#split attraction model
Continuing from my previous post on the aro community’s obsession with creating labels instead of addressing root issues. This time, I’ll be talking about sexuality, and/or lack thereof.
Those of you who have been active in the aro community within the past six months or so are no doubt familiar with the way asexuality is seen as the default for aros, leading those of us whoaren’tasexual (such as myself) to start advocating for ourselves more, and being firm about who we are. We’re allo aros, we’re here, and we’re going to make a place for ourselves. That’s all fine and good, but that leaves those who don’t quite fit into either box sort of left behind.
The fact is, as mentioned, asexuality is seen as the default for aromantics. You can’t just say you’re aro and have that be that, because people can, and will, assume that you’re ace. If you’re not ace, that’s so unusual that you’d better have a way to describe it! Are you straight? Gay? Bisexual? What do you mean, you’re “just” aro? Oh, so you’re a non-SAM aro, then?
In reality, everyone’s sexuality is their own business, and they shouldn’t have to disclose it to anyone, or have any specific labels if they don’t want to. For some people, they may not know exactly what their sexuality is, or they may not want to say what it is, or they may not care what it is. They should be able to say they’re aro, without any assumptions being made. Aros should be able to have, and talk about, whatever sexual attraction they do or don’t experience, without being pressured to lay out an exact description of what specifically they “are” to everyone else. Aro, as an identity, should come with no assumptions about sexuality.
Allo aros, in many ways, aren’t describing ourselves as such because we love the term allosexual. We’re describing ourselves as such because we’re tired of being assumed to be asexual. Any little bit of not fitting in with the ace community, imo, is enough to be welcome with us. But the way things are happening makes it come across as if you have to be either strictly allo or strictly ace, which leaves aros who don’t quite fit in those boxes feeling excluded*. Thus terms like non-SAM or neuaro are coined, and sure, those can be helpful to some… But they’re still clunky and overly specific terms that not everyone wants to use, yet they still feel forced to, because if they don’t, guess what’ll happen? Yup, you got it. They’ll be assumed to be ace.
“Aro” should be enough. Aro shouldn’t come with any assumptions about sexuality. But it does, and instead of coming together to change things so that asexuality is no longer assumed to be the default, the aro community is more focused on coming up with terms to describe aros who aren’t Aroace™, and then subsequently bickering about said terms. We need to address why these terms are necessary, rather than arguing about them and piling on more and more fancy bandaids that ultimately change nothing.
*Aces, don’t you dare try to use this as an excuse to criticize the allo aro community and our self-avocation. Don’t you dare try to silence us again, I’m not having it. If you have a problem with the ace/allo binary, then you need to start dismantling the whole system that led to its existence, not paint over one end and call it a day.
It’s Pride!!
Remember to give your fellow aroace and/or alloaro a nice pat on the back! And also 10 dollars.
Redbubble, Commissions,DNIproshippers/antiantis/queerphobes/etcin link, Pls reblog to support!
The following is an imaginary conversation.
“So, I’m grey-aromantic and demisexual. That means that I only rarely feel romantic attraction to people, and I only feel sexual attraction to someone after I form an emotional connection with them, and even then, it’s pretty rare.”
“But that’s just how everyone is. It’s totally normal to not get crushes on people that often, and I like to get to know people before I want to have sex with them, too.”
“Okay, you’ve brought up a couple different things here. First, there’s a difference between feeling sexual attraction and wanting to have sex with someone. You can feel attraction to a person and decide not to have sex with them until you get to know them. But I don’t feel that sexual attraction at all when I meet someone. Second, sure, it’s normal for me to not get crushes on people that often, and maybe it’s normal for you, too, but it’s not normal for everyone. Just look at all the movies that are about love at first sight.”
“That’s just fiction. That doesn’t really happen to real people.”
“Fiction can be sensational, but it’s inspired by reality. If it had nothing to do with reality, then people wouldn’t be interested, and it wouldn’t sell, and they’d stop making it. But, okay, let’s focus on reality. Real people talk about their crushes all the time. It’s basically all anyone wanted to talk about at my high school – who liked who, who was dating who, how much they loved this celebrity or that celebrity. Was it like that with the people you went to school with, too?”
