Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2009-08-26 07:16 pm
edenfalling) wrote2009-08-26 07:16 pm
Entry tags:
wherein Liz talks about her experience of asexuality (possibly TMI)
I am frustrated by all my WIPs and feeling embarrassingly confessional, so I am going to try once again to pin down and explain my sexuality.
This is always tricky for me, because... okay, let me start at the beginning. These days, when I have to use snap definitions, I say I am asexual. When pressed a little more, I say I am mostly asexual, but insofar as I have a more standard sexuality, it's heterosexual with bisexual tendencies, or bisexual leaning strongly toward heterosexual. But mostly I am just not interested in sex. At all. Ever. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Unfortunately (from my perspective), I live in a society saturated by sex and romance. So from birth onward, I was acculturated to expect that I'd end up in a romantic/sexual pairing at some point, and secondarily to expect that it would be with a man. While I never objected to that, as such, my reaction was along the lines of, "I will grow up and go to college and get a job, as one does. At some point in that process, I will meet a man who is also a decent human being with whom I can hold a rational conversation; eventually we'll get married and have kids, as one also does. Then I will be a functional adult." But I never went out looking for a romantic or sexual relationship. I never play-acted love stories. I was never excited about the prospect, never anticipatory. (Well, maybe about the kids. I do like kids; I would not keep teaching RE if I didn't.)
In retrospect, this was an obvious sign of asexuality -- a complete lack of interest in sexual intercourse, general disinterest in romance, and a low sex drive overall. But I didn't know there was such a thing as asexuality. I thought heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality were the only choices, and I never felt comfortable with them because all those identities are predicated on the assumption that you are attracted to someone and have a desire to act on that attraction. I do not have such a desire and never did. When I realized I had no desire to have sex with men, I wondered if I was a lesbian. When I realized I had no desire to have sex with women either, I wondered if I was broken, frigid, dysfunctional, or, I dunno, secretly subconsciously traumatized by the boy who stuck his hand down my panties in kindergarten. (This is unlikely, btw. I hit him for that, and a few years later kicked him in the balls for picking on one of my friends. I was not much for suffering in silence as a kid.)
Anyway, I worried, but I kept my confusion to myself because I didn't know how to put it in words. The idea of sexual attraction and sexual desire is so deeply ingrained in the world that I didn't know any way to suggest that I was not interested in sex without also implying that this lack of interest was a problem. I was not convinced it was a problem -- I worried because it didn't fit my expectations of 'normal,' but I never felt deprived or unfulfilled because I didn't get horny. I was also confused because I did have occasional crushes -- three, total, if you don't count transient mooning over celebrities -- but while I had an urge to be close to my object of affection, it was never a sexual urge; it was an urge for companionship, for conversation, maybe for a hug now and then. I was further muddled because I had a boyfriend in high school, with whom I maintained a strong (albeit troubled) friendship for several years after we broke up. So didn't that mean I only needed to meet the 'right' person? Didn't that mean I could do romance, and therefore maybe sex? And if I could, why didn't I want to?
Well, bluntly, I didn't want to because dating made me uncomfortable. Ryan and I used to sit on my bed and make out a little, but I was always trying to cut that short and just talk. We could talk for hours about everything under the sun, which was what I liked about that relationship. Ryan, on the other hand, fell in love with me, and I am sure he was sexually attracted to me. He was always the one who initiated the kissing; I went along because he expected it, and I was almost always the one who broke it off. We also hugged a lot -- I initiated about half our hugs.
I think the difference is that hugs can be nonsexual, but the intent behind open-mouth kisses is almost always sexual. I get comfort and contact in general; it's just sex I don't grasp.
Let me try to put that into concrete terms. First of all, I do find people sexually attractive, in the sense of looking at a man or woman and saying to myself, "Wow, he/she is smoking hot." I can find people (or images, or stories) sexually exciting. But I have never moved from that semi-intellectual/semi-hormonal appraisal to, "I would like to have sex with that person."
Never. Not once.
(Sometimes I have talked as if I wanted sex, but that is partly an artifact of the way English is constructed and construed -- if I say someone is sexy, listeners' natural assumption is that I would like to have sex with him/her -- and partly an attempt to make myself fit in. I try not to do that anymore, but it's hard to break decades of habit and acculturation.)
