Feedback: “Your video on gender envy/admiration really spoke to me.”
anonymous said: Your video on gender envy/admiration really spoke to me. When I figured out my aroace identity and my predominate aesthetic attraction to femme people I didn’t quite understand how I had convinced myself I was straight for so long. I feel like later after I realized I was masc non binary it explained more of my assumed attraction to masc people as being more along the lines of “i want to be like them”. ( re: this post ) ah, i can relate to the “convinced myself i was straight for so long” thing. i very much feel like gender envy / admiration (among other things) played a part in me falling for the whole “straight by default” (among other) shit that society fed me from Day 1 and that i likely would have broken free of that sooner had i recognized gender envy / admiration for what it…
Feedback: “your video on attraction & gender envy was rly interesting!”
anonymous said: your video on attraction & gender envy was rly interesting! Im also ace and nb and i think about it a lot about lately. I struggle to separate my looks-based/aesthetic attraction for masc ppl from dysphoria based envy and I thought it was just me! ( re: this post ) with 30+ people and counting on YouTube and many more elsewhere commenting that they’ve also had similar experiences, it looks like neither of us was as alone in our experiences as we’d thought. 🙂
Q&A: “If I’m ace/aro can I love aesthetically how any gender looks but…”
anonymous said: If I’m ace/aro can I love aesthetically how any gender looks but not want a relationship with anyone but girls you most certainly can, anon. aesthetic love does not dictate who you may want to have a relationship with. the only thing that decides that is literally who you want to have a relationship with.
QAC 54 – Confusing Gender Envy & Admiration with Attraction || Non-Binary | Asexual
it’s come to my attention recently that some feelings that i assummed were attraction may have not been attraction at all, but rather “gender envy” or “gender admiration”– feelings of admiration or envy towards someone else’s gender be it their self-expression, gender identity, (lack of) gender roles or socially imposed gender norms– anything pertaining to a person’s gender. never heard of gender envy or gender admiration before…? i’m not surprised, since i just pulled the terms out of my ass for lack of a better way of referring to these gender feels that i’m attempting to navigate. as someone who’s both non-binary and asexual i feel like both of these things have played a part in me mistaking gender envy / admiration for attraction. this is something that i’m just now beginning to give thought to, so please bear with me as i stumble around trying to talk about things.…
Q&A: “Could you help me by defining those types of attraction?”
anonymous said: I get your point about the types of attraction being connected in a web, not a scalar. Could you help me by defining those types of attraction? For example, I know sexual attraction is a desire to have sexual contact, and aesthetic attraction is about appearance. I’m less clear on the others, which are often defined via tautology. (“Romantic attraction is desire to have a romantic relationship.” Ok, then what’s a romantic relationship?) Can you help clear this up? Thanks! (re: this post, however i’m going to update that post to include definitions) it’s true, definitions can sometimes be circular and thus unhelpful/difficult to understand. often because the thing being defined is difficult to define, obviously. i guess i’ll give writing simplistic definitions a shot… i’ve done it before, but never all laid out at once like this. this is quite the task!
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Feedback: “I just wanted to thank you for your post on the alterous vs platonic thing…”
anonymous said: Hi, I just wanted to thank you for your post on the alterous vs platonic thing–I’m aroflux, have a qpp and’ve been miffed about the same things. Like, it’s great the term exists, but I feel invalidated by many promotions of it. Love’s not a binary. yeah… i wish people would think of attractions more like this: instead of isolating certain types of attraction and positioning them on a linear scale or even spectrum, as people often do. that said, the above is the 15min product of my sleep deprived brain functioning after 3am on 4hrs of sleep. it’s not thought out and thus is full of holes and problems, so please don’t take it too seriously zzz… edit: someone asked me to define these types of attraction, so i gave it a shot. disclaimer: please bear in mind that these are my own personal definitions as of now (2.24.2016).…
Q&A: “I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m bisexual, or biromantic?”
anonymous said: I’m having a hard time lately. I have been trying online dating for awhile (tinder etc. guys only) and am finding I get bored really fast and have no interest to carry on conversations or meet up – maybe I just have no desire to date right now. Lately I’ve also been noticing that when I go out I tend to notice the girls in the room before the guys. I’m starting to wonder if maybe I’m bisexual, or biromantic? How do you know the difference between that and just appreciating people who look nice? personally, if i’m experiencing aesthetic attraction (ie. in admiration of someone’s looks), it’s very similar to being in admiration of anything else. i love their sense of style or their overall look and that may trigger the desire to approach them and compliment them, but the admiration or attraction ends there if that’s…
Q&A: “I wonder if we can use ‘pan’ for not only sexual attraction than why not the rest of them…”
anonymous said: You know I wonder if I could identify as bi or pan. Because I am certainly asexual and wtfro/aro but my sensual, aesthetic and platonic orientations are pan I think? And if we can use that for not only sexual attraction than why not the rest of them. there are people who use prefixes like bi-, pan-, homo-, hetero- etc to describe the other types of attraction that you mentioned. for example, pan(-)aesthetic, bi(-)sensual, homo(-)platonic etc. these words aren’t common, but i’ve definitely seen them in use, primarily within the ace and aro communities on AVEN and Tumblr.
Q&A: “…do you think there could be other types of attraction?”
anonymous said: I know a lot of the time in discussions about asexual identities people break down attraction into 4 different categories: sexual, romantic, aesthetic, sensual (well and sometimes platonic). But do you think there could be other types of attraction? Sometimes I see people and I feel /something/ but I wouldn’t really categorize it as one of those – argh its so confusing! Am I just experiencing one of those types of attraction in a strange way?? without a doubt there could be (read: probably is) more to attraction than the categories that the ace and aro communities tend to refer to. attraction, as with feelings in general, is an insanely complex thing that most certainly cannot be neatly boxed into or described by categories. it doesn’t get said enough that not everyone even finds the existing categories helpful or meaningful in describing their attraction(s). you could be experiencing…
QAC 03 – Romantic Orientations & Other Types of Attraction
in this video i try to explain how there are several types of attraction, including romantic, sensual, aesthetic and sexual attraction. i also go on to explain that there are also romantic orientations in addition to sexual orientations and how these two orientations do not always match each other. i am certainly no expert on this topic, but i feel that this topic is not discussed enough, so i made this video with the hope of furthering awareness and discussion about the matter. i apologize if i have confused for offended anyone. re: the “Orientations” image used in this video, see here. feedback and comments are welcome. hope i explained things clearly/correctly enough. ;(
