Hey what's up hello! We finally have an audiobook! Read in our own voices!!! As a special treat, today we give to you a sneak preview of chapter one.
Episode Transcript: www.soundsfakepod.com/transcripts/sfbo-the-audiobook-sneak-peek
Buy the audiobook: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
Donate: patreon.com/soundsfakepod
Follow: @soundsfakepod
Join: https://discord.gg/W7VBHMt
Buy our book: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
Hey what's up hello! We finally have an audiobook! Read in our own voices!!! As a special treat, today we give to you a sneak preview of chapter one.
Episode Transcript: www.soundsfakepod.com/transcripts/sfbo-the-audiobook-sneak-peek
Buy the audiobook: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
Donate: patreon.com/soundsfakepod
Follow: @soundsfakepod
Join: https://discord.gg/W7VBHMt
Buy our book: www.soundsfakepod.com/book
[00:00:00]
SARAH: Hey what's up, hello! Welcome to Sounds Fake But Okay, a podcast where an aroace girl, I'm Sarah, that's me.
KAYLA: And the bi-demisexual girl, that's me, Kayla.
SARAH: Talk about all things to do with love, relationships, sexuality, and pretty much anything else we just don't understand.
KAYLA: On today's episode, Our Audiobook.
BOTH: Sounds Fake But Okay.
[Intro Music]
SARAH: Welcome back to the pod.
KAYLA: Hello! A special edition.
SARAH: A special edition. This is not a regular pod.
KAYLA: It's a cool pod.
SARAH: Because… okay.
KAYLA: Get it?
SARAH: I do get it. And I'm going to ignore it.
KAYLA: Okay.
SARAH: Instead of a regular episode this week, because Kayla and I are traveling for the holidays, the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, we're going to give you a little sneaky peeky into our audiobook which just came out on Thanksgiving!
KAYLA: Ahhhh! Yeah, what, it's like three days old now or something?
SARAH: Just a couple days old. Kayla just silently yelled, but this is in fact an audio medium.
KAYLA: I yelled for real. Did you not hear it?
SARAH: Did you actually yell? And Zoom just gated it out?
KAYLA: Yeah, I went ahhhh!
SARAH: I didn't hear it.
KAYLA: Okay, well I did. You'll hear it in post.
SARAH: Well, we wanted to give you a little sneak preview. It's not a preview, it's a post view, post listen, of our book, but we didn't want to give you the prologue again because we actually read that in an episode of this podcast.
KAYLA: Yeah, I'm trying to remember which one. It was...
SARAH: One of them.
KAYLA: I think we just did an episode about the book, right, when it came out?
SARAH: Yeah.
KAYLA: So, it's in that one. Go find that one
SARAH: Yes. So, we didn't want to give you repeated stuff because that's boring.
KAYLA: Yeah
SARAH: So, we're going to give you the first part of chapter one. And this is the official audiobook, so it's going to sound fancier and nicer than our reading of Prologue did.
KAYLA: Yeah, actually it's probably going to be upsetting hearing it directly after this.
SARAH: Yeah, it's going to be a lot slower. Like in a reasonable way.
KAYLA: Well, and just like better quality.
SARAH: It's just going to be better.
KAYLA: Yeah, maybe this was a mistake.
SARAH: Everything is fine. We hope you enjoy it.
KAYLA: Yes
SARAH: Please don't pay too much attention to the change in audio quality.
KAYLA: Yeah, just forget that.
SARAH: Just don't think about that. Okay, okay, everyone go. Right now. Have fun.
KAYLA: And scene.
SARAH: Chapter one. Society. We all live in one. In his acceptance speech for best score at the 2016 Tony Awards, Lin-Manuel Miranda co-opted a popular phrase to say what would become a well-circulated quote following the ceremony and beyond. “And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.” This was a powerful statement in light of the previous night's Pulse nightclub shooting when a gunman opened fire on a gay nightclub in Orlando in what would become one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history. It was a bold statement made from a tall soapbox that reminded us all that queer love is beautiful, that queer love is worthy, that queer love is precious. At the time, of course, we agreed. At the time, me, Sarah, if not Kayla, was already identifying as queer. But it wasn't until over four years and 118 podcast episodes later that I realized that this phrase, “love is love,” also applied to me, that it applies to all aspec people, that it has always applied to loves of all sorts and stripes, romantic and otherwise, and will continue to do so until the end of time. Earlier, we called our story, the story of Sarah and Kayla, Kayla and Sarah, a love story. We say that because it is. It is a story based in love, about two people who love each other.