The only times I have considered sex were about satisfying curiosity -- you know, "Maybe I should try this so I'll have a point of reference." This is exactly the same way I treat strange new food, or the way I got drunk once just to see what drunkenness was like. But having sex is more logistically complicated and emotionally fraught than getting drunk, so I have never cared enough to satisfy that mild curiosity. This is not to say that I am adamantly opposed to ever having sex. In the vastly unlikely event that I ever wind up in a romantic relationship and my hypothetical partner wants to have sex with me, I might well say yes. I just have no need or desire to seek out sex on my own.
I have no need or desire to seek out a romantic relationship either. The relationships I am interested in are familial bonds and platonic friendships. I do believe in the concept of a 'romantic friendship,' but I think that is a stupid description. Just because a non-familial relationship passes a certain depth or strength does not suddenly make it 'romantic' -- it just makes it strong and deep. (Possibly 'romantic friendships' would make more sense to me as a concept if I had a firmer emotional grasp of why people seek romance to start with, but I don't, so... *shrug*)
I think my asexuality is why it was relatively non-traumatic for me to accept that I can be attracted to women as well as men. I have no desire to act on the attraction in the first place, so it isn't as if I'd have to deal with the social disapproval of liking the 'wrong' gender as well as the 'right' one. And honestly, when I have strong physically-based attractions, they are generally to men; my attraction to women is more diffuse and tends to be based on emotional/intellectual grounds. So I am much more likely to say to a friend or coworker, "Wow, that guy is hot," than to say, "Wow, that girl is hot," though I admit this is also somewhat a culture issue -- guy-watching is a recognized social activity; girl-watching (for women, anyway), not so much.
But honestly? I am not all that likely to talk about hot people of any gender. Because I am not seeking out sex, I am not particularly attentive to the physical attractiveness of people I interact with -- I am not evaluating them as potential partners. (I pay a little more attention to actors in movies and tv shows, possibly because I am watching the events rather than living them.)
Um. I think I lost the thread of this post at some point. Moving on!
While I am not interested in having sex with other people, I do have a sex drive. It's just ridiculously low key. *grin* That is, I do find some things sexually stimulating (like well-written porn), I do enjoy the physical sensation of sexual excitement, and I do masturbate. But I masturbate maybe once a month, if that, and often when I run into things that are meant to elicit sexual excitement, my reaction is along the lines of, "Not this again; I am so bored of sex; get back to what you were doing before!" and I avert my eyes or scroll on past.
As I think I've said before, unlike many other people, I am in the position of being able to look at most sexual stimuli and then choose to take them or leave them. In my everyday life, I always choose to leave them; I consider sex much more trouble than it could possibly be worth. In my online reading, I sometimes take them (and enjoy them), but rarely for very long or with much intensity. I like that freedom. It is one of my favorite side effects of being asexual.
Having said all this about myself and my... orientation is not quite the right word, but it will do in a pinch, I suppose... I must admit that I don't remember when and where I first ran across the idea of asexuality as a sexual identity. I do remember immediately rushing off to look it up on Wikipedia and saying, "Oh my god, yes, that is me. Right there, that is me."
In general, I am not fond of labels, but finally finding one that acknowledged my existence and said that I was fine and normal and not a freak? That was such an amazingly warm feeling. Because the world is built for sexual people -- the world assumes that all people want sex, whether they act on that drive or not -- and sometimes it is exhausting having to deal with people thinking that I am flirting with them, that I am open to dating them, that I must be unhappy being permanently single, or any of the ways in which people assume I am going to react sexually and then are nonplussed when I don't. It can be nice to have a word to fall back on and say, "Look, I am so normal. Broaden your mind and accept me as I am."
Mostly I do not think about being asexual, because mostly I do not think about sex. But now and then I think I ought to, I dunno, publicize a little, so maybe other people will figure themselves out sooner than I did, and will have an easier time explaining themselves to the rest of the world.
