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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, hand out pieces of language to all the neighbourhood children who come a-knocking.
Last episode I covered some of the etymology requests that you sent in, but by far the most requested terms were asexual and aromantic. Your wish is my command: today, we’re talking about ace and aro! And it happens to be Ace Week this week, which you can find out more about at aceweek.org.
On with the show.
HZ: How did it feel when you found the vocabulary to explain yourself?
LEWIS BROWN: Oh, it was so good. I think it's maybe a bit of a cliche to say, but it was like I'd found a puzzle piece. And I was like, "Oh! That makes sense. Right. Yeah. You know, that checks out." It really helps, I think, to have to have a term for it. Before I had words like aromantic and asexual, I don't know, I just had a bad feeling. When I assumed that I did feel attracted to other people and I was kind of thinking, do I just have some trauma or something? Am I just a selfish person? And these are a cruel things to be thinking about yourself. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, no I don't. I can think of all the ways in which I'm a pretty giving person. I care about the people that I care about quite a lot. Just not necessarily in the way that everyone thinks is the most important way.
HZ: It's important, I think, to reframe it as it's not that you failed at what is the prevailing narrative; it is an active something else.
LEWIS BROWN: Yeah. So it's good to have a counternarrative.
My name is Lewis Brown. My pronouns are he and him. I'm a writer, a poet, and a freshly minted volunteer representative for AUREA, which is the Aromantic spectrum Union for Recognition, Education and Advocacy, which is an acronym that I like.
HZ: AUREA launched in 2019. We’ll also be talking about AVEN, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, which has been around since 2002.
LEWIS BROWN: The 'a-' part of aromantic and asexual means 'without' or 'no'. No sexual or not sexual, I guess, or no romantic, not romantic. So an asexual person is someone who experiences little or less or no sexual attraction towards other people; and an aromantic person is a person who experiences little or less or no romantic attraction towards other people.
HZ: During the course of this episode, you'll also hear the terms 'allosexual' and 'alloromantic', which mean 'not asexual' or 'not aromantic'.
LEWIS BROWN: The allo- means 'other' or 'different', so it means attracted to other people , either physically or romantically.
HZ: So far, the earliest known written example of the word 'aromantic' is from a 2002 post on the asexual online community Haven for the Human Amoeba. ‘Asexual’ meanwhile is a much older word, it was in use since the 1820s in biology, to refer to organisms that don't have sex systems, or are able to reproduce solo. It started to be used in regard to human sexuality since the early 20th century as far as I can tell, and people have been using it about themselves for several decades now: the Asexual Manifesto by Lisa Orlando and Barbie Hunter Getz was published in 1972. They said:
We chose the term ‘asexual’ to describe ourselves because both ‘celibate’ and ‘anti-sexual’ have connotations we wished to avoid: the first implies that one has sacrificed sexuality for some higher good, the second that sexuality is degrading or somehow inherently bad. ‘Asexual’ as we use it, does not mean ‘without sex’ but ‘relating sexually to no one’. This does not, of course, exclude masturbation but implies that if one has sexual feelings they do not require another person for their expression. Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.
LEWIS BROWN: You can point to some predecessors of the word 'asexual', some words that mean kind of similar things, or clearly people are reaching in the direction of the concept. But after you go back, it becomes quite vague, because the way people understand relationships at all, the way people even make a distinction between romantic attraction and physical attraction - or don't - makes it a pretty sticky business, trying to extrapolate into the past.
HZ: Yes, because there will always have been aspec people in existence, but their sexuality may not have been communicated by them or recognised by others. Or it is pathologised, and being studied as a specimen does not provide a great record of the reality of how people feel.
LEWIS BROWN: There's a couple of words that were floated around on the way to coming up with the current terminology and I can see why some of them didn't stick. I also see what they were getting at. There was a guy in the 1800s who used the word 'monosexual' to refer to people who were attracted to themselves only, because they recognized that these people were essentially - well, they still masturbated, basically, but they weren't attracted to other people. I mean, it's true that some asexual people still pleasure themselves or want to. Or have sex with other people for that matter. But monosexual? It's a bit confusing. They're not attracted to themselves. They're not attracted to only one person or one thing.