KAYLA: She said she loves me.
SARAH: Okay. And that's all a love story needs. Our love being purely platonic doesn't make it any less worthy than the romantic sexual stories we typically think about when discussing love stories, something we'll discuss further in upcoming chapters. Likewise, the aspec story is a love story because all aspec people, of every identity under the umbrella, experience love. Whether that's a deep connection with a life partner, a moment of pure and unadulterated excitement when seeing a cute dog on the street, or somewhere in between, it's all love. And yet, this is not a widely accepted notion. Love stories, according to Western society more broadly, are always about romance and sex. An emotional I love you between two non-kin characters in a dramatic film is assumed to be an expression of romantic love. Even just using the word love in reference to people in the English language implies romantic love, unless specified otherwise.
KAYLA: English is really not a sophisticated language.
SARAH: Do better, English. But how the hell did we end up here? And how can we take our socially conditioned romance and sex-centric blinders off, start seeing the world through an aspec lens, and begin to build for ourselves a world that is both loving and free of expectation? Well, step one is realizing how powerful those blinders are to begin with. Before we dive too deep into the nitty-gritty, we first want to make very clear that when we talk about society, not just in this chapter but throughout the whole book, we are writing from a Western, English-speaking perspective. We have done our best to cast as wide a net as possible when defining society and discussing what it expects of its participants, willing or unwilling, but the fact remains that we are both white Americans who grew up in the suburbs. It would be irresponsible to pretend that doesn't impact our perception of the social order and what our perceived role is in changing it. Every person will find themselves face-to-face with a slightly different social order and set of cultural expectations. Whether or not the society you know looks exactly the same as that which we describe here is less important than being able to dissect and critically read the motivations behind said society. We hope that the key takeaway from this chapter is not, these are all the specific structures we must destroy and there is no variation among them. But here are examples of social structures that are common, broad, and harmful. Here's how we might use our aspec lens to identify and dismantle both them and other structures like them. Okay, cool?
KAYLA: Cool.
SARAH: Let's go. From the moment any child is conceived, the crushing weight of society has already begun to bear down upon them. Admittedly, this sounds a bit dramatic.
KAYLA: I would say more than a bit. You really did one with this sentence.
SARAH: Well, it is dramatic. But it's also not necessarily false. Children are placed into gendered boxes even before they're born. Pregnant folks get told by strangers that by the way they're carrying the baby, it must be this gender or that. Parents prepare pink nurseries for a girl, blue for a boy. At baby showers, those pregnant with girls receive bows and frilly skirts for the baby, whereas those pregnant with boys receive onesies decorated with cars and trucks and trains. Once the baby is born, those societal expectations and pressures expand very quickly, along the lines of gender, of course, into the realm of heteronormativity. A young boy befriends a girl in his kindergarten class? Watch out, he's going to be a heartbreaker. Fully grown adults ask children, unprompted, which classmate of theirs they have a crush on. Girls are sexualized before they even hit puberty.
KAYLA: Which is gross.
SARAH: Hate it.
KAYLA: I'm not going to call your five-year-old child a flirt.
SARAH: Weird.
KAYLA: They're just not.
SARAH: Yes, different cultures impress slightly different expectations and pressures. But the general outline tends to be the same. Romance and sex are normal. If you don't feel attraction in the same way that everyone else seems to, not only are you missing out, but there's something wrong with you. Even progressive communities, those who reject all things heteronormative, tend to be highly allonormative. That is, the fact that someone experiences both sexual attraction and romantic attraction is assumed, or at the very least taken for granted. Sure, you're told you may be queer, but you still experience romantic love and attraction like a normal person. At least you're not a robot, a loveless freak. In a similar vein, many of these supposedly progressive communities also embrace a matanormativity, a term coined by Professor Elizabeth Brake-
KAYLA: My girl.
