Rest in peace to the touch starved arospec and/or aspecs. You deserve more hugs.

"being queer is about love" hmm actually being queer is about defying societal norms about gender and sexuality and does not depend on feeling love at all

happy lesbian visibility week

i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim

It's always "I may be aromantic but I still love my friends!" and never "I'm aromantic, but that does not mean I have to 'make up' for the love I 'lost' or am 'missing out on' by loving friends or family."

this year my challenge for everyone is to unlearn the association between love and morality. love is not something that is inherently morally good, and the absence of love is not something that is inherently bad. sex without love isn't morally bankrupt, it's just an action. people without love aren't less kind or less good, they're just people. when we can get past this false (and often unnoticed) dichotomy of good love/evil lovelessness then i think we are going to be able to take leaps and bounds in sex positivity, aro advocacy, certain discussions of mental health...

It feels impossible sometimes to talk about your experiences as an asexual person without getting lumped in with purity culture because it’s somehow simultaneously true that society hates sex and puts sex everywhere so both people who want to express their sexuality and people who don’t want to participate in it end up having knee-jerk reactions to each other because we’ve all built up defense mechanisms ready to trigger at a moments notice so you try to talk about how sex and romance is everywhere and inescapable and you don’t wanna be involved with it and then people blame you for the kink at pride discourse when you weren’t even thinking about that

Reminder that jkr basically funds a large portion of the terf movement in the UK and promoting harry potter and actively giving her money is helping fund that movement and is actively encouraging her and her followers because they see this as support

Stop adding in the tags for ways for people to engage in this content without giving her money when i explicitly stated that promoting harry potter also helps support this movement its really shitty to see people turn around and go “okay but you can still engage and promote this content but this way because were only helping it stay relevant and not giving her money”

Since I apparently wasn’t clear enough JKR will not be deplatformed as long as Harry Potter continues to remain relevant and people are still reblogging this with tags with ways to promote the series it’s really disheartening that a fucking book series is more important than the safety of trans people

JKR claims that the number of Harry Potter fans is proof of how many people support her transphobic views. Literally, any time you post HP content, JKR considers it a statement that you're "team terf." Do what you will with this information.

Happy International Asexuality Day!

What the fuck is the magnus archives

A Better Explination for Queer Platonic Relationships

This post is gonna be very 101, so if you’re already pretty familiar with aro terms and don’t want to sit through all the definitions and explanations I have another post here that’s basically a very condensed version of this one.  

Anyways, I think the reason that a lot of non-aromantic people don’t understand queerplatonic relationships is that qpps as a concept are not just a type of relationship, but also a response to amatonormativity.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, amatonormativity is the societal view of romantic monogamous relationships as both the most important relationships you can have and as the end goal for happiness. While this norm disproportionately affects aromantic and non-monogamous people, it also has some very negative effects on people outside of these groups. If you’ve ever experienced peer or familial pressure to get a romantic partner when you didn’t want one, lost touch with a friend because they got a partner and stopped putting as much time into maintaining your friendship, or been told by a romantic partner that you needed to stop interacting with a close friend because they felt threatened by your friendship then you’ve experienced the negative effects of amatonormativity. This is not an aromantic specific issue, however, in this post, I will be discussing it within the context of aromantic terms and experiences.

For many aromantic people, there is a fundamental fear that all of their close friends will pair off into romantic relationships and they will be left alone. This fear comes from amatonormativity. If there was no expectation that people would prioritize romantic relationships over friendships then there would be no real need for people who don’t want/can’t have romantic relationships for whatever reason to fear being left alone and isolated from the support of other people.

I think this fear is one of the main reasons queerplatonic relationships exist in the first place. Sure, there are different types of platonic relationships with varying degrees of intimacy and commitment that aro people could participate in, but I think that if you look at how queerplatonic relationships are talked about you’ll find that aromantic people lean towards qpps because they are more then just another type of platonic relationship.

Qpps come in all shapes and sizes. They can be monogamous or polyamorous, involve lots of physical intimacy or very little, include lots of romantically coded things like dates, marriage, and living together, or be closer to the traditional view of friendship. The spectrum of what counts as a qpp is in fact so big that the term becomes almost impossible to define. The one unifying thread that I can see among all these different types of qpps is that they’re platonic relationships that still involve a high level of commitment. 

Essentially the only agreed upon factor here is that the relationship is platonic, but a commitment has been made somewhere along the lines to not abandon one another for a romantic partner, everything beyond that is pretty up in the air. This isn’t the definition you’re likely to get from those “what is a qpp” posts, but spend 5 minutes scrolling threw some popular aro blogs and it becomes incredibly apparent. I’ve seen people joke that “queerplatonic partners are like friends that don’t abandon me for their boyfriends” or that “all my friends got dates so I had to find a qpp”. These statements, while kind of morbidly funny on some level, do point to a larger trend. While most relationship categories are defined by level of intimacy, qpps are more of a commitment to break amatonormative social norms with someone you’re close to.

And if we’re going to agree that that’s what a queerplatonic relationship is, and for the purposes of this post we are, then it suddenly becomes very clear that the aromantic community is doing ourselves a huge disservice when we try to define qpps without talking about amatonormativity, or in some cases, even mentioning the aromantic community at all.  