HZ: 'Monoromantic' as well would probably not be a good path to go down.
LEWIS BROWN: No, it makes it sound either like you're specifically in love with yourself or that you mate for life, you pair for life or something. I guess some people do, but yeah, monosexual is a bit close to monogamy. There was someone a bit later that talked about 'anesthesiasexual people', which is really weird.
HZ: Is that consensual?
LEWIS BROWN: It sounds very strange, doesn't it? He's kind of implying that urges are suppressed? I don't really know what the reasoning with that one is.
HZ: It was the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld who came up with ‘anasthesiasexual’, in 1896. Some five decades later, the Kinsey Scale opted for the more nondescript Category X.
LEWIS BROWN: Some people think that some studies might have incorrectly classified asexual people as bisexual, because they were equally indifferent to sleeping with both men and women. You can be bi and asexual for sure. But there was a conflating of the categories among some schools of thought a while ago.
HZ: Not MORE problems for 'bisexual'! The word has already been through so much! (Listen to the Allusionist episode Two Or More for more about that.) As for 'aromantic', it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018, pretty good going for such a new word; but its precursors are a bit more difficult to note, because it has been easier to recognise aromanticism, identify as it, form communities around it, since there's been a term for it.
LEWIS BROWN: I know that there was a thread on the predecessor of AVEN online, where some people refer to themselves as 'asexual-asexual', as if to say that they're not interested in sex or any of the other stuff that goes with it, just like double asexual, which doesn't really make sense.
HZ: Just really making the point, though.
LEWIS BROWN: Yeah. And someone else said, "Hey, doen't 'aromantic' make a bit more sense, if that's what we're using the second asexual to refer to?" It became popular on forums. It was a formation of people who were already talking about asexuality and wanted to talk about this other thing that co-occurs for some people, and it seems like a related conversation, but isn't the same thing. For me, they are related, because I'm aromantic and asexual. A lot of the people I know who are one are somewhere on the scale for the other, but I know that you shouldn't always talk about them in the same breath, because the experience of being asexual but not aromantic, and the experience of being aromantic but not asexual, are very different experiences. And the experience of being both is probably pretty different too. And I can only speak to my own one. There's lots of different combinations. If your sexual orientation and your romantic orientation match, as it were, you're perioriented. And if they don't match, you're varioriented, as in that they vary. So in my case I would be perioriented because I'm both asexual and aromantic; but if you were asexual, but homoromantic, so you were romantically interested in people of the same gender, but not sexually.
HZ: The forums weren't all united behind the word 'asexual' or, later, 'aromantic'.
LEWIS BROWN: There was the faction of people that sounded pretty sex-negative, and kind of sanctimonious, if you ask me; the anti-sexuals. And then there were the hard line asexuals that to me sound quite exclusionary: they had quite rigorous standards on what asexuality was, and they thought the term only applies to individuals who experienced no sexual attraction or arousal. So there would be no room for people who are grey asexual, or demiasexual or whatever, in that community. Actually ‘greysexual’ is another common one: it's the purposefully vague one of "I experience less sexual attraction or sometimes sexual attraction," but the important thing is less than an allosexual person. And the third group, the one that I'm glad won, as it were, were the queer asexuals who were a group of people who, I understand, consisted mainly of activists who had a history with other kinds of LGBT and queer movements and saw asexuality as a kind of a flexible identity that should be a tool that people can use to use for themselves. And they wanted to create like a essentially a supportive and open and as inclusive as possible kind of community. And it's not like there was a vote or a war that led that, that third inclusive, inclusive faction to kind of, to win out; it was the idea that stuck. It was idea that had the most appeal.
HZ: It does seem like the most generous.
LEWIS BROWN: Yeah, I think so. I think it's absolutely the most useful, I think it's the kindest way to think about it, the most politically useful if you want to organize around it and understand what it means. And then the aromantic community grew out of AVEN a few years later, and that's where AUREA came from. I think the communities have rallied around quite a welcoming, inclusive, let's build the tools to talk about our experience and understand it and find solidarity with each other.
