officialaspec

[officialaspec]

"tbh we might have clowned on [aros & aces] a lil too harshly" bigotry. the term you're looking for is bigotry. denying communities their vocabulary and ability to safely exist because you think you're the personal arbiter of which identities are "valid" is bigotry. minimizing and infantilizing and harassing entire groups of people based on their orientation is bigotry. aphobia isn't some forgettable phase of being cringe as a teenager, it's bigotry that inflicted long term damage to these communities.

[officialaspec]

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

[officialaspec]

2022's Ace Week Proclamations are starting to roll in! Pennsylvania is back for the third time, joined by first timer Wisconsin!

[officialaspec]

Thinking of coining a new label: arofog / acefog. I'm not super sure of the name yet, so I'd love any suggestions! I was going to base the name on fog, due to the foggy, misty, or cloudy feeling of one's attraction. I may also just call it quoiflux if that term doesn't yet exist. Please let me know which you prefer!

EDIT: I'm definitely leaning more towards quoiflux, which can be used as a definition for arospec or acespec people.

Definition:

Basically it's kind of a mixture of quoi- and -flux, wherein the user feels like they are on the aro or ace spectrum, but their feelings are hard to pin down and determine. They may feel as if they fluctuate between different labels, like -flux, but are not always able to describe their feelings or say what labels they are. Quoiflux people may also feel like they identify with multiple labels all at one time, with varying levels of intensity. This can fluctuate rather quickly, sometimes with multiple labels feeling right in one day. Essentially, it would be used by people who have strong aspec feelings that can be hard to pin down and describe and may vary depending on the day or one's mood. These terms do include gray- and demi- labels, as someone who is quoiflux can experience romantic or sexual attraction at some point, just like with these two identities.

Please let me know what you guys think! I need feedback for this, and any help would be wonderful!

!!!Exclusionists/Aphobes Do Not Interact!!!

[officialaspec]

Trying to figure out if you’re ace or aro can be so goddamn hard because it’s like, trying to find the absence of something. Imagine you’re at a pond and you want to know if there are any turtles, or fish. Say you find a turtle and you’re like “great! Now I know there are turtles.” Or a fish, now you know for sure there are fish. Or you find both, and now you know for a fact there are both turtles and fish in the pond.

But like, if you don’t find any turtles it might be that there are no turtles or maybe you’re just really shitty at looking for turtles and maybe you THINK you saw a turtle over there or maybe it was just a stick. Maybe there are only a few turtles. Maybe you need to do something special to find the turtles. Maybe a bunch of these rocks are actually turtles but you couldn’t tell them apart. Maybe there are no turtles. You have no idea. Meanwhile some people are saying “Oh there have to be turtles! You’ll find them eventually ;)” or “How many turtles have you found in your pond?” or “Try planting some vegetables at the shore to attract the turtles.” Or “Oh no! What disaster happened to your pond that there are no turtles?” And you’re just standing there wet with an empty net and a tired expression.

But whatever because whether there are turtles or fish or not your pond’s ecology works just fine without them because that’s what eco-communities do they form a system around what they have. You aren’t missing anything if you don’t have turtles you just have a pond system without turtles. If someone tried to change you by pouring a bunch of turtles into your pond it would probably fuck something up.

So you don’t have to be entirely sure. You don’t have to search every inch of the damn pond before you can decide there are probably no turtles. If you want to take the aro or ace label because you think it fits go for it. And if you do find your turtles you can rename the pond. That’s fine.

[officialaspec]

my problematic aro opinion of the day is that that trope where romance focused queer media has the one aro character whose main interests are shipping/matchmaking and who exists to provide perfect fixes and advice for the romantic leads then disappear as soon as they’re no longer needed is literally just the gay best friend trope but applied to a different part of the community and it is not, in fact, good representation

[officialaspec]

So you said queer history didn't start with Stonewall, which is not even surprising at all. However, that's all I've ever been told, so I don't know anything about the time before Stonewall. Do you have a tag, a masterpost, or some articles or something for me to read so I can learn about queer history before Stonewall? And I'm sorry if this comes off as rude or anything; I just genuinely want to learn the untold history of the community I'm a part of. Thanks 😊

First, thank you for coming to us, you didn’t come off as rude at all. 

Well, we don’t have a tag or masterpost, but I can create a list of articles we have up at this point (May 14, 2018) that focuses on queer subjects from before Stonewall.

