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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My academic career finally ended

I didn’t talk about it much, but until recently I was technically still involved in academia. I participated in Project Recognize, a research grant to improve survey measures of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) for public health research.

The project was particularly interested in measures of asexual and intersex groups, because there is a gap in the academic literature. For example, this NASEM report has hundreds of pages on SSOGI measures, but barely anything to say about asexuality at all.  We were filling that gap by looking beyond academic literature, such as exploring grassroots community literature.

We were funded by an NIH grant, but as you can imagine, this is exactly the sort of research that’s getting targeted for being too “woke”.

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The cultural practice of community agreements

How many readers are familiar with the practice of community agreements? This was a widely extant practice in my experience with queer student groups and queer conferences in the US in the 2010s. At the beginning of almost every discussion, the moderator would establish some ground rules, usually using catch phrases as titles, written on a black board.

For example, “One mic one diva” cautions against interruption, while “step up step back” cautions against dominating the conversation. “Oops, ouch, educate” outlines appropriate steps when someone makes a mistake. “Don’t yuck my yum” cautions against derogating what others love. “Use ‘I’ statements” asks people to avoid generalizing their personal experiences. And there’s often a “confidentiality” agreement, which doesn’t have a catch phrase but is still obviously important. The particular choice of agreements may vary, and sometimes the same agreements go under different names.

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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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Attraction to nonbinary people

Difficult survey questions

I’ve spent a lot of time making surveys that ask people about their orientation, so I’m familiar with the messy relationship between orientation and nonbinary genders. Gay and straight are labels that assume that a binary gender for both the subject and object of attraction–men who love men, men who love women, etc. If you’re a nonbinary person who loves women, or a woman who loves nonbinary people, “gay” and “straight” don’t really succeed in conveying that information.

Some nonbinary people, I’m aware, will identify as gay or straight anyway. For example, if you’re commonly perceived as a man, and your dating pool primarily consists of men who love men, you might feel that “gay” fits–or is at least useful–even if you don’t identify as a man. On the other hand, some nonbinary people would be uncomfortable with a label that frames them within a binary gender identity.

In any case, if someone fills out our survey, and they say they’re nonbinary and gay, I’ll say sure, that’s what they are. The survey isn’t there to judge, only to measure. But… I have no idea what genders they’re attracted to. If I want to know that information, I have to ask directly. Are you attracted to men? Are you attracted to women?

But isn’t it strange? In order to understand the orientations of nonbinary people, we’re asking about attraction to men and women. Didn’t we leave some other genders out? What about attraction to nonbinary people?

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More on the purpose of readings

In my previous post (which you may have missed, since FTB was down for a few days), I asked “What is the purpose of a reading?” I discussed a reading of Elden Ring that baffled me. I could not understand the purpose of the reading, other than arguing that it was intended by the authors. And the article didn’t really do anything to convince me of authorial intent.

I wanted to keep things simple, but my thoughts were spiraling outwards from there. So, if you permit, some more scattered discussion.

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