It's Not Exclusionism to Ask Yourself WHY You Use a Label

(Is this politics??? Philosophy???? Life??? When you're plural, it gets all blurry. We went with the safer "blogging" label this time. This post is also a re-post from our Tumblr account, but either way, we cannot see ourselves putting this very nicely any way we slice it. Consider yourself to be warned.)

WE NEED MORE POSTS TALKING ABOUT BEING SYSIAN AND PLURILLEAN AS LEGITIMATE ORIENTATION TERMS OUTSIDE OF BEING ASPEC.

That doesn’t make y'all invalid if a system is sysian or plurillean and that DOES make them aspec, but not acknowledging this as a separate orientation reeks of sysmedicalism to a lot of us (as in, us, Rusanya). And honestly? With the way the so-called inclusive communities are, the proper term we should be using in that first statement might be ACEspec.

We only ever see those labels (especially the former) in relation to asexuality, which we feel is bullshit because inner world relationships are just as real as outer world ones! It's like...okay, sure, but that has some uncomfortable implications for those of us who don't imply greater significance to the external world than the internal one. We have our own issues with the terms, like the fact their literal definitions have some uncomfortable implications for those of us who are sysian romantically their sexuality doesn't match the same way - we have resolved for ourselves by calling them umbrella terms, but, like. Is our headmate Lucy just not a lesbian anymore because she finds the girls in our inner world hotter one sexier than those in the outer world? What the fuck? She still loves women queerly, they're just women in our system exclusively.

We think you can see what our problem is here by this point. We do not give a fuck about singlet (non-plural) expectations or singlet understandings of what attraction looks like. Giving a fuck and making yourselves palatable and forcing yourself into a box that only fits if you go by singlet rules is a way we oppress ourselves.

We see a lot of things that do this that aren't intentionally sysmedicalist but are like Just There as a direct result of plurmisic oppression. See: how people blatantly assume endogenics cannot have CDDs and how that implies to the world we're magically immune to trauma! regardless of your actual intentions, as one example of a different issue caused by the same problem.

Critical analysis skills are in fact at an all-time low and that includes being sociologically-minded, we finally figured out the words for it, thank fuck. Being able to treat a thing as legitimate as well as justified while also understanding some of the nastier aspects of the history or implications surrounding that thing does not suddenly mean you're endorsing the nastier thing(s), that's like saying because you're using roman columns you're entirely and fully devoted a dead empire and everything it has ever said and done and condone every single tiny thing it did in the name of its wars and atrocities etc etc etc.

You get what we mean?????

But because (from our observations) that skill is just so blatantly not there for so many people everything is read in bad faith and it's assumed our intent is to attack when our intent is to, like, point out something we perceive is an actual problem. Like. Constantly. We feel like we cannot talk about things we perceive as issues (or at least, if not issues, maybe just things that are unacknowledged) pretty much ever lest we get disemboweled by the online community.

Saying it again, one more time: we could be wrong here, but our observations have indicated that a lot of people do not have adequate skills to identify the actual repercussions of living in a society. Not just the things that are told to you, but also what is NOT said, what is simply assumed, and what the meanings of words are to the normative power versus what YOU are saying.

We know we're rehashing an ages-old discussion with ourselves especially when we say "propaganda exploits that type of ignorance and unwillingness to analyze things," and so, when we say "words MEAN THINGS" what we generally are saying, so, when you're deconstructing them, you HAVE to understand how those words are used when a normative power applies them to a marginalized one. That's why we also fucking fixate on system roles so much we think, they're the most direct example that we can easily apply that is relevant to us in a way that makes them easy for us to deconstruct.

"Role" to us has a very specific connotation and in relation to the normative power, a "role" implies a point of purpose. The way singlets call their friends a "protector" implies a personality trait as in "oh my friend is such a protector, you know?" but saying "my headmate's role is a protector" implies a point of purpose, something that, as far as we are aware, is a concept that was introduced by singlets and then forced onto our communities as plurals and systems. We will never tell people to stop using words the way they personally like, but, for us, the way we can see this being fixed is...just saying "wow, my headmate is such a protector, you should have seen her yesterday" or "yeah, he's very much a caregiver haha - he loves to make food when some of us are feeling down, sing us lullabies when we can't sleep, and doesn't seem to mind vacuuming when we ask him" because it no longer implies a point of purpose.

The point of that analysis is more about "is it even useful to imply a point of purpose" because, as much as we all hate it, again, we DO live in a society. It's not exclusionism to ask yourself WHY you use a label, and the pathways that could have led you to that and what the alternatives could have been or could be.

Do you understand what Rusanya is trying to say when Rusanya says all of this? 😖

Even if the answer is literally "because I am having fun" or "I don't know" a good many of us do still think it's always good to ask at least once, why a word exists - not in a self-analytical way but in the way we described above. Something like this is a completely different ballpark than saying something "does not make sense" and so "does not exist" or whatever. So we would feel much better if this was a conversation that could be had, even if the result was more of a harmony of discord situation, where like, some people agreed with this and some did not.