Sappho, the Poetess

Kristina, King of Sweden

Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, and Occam’s Razor

Josephine Baker, a Woman with Eclectic Talents

Queer Women and AFAB People During the Holocaust

Magnus Hirschfeld, the Founder

Institute of Sexology, a Place of Learning

San Domino, Gay Island

The Bitten Peach and the Cut Sleeve

The End of the World War 2 Series

Vita Sackville-West: Creating a Legacy

Langston Hughes: the Poet

The Marriage of Jane and Paul Bowles

Bjornstjerne Bjornson, the Advocate

Osh-Tisch, the Warrior

The Trials of Oscar Wilde

Sir Ewan Forbes, the Doctor

Frida Kahlo: Lover of Self and Others

Albert D.J. Cashier

The Golden Orchid

Queen Christina, Queer Codes and Queer Coding (Part 2)

Queen Christina, Queer Codes and Queer Coding(Part 1)Different from the Others, the Beginning

The Story of the Ladies of Llangollen

Wilfred Owen: Dating Your Heroes (And Writing Through Hard Times)

Virginia Woolf: Struggling (And Never Being Perfect)

Tamara de Lempicka’s Legacy

Tamara de Lempicka’s Life

Federico Garcia Lorca: Words that Scared a Country

Bricktop, and the Happy Ending

Bricktop, the Fabulous

Frank Kameny

Sophia Parnok, Russia’s Sappho

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Alan L. Hart, Part 2

Alan L. Hart, Part 1

Defining Identities in North America, Part 2

Defining Identities in North America, Part 1

Alan Turing

Hatshepsut

Hamish Henderson

Elagabalus, the Empress

Billy Tipton and the Question of Gender

Takatāpui

Yukio Mishima

Kitty Genovese

Catherine Bernard: A question in studying asexual history

György Faludy

Edward Carpenter

Dawn Langley Hall

Zimri-Lim, King of Mari

Coccinelle

Lesbia Harford

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Frieda Belinfante Part 2 

Frieda Belinfante Part 1

Eleanor Rykener

Redefining the Dandy: The Asexual Man of Fashion

I hope this helps! 

[officialaspec]

Some people will be like "ace people bring up the fact they're ace too much it's annoying blah blah blah" like you realize how you sound right. We all make jokes abt our sexualities/genders on here CONSTANTLY you just don't like it when ace people do it. Maybe you should think abt why that is

[officialaspec]

i hate how stuff like "op is a homophobe" or "op is a transphobe" or "op is a biphobe" are (rightfully!!!) taken seriously and treated as useful information to avoid giving bigots a platform. but saying "op is an aphobe" is treated as haha funney meme cringe

[officialaspec]

Except it's really not that deep? I hate to break it to you but a huge part of folklore is how stories evolve to adapt with the experiences of the people telling them. That's the nature of oral story telling: every generation who tells it adds something relevant to their time, so over time these stories can mean multiple things. Yes, sirens originally used a person's perfect ideal world to "seduce," but many modern adaptations of sirens portray them as literally seductive in the sexual way, so making jokes referencing that version of sirens is not wrong. Acting like the people who created these stories are all-wise and ever knowing is... sort of weird, because they were literally just people too, and people create stories and monsters to make sense of the world around them and their own fears (fears that, by the way, do in fact change and evolve over time, thus warping and changing the stories that go with them).

Also, saying that aces making these jokes because of common misconceptions and the shifting of folkloric stories is "the height of hubris" is a massive yikes.

Some people will be like "ace people bring up the fact they're ace too much it's annoying blah blah blah" like you realize how you sound right. We all make jokes abt our sexualities/genders on here CONSTANTLY you just don't like it when ace people do it. Maybe you should think abt why that is

[officialaspec]

I really wish people would understand that there are other forms of queer rep besides two same gendered people kissing.

A queer character is queer rep regardless of their romance or a lack thereof even. Ace and aro people exist. Trans people exist. Bi people exist. Queer characters are rep by existing, not just by who they interact with. If a character is nonbinary, they are queer rep whether they kiss someone or not. A bi character in a relationship with someone a different gender is still queer rep because they are still bi. Queer characters can even just be friends with one another. They can be single! And still be queer because that’s who they are not who they do!

This whole trend of deciding if art is valid representation based on romance and ships is reductive and dismissive of identities existing within individuals. And of the communities that we all need.

Just please, stop reducing entire identities down to relationships. Its all good and fun to enjoy your ships, but you have to remember the community is bigger than just romances.