The community is very open and encouraging of people to set their own terms and say, oh, if you want to use just the whole, the big umbrella term, aromantic, asexual, aspec, which is both, or aro ace, or if you want to just call yourself queer, if you like the word queer, which I personally do, but I know not everyone does. I can understand the impulse to be wary of labels and lots of little subcategories.
You quite quickly get lost in the weeds of different terminology. If you keep digging, there's lots of specific words. But I think that's very useful for a lot of people. Like my personal journey was thinking, first I thought I was straight and then I thought, wait, okay, I'm not actually into the sex part of this. It's okay, I don't hate it.' Demisexual' was kind of a label I landed on for a while, which means sexually attracted to people that you have an emotional connection with. And then I realized, I think actually, no, so I moved from demisexual to asexual. And then a little while later I realized I was aromantic as well. Because pretty much I thought, wait, all of the things I like about dating people are the things I like about being friends with people as well.
HZ: I bet some of your brains are at this juncture supplying the word ‘platonic’, a form of love that transcends the physical and approaches the divine. Named after the Greek philosopher Plato, although that may have been just a nickname, his birth name might have been Aristocles and ‘Plato’ from the word ‘platys’ meaning broad and was a nickname referring to his shoulders. Anyway, broad shoulders or not, Plato’s writings in Symposium earned him the adjective platonic, albeit not till the early 16th century, about 1800 years late for Plato to see it. But in the 17th century the idea of platonic love was mocked, in plays and poems, and by the 1630s the word had a connotation of ridiculousness, that love could be separated from carnal, or just was impossibly lofty. So ‘platonic’ was robbed of that sense of transcendence, and become rather diluted, used for a relationship that is too tepid to become romantic.
LEWIS BROWN: I guess ‘platonic’ has kind of become the catch-all, right, the miscellaneous, the bin that non-sexual and non-romantic relationships go into.
HZ: I suppose one of the whole endeavors of humanity, since we developed language has been trying to describe love and associated functions. And we have a lot of words, but it doesn't make it any less of a complicated lifelong mission.
LEWIS BROWN: There are - was it the Greek definitions of different kinds of love? They had like a lot of different words for different kinds of love. Eros, which was romantic love. You had philia, which was friendship, bonds of friendship. You had agape which is kind of an unconditional love as you might have towards God or the divine.
HZ: Storge, described as the familial affection such as a parent might have towards their child.
LEWIS BROWN: Ludus, which is like playful, flirtatious, love. I don't know whether that's meant to be sexual or whether it's meant to be just like flirting is fun. And then pragma, committed, compassionate love.
HZ: Philautia:
LEWIS BROWN: Which is self-love, which is nice. I'm glad they had a word for that. It's good to think about these things, the ways people have conceived of this stuff in different periods in time.
HZ: This is just some of the ancient Greek love lexicon. The English one is expanding too.
LEWIS BROWN: I love that there are micro labels that are ultra specific terms that you can use to describe the nuances of your identity, if you feel so inclined, or you can just have an umbrella term. You can pick something quite vague; you can decide that you don't like labels and if that's what you want to do, all power to you.
This kind of thinking can be useful to people who aren't even in the aromantic community or the asexual community, because there might be people out there who haven't really thought about it. And they think that they're just straight, heterosexual; but actually, maybe they're only sexually attracted to the opposite gender, but actually they might be romantically compatible with people of more genders. Or they might be bi, but they might have different feelings about different genders. And I think this kind of language invites people to examine the nuances of what they're into and what works for them and to think about the different things they want.
I think these kinds of conversations and the split attraction model and talking about the differences between the different kinds of attraction, and, and the different kinds of relationships: I think it can enable you to communicate better in relationships. I think it can enable you to, to more clearly say, in a way that can maybe seem kind of clinical, but I think is actually pretty conducive to quite healthy communication: to say, this is what I want, this is what I like, this is what I'm willing to do, if you want to do it; this is what I'm absolutely not willing to do. What's on the table? If I want something from this relationship that you're not willing to do, is that something I'm just going to have to accept, or are you okay with me seeking that from someone else? You quite naturally start talking about what you want and what they want. I think in a way that is quite liberating and quite, I don't know, I think it fosters good communication and good consent. It makes it easier.
