useless bi aro

Is your experience of aromanticism different from ace aros? And how/why? (Plus any other thoughts on the topic.)

And/or

Yes I experience aromanticism differently from aroaces. It's really difficult to put how exactly into words which is why I'm hoping to hear more perspectives.

Obviously with bi people there's the SAM issue - this is a thing with aroaces (bc not all of them use the SAM although some do) as well, but a lot of aspec use the SAM, and even those who don't have an understanding of it.

I don't interact much with the bi community because I can't without being erased/ignored. That sounds negative but I don't blame them. It's no individual personal making the decision to ignore aro people it's just that for a couple of reasons it tends to happen naturally.

Aromantic awareness is pretty dire, so most people don't know about or don't think to include aros in discussions.

As well as this, when people who don't use the SAM talk about sexual orientations they tend to talk about crushes and relationships. And that's where they lose me.

It's a fundamentally different experience being aromantic bisexual and being just bisexual. I relate on a surface level. I love bi memes and the bi flag, and bi jokes. And I do relate to being bisexual, that's why I use the label. It's not just that the word technically describes me, I relate to the term and to the community. But being aromantic means that I can't relate to a lot of bi experiences.

On the other hand, as much as many of us feel erased for being allosexual in the aromantic community, I've always felt that most of the community understands and expects that we all have wildly different experiences with the way our orientations intersect with each other.

For the record, I’m not saying that you can’t bring trends like this up: aros, in general, definitely prioritize platonic relationships in a way alloromantics usually don’t. We can talk about that without constantly adding disclaimers for the aros that do not feel this way. We can generalize a bit. That’s fine.

It becomes a problem when this idea, the idea that we all place an extremely meaningful priority on our platonic relationships, becomes one central to the aro community, to the point where it’s assumed to be universal. When it’s not. It’s just not.

And then there’s the “we can still love!” attitude that the community tends to have. A lot of ‘mainstream’ (as mainstream as you can get with aro identities, anyway) arospec content focuses on our abilities to love platonically; comics, stories, etc. are all about how much we love our friends ‘despite’ being aromantic, about how we love our family, about all the forms of platonic love we can still feel. There is rarely any mention of aros who have a complicated relationship with ‘love’ in general, of aros who struggle to form and maintain relationships, of aplatonic aros, of everything in between and beyond that. There are a million and one ways to be arospec, and yet, we are so focused on dispelling the stereotype that we can’t love, that we’re heartless monsters, that we’ve been pushing the same one narrative over and over and over again, to the point where we’ve started to forget that it’s not the only one.

Even in the aro community, love is romanticized to the point of reaching a mythical status, when in reality, it’s nothing more than an emotion. That’s it. Love is not the arbiter of humanity. And I think that a lot of the aro community has unconsciously internalized the idea from an amatonormative society that love is, in fact, what makes us human, and that, since we cannot love romantically, we need to be able to love platonically in order to fill that ‘hole’ left in our humanity. (Or at least the hole left in our lives by the absence of a romantic partner.) When the truth is that we don’t need to justify our humanity to anyone: we are human by virtue of being born human. We have nothing to prove to anyone.

And that’s just among LGBT+ folk. Cis straight people dismiss all that language automatically as ridiculous alphabet soup stuff, whether or not they know the phrase MOGAI to mock it with.

Can you see how this is a direct enemy of NB people — a community that (in this specific contemporary iteration of that concept) has only begun to articulate itself at all in the last 20 years, and only really picked up big steam in the last 5-10 — describing themselves at all?

Like if the cut-off for respectable LGBT language was 2000, and anything more recent than that is MOGAI bullshit…. modern NBs just aren’t allowed to talk about themselves whatsoever, because any word coined after 2000, especially if it was coined on tumblr, is just ~snowflakey MOGAI radikweers making up ridiculous nonsense words for overspecific concepts?~

However, it was immediately met with STRONG negative stigma because of an association with, essentially, newer or more niche identity labels. If you were Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or (binary) Trans, you were less likely to see a need for an alternative to LGBT. Therefore, it was more likely to be used by people not already totally included in that “mainstream” group. Non-binary folks, people on the ace and aro spectrums, people who used a split attraction model, people whose queer identities were impacted by neurodivergence, etc, were all more likely to like the phrase MOGAI.

The arguments against it are also all false. They have either falsely attributed real arguments against completely different terms, or straight up made shit up about MOGAI in order to discredit it as ‘silly nonsense’.

(As a note, thanks for reminding me: Gender Alignment in this case refers to how your gender aligns with cisnormativity and assignment. IE being non-cis. Not like “woman-aligned”/“man-aligned” NB vocab.)