SARAH: Okay. To describe the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive romantic long-term coupled relationship, and that everyone is seeking such a relationship. Even those who are sex positive and embrace and support polyamory often fail to embrace the other end of the spectrum. The idea that romance and sex in general are not a requirement for a fulfilling life. Before we move any further in this argument, it's important that we first establish that this entire book will be grounded in the premise of the split attraction model, or SAM. What the split attraction model describes is an ethos wherein romantic attraction and sexual attraction are not the same thing.
KAYLA: By the way, while we won't delve deeply into attractions outside of romantic and sexual, it should be noted that the SAM also accounts for other types of attraction such as sensual and aesthetic attraction.
[00:10:00]
SARAH: It is true that for many people, romantic and sexual attraction are related, and for some it might even be impossible to differentiate between the two. In fact, for the vast majority in society, they are understood to be the same thing. That is, saying someone is heterosexual implies that they are both heteroromantic and heterosexual. The fact of the matter, however, is that though the exact location of that line between romantic attraction and sexual attraction may differ from person to person, this line does exist. Further, embracing the split model allows us to dive deeper into understanding the attraction that we may or may not experience. This is why, in aspec communities, people will often list both their romantic and sexual orientation, whether, like me, they carry the same prefix, aromantic and asexual
KAYLA: Or whether, like me, they're not the same at all, biromantic and demisexual.
SARAH: However, the tenets of the split model do not apply only to aspecs, but rather all people. Some people find that they identify as homoromantic bisexual or panromantic heterosexual. Any combination of the identities is possible. And although they are separate, expectations related to both romance and sex are equally prevalent parts of our social order. They are not weighted equally at every moment, nor do they weigh the same on all genders, but it is important that we recognize that each carries a burden and places pressure on us. Every person, regardless of how woke, educated, or queer, is impacted by these pressures, whether we know it or not.
Sarah. I assumed, for the first decade and a half of my life, that I would someday get married. It was what everyone did, right? It's not like my parents specifically pushed this onto me or ever discussed it with me, but all the examples I saw in the media of successful adults involved a committed and monogamous romantic sexual partner. No exceptions, full stop. Yet in my own life, I knew several fully grown adults who were unmarried and who remained perfectly successful and happy in their own right. One might think that I would look to these people as examples, view their lifestyles as alternative options, but instead, young me saw them as outliers. I didn't look down on them, but I didn't aspire to be them either. I would, of course, not follow their grisly path, but embark on the well-trodden byway of my many, many foremothers. Marry a nice man, have two and a half kids, buy a house with a white picket fence, live happily ever after. I even imagined what my wedding dress would look like, painfully early 2000s in design, and what I might name my kids. The extensive list detailed both first and middle names.
KAYLA: One thing about Sarah is she really likes naming things.
SARAH: I love a name. I continued to think this way well into my teenage years. Then, in 11th grade, at the ripe old age of 16, I took Advanced Placement English Language and Composition. The teacher was Miss Burke, a woman who was widely beloved by her students. The cool English teacher who, despite being “old” in the eyes of her students, dear listeners, she wasn't even middle-aged, but she was teenager approved. Miss Burke was single, childless, and as far as I could discern, happy with this turn of events. Her unfettered lifestyle meant that despite being a woefully underpaid public-school teacher, she was able to spend her summers traveling all around the world. She decorated her classroom walls with pictures of her many travels, and willingly shared stories with us, the places she went, the things she saw, the many strangers who were shocked by her uncovered hair on the streets of Cairo. Because of all of this, when I looked at her, 16-year-old me saw something new. Miss Burke was a real adult. She was established. She was successful. Yet this was the life she willingly chose, because she looked the burdens of societal expectation and social pressure in the eye and told them no. Being single and childless didn't make her some spinster or hag. It made her cool. It meant that she got to do things that my other teachers, with their marriages and children, could not. And for the first time, it became apparent that that life, the Miss Burke life, was an option for me. She was tangible proof that you could buck society's expectations and still thrive, that you could be partnerless and childless and still live a fulfilling, exciting life. Why it was my AP Lang teacher who opened my eyes to this and not members of my own family, I can't say. Perhaps it was the stories of her travels that got me. Perhaps I just needed to learn it from an outsider. Whatever the case, Miss Burke's mere existence opened the door for me. I wouldn't step through that door for some time, but that didn't matter. Just knowing that it was there, that I could reach out and turn the handle and step through at any moment, transformed my whole world. It wasn't until I was much older, when I had come to terms with my identity and finally stepped through that door, that I realized that for all the imagining young me did of my potential stereotypical future, my husband and two and a half kids and white picket fence, I didn't imagine actually living that future. I didn't imagine what my husband might be like, instead investing my imagination into creating the perfect wedding dress and allowing my future life partner to remain nameless and faceless. I imagined what I might name my children because I have always loved names and naming things, not because I had any interest in actually being a mother. I didn't truly want any of the things I imagined for my future, I just thought I was supposed to. I imagined the future that was expected of me for no other reason than it was the expectation. But looking to my 11th grade English teacher and realizing I could break away from that, that I could choose the future I wanted, let it take the shape that was right for me without heeding the watchful eyes of Big Brother and society's oppressive expectations, that set me free.
