Why I like the Split Attraction Model

[sqbr]

(Because I promised myself any future long replies to reblogs would go here and not tumblr)

http://planettes.tumblr.com/post/146807918775/planettes-imo-the-split-attraction-model-is

Imo the split attraction model is ultimately useless and homophobic when you can still just say that youre lgb in any situation and will be regarded exactly the same in society with 100% less confusion.

No.

I do think the way some asexuals discuss split attraction can be gross for non-asexual lgb people, and that needs to be addressed. And there are definitely some lgb people on the asexual spectrum who don’t consider their asexuality to be a significant part of their identity and that’s fine. There are also some who identify as just “asexual” and consider the lgb-ness less important! For many people, myself included, being asexual-and-also-lgb is NOT the same as being lgb, and well beyond the bedroom. Maybe we’ll come up with a better model one day, but until then I’m going to use the best terms I have to describe myself and not erase my sexuality for other people’s convenience. I do understand that queer people have historically been hypersexualised, and I think it’s really important for asexuals to bear that in mind when we discuss the relationship of asexuality and queerness. But we can’t help existing, and the solution isn’t for us to hide but for all of us to work together against the broader harmful attitudes.

Times being grey asexual affects my life outside my relationships:

• Discussing relationships and dating: giving advice, discussing social dynamics and sexism, talking about my past personal history etc.
  
• what characters and stories I enjoy and relate to, and my discussions of this with others. Considering I write dating sims and am in the heavily romance-and-porn focused parts of fandom, this is a LOT of my day.
  
• discussions of queerness, which usually default to assuming everyone is into sex. Until I discovered asexuality I thought I couldn’t be bi, because people always defined it in terms of sexual attraction. If biSEXUAL wasn’t so much the default, I wouldn’t need so much to clarify “bi” to “biromantic grey asexual”.
  
• asking people to accommodate my sex aversion, which extends to things like nudity and sexual metaphors (this comes up a lot in fandom too)
  
• understanding and explaining how I feel about the world! Sexuality is a big part of a person! It's useful to have terms for it!
  

And afaict this is all just as much of a thing for aromantic people regardless of sexual orientation. Not experiencing romantic love is going to have HUGE effect on how you feel about romantic relationships, and society LOVES talking about romance, and assuming it is central in everyone’s life. I absolutely feel a commonality with aromantic bisexual people, and SOME of our experiences are similar, but they’re not interchangeable.

This reminds me a lot of the arguments 20 years ago that bi women should just identify as lesbians. Again: solidarity is important! There are many similarities! Some technically bi women DO choose to identify as lesbians. But they’re not interchangeable terms. (Alas if history is any guide, this means that in 20 years asexuals will be more included...with a more level playing field for everyone to snipe at each other and erase each other’s experiences, hooray)

EDIT: On a reread I feel like their whole argument is just building up to excluding heteromantic asexuals/aromantic heterosexuals (which I have argued against elsewhere), and the stuff about lgb aces etc is a cover. But here's my rebuttal anyway.

Comments

[anghraine]

Strong agreement with you here. It's very "pick a team" rhetoric as far as I can tell. Nobody is denying that there is plenty of gross ace rhetoric you can dredge up at AVEN or Tumblr or wherever, should you feel so inclined. (I'm not, which seems to be... surprisingly rare.) But no matter how much Team Acephobe seems to want it to be, the mere fact of ID-ing as asexual is not inherently 1. TMI and/or 2. sex-shaming.

[sqbr]

Yeah as a bi person the rhetoric feels very similar.

cw sex talk

[(Anonymous)]

But no matter how much Team Acephobe seems to want it to be, the mere fact of ID-ing as asexual is not inherently 1. TMI and/or 2. sex-shaming.

Yep. And it's so contradictory, too - a lot of the spaces I've been in where that attitude is prevalent are very much in favor of letting people talk frankly about sex and sexuality, and while I think it's a good thing that spaces like that exist, there is no possible coherent definition of TMI where "I just jacked off" or "I want [fictional character or celebrity] to [do very specific things to me]" is A-okay, but "I don't really like sex stuff" is crossing the line. Just admit you think prudishness is a character flaw already, assholes.

