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| Okay I was searching for an image to represent me being confused about sex, and came across this stock photo of a white woman sitting with a laptop, looking like she is trying to write a blog but is also very confused. I find this delightful- please feel free to imagine that I look exactly like this while I am blogging. Image source. |
Recently I was at a queer event and I mentioned I'm asexual, and then I gave the definition in case people don't know what it means- "it means you are not sexually attracted to anyone."
And it felt weird, because yeah I know that's the definition, but that isn't really how I understand my asexuality now. Like, okay I guess I am probably not sexually attracted to anyone, whatever that even means, but I no longer feel like that's what it is for me to be asexual.
Instead, being asexual is more about... I don't *get* sex. Yes, I do in fact have sex with my husband, Hendrix, and it works well, and I enjoy it, but in a general sense I don't *get* sex. It only works well with him because I have done A LOT of work to figure out my body and what I even want. I still feel like I have no idea what sex is about in general. When I hear other people talking about sex, it doesn't sound like anything I can relate to at all. I don't *get* sex.
I "get" it when it's with him. But in a general sense, no, I have no idea.
When I was first figuring out I'm asexual, I was super-fixated on the whole "no sexual attraction" definition. Trying to figure out what sexual attraction even is, in order to be allowed to claim I don't have it. It seems like this is a very common experience for asexuals.
But after 5-ish years of IDing as asexual, I don't care about that as much any more. I just feel comfortable with the asexual label, and, yeah that's pretty much it. I don't need to justify it to anyone- I don't worry about that anymore.
Recently I've found a really good group of queer friends, and we like to talk about our queer lives A LOT. And it's so extremely freeing to me, that I can be "out" as asexual and be very open about the fact that I don't understand sex. (Typically I feel like I can't be openly clueless about sex, because people will think I'm just pretending to not get it, because of prudish judgmental holier-than-thou reasons, or something.) I've never really had this kind of experience before, and it just feels so good, just to be honest about how I don't get it.
For example, we had the following conversation:
me: So I saw this video, and there was a couple talking about "do you want to look at some toys" and they're looking at a computer screen, but it turns out it's rubber ducks, and the joke is that you're supposed to think they are talking about sex toys, but they're not. But this isn't realistic, right? If someone was really talking about sex toys, they would say "sex toys," they wouldn't say "toys." It's just "toys" in the video because media has to be censored like that, but in real life it wouldn't be.
queer poly friend: Actually, a lot of people are really awkward about sex and unwilling to talk about it directly, which is a PROBLEM and people should COMMUNICATE.
me: But... wait, how can you even have sex without talking about it? Like how would that even work???
queer poly friend: Yes! A lot of people are bad at communicating about this!
me: But how?????? Don't you at least have to say "what position do you want to do?" How is it even possible to have sex without saying to each other "what position do you want to do?"
other queer friends: [start legitimately trying to explain how it comes about that people have sex without saying to each other "what position do you want to do?"]
me: [still doesn't get it, also now has a lot of concerns about how consensual that even is]
Like wow, I love how they treat it like a real question! In the past, people have refused to explain things to me because "stop being so naive". And yes, sometimes with these awesome queer friends I do have to just stop asking and accept that I'm not going to "get" it and that I will just annoy people if I keep asking over and over. But wow, I've never been in this kind of environment, where I can openly be as clueless about sex as I really am, and it's accepted.
This is what I mean about being just really comfortable and happy with the label "asexual."
Also I read asexual blogs, and the things they talk about make sense to me. I don't care as much now about being 100% sure that I've never experienced sexual attraction or whatever. It's about the community, about finally finding people who talk about sex in a way that I can "get."
I was worried, after I discovered I don't have vaginismus anymore and sex is going really really well for me- I was worried that I wouldn't be "allowed" to be asexual anymore. But the truth is, the reason I'm able to have sex in a way that goes well is that I did the work to figure it out. I came from a background of Christian "sexual purity" teaching that goes "best-case scenario is that you don't have a single sexual thought at all before marriage, and then BOOM on your wedding night you'll have the BEST SEX EVER" - and when it didn't work that way, there wasn't really much help for me from sex-normative society. (But wow, thank Nonbinary God that I didn't actually wait till my wedding night, can you imagine putting all those expectations on one single day, picked out months in advance, and then right when you expect the magic to happen, that's when you figure out sex makes no sense at all?)
I did the work, and it was A LOT of work because I'm ASEXUAL. Honestly, though, everyone should do the work of figuring out what they actually want, and if you choose to have sex then you should also definitely do the work of masturbating and really finding out how your genitals work and what feels good- I worry about people who don't run into huge roadblocks when attempting to have sex, because if it's easy, then they might not ever end up doing that work, and then their sex life is just what society expects them to do, rather than what they actually want.
But anyway. I did the work, and then I worried that my success meant that I would have to be heterosexual- like the thing that finally helped me understand myself would be taken away from me. Back to heterosexual world... Heterosexual world, which told me "just relax" and other completely useless advice about how to have sex. No, I figured this all out myself, asexually, and I want that to be acknowledged. It didn't come naturally at all. I did the work. I'm not heterosexual.
And as I worried about all that, I circled back to the standard definition- "asexual means you're not sexually attracted to anyone"- and I asked myself if that applies to me. In terms of the very very specific way that asexuals define "sexual attraction", no, I do not have sexual attraction. But for your average non-asexual person, who doesn't spend tons of time reading blog posts about "but what exactly is sexual attraction?" on the internet, they would totally say that my feeling of wanting to have sex with my husband is sexual attraction. Right? Like for someone not familiar with all the nuances of asexual terminology, yes, that's exactly what they would call it.
And maybe I'm ridiculous for claiming it's not.
Does it matter, though? I don't want to spend my time so concerned about parsing out the "truth" about whether or not I have sexual attraction. What matters is that IDing as asexual has given me the freedom to be honest about not understanding sex- I don't have to pretend anymore. It's given me the space I need to figure out what I actually want from sex, on my own terms. And it's given me access to a community of people who also don't "get" sex- finally people are talking about sex in a way that actually makes sense.
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This post is part of the February 2022 Carnival of Aces. The topic is "Beyond Attraction."
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Related:
How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)
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