You know maybe amatonormativity exists but it's hard to say that when I'm 90% sure gay people were not being encouraged to seek out relationships by the wider culture until maybe 2005-ish

what's amatonormativity?

A Tumblr-based sociological theory that boils down to "compulsory alloromanticism" but I've also seen it defined to include monogamy as another expectation under the header of amatonormativity

Amatonormativity is not tumblr based- it was not created on tumblr nor was it popularised on tumblr. Amatonormativity was not even coined by asexual people or with asexual people in mind exclusively. 

Amantonormativity was coined by feminist academic Elizabeth Brake in her book “Minimising Marriage” to refer to:

Amatornormativity doesn’t just affect asexual and aromantic people. Whilst it’s often asexual and aromantic people you see talking about amatonormativity (because we become hyper aware of it due to how it affects us), it actually impacts the lives of people of all orientations, including LGBT+ people.

Amatonormativity in practice is…

And much more…

Also the way turning down a request for a date, while single, is often viewed as some sort of terrible insult instead of an analysis of poor compatibility.

Also the idea that it’s wrong to break up with someone unless they’ve done something objectively terrible enough to “deserve it” rather than because the relationship isn’t doing anything for you.

It also encourages people to stay in abusive relationships because it pushes being in a relationship is the highest priority/being alone is terrible.

Also....

“I'm 90% sure gay people were not being encouraged to seek out relationships by the wider culture until maybe 2005-ish”

Yes.

Yes, they were.

They were encouraged to seek out heterosexual relationships.

You can’t uncouple Amantonormativity from Heteronormativity. One is built into the other. Heteronormativity means there is one right way to have a life, and that way is being straight, is falling in love, being monogamous, is complying to certain standards of beauty, it’s being white and thin and abled. 

ALL of those things go into the ideal norm that is oppressing ALL OF US. It doesn’t matter in WHICH way you stray from the heteronormative ideal --- if you’re polyamorous or if you’re gay or if you don’t fall in love or you love while disabled. ANY WAY you stray from it is punished. 

Amatonormativity is not just “you must fall in love.” It’s “You must fall in love in the right way with the right person.”

So yes, amatonormativity is absolutely linked to heteronormativity.

And, as ace-and-ranty hinted, it is also linked to the supremacy of monogamy. Amatonormativity also excludes all forms of polyamory.

It also has something to do with why gays successfully got gay marriage before they got, say, “federal protection from discrimination in adoption cases” or “the right to be gender nonconforming in public school”. People who think it’s weird to see a man in a dress can still wrap their head around “he wants to marry the man he loves” because all you did was swap the expected pronouns.

Amatonormativity does pressure people into heteronormative relationships, but it also exists within the gay community and allies, to place a monogamous marriage to a same-sex partner above, say, a polyamorous polycule, or an asexual living with a queerplatonic friend.

Hello, all. I wanted to address something about aromantic awareness in the aspec community, and especially about allosexual aromantics. Can we please tag posts and reblogs that are specifically about asexuality as asexual.

I’m not asking anyone to stop posting or reblogging about asexuality. This is not about me, an allosexual aromantic, being acephobic. Not at all. I ask because there is quite often a lot of arophobic messages in alloroace content and so much hostility towards aromantics who are not asexual. All this “we can feel love! We’re not monsters!” subliminal (and sometimes overt) messaging is triggering for me, not to mention the general hatred of sexual attraction without romantic attraction within society’s amatonormativity. I am simply asking to be able to choose when I see asexual content on my dash so that I can be aware of it and if I choose to click on the post, I can be prepared in case of arophobia and/or alloarophobia.

Not all aro’s are ace, just like not all ace’s are aro. We aro’s already deal with so much erasure and hatred and we need solidarity from the ace community instead of hatred toward aro’s who aren’t also ace. The ace community is only recently gaining visibility and support from the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community. Don’t you remember when you were as erased as we are now? I’m not asking for a whole lot here. I’m simply asking people to tag asexual content as such.