(As an aside, being asexual does put me in an interesting position as a writer, because every time I write a romantic or sexual relationship, I am writing from the outside. This is not an insurmountable issue -- if it were, I couldn't write men, or action scenes, or anything other than white female asocial college drop-out store clerks *grin* -- but it does go a long way to explaining the lack of conventional romance in my work. I find sex easier to manage, oddly enough; I can work by analogy to other physical appetites, cravings, and hobbies. With romance and the sexual aspect of crushes, though, I always feel like I am trying to repair delicate jewelry while wearing oversized rubber gloves, so to speak.)
This is always tricky for me, because... okay, let me start at the beginning. These days, when I have to use snap definitions, I say I am asexual. When pressed a little more, I say I am mostly asexual, but insofar as I have a more standard sexuality, it's heterosexual with bisexual tendencies, or bisexual leaning strongly toward heterosexual. But mostly I am just not interested in sex. At all. Ever. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Unfortunately (from my perspective), I live in a society saturated by sex and romance. So from birth onward, I was acculturated to expect that I'd end up in a romantic/sexual pairing at some point, and secondarily to expect that it would be with a man. While I never objected to that, as such, my reaction was along the lines of, "I will grow up and go to college and get a job, as one does. At some point in that process, I will meet a man who is also a decent human being with whom I can hold a rational conversation; eventually we'll get married and have kids, as one also does. Then I will be a functional adult." But I never went out looking for a romantic or sexual relationship. I never play-acted love stories. I was never excited about the prospect, never anticipatory. (Well, maybe about the kids. I do like kids; I would not keep teaching RE if I didn't.)
In retrospect, this was an obvious sign of asexuality -- a complete lack of interest in sexual intercourse, general disinterest in romance, and a low sex drive overall. But I didn't know there was such a thing as asexuality. I thought heterosexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality were the only choices, and I never felt comfortable with them because all those identities are predicated on the assumption that you are attracted to someone and have a desire to act on that attraction. I do not have such a desire and never did. When I realized I had no desire to have sex with men, I wondered if I was a lesbian. When I realized I had no desire to have sex with women either, I wondered if I was broken, frigid, dysfunctional, or, I dunno, secretly subconsciously traumatized by the boy who stuck his hand down my panties in kindergarten. (This is unlikely, btw. I hit him for that, and a few years later kicked him in the balls for picking on one of my friends. I was not much for suffering in silence as a kid.)
Anyway, I worried, but I kept my confusion to myself because I didn't know how to put it in words. The idea of sexual attraction and sexual desire is so deeply ingrained in the world that I didn't know any way to suggest that I was not interested in sex without also implying that this lack of interest was a problem. I was not convinced it was a problem -- I worried because it didn't fit my expectations of 'normal,' but I never felt deprived or unfulfilled because I didn't get horny. I was also confused because I did have occasional crushes -- three, total, if you don't count transient mooning over celebrities -- but while I had an urge to be close to my object of affection, it was never a sexual urge; it was an urge for companionship, for conversation, maybe for a hug now and then. I was further muddled because I had a boyfriend in high school, with whom I maintained a strong (albeit troubled) friendship for several years after we broke up. So didn't that mean I only needed to meet the 'right' person? Didn't that mean I could do romance, and therefore maybe sex? And if I could, why didn't I want to?
Well, bluntly, I didn't want to because dating made me uncomfortable. Ryan and I used to sit on my bed and make out a little, but I was always trying to cut that short and just talk. We could talk for hours about everything under the sun, which was what I liked about that relationship. Ryan, on the other hand, fell in love with me, and I am sure he was sexually attracted to me. He was always the one who initiated the kissing; I went along because he expected it, and I was almost always the one who broke it off. We also hugged a lot -- I initiated about half our hugs.
I think the difference is that hugs can be nonsexual, but the intent behind open-mouth kisses is almost always sexual. I get comfort and contact in general; it's just sex I don't grasp.
Let me try to put that into concrete terms. First of all, I do find people sexually attractive, in the sense of looking at a man or woman and saying to myself, "Wow, he/she is smoking hot." I can find people (or images, or stories) sexually exciting. But I have never moved from that semi-intellectual/semi-hormonal appraisal to, "I would like to have sex with that person."
Never. Not once.
(Sometimes I have talked as if I wanted sex, but that is partly an artifact of the way English is constructed and construed -- if I say someone is sexy, listeners' natural assumption is that I would like to have sex with him/her -- and partly an attempt to make myself fit in. I try not to do that anymore, but it's hard to break decades of habit and acculturation.)