KAYLA: Society is built for couples in the context of everything from tax benefits and life insurance policies to Spotify discounts and buy one get one couples massages. We've built our society around the romantic sexual partnership, not only because it's the preferred idolized way of being in our social order, but also because it's simply the default. For centuries, it has been expected of essentially all people that once they reach a certain age, they will pair into hetero monogamous marriages and produce offspring. In many situations, it's more than just an expectation. It's a given to pursue an alternative lifestyle by choice is outright taboo. But why? Coupling for the purpose of reproduction is surely driven in large part by evolutionary instincts. What of the rest of it, though? We'll leave it to the actual scientists to dissect why humans are social pack animals, and we'll leave it to the reply guys of the Internet to argue about whether there's any biological merit behind modern gender norms. But there's so much to explore beyond these basic concepts. Why are romantic relationships inherently valued as greater than platonic relationships? Why is it assumed that just because a person lacks a romantic partner, they must also be lonely? Why is it believed that couples who have children are more productive in society than those without? Whether or not we have the answers to these questions, of course, is not actually the point. Aspec activists much more academically minded than ourselves have rightfully pointed to capitalism and white supremacy as the source of many of our societal maladies. But on a micro level, identifying straightforward, unambiguous answers to such complex queries is far easier in theory than in practice. What matters is that we're asking the questions and that we are becoming aware of the way our social order shapes our relationships, our priorities, and our view of the world. Picture, for example, an old woman.
SARAH: I'm doing it.
KAYLA: Okay, yes, let's all do this together. She lives alone, she's never been married, and she's childless. Perhaps she has a few cats.
SARAH: Mm
KAYLA: Now, don't think. Just let your gut guide you. What are you picturing?
SARAH: A lonely spinster.
KAYLA: A grumpy old hag?
SARAH: A Disney villainess, even? If what you pictured was anything but a negative depiction of this woman, then we applaud you, because you're a step ahead of the rest of us. Society conditions us to believe that this woman must be lonely or mean or otherwise unsavory, simply because she is existing outside the norm. But if that old spinster with her cats is content, fulfilled, and not hurting anyone, who are we to tell her she's doing it wrong? Who are we to tell her that she's missing out on something? Why must her happiness look the same as everyone else's?
KAYLA: I mean, if she has cats, she's doing something right. I think we can all agree on that.
SARAH: Alternative lifestyles need not be what you're stuck with if you can't achieve the marriage, kids, and white picket fence. They can instead be what you choose. If living alone with a handful of cats sounds good to you, then by all means, do it. If it doesn't, don't. If it does, but then you change your mind and decide you want to pursue a different path instead, that's fine too. In the end, a heteronormative society benefits from staying heteronormative. It's easier for those who fit the heteronormative bill when those couple-centric pillars of society remain entrenched, because it means the world of tax benefits and Spotify discounts continues to be built for people like them. That's why these norms endure, not because they have any inalienable basis in fact or truth. Okay, sure, you may be thinking, this is all very good and nice, but some of you may also note that there is still an elephant in the room.
KAYLA: Where?
SARAH: I can't find it.
KAYLA: We're in a pretty small room and I'm seeing no elephant.
