aro blog from??? an aro??? @arokassim - Tumblr Blog

So your "aces and aros" group only consists of alloaces and aroaces? That doesn't really sound like the right place for me, then.

Oh, no, my bad, you're totally right that it won't change unless somebody's the first alloaro and it might as well be me. Haha no, it was really silly of me to not want to be the vanguard for once. Of course I must be okay with being the only alloaro in the group and getting all the weird looks and questions. What was I even thinking, that I don't want to always have to be the one to speak up and point out how something alienates or even excludes non-ace aros? Perish the thought. Obviously that's forever my duty and I should be glad you've reminded me of that.

Oh btw your group chat's icon is a dragon on an ace of spades with the ace flag colours in the background. No, it's fine, I'm feeling super welcome here 🙃

grovylelover

aromanticofficial

official aromantic post

moonsandloons

Not only should we normalize the idea that aromantic people can be in relationships that are purely sexual and it’s not manipulative or weird to have sex with someone you don’t feel romantically towards, we also have to normalize that sex without romance can be soft and kind and LONG LASTING! Just because a relationship is sexual that doesn’t mean it’s just a one night stand or a temporary thing. That can be a commitment if you want it to be.

fucknugg3t

I typed aromantic man on my computer frowned when it went red went to check what was up knowing how my phone corrects it to romantic man my fucking phone putting words in my mouth I fucking hate my phones autocorrect but no no this pure creature just wanted to capitalize it to Aromantic man computer sir I love you you’re right I deserve to type it with a capital letter I love you computer I don’t care how old you are I’m never throwing you away you’re everything Mr computer

aropride

being a non partnering aro is great because we have way more time for the killings

aropride

i love this website i just feel so understood here

joelywoely

like to think this is why op's sc is green

strawberry-crocodile

marriage is insane. people will really be like "if you really love me youll sign this legal document binding our finances together"

strawberry-crocodile

marriage is taught to kids and talked about as like the ultimate form of love, the natural endgame for a relationship, but functionally, it is primarily an economic contract. bind together your finances, be able to adopt, get to decide what happens when the other dies. but all this legal bullshit is still tied to, like, expectations of living together, romantic and sexual monogamy, labor from the woman (we know marriage is built For The Hets, right?), social stuff. pinkie promise im the only person youll fuck ever and we can buy a house.

kinda fucked up is all im sayin.

strawberry-crocodile

to be clear im not saying never get married, im saying marriage id a crass, practical legal procedure and should be dome for crass, practical legal reasons. and never marry a man who won't do dishes.

aroace-avenue

I want old aros so badly. I want a history. I want a future. I want tales of lives that I understand. I want to see myself in a future where I’m happy and comfortable.

But I don’t have that, so I’ll have to build it.

blood-on-my-french-fries

I’ve got a story!

When I told my grandmother’s friend group about aromanticism most of them didn’t understand, they were polite and asked a lot of questions, some didn’t really believe it bc well, people in their 70s are rarely that open minded; but there was this one lady that looked pensive and when the others quieted down she asked me if the name for it had existed long, and when I said no she told me about her best friend:

A 74 year old woman who had married young, back when my country was in a fascist dictatorship and women couldn’t have/make their own money, so their only hope was marriage. They lived together years, and I’m not sure if they had children, but as soon as it was legal for her to divorce she did, and, living in a small town, she faced her neighbours’ questions and judgement: Was he a bad husband? Did he cheat or treat her badly? Was it the other way around? He wasn’t “man enough”? And many less nice things.

Her answer to all of them was that her now ex husband was a wonderful man, and that they’d remain friends as they’d always been, because on her side that’s all there could be, because she didn’t find it in herself to love, not him nor any man or woman, but still cared deeply for him as she did for all her friends.

She now lives happily in retirement, traveling around the country with her friends, ex husband included, and also has a cat.

When the lady told me this she sounded doubtful at first, afraid she was appropiating but when I told her that the experience sounded like those on our community she looked so happy, and kindly asked me to write down the terms and what they mean on a paper so she could show her friend when she went back home, tell her that she wasn’t alone that there were more people who had united and have a name and are fighting to be recognised.

That day I realised something: That there are more of us than we know about, that in this age of information many of the older generation were still estranged from the net and among them there are aromantic people too. And that for those people who have probably felt other and wrong most of their lives, the knowledge of the label and community, the confirmed existence of others like them that feel it’s important enough to recognise that feeling or lack thereof, can be just as healing, reassuring and important as it was for us, the newer generation who stumbled upon the term on the internet when we were teens.

