On artificial romance

I just watched a video by Daryl Talks Games titled “What Artificial Romance Does to People“. Although crushes/romance/relationships with artificial characters are stigmatized, Daryl discusses psychological research that suggests that they often have beneficial effects (although not uniformly beneficial). I’m not responding to the video, I just felt inspired to comment on the same subject matter, from an ace lens.

I believe that part of the stigma around artificial romance comes from the idea that they are replacing real girlfriends. “The guy who married Hatsune Miku should get a real girlfriend.” That’s people’s gut reaction, and I am not immune either.  Some degree of crushes on fictional characters seems fairly common, but that degree of artificial romance strikes me as weird. However, I do think we should take our initial reaction, and consciously reject it.

A core ace principle is that nobody needs to get a real girlfriend. No exceptions, not even for allo people. It is irrelevant whether or not a person has a romance with a fictional character–there is no moral imperative for them to form a romance with a real person. We could say that if someone is in love with a fictional character, they’re really just in love with a mental projection, so it’s really just a kind of self-relationship. To this I would say, having a positive self-relationship is a good thing, and it is eminently reasonable to prefer it over a romantic relationship with another person.

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A better masculinity, for those who don’t want it

A few months ago, I went to an ace unconference–an unconference being an event where attendees create sessions on the spot, rather than planning sessions in advance.  I’ve been to quite a few of these, and I usually end up attending a discussion on ace men, because men are a minority within ace communities, and that’s worth talking about.

However, something was different this time.  This discussion was framed around ace masculinity, rather than ace men.  I relate much more to one than the other.

Several attendees were interested in the question of how to maintain their masculinity while being ace.  A lot of masculinity is associated with being sexually aggressive, so ace men are perceived as less masculine.  However, they were still invested in following some form of masculinity, either because it was gender affirming, or because they wanted a certain presentation as they approached dating, or because they just liked it.  So they were talking about stuff like clubbing and going to the gym.

I don’t deny the value of the discussion, but my reaction was “oh god, I hate masculinity so much.”  I said: being ace isn’t a challenge to my masculinity, it’s an opportunity to escape it.  I talked about how much I liked growing my hair long despite initially feeling that it wasn’t very gender affirming. I talked about preferring Zumba instead of gym workouts.  Several other attendees voiced similar feelings (noticeably, the ones with longer hair).

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Tips for respecting microlabels

Readers may be familiar with the idea of stacking queer labels, especially words related to asexual and nonbinary people. For example, somebody might call themselves a nebulagender panromantic aegosexual fraysexual, and what does any of that mean? Perhaps you’ve seen these label stacks applied to a hypothetical person, a caricature meant to be mocked. Perhaps you’ve seen label stacks provided as a rhetorical example of someone worthy of respect, as if to say, “yes, we even tolerate those people”. Or perhaps you’ve seen the real thing in the wild: a person who unironically chains four or more identities together.

I’m assuming that the reader is interested in respecting others, and is not just coming here to mock labels they don’t understand. I offer some basic tips.

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Reflecting on interdisciplinary journal clubbing

I come from a physics background, but I spent the past three years running the Ace Journal Club, a group that reads scholarly articles from the interdisciplinary field of asexuality studies. While I was never the sort of person who disrespected the social sciences, my experience with the journal club has enhanced my respect and appreciation.

Asexuality studies is a highly interdisciplinary field, mostly within the social sciences. Looking at our monthly public discussion notes, the most common fields are psychology, sociology, and gender studies. But there have also been a few from communication studies, health sciences, and literature. There are a few odd examples from linguistics, library sciences, and I don’t even know how to classify the paper doing quantitative analysis of romance novels.

An important aspect of the journal club is that we aren’t just reading papers–we’re also discussing them. If I were just reading papers on my own, I would be left on my own to seethe about something the paper said that just didn’t make sense. But since I’m discussing it with other people, some of whom have expertise in the field, they can explain why it says that. OR, more frequently, they explain why it’s even worse than I thought, and then we can complain about it together!

How is it that all these complaints about social science articles lead to greater respect of the social sciences? It shows me that the social sciences are alive.
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Heartstopper season 2

Last year, I gave a lukewarm review of Heartstopper, including the first season of the TV series, and the webcomic up to that point. Today, I will offer a few comments on season 2. Because despite me being fairly critical, you know that I’m into it.

Coming out

If season 2 has any central focus, it’s on coming out. Nick has committed to coming out to people at school at the beginning of the season, and he only gets around to it near the end of the season.

On the one hand, I appreciate the portrayal of coming out as a long and arduous process. In many stories, coming out is portrayed as a single confrontation, usually with parents. But in real life, there are so many people to come out to, way more than you can reasonably fit in a story. When an LGBTQ person is committed to coming out, it really is a long-term commitment, and you never stop.

On the other hand, a huge benefit of coming out for gay/bi men is that you can actually have a relationship in public. There are just so many things you cannot do in a same-sex relationship while closeted because people would find out. But this does not seem to present much of a benefit to Nick and Charlie, because they’re pretty much already doing the things that you can’t actually do while closeted.  They somehow find an endless supply of private spaces.  Quite a number of these private spaces are actually in public, they’re just treated as private for no real reason.  The low-stakes story seems to remove some of the major issues that motivate people to come out.

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The veil of gender ignorance

One of the common TERF talking points is, “If I grew up today, I would have (wrongly) believed I was trans.” As with many TERF arguments, there’s also an anti-ace analogue: “If I grew up today, I would have sooner believed I was bisexual heteroromantic than just gay.” I’m going to take an analytical approach to understanding and countering these arguments.

The veil of ignorance

We can start by borrowing an idea from political philosophy: the veil of ignorance. We imagine that we have the opportunity to construct a society however we wish. Afterwards, we get to take our place within the society. The catch is, we don’t know which place we will take. So we don’t want the society to unfairly favor one group over another, because we may end up taking the unfavored position.

The veil of ignorance is particularly well-suited to this problem, because it’s pretty close to what we’re actually doing. We choose the cultural and social messages that are conveyed to the next generation. And, in order to make that choice, we imagine ourselves in the shoes of the next generation. “If I grew up today…”

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