the glossary · word
what does perioriented mean?
perioriented
Perioriented means your romantic and sexual orientations line up and point at the same people. Most people are perioriented, and that is exactly why most people have never noticed that romantic and sexual attraction are two different systems. When both dials always move together, it never occurs to you that there are two dials. The word mostly exists to make that default visible. Naming the common case is how you stop treating it as the neutral human condition, and everything else as a deviation from it.
this one has a whole chapter under it. read: which orientation combination are you? →
what to read on this
- Ace Angela Chen what the ace spectrum shows everyone about desire, not just ace people. the clearest writing anywhere on compulsory sexuality. the vantage point most of my videos are written from.
- The Invisible Orientation Julie Sondra Decker the introduction. the whole spectrum of words in one place, demisexual and gray-a included, written for someone who has just found the term.
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also asked
why does the word perioriented exist?
To give the default a name. Unlabelled things get treated as the baseline that needs no explanation, and everything else gets treated as the exception that does. Naming it turns it into one option among several, which is the same work the word straight does.
come think with me
one word a week.
this is one of about thirty words i have collected for feelings most people never got names for. i send one a week, with the reason it works that way.
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sits next to
- split-attraction model The idea that romantic and sexual attraction are distinct and can point in different directions, the backbone of the whole field guide.
- varioriented When your romantic and sexual orientations point in different directions, like being biromantic and heterosexual. Community term from the split attraction model.