The internet is great, of course, but if we want to find the older aros de have to look for them, because they most surely haven’t found themselves in that label yet either. And to do so we must share our terms and experiences and shout to the world that we exist outside the screens, that we are real. I know it can be risky or even dangerous but if we wish to find them, and hopefully make them a bit happier, it’s all we can do.

TL,DR: There are old aros out there, we just have to find them by spreading our visibility, not only for us, but for them too.

aroace-avenue

this makes me so happy to hear! thank you for sharing

collectoroflovelythings

Curious, I haven’t really seen any real trend among aspec people and the ship tropes they do like, however I think I kinda seen a trend in what they dislike. So in the tags tell me if you’re aspec (ace and/or aro) and if you dislike soulmates, and I mean the most straightforward romantic non subverted kind (but if there are versions you like feel free to elaborate)

#im aro #and i really dont care #its not something i usuall read but like #whatever so they got names on their arms. whatever

deadliestpieceontheboard

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.

bumblebeerror

I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.

Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.

starlightnecromancer

I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.

When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.

Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.

They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".

There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.

Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.

Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"

The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.

The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur

There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".

Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.

bumblebeerror

^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.

Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.

rjalker

And these same people to this day are pretending like it's absurd to make that conncection.

This is why I block everyone with any variation of "discourse" in their URL on sight. Aphobes made "discourse" blogs specifically for the purpose of harassing aspec people, so that their main blog was kept nice and clean and none of their followers had to see them telling people to kill themselves because they didn't want to date anyone.

I very vividly remember a post from what I thought was a nice person, that read something along the lines of, "It's important to tell kids it's okay to be gay, but it's pedophilic to tell kids it's okay to be ace".

These people literally fucking thought that being ace meant you were a pedophile, because it meant you were sexualizing all other orientations, and therefore telling kids they could be aspec meant you were sexualizing kids.

Every single fucking argument these people leveled against aspec people was not only blatantly recycled homophobia, absurd ammounts of it relied entirely upon ableism and racism, because these people were pretending that only white people were aspec, and the identity was, and I fucking quote, "A white supremacist's wet dream". They literally went around saying that everyone who was aspec was white, completely speaking over the black and brown people who were proudly aspec whose existance proved that what they were claiming was absolute bullshit.

These aphobes would claim to support all other LGBT people, especially trans people...unless the aspec person they were targeting was trans. Then not being a transphobe flew out the fucking window. Aphobes would claim that if you were trans and ace, that meant you weren't really trans, you were just pretending to be so you could invade the LGBT community.

Aphobes equated ace and aro identities as all "asexy cringiness" but they attacked both communities with equal viciousness, just under the same words.

This is why I block blogs with any variaiton of the word "discourse" in their url on sight. This is why whenever I see a new blog I want to follow, or get a new follower, I search the word "ace" and "aro" along with "trans" and "nonbinary" and "pan" and whatever other specific fucking keywords apply at the moment.

And the worst part is?

The aphobes who spent years harassing and attacking and traumatizing aspec people on this site are still here, with friends and tons of followers, like nothing ever happened. They'll claim they're no longer "terminally online" about aspec identities, mocking themselves for "caring too much" instead of actually doing anything to make amends for the literal hate crimes they committed. They'll fucking downplay and make light of the Literal Hate Crimes they spent years committing because now it's no longer socially acceptable to stalk and sexually harass people over being aspec.

Anyways, block foulserpent, then known as snakegay. Do not let these fucking people get away with this shit and pretend it never happened.

Edit: Oh and how the fuck could I forget all their ableism towards autistic people???? These fuckers were claiming that "aspec" was a shortened version of "autistic spectrum" and that you were ableist if you used it to refer to the "disgustingly pedophilic fake identity" of being aspec.

Even though literally too many gods damned people to count, including me and my twin and literally too mnay people to count, who were aspec, who used the term aspec, were also literally autistic and told these people over and over again that that's literally not true, stop fucking speaking for autistic people (because, to be crystal fucking clear, no one making this aphobic claim was autistic. It was literally just allistic people infantilizing us and not only speaking for us, but beating us down when we contradicted them!).

Literally the most ableist fucking post I've ever seen on this site that claimed to support autistic people was written by an ableist as shit fucking aphobe who was. Gods even just remembering this fucking post is so fucking infuriating. Everything about it was so fucking infantilizing and ableist. They claimed that aspec people using the term aspec was, and I paraphrase from memory, "trapping autistic people in your posts like nets, unable to understand why everyone is hating on them".