HZ: Yeah, it does sound like healthy boundary-setting, as well as finding ways to describe yourself to yourself.
LEWIS BROWN: I don't want to overstate the importance. I don't want to say, “Oh yes, the aromantic and the asexual communities are really the ones pushing the envelope and having all the interesting conversations and everyone should listen to us.” But I do think that conversations that were started by, and have grown beyond even those communities, I think are quite cool. And quite good. And I described the things that people have been doing for ages without really having words for them, I'm sure. It's important to stress that none of this is new really. It's just new ways of talking about it, and talking about it more. It's very useful to have this terminology, I think. It helps you find other people that feel the same way. It helps you think, oh, okay this is a valid way to be, there are other people that be the same. And it gives you the tools to tell a story about yourself that is different to the story that, maybe society or the characters on TV or friends and family have kind of been not necessarily pushing on you, but just, you know, by osmosis.
HZ: There's really a lot of messaging from the allosexuals.
LEWIS BROWN: Yeah. I think aromanticism has maybe met a little bit more resistance in terms of people understanding why it's important, why people want to talk about it. There's a little bit of pushback that some people have, which I can kind of understand where it comes from, like, “if you don't want to date anyone, just don't. Why do you have to make a thing about it?”
HZ: Is it because everyone else makes a thing about which I guess about why you're not dating?
LEWIS BROWN: Exactly. The queer community is one that explicitly welcomes aromantic and asexual people. But there's definitely a small group of people that would malign aromantic and asexual people as just attention seeking straight people that want in on the party, you know? And invisibility is kind of the watchword of asexual and aromantic communities; they're not maligned, so much as people don't believe they exist.
HZ: Right. It's not going to get you killed, but.
LEWIS BROWN: I can't really complain too much, because I'm a cisgender, white, straight passing man. No one's ever called me slurs. I've never really had to deal with deal with queer phobia particularly, apart from in the subtle social norms that get in your head and make you think you're doing your life wrong kind of way. Male asexual people are probably less likely to realize that; female asexual people are probably more likely to realize that, and less likely to have people take it seriously when they explain it.
HZ: People just really want everyone to pair up and have a baby.
LEWIS BROWN: Yeah. I think the invisibility is, to an extent, not just a social thing, not just about public ignorance; I think it is also a consequence of constructing your community and your identity around a negative.
HZ: Do people also think, "Oh, well you just haven't met the right person yet, and then you won't be aromantic anymore”?
LEWIS BROWN: Oh, yeah. There's the "You haven't met the right person yet." The stereotypes are conflicting as well: you get to be both cold and aloof and narcissistic, or "Oh bless you, you're naive, you're still child." They're not horrible, but they're very disempowering. And it's also just a little harder to talk about. You've kind of got to prove a negative, right? You've got to bring up a conversation topic, you've got to say, "Hey, okay, so I'm going to talk about sex for a while, to explain to you that I'm not into it." I've kind of got to come out again and again and again,and you've got to set a lot more terms, you've got to set a lot more definitions. You've got to like definitions. Like definitions, or like wearing flags.
HZ: So you've got these terms where the a- means the absence of something. Would you prefer a term where it's actively a thing?
LEWIS BROWN: It's a tricky one, because it kind of does imply that you've got less going on. I guess the common kind of jokes in the community, what are the stereotypes? Cake: asexual people like cake, or at least it was common practice to welcome people to the AVEN forums by posting pictures of your favorite cake and offering them a digital cake. Garlic bread and dragons kind of the three things that ace people are stereotypically into.
HZ: Where did the dragons come from?
LEWIS BROWN: I don't know. Maybe dragons is just the second reason you might watch Game of Thrones, I don't know.
