When unimportant relationships are important

Recently, I wrote about my experience not forming close friendships. That’s not strictly speaking true–sometimes I do form some close friendships, but I tend to be uncommitted to them, and I often value friend networks over individual friendships.

Now I’d like to talk about how this causes friction with certain narratives in the ace community.

In particular, there is a narrative about friends who disappear the moment they form a romantic relationship, because they put a lot more priority on their romantic relationships.  I will use as an example, an excellent essay by swankivy, “Dealing with other people’s relationships“.

Linkspam: May 17th, 2019

On Fridays, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting.  We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!

Ace Blogging

Sennkestra has an Addyi update, and also informs us of Bremelanotide, another drug to treat HSDD, which has recently been submitted to the FDA.

Coyote made a timeline about HSDD and Addyi/Flibanserin, outlined some arguments used to defend the drug, and possible actions.

Ozy compared sexual attraction to Tide pods.

Aro vlogging

Connie had some aromantic dating advice.

Question of the Month: May 14th, 2019.

How explicit do you think ace representation needs to be? 

One of the most popular examples of claimed to be ace characters I can think of is Sherlock from the BBC version. Apparently actor Benedict Cumberbatch affirmed Sherlock as asexual, but as far as I know this is never stated in the show. Is it enough for someone who has some authorship over a character to say they are ace on the sidelines? Like J.K. Rowling saying Dumbledore was gay but not writing this into the original Harry Potter series? Or do you think representation should be more explicit? What about characters that fans claim are ace? Apparently some people think a close reading of Batman’s history reveals he is asexual.

I don’t make close friends

What is a friend? In ace communities, most of the time when we’re talking about friendships, it’s in order to differentiate it from other kinds of relationships, such as romantic or queerplatonic relationships. Of course, this puts a strong emphasis on the kinds of friendships that are most difficult to differentiate from queerplatonic/romantic/etc. It puts an emphasis on very close friendships.

I don’t form those kinds of friendships.

Wellll… there’s a big question mark at the end of that statement. It depends on what counts. There are many individuals that I’ve spent an extensive amount of time hanging out with, that I would consider close. But eventually, it slows down or we stop seeing each other–a change that suits me just fine, and does not cause me concern. Not to say that my time with my friends isn’t valuable, it’s just, there are other friends to be had.

Linkspam: May 10th, 2019

On Fridays, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting.  We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!

Ace Blogging

Ozy talked about graysexuality as the birth of a new orientation.

Michael Paramo discussed asexuality on Usenet in the early 1990s.

Coyote argued that using “non-SAM” to refer specifically to the romantic/sexual orientation dyad is amatonormative.

Addyi, the drug to treat HSDD, has a new ad campaign.  Sennkestra explains why we’re mad.

The Carnival of Aces, themed on “The Five Love Languages” was posted.  The next call for submissions is here.

Carnival of Aros

aroacepagans is hosting the May Carnival of Aros, themed on “The Intersection of Religion and Aromanticism“.

Carnival of Aces: The Five Love Languages

The Carnival of Aces for April has been posted by luvtheheaven.  The theme was “The Five Love Languages“.  Please take a look!

The next Carnival of Aces is being hosted by Demiandproud.  The theme for May is “Performance and Play”.  Get your submissions in before the end of the month!

The Carnival of Aces is hosted by volunteers each month.  If you would like to volunteer, please see the masterpost for instructions.

Terrible graphs of orientation

It used to be one of distinctive features of ace communities, that we really liked drawing graphs. Oh so many graphs, more than I can include. The graphs were painful, and we liked the pain. It’s fallen out of fashion lately though, possibly for the best.

This article is one part historical retrospective, one part laughing at terrible graphs, and one part trying to “improve” the graphs with more math. There are a lot of graphs, so we better get started.

Triangles, Squares, and Hypercubes