[officialaspec]

hate when ships get super popular and then become prioritized over aspec headcanons, and i don’t just mean ppl think their interpretation is correct and everyone else is wrong, im talking about extremely toxic and hateful vitriol that pollutes fandom spaces and makes them unfriendly and even hostile toward aspecs. i hate this especially when the character has very clear aro/ace coding and subtext and everyone will just be like “no you’re wrong AND homophobic they have CHEMISTRY” yeah sometimes that’s called friendship. like idk how to convince people that if a character is all but canonically aroace and the only ambiguity is that they just haven’t said the word aloud and you just. erase that aspect of their identity, that’s aphobic. idc if you’re like “yeah they’re aspec and in a relationship” or “i think they’re gay but i respect your interpretation” that’s all fine and good. but im just asking y’all to stop acting like aro-ace characters are somehow lesser or that your interpretation will “fix” them.

anyway im just tired of romantic relationships being positioned over platonic ones. i like shipping as much as the next person (okay, maybe a bit less than the next person) but sometimes they’re just friends. let aro/ace people have some sort of rep and stop acting like all of our headcanons are wrong or bad. you’re ruining fandom for all of us <3

[officialaspec]

not to be aro on main but the romanticization of love my beloathed

[officialaspec]

No offense but a lot of you guys are fully supportive of ace people and aro people until one of us makes you feel a little bad about how the world literally revolves around sex and romance.

[officialaspec]

Okay but people really need to realize how wrong it actually is to say ‘you’ll find someone eventually’ when that person clearly said they don’t want to find anyone and that they’re already perfectly happy with their life.

If those same people told me they’re in a happy relationship and I responded to that with ‘you’ll break up eventually’ I bet they wouldn’t like that. They’d literally get so confused and be like ‘Okay sure, there is always a possibility but why bring it up so randomly when it's totally irrelevant right now.’ and that is exactly how we feel! What matters is how we feel and what we want now and not what possibly might happen in the future, especially if it’s not even likely to happen. Why is it so hard to simply accept that someone doesn’t want that change in their life and be happy for them just like they’re happy for you when you’re in a relationship?

Imagine if we told them that thinking relationships make them happy is just a phase and that they’ll realize how being single makes them a lot more fulfilled (just like how they tell us that ‘the one’ will make us change our mind). I mean, I’m sure there are people out there who do come to that realization just like there are also people who eventually realize they do want to date which is valid, of course. What is actually wrong is making unnecessary assumptions and invalidating someone’s lifestyle solely because it’s different from yours. It’s not that they are simply stating the change is possible, they actually think it will undoubtedly happen and change your life for the better because they believe their lifestyle is superior to your current one. That’s the real problem.

Instead of forcing your lifestyle on someone, you just simply need to learn that no lifestyle is superior to the other, so even if it does change it doesn’t mean their previous one was any less valid or inferior to yours. That’s literally all people need to realize in order to respect us instead of expecting the change in our lives that doesn't need to happen.

[officialaspec]

Hey, I was wondering if I fit the definition of quoiflux, and figured you were the best person to ask since you coined it. I'm thinking of identifying as quoifluxomniemotional (if that's allowed, can I combine quoiflux with other terms?) Anyway, I identified as alico-before finding quoiflux, but I think this fits me. I feel like my type of emotional attraction changes. I relate to demi- the most, because I generally fit that. However, I also feel like bits of fray-, akoi-, grey-, flux-, spike-, dello- etc. It seems to change at random, sometimes depends on the person, and is a mix of those identities. The closer the bond I form with someone, the more stable my attraction gets, but I don't think it's ever completely stable. It's all confusing and it's hard to figure out how I feel most of the time. Does this sound like quoiflux?

Sorry if this was asked a while ago, I've been busy with real life things and haven't been on!

To answer your questions: yes, quoiflux can be combined with any other labels or modifiers you wish; and that sounds like you fit quoiflux to me! I created quoiflux to be on any spectrum (romantic, sexual, platonic, aesthetic, etc), so if you feel like you can't pin down your exact label on any a-spectrum, then you are more than welcome to use quoiflux as a label for yourself! To tell you the truth, I myself coined the label because I fluctuate between relating to several different aro labels but never fully identified with them all the time.

I hope this helps you!

[officialaspec]

U know when a female character shows lack of attraction to men and everyone goes "she's aroace" "no she's lesbian" those r both valid headcanons but going "let's compromise and make her an ace lesbian" is terrible. You can hc her as ace lesbian if u want but its not a "compromise." And why is it never aro lesbian? Anyway idk where I'm going with this but let aro ppl have aro headcanons

Both headcanons are valid and both should be respected. Aros, aces, and lesbians are all severely underrepresented so of course we will all reach for the few characters we can see ourselves in. We don't all have to agree and we definitely don't need to change our headcanons in order to agree.