There is a reason that queerplatonic originated in the aromantic community. There is a reason that qpp is an aro term. Non-aro people simply don’t have the same experience with relationships that aro people do, so they don’t have the context necessary to understand why we would need qpps in the first place. 

I think this is where a lot of the “aren’t qpp’s just friendships?” questions come from. Sure, there are people out there who just want to make fun of every aro/ace term and identity, and that is part of why the ‘don’t you mean friends’ response has become so popular, but in this case I really think a lot of it’s due to the fact that we’ve explained qpps so poorly. Someone who isn’t aro, and who hasn’t felt the devastating effects of your friends drifting away into romantic relationships while you can’t have one/ don’t want one, isn’t going to understand why aro people would need a whole new type of close, emotional, platonic relationship when just plain old friendship has worked fine for them. Without the context of amatonormativity and the experience of being aro, qpp’s becomes almost nonsensical, and when we leave those things out of our definitions of qpps people aren’t going to understand what we’re talking about. 

We need to do a better job of explaining queerplatonic relationships because otherwise, people are going to continue misunderstanding what they are. 

The word “queerplatonic” was initially coined by kaz on DreamWidth.org, back before the presence of Tumblr in online aromantic communities. You can read the development of both the terms “queerplatonic” and “zucchini” here: https://kaz.dreamwidth.org/238564.html (just throwing this on in case anyone is interested in the origins of the word!)

Yo! I was looking for this information and I couldn’t find it anywhere, thank you so much!

Relationship Anarchy

Amatonormativity

Polycule

QPRs

ID from alt: [An edited version of xkcd 2501 that read: Person 1: Relationship anarchy is second nature to us aromantics, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the definition of amatonormativity and one or two types of polycule. Person 2: And QPRs, of course. Person 1: Of course. Footnote: Even when they're trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person's familiarity with their field.]

Relationship Anarchy sorta explained

You asked, so I shall do my best to explain. Let's keep in mind that I quite literally learned about the existence of relationship anarchy a day ago so take all of this with a massive grain of salt lol but here we go:

Western society has lots of rules of how each relationship is supposed to look/operate.

Friends aren't supposed to raise kids together, merge finances, etc. That's only for married couples.

People who are romantically intertwined are supposed to kiss, have sex, etc. and eventually end up married.

The ideal romantic partner is someone who can fulfill most if not all of your emotional, physical, and sexual needs, and anything less is a sign of incompatibility.

There's also the relationship hierarchy that society upholds—or the "relationship escalator."

At the bottom is friends, then romantic partners, then spouse.

The more intimate you become with a friend, the more likely people are to assume you want to be romantic with them—i.e they assume you're moving up the escalator.

The more intimate you become with a romantic partner, the more likely you are to get questions about when you're going to "take the next step" and get married.

Lots of rules, lots of expectations. And relationship anarchy (RA) basically says "no 💙"

RA basically refers to a deliberate rejection of these social norms. No rules and no inherent hierarchy.

Instead, partners decide amongst themselves what they want their relationships to look like.

Here's a nifty graph to help visualize this:

You can be friends who rely on each other as primary sources of emotional and sexual fulfillment. Life partners, but you don't have sex or romance at all.

You can be sexually, romantically, emotionally fulfilled by one person but still just be two people loving and experiencing each other with no need for labels or the expectation of any "escalator" progression towards marriage or anything else.

Essentially, you build relationships buffet style, and each relationship is as significant in your life as you want it to be and they all serve whatever role you want them to serve. These relationships can be monogamous or polyamorous or anything in between.

Totally up to you.

I think we could all benefit from a local train line having a stop within about a half mile of our house

A half mile was choose as that's brought the fartherest people are willing to walk to get somewhere comfortably as a result, if we want to build a metro or regional rail system, then we as planners want to concentrate as much density as possible within that half mile radius for the maximum amount of riders.

And of course to distribute the benefits of living near transit stops to as many people as possible

the humble "like" is oft mocked despite what it does for us. "like, three people" is a vastly different statement from "three people". "and i was like 'what the fuck'" is vastly different from "and i said 'what the fuck'". i love you "like" and anyone who says you make people sound stupid will be killed on sight

With great power (aromanticism) comes great responsibility (destroying romance with my bare hands)

an aromantic person is someone who (fill in the blank here) // april 10 2024

I used to make random queer positivity posts and got harassed for it to the point where I felt like there wasn’t any point anymore. Especially in lesbian tags.

That’s kinda fucked up.

TERFs seem to frequent the tumblr lesbian tags a lot.

Anyway, all kinds of lesbians are good. Trans lesbians, ace lesbians, aro lesbians, oriented aroace lesbians, bi/pan/mspec lesbians, nonbinary lesbians, he/him lesbians, they/them lesbians, neopronoun lesbians, lesbians of color, disabled lesbians, intersex lesbians, polyamorous lesbians, and lesbians who have had relationships with men in the past that were positive despite not experiencing attraction to men and are struggling with their identities or whether or not they’re “allowed” to consider themselves homosexual now (you absolutely are).

You’re loved here.