Split Attraction Model (SAM)

The split attraction model or SAM is a term created on Tumblr in 2015 to describe a hostile misunderstanding of romantic orientation and attraction subtyping. It comes from neither the asexual community nor the aromantic community, but rather, originated as an external description for the language used by those communities, as part of a wider surge of hostility against aros and aces on the Tumblr blogging platform.

History

Although the asexual community was not the first in history to conceptualize multiple types or axes of orientation, in its modern usage, the concept of romantic orientation dates back to the early 2000s, when asexuals in early online asexual communities began self-describing with terms like "heteroromantic" and "aromantic."

This terminology emerged in connection to (but separable from) the concept of multiple types of attraction. At the time, one of the most popular definitions of "asexual" was "a person who does not experience sexual attraction," which featured on the front page of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. From here, some asexuals made a distinction between sexual attraction and romantic attraction in order to explain their romantic identities. Other asexuals also began using additional attraction terms, such as emotional attraction, sensual attraction, and aesthetic attractions, starting in the early 2000s. These attraction types could also be paired with parallel orientation identity terms (ex. pansensual, panaesthetic), but that application of them wasn't necessarily as common.

Beginning in 2011, ace bloggers on Tumblr began to experience waves of mass-scale harassment for identifying with the asexual umbrella, typically involving criticism of ace community language. In 2015, a new criticism emerged among anti-ace bloggers: conflating the concepts of multiple orientation labeling, attraction subtyping, and universalizing language by sloppily grouping all three together as "the split attraction model." Many of the earliest Tumblr posts on this subject have been lost, but early uses of the term involve accusing the split attraction model of being homophobic, as well as defining it with an inherently universalizing element. The use of the word "split," in particular, seems to have possibly originated from Tumblr user pure (also known as Tumblr user medicine), who wrote "i got a prollem w ppl splitting a complex sociocultural influenced ting like attraction into only two distinct experiences that ppl present as inherently unrelated all the time." The term "split attraction" necessarily centers a more monolithic experience of attraction as the default, and the term "split attraction model" was typically used to describe inappropriate sweeping statements about how a romantic/sexual attraction distinction is universal for everyone.

More precise and less derogatory terms include "romantic orientation" (or "romantic orientation labeling," for the personal use of terms like aromantic) and "attraction types," "attraction subtyping," or "differentiating types of attraction." Not everyone who experiences different types of attraction necessarily has a distinct romantic orientation, and not everyone who has a romantic orientation necessarily experiences multiple types of attraction.