SARAH: Thus far we've mentioned a few times a so-called, quote, aspec lens, and will continue to do so throughout this book. And it is the essence of an engine behind our entire text. But what the hell does that actually mean? What is the aspec lens and how do we use it?
KAYLA: I have a feeling we're about to find out.
[00:20:00]
SARAH: I can't wait. Even for folks who may already be familiar with the concept, it doesn't have a clear official definition within aspec communities. It's not a particularly easy thing to define. After all, even in a book explicitly about the aspec lens, it was necessary for us to provide a full chapter of context before even breaching the subject of its meaning. But now that you have that necessary background, we'll finally define for you what we mean by the aspec lens in the context of this book. To view something through the aspec lens is to strip it of all societal expectations. To approach the world eyes wide open about how profound the social pressure is on every aspect of life and every minor decision we make. To know that what we are taught is right is not the only way to be, and that just because your experience of the world is less common doesn't make it automatically unnatural or wrong. It is to reject the premise that we should act a certain way just because that's the way it has always been. To look at the world as objectively as we can muster, and to let that guide our decisions and opinions. When people first learn about asexuality and the broader umbrella of aspec identities, it can often be difficult for them to wrap their heads around. It's far less straightforward than understanding, for example, what it means to be gay. A straight person can look at a gay person and say, okay, they're just like me, except they feel attraction to the same gender. A straight woman can understand and empathize with the attraction that gay men feel towards other men, because she feels that exact same type of attraction to men, too. But for people, whether straight or not, to learn that some people don't feel any such attraction at all and can still be perfectly fulfilled, that can flip their role down its head. And with any luck, their reaction to learning this won't be pushback, but a lightbulb moment. A moment of understanding that, oh, there is a whole other abundance of perfectly valid ways of existing that I had not previously considered. Quick, before it's gone, capture that lightbulb moment. Condense it down to its most basic essence. Mold it into a lens through which to view the whole world. Diet purple if you so please. This is your aspec lens.
SARAH: Wow, what a cliffhanger.
KAYLA: I mean...
SARAH: I'm on the edge of my seat, what could possibly come next?
KAYLA: How is the rest of the chapter going to go? The rest of the book even?
SARAH: The only way to find out is to acquire this book. We have it in audio form if you want to continue hearing it like this. Get it on all the audiobooks places. What's it called? Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual…
KAYLA: And Aromantic Perspective…
SARAH: On Love, Relationships, and Pretty Much…
KAYLA: Sex
SARAH: Everything. Oh, right.
KAYLA: Why are you behind me?
SARAH: I was so proud of myself I thought I had gotten it right.
KAYLA: It's pretty much anything else.
SARAH: I forgot about sex.
KAYLA: It says anything else. It does. I'm looking at the book right now.
SARAH: Wow.
KAYLA: It says anything.
SARAH: Well, the great thing about audiobooks is we were looking at the text in front of us. We were not trying to do it from memory.
KAYLA: Yes, if you want to acquire this, you can either go to soundsfakepod.com/book and all the links are there. If you're listening to this on Spotify, you can get it on Spotify. If you're a premium member, you can get like 15 hours of listening for free a month. And I believe our book is less than 15 hours.
SARAH: That’s our whole book. You can do our whole book in that.
KAYLA: So, you could do that. Audible. Hopefully your library might have it. So, you could check on the Libby app and request it if they don't or get it if they do. Anywhere you get audiobooks, it should be there.
SARAH: Or you could read it with your eyes
KAYLA: That’s true
SARAH: On all the places where you get books that you read with your eyes.
KAYLA: Yes.
SARAH: So, go do it. Go.
KAYLA: Quick, quick, quick, quick now.
SARAH: Be the first ones. Be cool.
KAYLA: Scurry along. Yeah, I'm really excited to hear people's reaction to it. I hope you like it.
SARAH: If you hate it, don't tell me.
KAYLA: Keep that to your fucking self.
SARAH: Alright, okay, we'll leave you alone now. Thanks for listening. I'm not looking at the outro so I don't know it. Enjoy. Please join us next Sunday for more of us in your ears.
KAYLA: And until then, take good care of your cows.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]