#queeragamic

[mosscoric]

A-Spec Relationship Lables

Queerplatonic: a term for a relationship that bends the rules for telling apart romantic relationships from non-romantic relationships. It typically goes beyond what is considered normal or socially acceptable for a platonic relationship but is not romantic in nature or does not fully fit the traditional idea of a romantic relationship.

Iodic: a term for aromantic and other a-spec people that can be used to describe their ideal relationship. an iodic person’s ideal relationship would be more emotionally involved than what’s typically associated with friendship in western society, and would have a similar level of closeness to what is typically associated with romance.

Callistic: a term for aromantic and other a-spec people that can be used to describe their ideal relationship. callistic describes a-spec people who do not want a queerplatonic relationship, close friendship, or anything similar.

Europic: a term for aromantic and other a-spec people that can be used to describe their ideal relationship. a europic person is somewhere inbetween callistic and iodic. their ideal relationship would be more emotionally involved than what’s typically associated with friendship in western society, but they do not want to completely committed to their partner.

Appromour: a type of relationship which is not quite a queerplatonic relationship but also not quite romantic. people in an appromour may desire or be comfortable expressing and performing a number of typically romantic activities, and they may live together or get married. it may look like and may be very close to a romantic relationship but is still decidedly not romantic.

Queeragamic: a term for a deep, emotional connection that transcends common conceptions of friendships and their importance but does not involve sexual acts.

Passionate Friendship: a nonsexual, nonromantic, emotionally and physically intimate relationship between friends. this friendship serves as a primary relationship, so if the people involved create a hierarchy of relationships in their lives, the passionate friendship is either their most important relationship or one of their most important relationships, entirely equal to the other most important. it can also be a relationship where it is unclear whether the feelings are “romantic” or “nonromantic” for one or more of the people involved.

Companionate: where one does not wish to have a romantic or sexual relationship but still wants a deep relationship with someone.

Wavership: a form of relationship where the exact type of relationship changes. for example, one day the relationship might be romantic, the next day it might be queerplatonic, a platonic bond another, and a soft romo relationship another day. wavership can also be used when the exact nature of a relationship isn't known by the people in the relationship, but they know it's a partnership of some kind.

Semiship: a term for relationship that is in a “gray area” of relationships. a semiship is a relationship that isn’t as committed or “deep” as relationships are expected to be, by the preference of those involved.

Softromo: a term used by a-spec communities to describe a relationship that is a "low level romantic relationship". it is typically somewhere in between a romantic relationship and queerplatonic relationship, with the parties having some amount of romantic feelings and/or romantic actions, but not fully, as seen in "normal" romantic relationships.

Delamour: a lover who one shares a bond that is so deep, so profound, that the word ‘love’ is just too simple. it’s not sexual, romantic, platonic, spiritual, or any single type of attraction (though it may share elements with them), nor is it simply a combination of multiple types. it’s beyond any label or category or trope of love.

[queerplatonicpositivity]

Oh hey, I didn't know you created queeragamic! Small world. Honestly I've always appreciated the term since I'm sex-repulsed and would feel most comfortable using a term like that to avoid any possibility of someone thinking my QPR was anything else. I haven't used it since I'm honestly scared of the people who hate on the term but I wanted to let you know people really vibe with it.

Hi, Anon! Thank you so much for this message. There's a lot of things I'd do differently if I could go back and approach the idea of a term like this again, but the actual idea that there can be a term like this is very important to me. I'm really happy it resonates with you and with other people, too. 💜

[shades-of-grayro]

If you’re paying attention to criticisms of the word queeragamic, I want you to consider something:

There’s an important difference between “I’m uncomfortable with people assuming that I have sex” and “I don’t want to be associated with people who have sex because I believe they are wrong/dirty.”

It’s a common enough ace experience to be uncomfortable with the idea that other people assume you are having sex. Feeling that discomfort is not in any way sex-shaming people who do choose to have sex.

Assuming that an ace person is somehow sex-shaming other people because they are personally uncomfortable with sex is textbook acephobia. Like that’s the oldest one in the book. And I’ve been seeing a lot of that from the aro community wrt this term, and I’m not happy about it.

Now, that’s not to say that people can’t express this feeling poorly -- they sometimes do. But the person who coined “queeragamic” did make it clear that it was about their personal discomfort, and people are willfully misinterpreting that at this point. If a person words this feeling badly, and makes a correction to clarify that they didn’t mean it that way, and you continue to choose to interpret it that way? That’s acephobic.

Anyway, I’m done with allo aros using their identity as a shield to say the exact same things about aces that exclusionists do. And I’m sad that other aces are falling for that nonsense.

(None of this is to say that I personally like the term queeragamic, I don’t. There are valid criticisms you could make about it, but this one? The one that most people are latching on to? It’s acephobic.)