The only times I have considered sex were about satisfying curiosity -- you know, "Maybe I should try this so I'll have a point of reference." This is exactly the same way I treat strange new food, or the way I got drunk once just to see what drunkenness was like. But having sex is more logistically complicated and emotionally fraught than getting drunk, so I have never cared enough to satisfy that mild curiosity. This is not to say that I am adamantly opposed to ever having sex. In the vastly unlikely event that I ever wind up in a romantic relationship and my hypothetical partner wants to have sex with me, I might well say yes. I just have no need or desire to seek out sex on my own.
I have no need or desire to seek out a romantic relationship either. The relationships I am interested in are familial bonds and platonic friendships. I do believe in the concept of a 'romantic friendship,' but I think that is a stupid description. Just because a non-familial relationship passes a certain depth or strength does not suddenly make it 'romantic' -- it just makes it strong and deep. (Possibly 'romantic friendships' would make more sense to me as a concept if I had a firmer emotional grasp of why people seek romance to start with, but I don't, so... *shrug*)
I think my asexuality is why it was relatively non-traumatic for me to accept that I can be attracted to women as well as men. I have no desire to act on the attraction in the first place, so it isn't as if I'd have to deal with the social disapproval of liking the 'wrong' gender as well as the 'right' one. And honestly, when I have strong physically-based attractions, they are generally to men; my attraction to women is more diffuse and tends to be based on emotional/intellectual grounds. So I am much more likely to say to a friend or coworker, "Wow, that guy is hot," than to say, "Wow, that girl is hot," though I admit this is also somewhat a culture issue -- guy-watching is a recognized social activity; girl-watching (for women, anyway), not so much.
But honestly? I am not all that likely to talk about hot people of any gender. Because I am not seeking out sex, I am not particularly attentive to the physical attractiveness of people I interact with -- I am not evaluating them as potential partners. (I pay a little more attention to actors in movies and tv shows, possibly because I am watching the events rather than living them.)
Um. I think I lost the thread of this post at some point. Moving on!
While I am not interested in having sex with other people, I do have a sex drive. It's just ridiculously low key. *grin* That is, I do find some things sexually stimulating (like well-written porn), I do enjoy the physical sensation of sexual excitement, and I do masturbate. But I masturbate maybe once a month, if that, and often when I run into things that are meant to elicit sexual excitement, my reaction is along the lines of, "Not this again; I am so bored of sex; get back to what you were doing before!" and I avert my eyes or scroll on past.
As I think I've said before, unlike many other people, I am in the position of being able to look at most sexual stimuli and then choose to take them or leave them. In my everyday life, I always choose to leave them; I consider sex much more trouble than it could possibly be worth. In my online reading, I sometimes take them (and enjoy them), but rarely for very long or with much intensity. I like that freedom. It is one of my favorite side effects of being asexual.
Having said all this about myself and my... orientation is not quite the right word, but it will do in a pinch, I suppose... I must admit that I don't remember when and where I first ran across the idea of asexuality as a sexual identity. I do remember immediately rushing off to look it up on Wikipedia and saying, "Oh my god, yes, that is me. Right there, that is me."
In general, I am not fond of labels, but finally finding one that acknowledged my existence and said that I was fine and normal and not a freak? That was such an amazingly warm feeling. Because the world is built for sexual people -- the world assumes that all people want sex, whether they act on that drive or not -- and sometimes it is exhausting having to deal with people thinking that I am flirting with them, that I am open to dating them, that I must be unhappy being permanently single, or any of the ways in which people assume I am going to react sexually and then are nonplussed when I don't. It can be nice to have a word to fall back on and say, "Look, I am so normal. Broaden your mind and accept me as I am."
Mostly I do not think about being asexual, because mostly I do not think about sex. But now and then I think I ought to, I dunno, publicize a little, so maybe other people will figure themselves out sooner than I did, and will have an easier time explaining themselves to the rest of the world.