Tl;dr: tag asexual content because the arophobia often found in it is triggering to aro’s. It’s not acephobic to ask for this content to be tagged for this reason.

I agree, as a grayspec person who identifies with both, it can be hard to not get that negative feedback from aces against aros. I don’t think it’s intentional, but we need to stop shoving others down to climb over them, and instead help them up, lock arms, and stand together.

While there is a lot of arophobia in ace spaces, I don’t thank as many people are actively being a part of it is it appears. Wording like “oh we can feel love we’re not monsters” isn’t used solely by those who mean offense, and it’s likely not thought about “oh this can harm people.” Just like “oh we feel sexual attraction/still want sex, we aren’t inhuman.”

Because being Aro or aro spec does not make you a monster,

And being Ace or ace spec does not make you inhuman.

Instead of picking sides, we should know that we all deserve support and our sexualities are, and that no one is inhuman or monsterous.... that is... unless we’re all really just dragons (I’m aware that the aro in this is a griffin, we can be griffins too :)

Amidst discussion about wealth inequality and race issues, I really wanna hammer into younger Gen Zers minds about how awful Ronald Reagan was I feel like we all got propaganda’d in school on how great he was just because of basic charisma and for the fact that he made some dopey speech at the berlin wall, but looking back he was just pure fucking evil: He caused so many problems that we’re all dealing with today- and problems that made Zoomers become “Doomers”:

All of us are angry about how Rich people are putting down poor people during this Gamestop-Robinhood fiasco, it’s good to remember when that started to get real popular…when people say “Ronald Reagan was the devil”, they’re not fucking around.

Ace Pikachu supports you and loves you.

2020 is when I’m making ya’ll recognize the asexual Greek Gods (since I keep reading sad stories of gatekeeping against the ace community and more)

Athena, who doesn’t want anything sexual in a 10 mts radius around her. Artemis, she had a thing with a boy once but it was super platonic. Hestia, founder of the “Sex? NO THANK YOU” club. And Hades, specially depending on the variation of his myths was like “got a waifu, this is all I need for the rest of eternity”.

Aromantic people are so strong that they take out Cupid’s arrow and break it in half in front of his eyes without breaking eye-contact 

No: “Dysphoria isn’t what makes you trans, gender EUPHORIA is what makes you trans!”

Yes: “The only requirement to be trans is that you do not 100% identify with the gender you were assigned at birth. Arbitrary standards of transness only serve to hurt trans people and give cis people more ammunition against us. Stop hyping up these arbitrary standards and milestones.”

This this this! Is so important! You don’t have to have exceptional qualifications in any way to be trans!

THIS

ALL OF THIS

Shout out to the polyam community for being my first experience with questioning the romantic norm. Although I don’t consider myself polyam now, it was a comforting label to have before I realized I was aromantic. It was nice for my realization that I could be special to someone regardless of if they were romantically interested in someone else to be validated by a whole community.

my piece for @aspecjournal! artemis is powerful and will protect you!!

Y'know, whenever people want to talk about why aspec people 'count' as an oppressed identity, they tend to go for the big stuff like corrective rape and conversion therapy. And like, we should absolutely talk about that stuff. Obviously those things are terrible and important and we need to raise awareness and deal with them.

But I feel like people often gloss over how… quietly traumatising it is to grow up being told that there is only one way to be happy— and that everybody who doesn't conform to that norm is secretly miserable and just doesn't know it— and then to gradually realise that, for reasons that you cannot help, that is never going to happen for you.

You're not going to find a prince/princess and ride off into the sunset. Or if you do, then it's not going to look exactly the way it does in fairytales. You're not going to get a 'normal' relationship, because you are not 'normal', and everybody and everything around you keeps telling you that that's bad.

You see films where characters are presented as being financially stable, genuinely passionate about their work and surrounded by friends and family, but then spend the rest of the plot realising that the real thing they needed was a (romantic and sexual) partner, to make them 'complete'.

