![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI 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.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-16 06:47 am (UTC)