(As an aside, being asexual does put me in an interesting position as a writer, because every time I write a romantic or sexual relationship, I am writing from the outside. This is not an insurmountable issue -- if it were, I couldn't write men, or action scenes, or anything other than white female asocial college drop-out store clerks *grin* -- but it does go a long way to explaining the lack of conventional romance in my work. I find sex easier to manage, oddly enough; I can work by analogy to other physical appetites, cravings, and hobbies. With romance and the sexual aspect of crushes, though, I always feel like I am trying to repair delicate jewelry while wearing oversized rubber gloves, so to speak.)
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(Anonymous) 2013-12-15 08:35 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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(look at my comment being anything but. XD)
Do you ever feel lonely for a rommate-friend, though? Someone who'd live with you and be there for a chat whenever, or to watch TV with or just not eat dinner alone, or are non-roommate friendships enough? I think even though I tend to keep to my room most of the time and if I did have a romantic relationship they'd have to know to keep the hell out of my space, like, about two thirds of the day, I'd have a hard time living entirely alone. ...but I suspect that ability to live alone has more to do with personality types than asexuality. XD
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(I admit this was mostly driven by years of frustration at cleaning up after other people in the kitchen and bathroom. It's always the tidiest people who ends up doing the cleaning, because they care most, instead of the people who make most of the mess. And I was sick of the unfairness.)
While I sometimes regret living alone from a financial perspective (shared rent is halved rent, you see), I have never regretted it from a personal one. I really, really like my physical privacy, the ability to arrange my space however I want, the freedom to wander around naked if I damn well feel like it, and so on. I get most of my need for face-to-face human interaction filled at work -- as a clerk, I deal with people all day long at sometimes exhaustive length -- and when I come home, I want to be alone and unwind.
And yeah, I think that is an asocial/introverted personality thing rather than an asexual thing. *grin*
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But I am aware that those particular definitions of community, responsibility, and adulthood are my own personal quirky obsessions, so I have no problem with people who are uninterested in children. To each her own, you know?
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I just read the comment you made to askerian, and I CAN completely sympathise with you about the cleaning/needing personal space thing!! I'm a little obsessive compulsive about cleaning; my boyfriend loves it, he'll go in the shower and when he comes out ten minutes later, his whole house is just...clean. But it gets irritating...because now he doesn't clean as much as he used to because he knows I have this natural compulsion to do it anyway...and it's not fair! I often wonder what it'll be like if/when we actually do move in together - it's all well and good me being at his messy place two days a week and then coming back to my perfectly symmetrical bedroom again, but what about when we're together ALL the TIME?? Terrifying prospect!!
I seem to have wandered too...sorry if this seems like a WHOAHRANDOM comment; I do read your journal all the time, I'm just not a commenter. But this intrigued me too much :)
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I think that it's easier to cohabit if you lay out some ground rules first? And play to both people's strengths rather than dividing every task in half? So if your boyfriend is useless at cleaning, it's probably better to assign him chores he is good at and that you dislike, than to constantly force him into cleaning to your own standards.
(I resolved the clean bathroom issue with my sister -- the slob -- by telling her that I didn't care what she did to her own room, but if she kept leaving sopping towels and clothes all over our shared bathroom, I would dump them in the laundry bin or on her bed. She started tidying up in self-defense after a couple weeks. *grin*)
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Aha, you've touched on my one of my even bigger flaws (not that being neat and tidy is a flaw, but obsessing about it is, I suppose) - I can't stand the idea of delegating tasks, even ones that I hate, to people who I know won't do them as well as I do. I'm hopeless! It's why I'm always so hectically busy - I won't let anyone do anything for me, and I even take on MORE work than I need to, just so that I feel reassured in knowing that at least the job will be done well. *flail!* I'm sure I'll work it out...learning experiences and all that. Or maybe I'll move in with you and we can be solitary cleaners together... :)
Haha, I am keeping that in mind for the next time MY sisterslob does that! That's inspired!
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However do you manage to survive in fandom with a distinct lack of interest in sex? I find myself more and more frustrated with fandom's need to pair/focus on sex as time goes on... since we all know sex is the magic cure to EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG WITH US.
>_< So. Annoying.
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And I find it hard to imagine having an intense sex drive. I can intellectually picture it or analogize from, say, my Coca-Cola addiction, but deep in my gut it makes no sense.