“Yeah! It could get really annoying. But they were just exaggerating. Teenagers make such a big deal out of everything.”
“Ha! They do. I know I did. So maybe they were exaggerating about how strong their crushes were. But when someone tells me what they’re experiencing, I think it’s important to believe them. And if they’re describing something that doesn’t line up with my own experience, then it’s even more important to believe them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, so, did you know that I don’t have a sense of smell?”
“Really?”
“Really. Born without. Never had it. You could fart right now, and if I didn’t hear it, then I wouldn’t know.”
“That sounds super convenient, actually.”
“It can be. The thing is, I have no idea what it’s like to smell. That’s not a part of my experience at all. So, like, you’re telling me that it’s possible for you to just walk into a room and know what’s for dinner? Without seeing it? You just know? From the air? Like magic?”
“It does sound like magic, when you put it like that.”
“I know, right? Sounds pretty sus! But if I’d gone my whole life saying that smell wasn’t real, if I told everyone that they were lying or delusional because they said they could smell… what would that make me?”
“A jerk.”
“Exactly! I’d be a real jerk. Stuck in my own head, unable to imagine that other people might experience the world differently. So, instead, when someone tells me that they feel something that I don’t feel, or that they feel it more often than I feel it, or more strongly, I believe them. And I hope that they extend me the same courtesy – that they believe me, too, when I tell them that my experience is different from what they experience.”
“But what you described before, how you experience attraction, that didn’t sound different than what I experience.”
“Well, being able to talk about this stuff means that it’s possible to find people who experience the world the same way that you do, or at least in a similar way. That’s why I like these labels so much. They help me find other aro-ace people to talk to.”
“Are you saying I’m aro-ace?”
“I’m not going to try to say what you are. I’m not inside your head. You get to describe your experience the way you want to. But if you find that these labels are useful to you like they’re useful to me, I’d be happy to talk with you about it, as much or as little as you want.”
The split attraction model, or SAM, has been viciously attacked over the course of the past couple years, based on claims that it is homophobic, sexualizing, etc. In order to understand where these claims break down, it’s important to consider the history of split attraction as a model for orientation.
Disjunctive Identities: The Original SAM
Long before the split attraction model was conceived, before even the popularization of gay and lesbian as identity words, there was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. By 1879, Ulrichs had published twelve books on the subject of non-heterosexual attraction. Though the language he used is not modern sexuality language, the various classifications of orientations that he eventually came up with are fairly similar to modern LGB+ identities, with some exceptions.
Most notable among those exceptions (at least for the purposes of this post) is the fact that he identified two distinct categories of people who would today be considered bisexual (which he then called uranodioning in men and uranodioningin in women): konjunktiver and disjunktiver. (In English, conjunctive and disjunctive bisexuality.) The first described a person with both “tender” and “passionate” feelings for both men and women. The second, however, described a person who had “tender” feelings for men, but “passionate” feelings for women (if the person was a man - the inverse if the person was a woman).
Though Ulrichs’s model was never widely popularized, due to its complexity (he also recognized “man who has sex with men in prison but is otherwise straight” and “man who has been through conversion therapy” as distinct sexualities, among others), it remains the first historical model of orientation to account for split attraction.
Limerance: Separating Love From Sex
The next instance of a model accounting for split attraction was published almost exactly a century after Ulrichs’s works. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov’s studies of attraction and love in the 1960′s led to the publication of her book “Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love” in 1979.
Limerance encompassed what would now be termed a crush, or infatuation with someone - the kind of attraction that would lead to the formation of a relationship, and which could lead to a longer-term, stable experience of love. Although Tennov viewed limerance as essentially including sexual attraction, she acknowledged that sex was not the focus of limerant attraction.
In and of itself, therefore, limerance would not be considered a split attraction model. However, it is worth mentioning because of later use of “non-limerant” as a precursor to today’s “aromantic.”
