tastethea-bow - Tumblr blog

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MONKEY MAN (2024)

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Not queer as in "queer is not a slur" but queer as in "I do not give a fuck if its a slur, you don't get to censor my identity regardless". Queer as in "I HOPE my identity upsets you". Queer as in "my identity is not only a slur but a threat"

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♥️

nothing has been more important to my being queer than when i went to my first pride parade, got seperated from my group, had a panic attack about it and was sitting on the side of the road holding a tiny genderfluid flag and freaking out. then this six foot five drag queen in four inch heels appeared from literally nowhere and sat down next to me. i, this scared-shitless trans bi kid at pride for the first time, very nervously told her she looked pretty and i told her my name and that i got lost and didn't feel like i should be at pride and she held my hand and said "oh, honey, everybody deserves to be here, especially you. pride is for everybody who's ever gotten lost, who's been scared of who they are or where they are. you think we never been scared before? pride's for you, honey, because you're scared. you don't have to be proud right now, but you're gonna be one day, honey, i'm sure of it."

i found my group soon after that and i never saw that queen again but to this day i am convinced i met an angel.

so yeah. pride is for you. pride is for all of us.

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Hmmm 🤔

☆ AROFUCKED/AROWEIRD

(Plain text : Arofucked/aroweird. End plain text.)

(ID : Two rectangular flags made up of six equally-sized stripes. The colors, from top to bottom, are : purple, light blue, cream, light green, forest green and dark grey. The flag on the right has a symbol in its center representing two dark grey intersecting arrows with a cream border.)

Arofucked/Aroweird : A term for when someone's aromantic identity and/or their relation to it is inherently so complex and transient that it feels unable to explain or comprehend. It can have ties to neurodivergency.

happy aro week ! here is my personal contribution, this has been spinning around in my head for weeks and it describes me perfectly. what if i was aro but what if i wasn't if you see me identify as aro yes i did because no i didn't

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Good morning to aromantic kinksters, polyamorous aromantics, aromantic doms, aromantic subs, aromantics in long term sexual partnerships, aromantics who enjoy casual hookups, hypersexual aromantics, and all aromantics who have been stereotyped as manipulative or heartless for having sexual relationships

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Annnnd we back on the bullshit!

Being Aspec makes you Queer. Full stop. Doesn't matter if you're Cis or Het, you being Aspec makes you Queer.

friendly reminder: excluding aces from "being ace" because they don't fit this arbitrary definition you've made of asexuality doesn't make you cool :)

all this shit does is cause unnecessary infighting in the Queer community when there are cishetallos that really need reality checks :))

this won't be the last time I say this but: I hate "actually asexual" people :)))

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It's the opposite of feminism 😕

hot take but “kill all men” and similar proclamations that all men are evil and inherently bad is not feminist and is only making things worse, pushing men to become like Andrew Tate. it is also removing accountability from men who are actually bad; “you can’t get mad at me, it’s in my nature!”

you are not helping anyone. not yourself, not women, not men. you are just hurting actual good people while the people you are trying to hurt are enabled. you are not turning people away from misogyny, you are pushing them towards it.

hating all men is not cool. it is not feminist. no issue is solved by simply reversing who is being affected.

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I am both.

"you're not aspec you're just confused" can't i be both

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Every time someone talks about how it's our "purpose" or how we're "meant to" to reproduce, I want to tear my reproductive organs out and slam them down on the table.

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me irl: no one can know im aroace, i will hide it from everyone, the only people that know was because of an accident

me on tumblr: AROMANTICISM!!!!! ASEXUALITY!!!!! LOVE LOSES!!!!! SEX SUCKS!!!! ROMANCE IS BORING!!!! I LOVE BEING AROACE!!!! FUCK AMANORMATIVITY!!!!!

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Just like every other community, we do actively tear ourselves down unfortunately 🤷

Why is it that when I talk about a personal experience involving alloarophobia perpetuated by an asexual, people are very quick to go "No! That person wasn't ace! They were just lying to troll you! They just wanted their argument to seem more valid!"

Like... no. There's plenty of aces that fully, 100% think alloaros don't belong in the aspec community. There's aces that have some absolutely rancid takes about aros. There's aces who actively speak over aros about our issues and act like authorities on aromantic stuff despite not being aromantic themselves. There's aces who use us as scapegoats. There's aces that view aromantics as sad losers or psychopathic monsters. There's aces that believe romantic love is what redeems sexuality and makes someone a good person/human.