As for fandom, I do like reading about strong emotional ties, so I am not all 'ew, pairings!' or anything. I prefer friendship to romance, but so long as a romance has a friendship component rather than being all 'true love negates the need for me to show how these people might actually work together!' I am perfectly happy reading about how two people build a relationship.
I admit that unless I am specifically seeking out PWP stories (because I do like reading porn sometimes), I tend to skim past most sex scenes. I feel that after a while, if you have seen one, you've seen them all, and since I don't usually find them interesting in and of themselves... why bother? I think maybe as much as 80% of plot-based or character-based stories with incidental sex scenes would be just as good if not better if they'd used fade-to-black instead.
But this is why we have scroll wheels! *grin*
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(Hmm. I should look up the OWL curriculum and see if it mentions asexuality anywhere. If it doesn't, I should write to the UUA.)
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This is weird because I am with a guy who has a higher sex drive than me. I suppose I get some pleasure out of it, but I have sex because it makes him happy, not because I have this need to have it myself. I just consider this part of the compromises in a relationship.
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And there's nothing wrong with that, I think, at least so long as he knows it's not that he's, I dunno, bad at sex, just that you don't really see the point of sex in general but are willing to make him happy because you care about him. (Wow, convoluted sentence is convoluted. *headdesk*)
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But I also knew about asexuality as an orientation, and knew I was most likely that. Because I? Am just not that attracted to anyone, not to have sex at least.no subject
I wish I had known about asexuality as an orientation. It would have saved me so much confusion in high school and college.no subject
If I'd cared, I'd have been confused. As I was essentially as anti-social back then as I was non-sexual, I couldn't bring myself to care.no subject
I can remember in my 30's telling my mother how grateful I was that I grew up without the programming of societal expectations that said my life would only be validated by marrying and having children. I was glad that she had let me go my own way without trying to make me feel bad about it. And I will never forget her response- she was horrified that I thought she did NOT believe that the only way for a woman to be truly fulfilled was by marrying and having children.
The lesson I took from that encounter was that I guessed it wasn't so much that she let me be myself, than that I was too thickheaded or unobservant or insensitive to pick up on the message. Ah well.
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I don't think my parents pushed much on me in terms of relationships. Politics, education, religion -- yes, all of those -- but not relationships. They did make a point of changing names and genders in children's books so at least half the characters were female (and of naming my earliest stuffed animals for me, so they were also female); they modeled a stable and relatively egalitarian marriage; and my mom has said on a few occasions that she felt having children really taught her what it meant to be a responsible adult. But they never talked up marriage, sex, and romance as the be-all and end-all of life, and their marriage is more best friends with benefits than a deathless romance, so...
*shrug*
I have, over the past few years, kind of talked around telling them that I am asexual -- I haven't used the actual word, but I have made it pretty clear that I am not going to be in a relationship and they shouldn't expect grandkids from me -- and they've been okay with that. So I think, all things considered, I have been very lucky.
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For me it is more about the relationship than sex. I find people attractive, enjoy romance, and even the physical side, but having a real relationship is more trouble than its work. I am physically affectionate and have close platonic friends of both sexes who I can cuddle up or ask for a backrub without it getting weird.
I have enough trouble keeping my own stuff together let alone someone else's. I wouldn't get a cat because it is too much responsibility let alone a lover. As a hetero leaning girl, I refuse to enter a relationship where I more mother than mate. This is what has always bothered me about relationships. It’s never just you and your partner who get into one: It’s always you, your partner, and society. And that’s not a three-way I’m comfortable with.
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I am too selfish to deal with anyone's baggage beyond my own.
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Thank you for the link! I am white (and therefore privileged to not have to think about various issues unless they are shoved in my face), so it had not occurred to me that stereotypes of various races could play into people's experience of their sexual identities. That is definitely something I want to think about now.
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I agree with you on perfume. Really, I think the world would be pleasanter without it altogether. The times when it's done wrong dwarf the times when it's done right.
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I have never (that I recall) noticed any person's scent as being attractive -- 'just showered' is probably the closest I get to that. On the other hand, I don't think I've experienced people's sweat as being especially unattractive either, at least not fresh sweat in moderate amounts. I just notice that after a while without bathing or washing their clothes, everyone gets rank. *grin*