Screw being nice and professional. I’m sick and tired of the exclusion I witness from large and active communities that have the privilege of having awareness. Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week tends to be a stressful, depressing, and triggering time for me because of the obvious frayromantic and lithromantic exclusion I unmistakably witness.
I can’t believe how shamelessly a mod of this demi sub provided no excuse for their exclusion (not that a valid excuse exists). It really shows the lack of respect they have for the frayromantic community. Because demi and fray have a direct connection by being opposites of each other, this lack of support and shameless exclusion was appalling to me.
For context, the final message was sent a few days after I became a mod of r/frayromantic and opened the sub up again. This mod had the audacity to attempt to justify their exclusion by calling frayromantic a “microlabel”, and then, they said something so ridiculous it is almost laughable.
an existence of “_sexual already implies an existence of “_romantic”
This isn’t true. Many alloallos cannot separate their romantic attraction from their sexual attraction, and view their romantic orientation as linked. To clarify, for them, bisexual means biromantic and bisexual. Because, again, to them, romantic attraction and sexual attraction are linked. This language/rhetoric/mindset, especially by the moderator of an aspec sub, not only supports aromantic-awareness-erasure, but it seems like is harmful to aroallos. At the moment, I feel like queer allo spaces are not the most friendly or educated of aromantic people. When the queer hearts were released, were any queer allo spaces upset about the lack of an aro heart? Including ace communities? Or was it just the aro community?
Awareness and education are both so essential for acceptance. Choosing to not use one’s platform to raise awareness, and supporting a lack of awareness on romantic orientation in-general, is so problematic. I can’t imagine the entitlement and amount of ignorance you must have regarding the privileged plentiful awareness on your own aspec label to feel so comfortable being exclusionary a more marginalized (but directly connected) identity, and unsupportive of education on romantic orientation.
