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| The word "new". Image source. |
[content note: talking about sex]
Attraction is... different now... and I don't know how to talk about it, or maybe I do have words but I don't know if I should publish them. Because it's personal and intimate now in a way that it wasn't before.
All right, the general overview is: I'm asexual, I'm married, and having PIV (penis-in-vagina) sex with my husband was always a whole huge difficult task, because it turns out I had vaginismus (or something similar). And then I gave birth to our baby, and that cured the vaginismus. Now sex is completely different than before, so completely different, it's astonishing how big the difference is. Sex is a totally different thing now- it's easy, we can just go ahead and do it just because we want to do it (okay realistically though, we have a baby and therefore hardly ever have spare time). It's not like before, where I had to go through a whole long process, which I developed myself through trial and error, to get my vagina to open- and if I didn't do that process, PIV would be incredibly painful or even impossible. And no, the process didn't always work, so sometimes we just couldn't, and that was that. But now, oh wow it's so different, it's so different, I cannot overstate how different it is. Sex is a totally different thing now- better, definitely better.
So that's the physical side of things, but it turns out there's also an emotional/ attraction/ desire side. Which I will, maybe, I guess, talk about in this post.
But... should I? Because it's personal in ways that it never was before. It was easy to blog about "I'm asexual, I don't have sexual attraction", but now I want to tell you I do have a desire for sex with my husband, in ways I didn't before... is that too personal to post on the internet? Or, actually, the answers to the questions "How is it different? Why is it different? What is it like?" maybe that's what's too personal. Because I could answer those; I think I do have the words to describe it. And asexuals everywhere are asking each other "has anyone figured out what sexual attraction is???" and the allosexuals are like "well I can't really describe it, but, like, it's just, you just know." And now here I am with an asexual background and I can actually describe the sexual feelings I have now, in a way that's accessible for an asexual audience. I think?
And... I want to write the post that 4-years-ago Perfect Number would have needed. But... is it too personal to post on the internet?
Or, is someone going to say "Having sexual desire for your husband is not really news... That's like, the most normal and boring thing. Why would you blog about that?" But for asexuals, it's not "normal and boring"; for asexuals, it's one of life's biggest unsolved mysteries. And now I have something to say on it.
Where to begin?
Okay I'll start with this: If I had any doubt before that asexuality is a real thing, or any doubt that I was asexual, well that's obviously gone now. The feelings I'm having now are really totally different than before; I very much did NOT have these feelings before, so I can say for sure I was asexual. (I also say I still am asexual- maybe I'll talk about that more in another post.)
Way back years ago, when I was questioning, trying to figure out if I was ace* or not, I always wondered if maybe I do have all the same feelings as a "normal person" but I'm just so confused and therefore categorizing them wrong. I thought, maybe I do feel sexual attraction, but I'm just such a loser that I can't even recognize that's what it is. And maybe this is common for asexuals- you never really get a good answer to the question "what is sexual attraction, anyway?" and eventually you just have to conclude, "well, I don't really understand what it means, so, uh, I guess that means I don't have it... surely if I had it, I wouldn't be spending this much time confused about it" and that's how you come out as ace.
You never get an answer, and eventually you decide that's your answer.
But now, now I have new feelings, new desires for sex. And it's not like "I felt this a little bit before, but now I feel it a lot"; no, it's something I really have never felt before. Specifically, well maybe this is TMI but here goes- specifically, I mean occasionally daydreaming about the feeling of PIV, the actual physical feeling of it in one's genitals, and wanting that feeling, and therefore wanting to have sex. That. I'm calling that "sexual desire", I guess.
Wait, let me rephrase it, I want to say this clearly. If I was had a time machine and was explaining it to myself-from-a-few-years-ago, here's what I would say:
Okay, yeah, I know when you hear "I like the actual physical feeling of PIV" you're confused as hell. You're making a list in your mind of all the physical feelings you have during PIV, and you're trying to figure out which of them is the one that has people so excited. No, that's not it at all.
My "list of physical feelings I have during PIV" is now completely different from before (before I gave birth vaginally). And now the overall experience actually is the sort of thing that one would desire, like inherently desire it for itself. Not like I used to desire it, like "here is a complex explanation of the reasons I want to have sex." No, it's nothing like that any more, because now it's the kind of thing that is actually desirable in and of itself.
The feelings on your list- which range from pain to neutral to "yeah it's good but nothing to write home about"- no, it's not any of those. You really don't have this one. You really are asexual.
So, yeah, that. And other new emotions too besides that. Maybe I'll blog about them, maybe not.
Before, I wanted to have sex with my husband for other reasons- and even years and years ago, before I met him, and I was attracted to other boys and I conceptualized it as "lust"... Other reasons. Reasons about wanting my partner to feel a certain way about me. Or more "transactional" sorts of reasons. Or curiosity.
