Quoiro/WTFromantic: a brief timeline of disidentification with & personal rejection of romantic orientation

[Note: this post has been crossposted to Pillowfort.]

Since I’ve been thinking lately on the topics of those-who-struggle-with-labels and the process of getting new terms to take root, I decided I’d put together a brief timeline of one specific subset of that: disidentification with and personal rejection of romantic orientation.

Featured in this post: the coinage and meaning of wtfromantic, the subsequent coinage and meaning of quoiromantic, some discussion over competing definitions, and a sampling of personal reflection posts on the topic demonstrating its continued relevance over the past eight years. Formatted by year, with select text excerpts in blockquotes.

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Insecurities and Consent

For some people, asking for consent feels like asking someone their opinion of your inherent desirability and maybe even your worth. Rejection of an activity can feel like a rejection of your entire self.

This is a problem. It’s not healthy for your entire relationship to be on the line every time you ask someone for sex. You need and deserve to be secure in your own desirability and worth without relying on the unpredictable sexual urges of other people to maintain that security. Your partners need and deserve the space to say “no” freely and without emotional pressure. […]

Plan ahead of time how you can work through these feelings without making your partner feel punished or obligated to change their mind. If you have a regular partner, it might be good to let them know about your insecurities and how you plan to handle your response, so they know, for instance, that if you need to go for a walk or take some alone time, you’re not punishing them and you don’t want them to change their mind to placate you – that you know it’s your responsibility to work through your feelings and that you’ve got it handled.

You can also preempt some of these insecurities by working on finding other ways to feel good about your body or to feel close and connected to another person in a way they do freely consent to.

–TDF, “Insecurities and Consent”

Today I’ve added this as recommended reading onto my sex-as-worth principle post.

PF Promo

I’ve talked some on here about Pillowfort.io and what I see in it, both in this short post and in this Carnival of Aces post, so I just thought I’d let y’all know that their Kickstarter is currently over 80% funded and has a little more than a week left to go.

While I understand having reservations, I’ve really enjoyed my time there so far, and there’s been a lot of discussion about how Pillowfort’s similar and different features encourage a different social dynamic from what a lot of us are used to (for instance: in this comment section and several other places, I’ve seen PF users mention that the site’s features have helped them participate in a lot more interaction and real conversations).

That interactivity, in addition to PF Staff’s responsiveness and PF’s anti-harassment tools, makes Pillowfort.io worth looking at if you are another beleaguered ace tired of the status quo. Aces have talked about the problems with AVEN at length and have talked about how Tumblr has become a hostile environment (in general, and for aces in particular) with the way a post of yours can easily spin out of control and get you flooded with harassment. Suffice to say, there are a lot of elements in play over on Pillowfort that I think can significantly alter those dynamics that by now feel so ingrained. For instance, how would you like it if, upon deciding one of your posts was a bad idea, clicking “delete” on one of your posts also deleted the reblog-copies off the blogs of anyone who had reblogged it? And deleting it literally deleted it from the whole site, not just from your own blog? You could actually make sure that no one ever saw it again. Or, one better, what if you wanted to put the post back up again but keep it away from unfriendly eyes? What if you could keep parts of your blog public while also setting an individual post to “viewable to mutuals only”? Can you imagine how that would change the game?

…And that’s only some of what I value about Pillowfort. I meant for this to just be a short two-sentence “hey check out the kickstarter” post but once I get going talking about this place, it feels like there’s so much to say. But please, check it out and see for yourself.

At the moment, PF is still in closed beta and will remain so even for a time after the Kickstarter, but beta invites can still be obtained via the Kickstarter for the next few days for just $5, and if you want you even can use the demo account right now for free. So you’re invited to take a look around!

Watching through the window vs. closing the blinds and building a pillowfort

This post is for the July Carnival of Aces, on the theme of “then and now.”

In the past five years or so, my relationship to the ace community has changed, gradually. There’s a difference between saying that and saying that the ace community has changed, and I don’t think I’m in touch enough now (or have ever been) to confidently make a case like that… but, because there are so many bloggers I know who are burned out on ace discussions or dead sick of the usual unmerry-go-round, I also know I’m not alone in feeling tired, and drifting, and withdrawing, and sometimes, closing the blinds. But this isn’t a post about being jaded and frustrated with the state of things (as fair as those posts are). This is also a post about changing my online practices to better suit what I actually want out of ace blogging, and how that’s still a work in progress for me.

Academics sure are bad at talking about abstinence, huh

lol nothing like a little academic reading on “purity culture” to reopen some old baggage

[cn: conservative Christian talk, anti-ace stuff, discussion of rape (fictional and political)]

Where did this “gray-asexual flag” come from?

Let me walk you through this series of events: I visited Rowan’s and Queenie’s blog and saw these two posts within a short timeframe of each other, so I thought, oh, looks like Redbeard’s been making graphics, I wonder what else he’s uploaded lately. Turns out: animated flags. Flags which I mostly recognized, except for… one, labeled as a “gray-asexual flag.”

What?

For your convenience, I’ll skip over the “I thought gray-aces already had a flag” reaction and jump straight to these other parts:

Asexual academic articles?

This seems like a good place to ask: if someone were writing a rhetorical studies article on (perceptions of) asexuality, do you know of any academic work you would expect to see cited? –or think it’s important to have read? Not necessarily the definitional “what is asexuality, who are asexuals” type of thing, but more in relation to broader culture or other subcultures. I know there are a few pages out there with asexuality bibliographies and such, but I’m not assuming that stuff’s up to date.

Right doesn’t equal sexy.

There’s already a lot of debate around the ethics of engaging with (and, specifically, enjoying) unethical pieces of media (…however that might be defined). This isn’t about that so much.

This post is about the opposite.

Content Notes: sexuality and porn talk (non-explicit); morality & pleasure talk, including possible scrupulosity triggers.

2017-2018

ftr: on certain popular ace character interpretations

Still can’t brain enough for any of the full posts I want to do but I hope everybody realizes that the “people interpreting a character like BBC Sherlock as ace” phenomenon and the “people responding to asexual identity with ‘what, you think you’re better than us?'” phenomenon have something to do with each other.