I can’t get over this lmaooo
ok, after actually looking up the term and doing some goddamn research (my goodness somebody on the internet actually decided to look something up before forming an opinion, dear god what a day), i can pretty safely say that everyone hitting this post with the “that’s just a friendship!” bit is wrong! and i can explain why! i myself didn’t get this initially! but after looking into it, i realized that it’s mainly due to the framework i was thinking in! Yeah, there’s actually merit to what these people are saying, this is stuff that’s been considered and these are indeed terms that exist! they were also coined by ace people specifically to describe their relationships! So what gives? What does Queerplatonic Relationship mean? well i certainly fucking didnt get it at first, but it stems from attempting to define a kind of relationship that there arent really words for in the standard english lexicon! the poster above me is a TERF, and wherever i see myself agreeing with a terf i also see that there’s possibly some flaw in my logic or understanding of the thing. Basically (mind you this is only some very cursory and basic research, just type the term into google lol), QPR’s are a way of defining a relationship that has many of the same obligations and aspects of a traditional romantic relationship, without any of the explicitly romantic parts that come with having a spouse or romantic partner.
the idea of living in the same place, or jointly bringing up children, and performing many other tasks as a kind of unit that society would often mislabel as something done by two romantic partners in a union of some kind (i use that term to loosely define an exclusive relationship, not actual binding marriage, though this can include such). the idea of the QPR isn’t just “friends”, it’s very specifically “individuals in a platonic relationship that perform a number of the social aspects of a traditional romantic partnership”.
like, be real for a second. if someone described their relationship with someone to you and said “Yeah we own a house together, we have a kid that we adopted and take care of, we decided to get a dog last week and we file taxes as two members of the same household.”, you wouldn’t look at that person and assume that they arent romantic/sexual partners of some kind, because… well, traditionally, that’s shit that married people do. getting hit with the additional “Yup! And we’re not romantically or sexually involved at all! She has a boyfriend that she visits on the weekends and I’ve never had a romantic relationship in my life.” would throw you for a goddamn loop! What would you even call that relationship? and that’s where the term comes from: an attempt to define a very specific kind of relationship that certainly can and has existed, but isn’t commonly recognized or talked about!
so i think everyone shitting on these folks owes them an apology, i know i personally do for making assumptions that clearly weren’t true!
Actually QPR was coined by aromantic people but asexual people do also use it!
Finally I have a reason to reblog this after cringing every time it’s come across my dash.
Also that right there is a really good tutorial for how to react to posts like this: Resist the very human instinct to immediatly agree with opinions that are presented to you in this manner (unless you already have knowledge on the matter or have already formed a different opinion), instead look up the actual facts, think on why people might be agreeing or disagreeing with it and form your own opinion.
Like. It’s normal to just kind of instinctually agree with posts that are presented in this way that’s very “haha obviously this is bullshit”. It’s easy to just pile on, when presented with something you don’t understand and follow the presented opinion of “this thing i don’t understand is bad”. But it’s important to actively realize when you’re doing it and work against it.
it’s also worth noting: it Is a very genuine and targeted tactic for ace exclusionists to take everything involving asexuality and aromanticism and turn it into a joke because it’s much easier to spread their rhetoric that way
most people, when presented with an idea for the first time, are more likely to listen to “isn’t this outlandish idea presented without context Funny” than they would “isn’t this marginalized group undeserving of understanding? aren’t they Threatening?”
if you get it into people’s heads that aspec people are just a Joke, that nothing about this is Serious, then they’ll do the leg work of spreading your ideology to hook more people for you because it’s Funny and they’ll be more primed to eventually fall into the second bit. why do aspec people Need a spot in the queer community if they’re just a joke?
or, in the case of the argument presented in this post specifically, “why do aromantic people need a space in the queer community when they’re just Friends? obviously these are just Normal Straight People trying to force their way to spaces that they don’t belong by making up special words to describe normal things. don’t you agree? Don’t You Agree?”
that’s what makes it insidious, it primes you to believe something bigoted while giving itself plausible deniability. using the existence of people’s ignorance to spread it further than they could if they’d been honest straight away. and Because it’s presented like a joke and Because it relies on that ignorance they get to pretend that anyone pointing out that that’s what they’re doing is being ridiculous. like, say, Earlier In This Post.