HZ: The first, of course, is the constructed languages.
HZ: As we know, words shift in meaning - take 'romance', its first incarnation in English language in the 14th century being a verse narrative of heroic adventures, which after a couple of hundred years evolved towards meaning love stories more specifically. And yes, the 'roman' in it does refer to the Romans, but indirectly - in the fifth century, the inhabitants of Gaul, a large region of western Europe, were calling themselves Romanus, so there was an Old French word 'romanz', with a Z at the end, which meant verse tales in the style of Romanus, that is vernacular rather than formal Latin, and included stories of knights doing their gallant stuff. Falling in love might have been a feature, but not the focus until the 1660s, and it took another couple of hundred years for the word to refer to love relationships in real life.
HZ: I just looked up the etymology of 'relationship', which apparently was only to do with romance or sex from the 1940s. And before that, it seems a lot more in line of like what we're talking about, where the relationship is about a strong affinity. And then I looked up 'affinity', which was a relation by marriage.
LEWIS BROWN: It became a bit circular.
HZ: Goddammit.
LEWIS BROWN: It's tricky. 'Love' is a tricky word as well when you're talking about asexuality and aromanticism, because some people like it, for example, I very much still like the word love. But some aromantic people don't like the word or some. They would position themselves as loveless and say, oh, I care about other things. That's not my experience at all, but I still appreciate that. Also it's not helpful to aromantic people when you're talking about asexuality, like, "Oh, we can still fall in love! Don't worry, we're still human!" That's probably like the biggest source of tension, if there is one between the two communities, is when you accidentally throw the other one under the bus by trying to fit in.
HZ: It's the words that are the problem, Lewis!
LEWIS BROWN: It's definitely useful for anyone who differs from the norm to have language to describe that difference. As long as they have control over that language, can help you form solidarity. You can advocate for yourself. You can use it to tell another story that has a happy ending, rather than the story that you think you should be following but you're not doing a very good job on it because it's not really for you. So I think it's very important to have them, but yeah, I can absolutely imagine a world, I don't know, in the future where things are more equitable and everyone understands the options. Maybe in that future you don't use the words aromantic and asexual as much, or define things on a different axis, a different spectrum.
HZ: The Allusionist is an independent podcast made by me in a cupboard lined with coats, and supported by you: by listening, by recommending it to others, and by patreonising the show at patreon.com/allusionist. It’s been a year since the show left the Radiotopia collective, which was a huge change and a big wrench, but the support and the community in the Patreon has been really incredible. And Teamlusionist tell me a lot of great stuff, for instance after the last episode Lauren gave a clue that excelsior might be from fraxinus excelsior, the Latin name for European ash trees. Patreons also get bonus etymology from me, like in the course of researching this episode, I learned that the word ‘attraction’ was originally a medieval medical term about drawing diseased matter towards the surface of the body! It didn’t refer to magnets or people till around the year 1600! Weird turnaround! That’s a free etymology for all of you, but you get more on the Patreon. Also it’s truly lovely to have this happy online space, with zero death threats, and it’s not easy to be an independent podcast in the choppy waters of online content-making, but it was possible to make that leap thanks to you patreons. And it’s a good time there! Come join us at patreon.com/allusionist.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
obelus, noun: a symbol † used as a reference mark in printed matter, or to indicate that a person is deceased. 2. A mark (- or ÷) used in ancient manuscripts to mark a word or passage as spurious or doubtful.
Try using obelus in an email today.
You heard from Lewis Brown, a writer and poet who was speaking on behalf of AUREA, the Aromantic spectrum Union for Recognition, Education and Advocacy. Find out more about them at aromanticism.org. Thanks to UnYoung. This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick. Our ad partner is Multitude! To sponsor an episode of the show to shift some of your product before the holidays, or in 2022, contact them at multitude.productions/ads.
Find the show on Twitter,Instagram andFacebook @allusionistshow. And to hear or read every episode, get more information about every topic, see the full dictionary of the randomly selected words, and browse a lexicon of every word ever covered in the podcast linked to the relevant episode, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