Affectional Attraction: The First Modern SAM
It is unclear when, precisely, the term “affectional orientation/attraction” first came into popular use. I have seen its coining attributed to Curt Pavola, a gay rights activist from Washington, and to Lisa Diamond, a psychologist. However, the term seems to predate both of these individuals, with the earliest use I can find being from a 1989 paper on education about gay and lesbian identities, wherein the authors use affectional attraction as a term which they do not feel the need to define, indicating to me that its origin must be earlier than that.
Affectional attraction/orientation was used, as a term, to indicate that simply using sexual attraction/orientation was reductive - that it implied that a relationship or feeling of attraction was entirely or mostly about sex. A large body of writing about orientation from the 90′s and early 2000′s uses “affectional/sexual orientation” or similar phrasing for exactly this reason.
Haven For The Human Amoeba: Today’s Split Attraction
Finally, we trace split attraction to a form that is familiar to all of us today.
An attempt on AVEN to trace the origins of romantic orientations as we know them leads to the Yahoo email group Haven For The Human Amoeba (the name of which was derived from the article “My Life As A Human Amoeba”). In that group, in 2001, there were a series of posts about the term "hetero-asexual”.
The idea of split attraction as used today, however, was developed about four years later, in 2005, on AVEN. Terms were hashed out, and the structure of the language that we use today was born. By 2007, the modern language of split attraction was in common use in asexual circles, and was also tentatively suggested to non-asexual people who were questioning their identities.
Conclusions
What can we conclude from this information? I would summarize what I’ve found with the following points:
1) That split attraction, or the potential for split attraction, is not a modern concept, but has been something we have been aware of for centuries.
2) That split attraction is not an exclusively asexual concept, but up until very recently was an integral part of orientation studies in general.
3) That the modern language of split attraction originated within the asexual community.
4) That anyone who blames asexual people for any perceived horribleness of the split-attraction model is flat wrong.
Further Reading & Sources
On Ulrichs’s Uranian model of orientation: one,two,three,four,five
I know of an earlier example! In 1977, Shively and De Cecco propose a model of sexual orientation that is split into “physical” and “affectional” aspects in their paper “Components of Sexual Identity” - I’ve pulled out the relevant excerpts here: https://nextstepcake.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/models-of-sexuality-in-shively-and-de-ceccos-components-of-sexual-identity-1977/
I don’t know if this is the first - they propose their specific model as if it is the formal model to include this split aspect, but they discuss the concept having separate “physical” and “affectional” in a way that suggests that the concepts have been around previously, if not in a formalized way. Combing through the bibliography here may be an interesting endeavor for someone with more time than me.
Ahh, bless you. Papers that actually include bibliographies are my lifeblood.
So based on this info, I did some more digging. What I’m finding is that prior to about 1977, affectional was used exclusively to describe a platonic or familial emotional connection. (Examples: one,two,three) I would theorize based on this that the paper you found is the first to put the pre-existing term into a model of human sexuality.
Some evolution about these (a brief in LatAm context): the asexual community in Brazil has various affectional suffixed orientations to replace romantic ones, known as -afetive(a/o), such as heteroafetive, androafetive/gineafetive, homoafetive, biafetive, panafetive, lesboafetive/lesbiafetive, oniafetive/omniafetive and poliafetive (could be either ply (polysexual, polyromantic…) or polyaffective/polyaffectionate/polyamorous). It’s usually affinitive but could be amative (demiafetive) and nullitive (nulafetive/nonafetive).
All this results from our juridical word homoafetividade, firstly used in recognition of foresight for homoaffectional civil unions, used at least since 2006.
Nowadays it’s used to include equaric relationships (sapphic/vincian/enbian/etc.). There’s an NGO that uses transafetiva to connote trans partnership(s), similar to transamorous. This can cause erasure and is criticized by trans/bi activists.
Recently, feminists use homoafetiva to talk about homosociality and homoeroticism in heterosexual men. Which banalized the word into homoplatonic.
I recommend taking care translating -afetivo to -affective, it could allude schizoaffective.
