re: allosexual and zsexual
this is a great post that others ought to read and i just want to throw out my personal opinion on this topic so that it’s on this blog somewhere for future reference:
i personally despise the word ‘sexual’ being used as a general catch-all for non-asexual people, largely because of what is said in the OP.
when zsexual/zedsexual was first proposed i, like many, turned by back on the word allosexual because zsexual seemed like such a great idea to me at the time. that said, i personally no longer care for it for various reasons, the main two being that:
- i don’t like how the “A-to-Z” conceptualization positions asexuality and non-asexuality as two points on either end of a binary linear system.
- as a quasi-linguist and native English speaker myself, i don’t care for how English speakers are using the roman alphabet in such an arbitrary way. not everyone speaks English and those who don’t may not have the linguistic or cultural knowledge/context to even understand zsexual without explanation.
while allosexual certainly is not perfect, as noted in the OP and elsewhere, i still prefer it for now. at least allo- has an established meaning and usage as a prefix, meaning the word allosexual follows the same morphological structure as other orientations and the prefix’s meaning can be easily referenced for those who do not understand it (even if the meaning that they’ll find is vague as hell).
i also use non-asexual at times, although it certainly isn’t ideal…