You absorb the idea that any relationships you have with allo people will ultimately be unfulfilling on their side, and that this will be your fault (even if you discussed things with your partner beforehand and they decided that they were a-okay with having those sorts of boundaries in a relationship) unless you deliberately force yourself into situations that you aren't comfortable with, so as to make uo for your 'defects'.

You grow up feeling lowkey gaslighted because all the adults in your life (even in LGBT+ spaces. In fact especially in LGBT+ spaces) are insisting that it's totally normal to not be attracted to anybody at your age, and then you go to school and everybody keeps pressuring you to name somebody you're attracted to because they can't imagine not being attracted to anybody at your age.

And then you get older and realise that one day you're going to be expected to leave home, and that one day all your friends are going to be expected to put aside other relationships and 'settle down' with a primary partner and you don't know what you're going to do after that because you straight up don't have a roadmap for what a 'happy ending' looks like for someone like you.

(And the LGBT+ community is little help, because so many people in there are more than happy to tell you that you're not oppressed at all. That you're like this because you don't want to have sex, and/or you don't want to have any relationships, that your orientation is some sort of choice you made— like not eating bananas— rather than an intrinsic part of you that a lot of us have at some point tried to wish away.)

Even if you're grey or demi, and do experience those feelings, you still have to deal with the fact that you're not experiencing them the 'normal' way and that that's going to effect your relationships and your ability to find one in the first place.

If you're aiming for lifelong singlehood (which is valid af) or looking for a qpp, then you're going to have to spend the rest of your life either letting people make wrong assumptions about your situation (at best that your relationship is of a different nature than it actually is, at worst that the life you've chosen is really just a consolation prize because you 'failed' at finding a romantic/sexual partner) or pulling out a powerpoint and several webpages every time you want to explain it.

This what being aspec looks like for most people, and it is constantly minimised as being unimportant and not worth fighting against— even in aspec spaces— because we've all on some level absorbed the idea that oppression is only worth fighting against if it's big, and dramatic, and immediately obvious. That all the little incidents of suffering that we experience on a daily basis are not enough to be worth bothering about.

I mean, who gives a shit if you feel broken, inherently toxic as a partner, and like you're going to be denied happiness because of your orientation? Shouldn't we all just shut up and thank our lucky stars we don't have to deal with all the stuff some of the other letters in the acronym have to put up with (leaving aside the fact that there are many aspec people who identify with more than one letter)?

So you know what? If you're aspec and you relate to anything I've said above (or can think of other things relating your your aspec-ness that I haven't mentioned) then this is me telling you now that it's enough. Even if we got rid of all the big stuff (which we're unlikely to do any time soon because— Shock! Horror!— the big stuff is actually connected to all the small stuff) we would still be unable to consider our fight 'over' because what you are experiencing is not 'basically okay' and something we should just be expected to 'put up with'.

No matter what anybody tells you, we have the right to demand more from life than this.

@ everyone whos pronouns are she/they or he/they i hope you have an amazing day and this post is a little kiss on the forehead for you <3

I don’t think I ever realized how kind of socially isolated being aro/ace made me (before I knew I was) like so many games in childhood are about relationships. Who’s your crush, how many children will you have, do you have a list of your future kids names? School dances and celebrity crushes and my parents always asking when I was going to start dating. Me always saying I was focusing on school. Sleepovers and really wanting to gossip except it was always about boys (and girls, once friends came out) and I never had anything to add. “We’re too young to be dating seriously,” something I said from ages 12-21, when I realized. Celebrating marriage equality and realizing that I didn’t fit into the “now I’ll be able to get married” group either. My roommate telling me “once you’re in love, you’ll understand” when I told her that her boyfriend being over 24/7 was annoying. Trying to get into the bachelor/bachelorette but it never sticks. Every teen based tv show is about romance. Every adult show is about affairs. I’ve never seen one 20-something character say they didn’t want to date and have it not be treated like they’re emotionally unavailable or just stubborn. The age of women reclaiming their sexuality, my friends talking freely about how they had sex the other night and me in the corner going “yay you! Also gross” but not really because I want to support them but I never want it for myself. Realizing it’s going to be hard to buy a house on one salary. Realizing some of my questions about the future might stem from being aro/ace and some might be from mental illness. Hearing single female figures I look up to in my life being called uptight and “maybe if she’d just get some, she would loosen up”. Wondering if anyone’s ever said that about me. Wondering if my personality will be condensed into my romantic history. Thinking about how in high school, a gay guy offered to give me my first kiss because it wouldn’t mean anything and I said I wanted my first kiss to mean something and now I don’t want a first kiss at all. How every day at work, I see families and parents and kids and how I know I don’t want that, but they all seem so happy. There’s not anyone I know who’s older and single and happy with it, and I don’t know how to get there myself

