually asking (emphasis mine):

I have never identified, publicly or privately, as queer.  But I don’t correct people when they say that. I try not to correct people too much these days, because the desire to do so stems from ego. And I realised at some point that proclamations of identification are largely for other people, not for the self. So people can call me whatever they want to call me, if it helps them feel actualised or like they are relating to something they see in themselves. But it’s worth noting that no one has ever been considerate enough to ask me.

If some people in the aro community are feeling disappointed by the knowledge that Moses Sumney doesn’t identify simply and cleanly as ‘aromantic’ after all, that’s not a failure on his part, that’s a failure on our community’s part for  leaping to conclusions, and maybe of needing to be more careful about setting expectations when introducing his work to others in the future. 

Also, as Siggy has pointed out in an excellent essay, Moses sumney’s entire second album is all about grey areas and ambiguity and not fitting neatly into boxes and labels. Instead of assuming that anyone who talks about a concept without clearly IDing as such is faking it for attention and profit (like, bisexual stereotypes, anyone?), maybe we need to make room for the fact that people can have ambiguous identity and complicated relationships to concepts like aromanticism or queerness, in ways that may resonate without making the adoption of a public label make sense.

Originally, I wasn’t going to say anything, because I have a significant audience and I didn’t want to put a spotlight on something if nobody was paying attention to it. But I’ve seen more and more about this, so I decided to say something.

I am not going to boost the original post that’s going around that seemed to start all of this, because I think it’s disingenuous and I don’t want to spread it around any further. In fact, I may regret bringing this up at all, but I digress. For context: some folks have recently learned that Moses Sumney, who wrote the album “Aromanticism”, does not explicitly self-identify as aro. Many are upset about this, and feel that by invoking the name of aromanticism as his album title and leading people to believe that he identified as such, he is profiting off of the aro experience in some way, or using us for his aesthetic.

I deeply understand the frustration I am seeing re: Moses Sumney right now. It is incredibly disheartening to see that a celebrity you thought shared your identity doesn’t, and I think people’s discomfort with Sumney using the title of Aromanticism and leading people to believe he was aro is warranted. While he never explicitly identified himself as aro, naturally people are going to assume as such when you allude to those experiences so heavily and name your album after it. I think all these feelings are valid and I don’t want anyone to feel like they aren’t allowed to feel pissed or let down.

However: I would strongly caution us against this kneejerk reaction some folks seem to have had to cancel Moses Sumney over this. The original post I alluded to frames Sumney’s actions as exploitative in some way, as though he were intentionally profiting off of the aro community somehow. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

1. The aro community is not exactly in a position right now where talking about us really earns you any clout. Regardless, Sumney has stated that he turned down opportunities meant for queer artists because he does not identify as queer. I believe him; it’s certainly okay if you don’t, but to suggest that he has profited off of being perceived as aro seems unsupported to me, given that many critics and reviewers of the album have willfully misinterpreted it anyway. There are very few interviews with Sumney, to my knowledge, that seem to entertain the possibility that he might be aro as anything positive.

2. While it is understandable to be upset with Sumney for not being clear about whether or not he identified as aro when the album was released, it is unfair to expect him to use the labels we would like him to if he does not want to, even if the experiences he has described are tangentially similar to our own. This is particularly important given that Sumney is a Black man, and as he himself has stated, Black folks are often not given the same agency over their identity and orientation that white people are. Especially when he is a public figure–Sumney is a Black artist who deviates from the heteronormative standard, regardless of how he labels himself (something he himself has explained), and thus he was always going to be boxed in and picked apart by media outlets looking for someone or something new to sensationalize for clicks. At the end of the day, while being a celebrity, he’s still just a person, and he doesn’t owe anyone constant corrections or explanations of his identity or the use of labels he does not want to use.

3. “Aromanticism”, the album, was deeply influential in the aro community at the time of its release in 2017 and remains as such for many to this day. Many arospec folks resonated with it in some way or another, and frankly just seeing someone in the public eye acknowledge the very existence of aromanticism and create art related to aro or aro-adjacent experiences was groundbreaking for many of us during a time when the word “aromantic” hadn’t even been added to the dictionary yet. And that’s something else important to note–even if Moses Sumney doesn’t identify as aromantic, the experiences he talks about in interviews and alludes to on the album are aro-adjacent ones. To that point:

4. I understand that many feel like their identity has been used as an aesthetic. Even if that wasn’t Sumney’s intent, I think it’s valid to feel that way. But if we don’t allow anyone who doesn’t explicitly self-identify as aro to even invoke the name of aromanticism in their art, we will be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to talk about us at all. Maybe I would feel differently if we were in a place where talking about aro issues was the latest trend and Sumney could truly profit off of us, or if the album was a complete willful misrepresentation of aro experiences. But I don’t think either of those things are true, and I am troubled by the fact that an album that has been lauded as a piece of iconic aro media is suddenly being cast aside as exploitative and bad simply because Sumney doesn’t actively share our identity labels (a fact that was publicly accessible long before this, just for what it’s worth, though I don’t blame anyone for not knowing that).

Again, I want to reiterate that I don’t intend to invalidate anyone’s feelings on the matter. I share some of those sentiments myself. But Sumney’s work (both on the album itself and in interviews and statements he has given surrounding it) to challenge amatonormativity should not be discounted. Personal feelings about Sumney’s handling of the situation notwithstanding, the release of the album was in and of itself a net positive for the aro community. I personally don’t think him not identifying as aromantic discounts that in any way, and I fail to see the issue with that.