(And yes, yes, a lot of these people used to be sex-averse and are happier now that they're enjoying sex, but they're still assholes for generalizing their experience to everyone.)

Re: cw sex talk

[sqbr]

nods

I mean I don't think prudishness is quite the word: I have found that the people who were in favour of me being, to all appearances, a prude, don't neatly overlap with the people who are cool with with me asexual/having sexual trauma etc. And I think part of the problem is people interpreting "I personally don't like [sexual thing]" as the more prudish "I dissaprove of [sexual thing] in principle for everyone on moral grounds". But maybe we're just defining "prude" differently.

Anyway I agree that it's generally very acceptable to discuss all sorts of specific details of ones sexuality in many queer spaces, and that there's no logical argument for why it should be unacceptable to simply state ones asexuality in that context.

[aris_tgd]

I'm an aromantic heterosexual and I cosign this--finding the split attraction model was so helpful in figuring out how I felt about people that I'm really not inclined to give it up to make people who want to shame people like me happy. I'm not even trying to colonize queer spaces (and stuff like this is one of several reasons I'm not comfortable IDing as queer, because behavior and identity do not always line up neatly.)

Like, I don't necessarily think that aromantic/asexual heteros should fit in queer spaces, but there are some things that definitely fall under an umbrella of how society treats non-normative sexual and romantic orientations. But "stop identifying in a way that makes sense to you, start identifying in a way that I'm comfortable with" is never the answer.

[sqbr]

Right! Really it feels like they want us aro and ace people to do our best to pretend we don't exist, because we're inconvenient to their model for the world and that is apprently what matters most.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not sure how I feel about the split attraction model - I think that attraction is a very complicated thing with a lot of variables, and I'm not comfortable saying it naturally falls into two distinct categories - but I definitely feel like there's enough common ground for people who don't like sex (and don't see that as a problem that needs to be fixed) to occupy a common category, even if different factors caused them to be the way they are. Same goes with people who don't like romance - and before I come off as if I'm dismissing sex or romance aversion as not a real thing, I'd guess that different people's gender preferences are influenced by different factors as well. To me, it's less that someone is a homoromantic asexual or an aromantic homosexual as it is that someone is gay and asexual or gay and aromantic. It's probably splitting hairs, but I prefer seeing direction of attraction and type of attraction as different qualities.

But sex or romance aversion is going to be an important part of how a lot of people experience the world. Being queer doesn't mean that my sex aversion doesn't matter, and my sex aversion absolutely impacts the expression of my queerness. Saying that one cancels out the other is like saying my disability doesn't matter because I'm queer... which is actually a fairly apt comparison to me, because while random people interacting with me might not know that I'm disabled, and probably don't NEED to know that I'm disabled, it's sure as hell going to affect things from my point of view.

[sqbr]

Oh yes, it's very much a simplification. It works pretty well for me, so I use it, but even I have trouble eg I experience sexual attraction so rarely it's hard to say what my sexual orientation is beyond grey asexual. There are other people for whom the distinction between sexual and romantic attraction (or between romantic attraction and friendship, and so on) is impossible to neatly untangle. And yeah: the split attraction model says I'm in a distinct category from, say, aromantic bisexuals, but to me it feels more like we're both bi+ asexual/aromantic.

Going back to ignoring asexulity and aromanticism would be a step backward, but hopefully something better than the split attraction model will come along. In the mean time it's a useful kludge.

Agreed on the similarity to disability! And I wouldn't be surprised if, should some major disability realted conflict come up in the queer community, there'd be people saying "the important thing is queer solidarity" etc :/

[(Anonymous)]

However, there are people who experience both romantic and sexual attraction, but not to the same people. For example there are biromantic heterosexuals, heteroromantic homosexuals, etc. For them, type of attraction and gender it's directed at are inextricably linked.