Like. Literally. So much of this fucking hate spree was ableist it's fucking absurd. Allistic people really just fucking hate autistic people and try to use us as a bludgeon //against ourselves// whenever they think they can get away with it. And let's not forget that if you were openly autistic and proud to be aspec, they'd then come in and claim you were faking being autistic (the same way they'd claim you were faking being black or brown or trans or gay) to invade the community and "steal resources from real LGBT people".

And again. Cannot stress enough how these people screamed and cried about how the word queer is a slur and always has been and always will be, then immediately turned around to hurl the word kweer AS A SLUR. With no fucking irony. Literally using a slur they claim to hate as a slur and thinking they're the good guys. I guess they thought changing the spelling would make it okay for them to /literally use it as a slur/??? they literally just made it into a slur again and used it as such and then acted like they were the heroes for...calling queer people slurs that are apparenly unforgivable >.>

rjalker

And lets not forget that these people regularly flooded aspec tags with gore and porn despite their own claims that only "misguided children" were identifying as asexual or aromantic...

rjalker

Go through the notes of this post if you want to learn about the hellscape this was. There are so many people sharing their experiences.

warriorsdebt

There has been a lot that has struck me about this thread, especially as someone who has been active in this conversation since 2011. But I reblogged this post last week

And two days later, I got a note directly from my personal blog that from my activity preview seems to have been from someone unfamiliar with this entire sphere of discourse.

I saw the note the day after they left it, and there were so many "this really happened?"-style comments that I couldn't easily find their note in my activity.

This has gone from normal, to unheard-of, and back to normal again, at least insofar as young aces coming into our community don't know what we all fought through to make a space for you to feel safe in.

If you'd like to learn more, please feel free to reach out--I've been here since 2007, and I'm glad to fill you in on what I've seen. If not, that's okay too--but please know that a lot of us have bled and hurt and died so that "ace" is something you can put in your bio without fear. I don't begrudge you that; you're the reason I did it. But there was a fight, and this post points to some of the pieces of what that fight looked like.

lastoneout

I started to realize I was ace during this time and fuck was it rough. I had to spend years unpacking internalized aphobia just to come to terms with my identity.

And like I remeber this one post that went around that in retrospect I pray wasn't true, where someone was talking about how they were the president of their college's lgbt+ support club and one day someone who was a cis heteroromantic asexual showed up and they had to pull them outside and tell them they weren't queer and weren't welcome at the club. And like god that post fucking haunts me. Can you imagine being that cruel? The OP was fully painting themselves as a wise community leader who was correcting this misguided straight person and people were fucking patting them on the back for it and talking about how they were so proud of OP for protecting the real queer people from straights like that who want to invade our spaces and steal our resources.

I really, really hope that post was fake because I have spent so much time thinking about that ace person and worrying about them, wishing I could find them and tell them that OP was wrong and cruel and they belonged in that group.

And god forbid you HC a character as ace, that shit was a one way ticket to getting harassed and labeled a homophobe. And that shit hasn't even completely gone away, it wasn't that long ago that people in the MP100 fandom were just being openly and unapologetically aphobic because they didn't like ace Reigen HCs.

I also remember at least one prominent queer youtuber legit saying in a video that they didn't think there was anything queer about being asexual. That shit hurt because I really looked up to that creator, and tbf they have changed, but like that was just par for the course back then. You never knew if another queer person was safe or if they were going to turn out to think ace and aro people were special snowflakes who just wanted to pretend they were queer for funsies and thus should be unpersoned.

And Thomas Sanders basically had his entire internet presence nuked just for saying he thought ace and aro people were queer. Siding with aspecs was legit social suicide back then.

This shit also absolutely went hand in hand with transmedicalism, biphobia, and basically any movement that sought to separate queer people. TERFs have openly admitted that ace discourse was a recruitment tactic, because once they got you to believe one group of queer people was the enemy it was much easier to convince you to hate others. Aspec exclusionism and biphobia were the gateway ideologies, and tbh in some places they still are, that's why it's so important to recognize that TERF rhetoric is more than just hating trans people, they are smart enough when recruiting other queer people to not start with the transphobia.

And god the ace/aro exclusionist stuff really did go right into biphobic monosexual discourse(you can't use monosexual it lumps queer people in with straight people and besides biphobia isn't real it's just misdirected homophobia) those arguments were just copy + pasted from aspec discourse, and then transmedicalism and on and on to the next group. It's always the same arguments, the only thing that changes is the target. This is why anyone who EVER uses the argument that a certain type of bigotry is just a different type that's been misdirected is instantly sus to me. It's always an exclusionist dogwhistle used to try to deny whatever queer person is the enemy of the week a seat at the table.