[cat-prisun]

qprs aren’t like. romance lite they’re literally just queerplatonic relationships. relationships formed out of queerplatonic attraction. that’s it bro. people in a qpr could be allo ace, aroace, alloaro, allo acespec, allo arospec, or not even on the aspectrum at all, their partner could just be aspec.

like there’s nothing. inherent about a qpr. it’s like a non queerplatonic relationship, a romantic relationship for example. someone saying “this is my bf/gf/jf” doesn’t tell you anything more than they are dating romantically. it’s the same with a qpr. like are people making new terms for bf/gf/jf just because some people in them fuck and you want to specify you don’t?? no. bc that’s dumb.

tldr there’s no need for queeragamic because qprs aren’t “inherently” sexual. also sns but i don’t really care how allo aces feel about qprs bc it’s not about you anyways we’re including you in the term but it’s not your term lmao

[genderqueerpositivity]

A few attempts at queeragamic pride flag edits.

@queerplatonicpositivity

Bonus:

[officialaspec]

Now is as good a time as any to bring up the term "queeragamic," and the harm it's doing to the alloaro community.

[lovingitaromantic]

https://shades-of-grayro.tumblr.com/post/190413427190/thoughts-on-queeragamic

Here’s a post that explains the queeragamic situation and talks about the blog that coined the term (dab)

thank you so much!! here’s some info for y’all!

-Mod Ash 🐸

[arovaricious]

Genderqueerpositivity is one of the people that helped come up with "queeragamic"

I'm aware and I don't follow that blog anymore because of that reason. Other pride flags that have nothing to do with that, though, aren't an issue to me as they are otherwise an expansive resource for pride flags and edits.

[queerplatonicpositivity]

[ ID: Several pride flag phone lock screens. Each has confetti in the top left and bottom right corners and the phrase “The world is better with me in it” in cursive black font in the middle. Flags are queeragamic, queerplatonic, alloaro, alloace, aroace, oriented aroace, lithromantic, quoiromantic. END ID ]

Made some phone screens!  I’ve got a few different sets, and I’ll be queuing them to be released over the next couple days.  All of these design sets can be viewed here (link).  If you don’t see the flag you want, please be patient and see if it’s in another set.  If you don’t see the flag you want after I’m done posting them all, please DM me and ask. =D

[shades-of-grayro]

Thoughts on “queeragamic”

So, I initially wasn’t going to weigh in on this, but it seems there’s been some community conflict surrounding it. The current conversation seems a bit unproductive, and I wanted to weigh in with a more middle-of-the-road opinion to hopefully help us work towards a solution. 

To be clear, I’m only interested in good-faith efforts to listen to what others have to say, share thoughts and feelings, and look to how we can improve things moving into the future. If you’re interested in anything else, this is not the post for you.

Synopsis

Synopsis of the conflict below. Note that I’ve paraphrased a bit of it, but please read people’s own words and don’t assume that my paraphrasing is exactly how they would characterize the situation themselves.

@queerplatonicpositivity coined “queeragamic relationship” to mean “non-sexual queerplatonic relationship.” This was received negatively by alloaros, including @quiet-times [here] and @aro-allo-positivity [here], because they felt that this word was created due to not wanting to be associated with alloaros. @queerplatonicpositivity responded to the criticism here, here, and here.

Summary

I think this was handled badly on both sides.

While I believe that people have the right to use whatever words they’d like to describe their relationships, the wording of the original post coining queeragamic did have echoes of exclusionary rhetoric, and it is important to address that. However, the response trying to address this issue definitely crossed a line.

Is queeragamic harming people who have sex?

Does @queerplatonicpositivity have the right to call their relationship whatever makes them feel most comfortable? Yes. If this were framed as “I recently realized that I need a word to call my relationship that is explicitly non-sexual, and so I’ve coined a word for it” then I’d have zero issue with it. But it was framed as “I’ve just realized that people use this word for their relationships that are sexual, and that makes me uncomfortable” which echoes a lot of other exclusionary situations I’ve seen.

Here are a couple examples:

When that person tried to create a new aro flag because they didn’t like that the actual aro flag had a grey stripe that explicitly included people under the grayromantic umbrella.

I once had someone tell me that they felt excluded by the definition of asexuality that says “a person who doesn’t experience sexual attraction and/or desire” simply because it includes people who identify as ace due to not feeling sexual desire, when they do feel sexual desire, but not attraction.

There’s a pattern here of feeling excluded because others are included, and your post read really similarly to these things, even though I don’t think that’s what your intention was. Not to mention the context of aces feeling uncomfortable in shared ace and aro spaces due to allo aros simply existing. 