Because of the associations I talked about, MOGAI as a concept does also end up wrapped up in far-reaching ideas about what queer identity signifies, philosophies of inclusionism (beyond mere ace discourse), anti-assimilationism, and general attitudes toward queerness that are… incongruent with assimilationist, gatekeeping, reductive and radfem-leaning belief systems.

but.

the truth is we absolutely should move away from “cancel culture” and towards  what i’m calling “good faith” culture. the way i propose this works will be demonstrated by calling out myself for something “problematic” i have done.

i have scratched a child in my care. it was not the first child i scratched, nor the last. she is worth mentioning because it was the deepest of the scratches, and, when asked if i would do it again, i absolutely would.

cancel culture: “tumblr user inkskinned literally thinks it’s okay to violently scratch children, like? she takes care of these kids and she fucking scratches them (and who knows what else if she’s so fucking confident in admitting that) and like she has even drawn blood in a few of these instances. these are 3 and 4 year olds we’re talking about. one child she scratched while she was forcibly restraining and she is even proud of that moment. she’s fucking disgusting and i’m sick knowing she still is a teacher. she blew off violence. cancelled.”

good faith culture: “okay, she admitted to scratching children. she did not say it was violently or on purpose. after talking to people who work/live with young kids, almost all of them admit that, at some point, you will accidentally scratch your child. this is because we are mammals with soft skin and claws, and, similar to accidentally scratching yourself with the edge of your nail, is very easy to do with a wiggly object, particularly young ones. i don’t know about the restraining situation, let me go look into the source. maybe she apologized?”

me myself and i: i absolutely did apologize after it happened. i also did forcibly hold a child, who was the one i injured. she had slipped past (? how? the world will never know) three teachers and six ropes and had gotten to an absolutely-off-limits-for-children area, climbed up the very small retaining wall, and was about to take a forty-foot drop off the other side. I literally snatched her out of the air, and, in doing so, caught my nail on her wrist. she did bleed, but i obtained stickers and a bandaid to cure that problem. 

cancel culture: “i find it extremely unlikely that a child could do that by themselves. probably she is a very bad teacher who let a child go somewhere they shouldn’t and get into this situation to begin with. on top of that, if she knows she can accidentally scratch a child, why weren’t her nails trimmed? no offense but she needs to quit her “activism” and step down. i also don’t fucking believe her apology when she said right there she would do it again. bandaids don’t solve the trauma she allowed to happen.”

good faith culture: “okay. children do this kind of thing all the time, because they are children. this situation is clearly one where yes, a bad thing happened, but she used reasonable care. since she actively does not try to hurt children, and she was actually trying to protect one (albeit clumsily), we can see she’s just a normal human being who was acting in good faith.”

the reason i propose good faith culture is because i find the majority of “cancelled” people are activists and/or minorities. these people are targeted for incredibly small altercations or behaviors, despite the fact that they’re acting in good faith. i know for a fact mras/alt-right ppl make fake “liberal” accounts that target these people using the language of cancel culture, because it’s easily picked up on - it’s explosive, passionate language without true sourcing (or out-of-context sourcing) that encourages knee-jerk reactions. this breeds infighting and cruelty when we need to be a unified front.

good faith culture also makes a line between “problematic” and “genuinely cruel/disturbing/etc”. you cannot abuse, threaten, or otherwise intentionally harm someone in good faith. this is intentionally to prevent the god-awful “ted bundy might have been problematic” phrasing i have seen. he was not problematic. he was the fucking problem.

meanwhile, it encourages positive behavior. okay, a person blundered. they apologized and seem to have continued to educate and rebuild themselves. they are acting in good faith. oh, actually they never apologized and continue doing this nonsense. this person is no longer acting in good faith. 

sure, call out people who are not acting in good faith. i agree. there are plenty who deserve it. but when you pick apart all media/efforts made by activists with a fine-tooth comb looking for something you can “cancel” the person on, you’re doing more harm than good. if the person spends their life trying to help homeless lgbt+ children get off the streets but accidentally takes in an abuser while doing so, they’re still net-good. they were acting in good faith, the abuser is at fault here. if a person spends their life making youtube videos and not once but twice uses a racial slur, they are not acting in good faith. unfortunately, we attack the first person more than the second.

people make mistakes all the time. none of us are perfect. shows can try their best to be good and representationally accurate and take a slight misstep, books can have one problematic trope - if theyre acting in good faith, okay. like, maybe fix it in the future, but okay.

Just today I saw a post that listed all these “non-vanilla” sexual acts and how you shouldn’t be shamed into trying them. But when you look past the dogwhistles, it was an anti-porn, kink-critical post made by a SWERF, and since most radical feminists are both, they were probably a TERF too. The OP even tagged it as radical feminist and kink critical. The implication of this post was that most men (when you see a post from a radfem you can assume the term “men” also includes trans women) are forcing cis women in their lives to have violent and kinky sex and that if you are consenting to and desiring this “bad” type of sex you are brainwashed and wrong.

The surface message is easy to agree with- you shouldn’t be coerced into trying a sexual act you’re not entirely comfortable with. The issue though is the dogwhistle- that cis women are being coerced (whether they actually consent to it or not) into trying anything that is not vanilla sex between cis lesbians. Obviously the dogwhistle statement is problematic and the surface message is not. But really!!! This is how dogwhistles work! Please learn to recognize them.