I feel like semantics are a massive reason why the debate on "sexuality" is often so unproductive. We call people's orientations "sexualities", as if sex is the core of a relationship and actual romantic love is merely an extension of that, when it should so obviously be the other way around. Romantic love should be the core, but of course, both traditional and progressive societies are too obsessed with sex to see the bigger picture. When you try to explain to a right winger who happens to be against homo"""sexuality""" why the concept shouldn't be looked down upon as any less meaningful than a hetero"""sexual""" relationship, the right winger in question will often immediately go to images of sodomy in their head, along with any other images typically associated with such a relationship that they personally find distasteful. And why WOULDN'T it conjure such images in their head, when even the words we use to describe ROMANTIC ATTRACTION involve the word "sex"? Why do we not call it something like homoromanticism or something similar? I know that the end goal is to drop words describing various attractions from common use all together since they weren't important until rightists and false leftists made it important, but it's so painfully obvious that it was a mistake to let dishonorable people coin these terms in the first place. By framing the debate as heterosexuality and homosexuality, they soiled the whole thing and made almost every single argument surrounding it less productive, since the very inception of the word "sexuality". In short, the conflation of sex with romance drives me mad