But yeah, I try not to fault people who got swept up but changed and have put in the work, but it is still heartbreaking to think about how much aspec culture has just been completely lost because of that shit. We had solidarity and symbols and communities, and we've had to start over because half of us are too traumatized to bring back cake and dragons and the black/white rings and the rest just don't know because there's no one left to teach them. And it also sucks to see hateful stuff that was born out of that era still get passed around because the context is gone. It's just...beyond tragic. It really is.

chisecco

if you let me add, whenever someone in ANY SOCMED SITE posts the nicki minaj asexual moodboard, it makes me flinch and go through their account because it triggers my fight or flight response. there was also a benito mussolini asexual moodboard and a post claiming donald trump was asexual and aromantic

iirc thomas sanders was accused of being a pedophile during ace discourse, notably bc he posted a spicy drawing a minor had made of him (and then deleted the post and apologized). people kept accusing him for months and he was suddenly Too Cringe

2016 in particular was an insane year. my hero academia and yuri on ice fandoms were extremely large, and if you did as much as suggest that a character in those series could be asexual, acephobes dogpiling you was the least that could happen to you

i lost dozens of mutuals to ace discourse and saw whole blogs sink into acephobia, it was horrible to watch. to this day i Still have internalized acephobia despite being asexual myself, to the point i barely ever talk about my experiences as an asexual person. i am Afraid of what kind of jackasses could come out of nowhere and start being dicks again like they were in 2016-17

ps: a lot of acephobic talk points were also used in the (thankfull) short lived pansexual discourse of the early 2020s. and i mean exact carbon copies. i even saw terfs come forward and say they used to be acephobes before falling deeper into the rabbit hole and becoming terfs

ps2: many, many of the former Important ace discourse bloggers are still on this website. i will not say who they are to avoid a direct confrontation but you can find many "tumblr funnymen" who are still around and who used to be huge acephobic assholes by looking thru their blogs

arodabi

100% everything on this post, people were so vile that i get all shaky and cold sweats whenever i gotta talk about my identity to someone irl STILL bc deep down im scared they’ll turn on me.

Personal discourse anecdote:

I followed an aspec positivity blog in 2015 that would routinely get attacked and harassed so eventually they gave the blog to somebody else and retreated back to their main. I followed them there and realized they were somebody i actually went to high school with. They were a year under me and i never talked to them in person about it bc who wants a stranger coming up to you asking about your tumblr blog.

Anyways over the course of a year i watched them fall into being an ace exclusionist, just as vile as all the rest of them. I unfollowed obvi but i would see them all the time going after mutuals and saying nasty things in aspec tags. I remember them harassing ppl with hivliving if that tells you anything. It was horrible to see somebody who spent time defending us fall like that.

After i graduated i saw that they were made my ex high schools gsa president. They would make snide posts abt it from time to time but eventually they made a post that was basically “some acey came up to me and asked what we were doing for ace week or whatever. I just laughed in their face, why would we do anything for virgin week?” A friend of mine who used to know them screenshotted all of their ani ace posts and reported them to the high school. They then got kicked out of the gsa. They were sooooo mad too, blamed all the butthurt cringe aceys bc they didn’t actually kno who had reported them lol

Anyways, i think about this a lot. I kno that person is still out there, my friend gives me updates on them from time to time. I think it shows that as much as people liked to say this was just an online thing, it wasn’t that big of deal, the people who were doing this online were also the ones participating in irl queer spaces too, sometimes with authority. I’m glad it’s a lot better now but the blogs who screenshotted my post to call me mentally ill for being aro in front of their thousands of followers are still posting and popular. They just know to be quiet about aspec ppl for now. We cannot let them ever feel comfortable expressing that shit again bc i kno they didn’t actually change their mind.

angryaromantics

I do feel like, as the cost of living crisis skyrockets, non-partnering aros are going to get hit harder and harder. There is no framework built into the infrastructure of our society for people who don't have a dual-income household, and it does become more difficult as you age to reliably live with friends.

There is, of course, the option to live with strangers, but that has it's own varied and dangerous downfalls. Hit just as hard, or perhaps even harder, are going to be those in abusive households who's chances of being able to afford to leave grow slimmer.

Like, this stuff IS grim, so we've gotta start making good financial decisions, and supporting each other where possible.

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aro blog from??? an aro???