Carnival of Aros October 2020: prioritization

I'm aroace and definitely prioritize my aromanticism over my asexuality.

One event that leaded me to find out these orientations was when I, with 15 years old at the time, said I never had a crush and my peers got super surprised and shocked. I didn't understand that reaction, since everyone, specially people older than me, told me that I would find the right person. And I thought that "right person" was basically the same as "crush". After all that, some of my friends suggested I could be asexual, so I looked for that term.

For my surprise, the definition of asexual wasn't "Not feeling romantic attraction". Although the definition of asexual (feeling little to no sexual attraction) fitted me, that wasn't what I was looking for. Sexual attraction is a private thing, none of my friends talked about that. But crushes? Since primary school everyone talked about it and everyone is supposed to feel those. And over the years I excused myself (and to be honest didn't care much), until that point when I already should have felt something. So, reading what was on aven, looking for that specific term, I found it - aromantic. (for some time, I thought it was a subset of ace, so I imagine it's much more difficult for aros who aren't ace to find their identity)

That word, the word for who doesn't have crushes, was there. Before really identifying with it, I had to battle a lot of internalized amatonormativity, but after that, it was really relieving to identify with aro.

Although it was always the most important part of my identity, I prioritized my asexual part first, since I didn't know, like I said before, that aromanticism was independent. But... I have to say, sometimes even in the asexual community, I feel alienated. The focus is having romantic relationships without sex and related subjects, which, of course, is important. But... I don't want a romantic relationship. I don't even want a qpr.

Shifting my prioritization to aromanticism and engaging more with the aromantic community was very positive to me. The main focus on the aro community isn't much "having sex without romance" (or like, isn't comparable to the alloace focus on the ace community), but more the fact that we have few or no crushes, that is what we all have in common. I can go to that space and say that I never had crushes and instead of having weird looks, there are a bunch of people replying "same".

I don't know if my absence of both romantic and sexual attractions are together or not, but I like the idea of using both terms together while still using the sam for conversations about specific attractions.

If I had to use only one term to come out, I would say aro. For the few times I came out, I started to say ace because most people know it, but I would like to educate people on the sam and come out starting with the most important part of my identity.

Some of y'all don't know how to handle when a popular character becomes asexual and/or aromatic canonically, and it shows

The fact that so many queer spaces are devoted to drinking is, like, a huge problem

And the last time this topic got brought up in any sort of major way, somehow it got turned into “ace people are being bigoted about gay bars.”

The fact that our traditional community spaces are all alcohol-oriented, further enabling alcohol companies to prey on us, is a massive fucking problem.

Queer bars are important, but they shouldn’t be the only spaces available to us.

I can’t fucking drink bc medication and I always feel tired and out of place in bars.

I know I just reblogged this but I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there are SO many queer people who are alienated by bars being the main queer community spaces including:

There are SO many reasons that bars, while important to queer history, just do not cut it as the only available queer spaces anymore. I know y'all love to laugh at those of us who talk about queer cafes and queer bookstores cuz lol cringe but most of my queer friends and myself are seriously lacking ANY community because we fit into one or more of the above categories. I mean hell Tucson Pride this year was hardly accessible at ALL to me because I needed my walker and it was hosted outside on a fucking grassy hill with no sidewalks and I ended up having to leave early cuz pushing my walker around was hurting more than helping. We need more accessible queer spaces badly and I will not shut up about it.