You can’t remove yourself from this context, and the way your post is written certainly looks exclusionary. I’d consider re-writing it using a different framing. As I said before, something like “I recently realized that I need a word to call my relationship that is explicitly non-sexual, and so I’ve coined a word for it.”

On calling the criticism “hate”

Several criticisms addressed the fact that @queerplatonicpositivity called their responses “hate.” And I feel obligated to point out that “hate” can be based on legitimate criticism. What makes something hate is not the criticism necessarily being invalid (though it sometimes is), but rather the tone and method of addressing the issue. 

Sending anon messages that start with “do you hate [identity]?” is definitely hate. Using a belligerent tone might suggest that something is hate. Posting something knowing your followers are also going to send anonymous angry messages to the person is hate. Anything where your intent is to make the other person feel bad rather than understand what they did wrong is hate. 

Addressing an issue in a way that is not hate looks like:

Explaining why you feel hurt by the other person’s words with the intent of them understanding your side

Listening to how the other person feels, and trying to help them find better ways of expressing those feelings in the future

Ceding on points where the other person is right

Possibly having this conversation privately if possible.

And even if you still object to the word “hate” to describe this, I’m sure we can at least agree that it’s not a productive way of fixing the problem.

On “Oversharing”

I think the above section addresses most of my issues with the way this was handled, but I also want to address these points made by @aro-allo-positivity, in the context of listing things that are “wrong” with queeragamic:

“Needlessly gives other people private information about your sex life”

“Needlessly telling people it’s not sexual enforces the exclusionist rhetoric that aces overshare about their sex lives”

“Coiner also said something along the lines of being tired of having to explicitly state that their qpr isn’t sexual. Which like. You definitely don’t have to do.”

“Especially to people who didn’t ask.”

“How weird would it be to introduce a romantic partner to someone and then say “we don’t have sex” like………”

This is entirely inappropriate. You are not ace, and the only one reinforcing exclusionist rhetoric that aces overshare about their sex lives is you. 

Some aces are uncomfortable with people assuming that their significant relationships are sexual, and there is nothing wrong with those aces making it clear that their relationships are not sexual. Yes, there is a time and a place, but nothing about this particular situation says “wrong time or place”.

When we respond to hate, we need to make sure we’re not doing it on the aphobe’s terms, or we’re going to accidentally end up hurting people. The reason this is wrong is the same reason it’s wrong when allo aces respond to aphobes by saying “asexual doesn’t mean aromantic.” In this situation, it’s bad that aphobes conflate identifying as asexual with sharing about your sex life. It’s ALSO bad that they’re saying that it’s always wrong to share that information.

That’s the dangerous trap with responding to aphobes or when talking about stereotypes in general. Stereotypes are always bad for two reasons 1) they make a generalization, and 2) they imply that the stereotypical trait is a bad thing (it’s not, in most cases at least). A lot of people accidentally perpetuate part 2 when trying to address part 1, and I think that’s what happened to you here. 

I suggest thinking about how you wish allo aces would make amends when they do something similar, like saying “asexual doesn’t mean aromantic” in this type of context, and correct yourself the way you wish they would.

And also, calling people weird is just generally not a good thing, and if you’re about to say that in the future, I’d take a second look and make sure you’re not hurting people with what you’re going to say.

Other thoughts

I do have a few other thoughts about the word “queeragamic”. Disclaimer that in this section I am not trying to tell other people how they can label themselves, but I also just don’t like the word.

First, I just really don’t like the word itself. Like, I absolutely hate that the word makes direct references to asexual reproduction on purpose. Also, the word “queerplatonic” comes from “queering” the “platonic”, so… this doesn’t follow that format? So I’m confused as to why the prefix “queer” is there. Because “agamic” isn’t an existing social structure that you could “queer”. 

Second, I do have some concerns about reasons why people want to use a word that means “non-sexual qpr”. Sometimes people in qprs make the mistake of assuming that their partner is on the same page as them with regards to what activities they are going to do in their relationship. It’s important to talk about boundaries in relationships and make sure you’re on the same page as your partner! I’m vaguely worried that people will use this term as a replacement for actual communication - no single word will ever be able to communicate exactly what you want in a relationship, so make sure to talk about whether you want sex, hand-holding, or anything else in your partnership regardless of what you call it.

Also, genuine question: is there a reason it’s important to have a specific name for this rather than just saying “non-sexual qpr”, which is much more likely to be understood without giving a vocab lesson (where you’ll end up saying that anyway), and relatively short as well? 

[beyond-mogai-pride-flags]

Polyvariangled Pride Flag

Polyvariangled (formerly ambivarioriented/equivarioriented): an individual who has various orientations for multiple relationships. For example, one may be asexual and alloromantic to one partner, whilst being aromantic and allosexual to another partner. This may also include tertiary attractions, such as platonic, sensual, or other.