You wanna know why there are aces like this? Because they're not aromantic or they're not alloaro. Because society deems these views to be correct and they have no reason to unlearn it, especially because in some cases it benefits them.

Like, I get it. You wanna believe the aspec community is just acceptance, peace, and happiness for all, but people are still people. People can be cruel, people can be hateful, people can have cognitive dissonance so strong it burns away all their braincells and they just parrot their own oppression back to other even less acceptable identities because they want to feel better about themselves.

These people exist, stop saying they don't.

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We have AplAroAce, but do we have something like Grayplrose? GrayAAA?

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Here’s a reminder for anyone who thinks that conservatives accept aces: they think we need to be fixed. They think women and feminine people are inherently asexual but they mean it in a way that agency is removed, not as an orientation.

It’s also not a sudden switch. The churches I grew up in preached that sexuality was reserved for your husband, and that if you had boobs (they didn’t recognize anything but cis existed) that your body was inherently tempting, and men’s attraction to you was your responsibility.

Also — while I went to church camp every summer and did Bible Quizzing (I was really good at that actually) and was in the church pageant and youth groups and all of that — I know many people raised in much stricter churches, and that includes stricter purity culture beliefs.

The idea that men and masculine people wouldn’t want sex? Utterly unthinkable. I even remember having conversations in my Christian college with women who wanted to get married who said that part of their marriage was the duty to be sexually available to their husbands.

The body I was raised with was meant for the service of a future husband, not me. And that bled into secular culture (still does). Claiming my aceness was a huge part of claiming agency over my body and healing from the idea that it could only exist for others.

Here’s the thing: in a nutshell, women and feminine people are seen as not wanting sex, but having bodies inherently sexually tempting to men and masculine people. When the two marry, she must give her body to her husband in every way. And yeah, it’s as gross as it sounds.

Just because conservatives didn’t say “asexual” before doesn’t make this rhetoric new. Purity culture has been against anything not based in some 1950s idealized sexuality in marriage for a very long time. Very cis heteronormative— two things aces are not. The only difference is that conservatives are including the word “asexual” in their sexual ethics now.

Wrote an essay about it here.

But yeah it’s not new. They’re just learning how to use more vocabulary to say what they were already saying.

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friendly reminder that anyone on the ace spectrum can use the ace flag of that's the one you prefer. you aren't required to use the flag specific to your label if you don't want to.

friendly reminder that anyone on the aro spectrum can use the aro flag of that's the one you prefer. you aren't required to use the flag specific to your label if you don't want to.

friendly reminder that anyone on the aroace spectrums can use the aroace flag of that's the one you prefer. you aren't required to use the flags specific to your labels if you don't want to.

if you're grayromantic but want to use the common aro flag? go for it. if you're cupiosexual but want to use the common ace flag? do it. if you're demiromantic abrosexual but want to use the orange-blue aroace flag? that's your decision. these flags exist for the entire community to use if they wish. you are just as aspec as anyone else on the spectrum.

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[ID: At the top, text reads “Someone: why are you so vocal about being asexual? It’s not like everyone else needs to know”, and on the next line, “Me:”. Below is the it’s about the cones meme. Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec says “It’s about the trying to spread awareness of asexuality so that other aces don’t think there’s something wrong with them”. End ID]

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idk, maybe some people will think this is a hot take, but...

“If greysexual/romantic people feel attraction then where is the line between allosexual/romantic and greysexual/romantic?”

There isn't one.

There. Isn't. One.

That's how a spectrum works. It's a gradient. There isn't a line.

When is this colour no longer blue?

Is it still blue until it's completely red? Or do you see that there is red in it as soon as it starts becoming purple? Or somewhere in the middle? There is no line. Everyone will have a different answer.

(And I would argue that, considering all that comes into play with attraction like frequency, intensity, favourability/repulsion, gender, and so on, it is much more complicated than a 2D gradient like this.)

Yes, this means two people with very similar experiences might label themselves differently. Yes, this means someone who needs a bond to unlock attraction might feel allo-, but someone who experiences frequent, fleeting attraction feels grey-.

So if you're not sure whether your experience is more allo- or grey-, just go with what feels right.

And if you're using this attraction argument as some kind of “gotcha” to exclude grey-aspecs from asexuality and aromanticism then I don't know how to explain to you better that that is how a spectrum works.