A podcast run by an asexual, an aromantic, and an aplatonic called "AAA" and every time an episode starts, one of them welcomes the audience by screaming into the mic
"hello and welcome to AAA!"
Was talking with my headmates earlier and we agreed that we needed a specific term for our relationship with love, so today we're coining it – loveweird.
Loveweird is a word for when your relationship with love is weird, hard to understand, or outside the norm in some way. It can include loveless and lovequeer experiences but does not have to. Some examples of loveweird experiences include (but are not limited to):
- Skipping the stage of "love" and going straight to obsession, adoration, or other similarly strong emotions that "love" does not adequately describe
- Using "love" as slang or otherwise as a term to communicate what you mean without actually feeling love
- Feeling uncomfortable with the term "love" but not having any better term to replace it
- Only feeling platonic and/or alterous love
- Only feeling romantic love, without any of the "love for friends" that has become standard in some spaces
- Feeling that "lust" does not properly convey your sexual feelings, and that "love" is a better word for it
- Only experiencing or understanding love through actions, not as an emotion
- Viewing the concept of "love" differently than the norm or those around you
- Viewing "love" as an emotion that is not greater or more important than any other emotion
- Preferring other affectionate emotions or descriptions over love
- Not finding love to be (very or at all) applicable in your life
- Finding that your sexuality and/or gender impact how you view or feel love
- And, of course, the numerous undescribable relationships with love that those experiencing them feel fit under loveweird.
You can be a loveweird aro, a loveweird ace, a loveweird apl, or not aspec at all and still use loveweird to describe yourself!
I hope this term helps others as it's helped us!
Man, I am.... so tired of people treating aspecs who ask genuine questions about queer topics as if they're intentionally being homophobic for not understanding something. Look past your gut reaction for two seconds and understand that not everyone knows everything you do about queer stuff. You don't need to be condescending to be informative.
Anyway. I've seen some genuine concern about the "sex stripe" in the rainbow pride flag that I want to address because apparently I'm the only one who isn't gonna be a dick about it. If you're asexual, or sex-repulsed, or even just have trauma surrounding the act of sex, the insistence that some people have about adding "the sex stripe" back to the rainbow flag might concern you a bit. However, this stripe isn't as exclusionary (or allonormative) as it may seem at first glance.
Calling it the "sex stripe" is actually a shortening of what it stands for – it is a stripe that represents sexuality as a whole. That includes the act of sex, of course, since the right to have the kind of sex you want with the kind of people you want is something very important in queer history (and still isn't considered normal or even allowed in many places). But this is just one aspect of sexuality. Another is the choice to participate in sex at all, or on what terms you have it. This, of course, would be something of relevance to those like I listed above – this stripe is not just celebrating queer sex, but queer relationships to sex, as well as any other aspects of one's sexuality that they may or may not consider related to sex (or a lack thereof).
To sum it up – the "sex stripe" is also there for any of you who aren't interested in sex, because it represents more than just having sex. My heart goes out to any of you who had to deal with being called homophobic for wanting to learn more about queer history – your history – because people still haven't unlearned the strawman of "those childish aces who think all sex is icky are against gay sex." You'd think in a community like this, people would be kinder to those who are different from them, but I guess I was hoping for too much.
Stay safe, and don't hesitate to block people for being rude.
Friendly reminder, since I still see this being confused! (No hate to those of you who get this confused, this is a genuinely friendly reminder.)
Aspec = asexual spectrum and aromantic spectrum (and nowadays may include the aplatonic spectrum as well, it's just less known)
Acespec = asexual spectrum only
Arospec = aromantic spectrum only
Aplspec = aplatonic spectrum only
"Aspec" does not mean "only asexual!" "Aspec" means anyone who is anywhere on the multiple spectrums of lacking attraction! If you're aromantic, you can consider yourself aspec! If you're cupiosexual, you can consider yourself aspec! If you're demiplatonic, to hell with it, consider yourself aspec if you want to! "Aspec" is an umbrella term for all of us.
Aspec Basics
With Jaiden's new video, there are a lot of new/baby aspecs just realizing their identity. If you're new to the community, welcome! Some things that this community discusses may be confusing to you since you likely don't know what everything means yet. There's theories, terminology, microlabels, subcultures, and on and on. I feel your pain, I was in your shoes once! So, if you're new to the aspec community on Tumblr, here's some basics I feel you might want to know!
(Put under a cut because this got longer than I expected it to be.)
Quilccion Attraction
[ID: a five stripe pride flag. From top to bottom, the colors of these stripes are: alligator green, sky blue, white, dark gray, and black. / End ID]
You may have heard of quilccion attraction before, whether from me or someone else. As the coiner of this term, I wanted to revisit it, giving it a clearer definition to better understand why this term was coined. Not only that, but to make it more open to those who do not identify as quoi; my original coining post focused on those identities a lot, as my quoisexual identity was a large reason I coined the term. (For those interested in the now outdated coining post, please check my #quilccion tag.)
Obligatory disclaimer before I begin: I do not often use the label "quoisexual" for myself anymore, mainly because I prefer being a non-sam aro. And when I do use it, I don't consider myself on the ace spectrum nor an aroace (although quoix is considered under the ace umbrella). These feelings are very difficult to explain, so I most likely won't, but in case it affects anyone's perspective of this term – I do not label my sexual orientation with anything besides "quoisexual" at most, and absolutely nothing the rest of the time.
I've learned since my last coining post how to add readmores on mobile, so read under the cut if you want an updated definition on quilccion attraction.
Arohaze is incredibly important to me as a label, but I realized today that there's currently no ace version for people who might identify with it or want to make matching arohaze/acehaze content in the same way other aspec terms usually have content in pairs. So here is a post about it!
Acehaze, also known as acemush, is a non-sam term for an acespec person whose other orientation(s) are in between or both allo and aro/void. It is a very useful label for those who do not feel like they fit neatly into either aroace or alloace!
Here is a flag I created; I inverted most of the colors on the arohaze flag to create it.
[ID: a five stripe pride flag. The colors of these stripes, are, from top to bottom: dark violet, violet, white, light reddish brown, and dark reddish brown. / End ID]
Sometimes I think "but what if I'm not asexual?" only for something to prove me wrong. This week it was my friend asking me to choose "sexy" clothing and I asked if they thought a crop top with art of a pug on it counted