Anyway. And all of this is very much caused by the physical side of things- the fact that apparently childbirth cured my vaginismus. Because of that, the physical aspect of PIV sex is now "it feels good" rather than "ughhhh I have to spend a long time trying to get my vagina to open"- and so it makes sense that now that I've experienced sex in the "it feels good" way, now that it's happened often enough to change my understanding of what sex is, well yeah it makes sense that now I would start having the desire for it.
And also, wow I have a lot to say about this, and I feel like it's all tangled up- maybe I can't write it all in one post. (I feel like I should also address the fact that I'm just talking about PIV in this post... I know that it's problematic to claim that PIV is the only real sex or whatever, but based on my own experiences I have reasons for specifically focusing on PIV here, but I can't get into all that, it's complicated.) Let me just say one more thing though:
I now feel like there is something intrinsically special or intimate about sex/genitals. I never thought that before; it always felt like society had arbitrarily assigned all this meaning to this one specific activity. Take a look at what I wrote in this 2017 post, Sex is Like an Inside Joke (Thoughts from an Asexual):
And now I see sex as a hobby. You know how, if you're dating someone who's really into board games, and they always want you to play board games with them, so you do, and it seems weird at first but after a while you end up liking board games too. It's like that. My partner is into having sex, so I've gotten into it too, and it's enjoyable, though if it were totally up to me, I would choose to spend my time on a different hobby instead.
And I find it very weird that sex is such a popular hobby. Sure, I guess it feels good, but, really? It's not like, that good.
And this post from 2016, Boundaries in Dating: #stillpurityculture:
And this stuff about "100 percent of your body" is also ridiculous. When they talk about "sex" in this chapter, I'm assuming they're referring to vaginal intercourse (though other sexual acts are also not allowed, obviously). To be clear, "Boundaries in Dating" does not offer an explicit definition like this- I'm assuming it because that's what purity culture/ society in general typically means by "sex." It's so weird that they're using language about "100 percent" when they're talking about something that, in its most basic form, just involves a penis and vagina and no other body parts. If you have vaginal sex but not anal sex, does that mean you haven't "given away" "100 percent of your body"? If you have vaginal sex but your partner never rubbed the back of your head with their hand, does that mean you haven't "given away" "100 percent of your body"? If you have vaginal sex but never show your partner any ultrasound images of your internal organs, does that mean you haven't "given away" "100 percent of your body"?
If you have sex with one partner, then break up, then have your appendix removed, then have sex with a new partner, does that mean that your ex got "100 percent of your body" in a way that your new partner never can, because they can't be anywhere near your appendix? What if you start dating the surgeon who performed the operation? Wait, does a surgeon have "100 percent of your body" in a way that a sexual partner never can?
My point is, "giving away your body" is a euphemism for performing acts which stimulate certain areas [genitals, skin, tongue, etc], which definitely ARE NOT "100 percent of your body". And as a math person, I believe it's utterly ridiculous to attach actual numbers to a euphemism which doesn't literally describe the act to which it refers.
Back then, when I mostly chose to have sex because of how other people viewed it, or "transactional" kinds of reasons like that, then it didn't matter very much what the specific activity was. Oh, people are interested in playing with each other's genitals? Okay sure whatever I guess. If "sex" instead meant going outside and making bear sounds while patting each other's heads, it would be all the same to me. Okay sure whatever I guess. And I thought it was ridiculous how apparently society had decided that playing with each other's genitals is the activity we will use as a symbol of love and intimacy- like, why that, and not something else? Like yeah there's orgasms but I still don't think that's enough of a big deal to really justify it.
Same thing with euphemisms about "giving your body away" and stuff like that, stuff where you're supposed to hear the term "body" or "self" and interpret it as "genitals" and no other body parts. Just utterly ridiculous. Your ear is just as much a part of your body- why does nobody hear terms like "explore each other's bodies" and picture (fully clothed) poking around in your partner's ears?
But now I'm like, wait, something about this is special and intimate in a way that's not like other things. That's a new feeling for me. And maybe there is some sense in which your genitals feel more representative of "your body" than other parts are? I don't know, I'm still confused about euphemisms like "give your body away"- is it simply a euphemism that people use because they're too squeamish to say "sex" or "genitals", or do they truly feel that your genitals are "your body" in a special, intrinsic way that's different than your other body parts?
And, maybe it was "intimate" before, in a sense- in the same way that you might have a splinter that's so bad that you need somebody to help you get it out, and it's a huge act of trust to allow someone to do that. Yes, for me, sex always required a lot of trust and love and so it never made sense to imagine it with anyone other than Hendrix (my husband). But now it's intimate in a different and better way, not the "help me with my splinter" way.
And this is all swirling around the question "am I sexually attracted to my husband?" and I don't have an answer to that yet. Maybe yes? But I still want to ID as ace, for a bunch of reasons.
It's all new and different- in a good way- and I want to talk about it because I'm a blogger and that's what I do. And the world needs descriptions of sexual feelings that are accessible for asexual readers. And... there's a lot here, a lot that I could say. Maybe I'll write more about it in future posts.
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* ace = asexual / asexual spectrum
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Related:
How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)
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This post was written for the October 2021 Carnival of Aces. This month's topic is "attraction."
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