Must have different orientations for different individuals

Must be polyamorous or biamorous

Similar to schrosespec. See also: singulu-, kena-, apres-, queerotic, queeragamic, schrö-.

Flag source

[neopronouns]

I was browsing your carrd, and I was wondering what was bad about queeragamic? (I'm sorry if this comes off as rude, im wholeheartedly not indending to be)

this blog has a ton of posts explaining the problem - basically, the coining post was alloarophobic, and when alloaros (and aros in general) criticized the coiner's attitudes towards sexual qprs, they continued to make (allo)arophobic remarks.

i don't think the concept behind the term is bad. 'queerplatonic relationship' covers a ton of experiences, and i think having subsets of that term is totally fine! it's just that the way it was coined was super shitty.

[officialaspec]

Your daily reminder that the term queeragamic is unnecessary and only makes queerplatonic relationships more confusing to allo people, on top of alienating to alloaros, primarily, but other aspec people too.

[autcore]

Hi, this may sound ignorant but I genuinely am really confused: why is the term foveo accepted, but the term queeragamic (?) isn't? I don't use either terms, but I remember seeing people get really upset over queeragamic (which is valid, it wasn't a great term), but the term foveo seems kind of similar but opposite? Idk, I would be really grateful for your thoughts on the matter, I may just be misinterpreting the definitions. Thank you in advanced!

So here are some definitions to refer to (off the top of my head):

Queerplatonic - non-romantic committed intimate relationship

Queeragamic - queerplatonic relationship with emphasis on a lack of sex in said relationship

Foveo - replacement term for "friends with benefits", a non-romantic sexual relationship

The online aro community was not keen on queeragamic for the following reasons:

Because queeragamic is derived from queerplatonic it automatically makes the two terms related. This results in them being seen as a set where queeragamic is the "non-sexual" partner term to queerplatonic. This implies a sexual nature to queerplatonic relationships (queerplatonic as a term isn't supposed to imply anything about sex, what QPPs do in their relationship is up to them.) This is a problem because there are plenty of people in non-sexual queerplatonic relationships, some of whom are children and teens. Need I explain why sexualising a relationship model that kids are using is bad? Even with the internet, terminology (and flag!) changes don't reach all corners of the community as quick as you'd expect. If queerplatonic was suddenly sexualised, many people wouldn't know and many kids would get shit for using a term that others view as inherently sexual.

In addition to this, the original post defining the term queeragamic was widely interpreted as having a sex-negative tone. (Sex negativity isn't the same as sex repulsion btw, sex negativity is the conservative attitude that sex is a Dirty Sinful Act that Good And Pure People don't talk about.) From an alloaro perspective, this looks a lot like someone saying "ew those dirty sex-having aros are making it so I can't use queerplatonic because someone might think I have gross loveless sex like them"

Foveo, on the other hand, didn't intend to redefine/replace a beloved community term. It was coined to replace a term that came from outside the a-spec community, so didn't modify another term just by existing. Also having a word that isn't frowned upon/seen as a joke for non-romantic sexual relationships is important! "Friends with benefits" is seen as something temporary that will inevitably end in romance or a ruined friendship. Being able to discuss our experiences with a single word rather than a phrase with amatonormative baggage is legitimising and it helps us communicate the sort of relationships we want.

But don't take my word as indisputable, I'm not a neutral party as I have a few opinions on queeragamic.

[genderqueerpositivity]

(Image description: angled aroace, oriented aroace, tertiary attraction, queeragamic, queerplatonic, alterous attraction, aroace, akoisexual, nebularomantic, and quoisexual pride flags with the words "it's my identity and I get to choose the labels" centered in white and black text.)

[positively-queerplatonic]

About

hello i’m max and this is my queerplatonic blog!

i wanted to have a space where queerplatonic stuff could live, since the main blog i saw took a sour turn.

feel free to “spam” like or reblog, i do not mind at all

my pronouns are they/he

before you follow:

i support/believe in:

black lives matter

acab

stop asian hate

mspec-lesbians/gays

reclamating queer

mogai and liom

aspec people are lgbt

neopronouns

xenogenders and neogenders

i do not support

anti-black lives matter or “blue/all lives matter”

racistism, antisemitism, islamophobia, xenophobia

homophobia/transphobia/lgbtphobia/queerphobia

terfs/gender critical/transmed or any transmisogynist (here we love and support all our trans siblings)

pro-ship/anti-anti

map/no-map/pear/🍐/pedophile or whatever these creeps are calling themselves

pro-ana/eating disorder

aphobe, acephobe and/or arophobe (why are you here??)

battleaxe-bi or anti mspec identities

anti-neopronouns

anti-mogai

queeragamic or its creator/s