Embracing Incoherent Asexualities

playful musings on being stuck in the wrong word and adding more to fix it

(a)sexuality

My second-least-favorite stereotype about asexuals is that we’re asexual. 

The prefix “a” means “not”, so literally, “asexual” means “not sexual”, which sounds pretty straightforward if you’re not familiar with the diversity of the asexual community and sounds like a shitpost if you know anything real about us.

How we can be regular porn users, but wouldn’t feel attraction to those same actors in real life. 

How we really hold down the fort when it comes to erotic fanfic and some of the kinkier corners of the internet. (Someone has to keep watch on Rule 34 while y’all are out there getting laid.) 

How we can have a high libido, but masturbate only to the physical sensation without any sexual stimuli or fantasies at all. 

How we can have long-term sexual relationships with imaginary partners. 

How we can get crazy horny and fantasize about sex and even get on the apps to look for a partner, but know we’ll be unable to feel pleasure, or that we’ll be repulsed when the other person’s clothes come off, or that we’ll lose interest even before the hookup. 

How we might spend our 20s obsessed with never having had sex, or never having had good sex, driven to change that pattern and therefore caring about sex way more than allosexuals who figured it out years ago. 

How we felt sexual attraction and maybe even had good sex that one time 12 years ago and get horny about once a year and spend far too long thinking that if only we had the right relationship and pretended to be allosexual hard enough, we could recapture that moment. 

How we have sex with partners anyway and some of us enjoy it, or don’t mind it, and some of us think we don’t mind it because it’s tolerable and no one told us there’s a difference between enduring and actually being fine.

passionate incoherence

My first-least-favorite stereotype about asexuals is that you, the allosexual, have any idea what sexual attraction, desire, orientation, all of that even is, so you can imagine us like this: Boring, dispassionate, immune to falling in love, immune to being dazed by someone’s beauty, lacking all kinds of intimate desire.

Some of us, of course, have some of those immunities. But we all feel some form of desire.

I have fallen madly in love and stubbornly sworn it off. I’ve averted my eyes from people because they were too beautiful. I’ve become physiologically aroused while cuddling, touching, or fantasizing about intimacy with someone. I’ve psychologically desired things my body could never want. I’ve lain long hours in bed petting and kissing and nipping skin so beautiful it could make me shiver. Twice, I’ve met strangers who made me break out into a sweat. I’ve felt afterglows of physical pleasure that I can’t actually feel during sex.

I spent so many years of my life trying to assemble all these experiences and more into an even somewhat-normative, partnered sex life. But most of them aren’t actually sexual desire. They’re other forms of reaction and attraction. The fantasies where I kiss friends are symbolism garnered from a lifetime of media consumption, a shorthand for deep emotional intimacy that gets instantly replaced with the real thing––the need to converse, to connect––once I meet them. Or so I theorize at the moment, alongside a friend with similar experiences. And the things that are or might be sexual desire, those few and far between experiences, are weak flames that get snuffed out rather than fanned if I actually try to have partnered sex. Then, I run into so many obstacles: the mismatch between my different forms of attraction, how physical features that tug me to someone romantically are inversely correlated with what has the potential to turn me on; the repulsion I often feel to naked bodies even if I’m seduced by their beauty clothed; sensory processing issues that most often leave me stone, able to enjoy touching but not being touched; and most seriously of all, the sexual anhedonia that makes the whole process boring as hell, a drive to orgasm, sure, like scratching an itch, better taken care of alone than with the disappointment of involving another person in what will always be a lackluster experience if I’m supposed to receive pleasure and not merely give it.

I used to think I could be a stone service top, always giving and never receiving, or that I’d get into the kink community and explore forms of intimacy that might give me more of a thrill than vanilla sex. After all, my fantasies are kinky as hell (Hieronymus Bosch’s hell, for example), and I’ve sought pain before because at least that was something I could feel, as opposed to the boredom of regular old genital stimulation, producing orgasm, so mechanical and banal. But then I matched with people on apps who wanted the things I’d told myself I always wanted to try, and I couldn’t be bothered to message them saying what I wanted. Because I didn’t actually want those things. I’d confused fantasy desires with real desires and “tolerable” with “wanted” yet again.

This is TMI, and I’ll probably post it this way, because I want to hammer home this point: Asexuality is wildly incoherent. Asexualities live in the incoherence. Many asexuals are not asexual, depending on when and how you look. Of course there are people with no libido or desire, who are aromantic as well as asexual, who aren’t even that vague catch-all term “oriented” that describes people who have no romantic crushes or sexual urges toward anyone but still find themself in some way “preferring the company of” men, or women, or some other imperfect categorization of people marked by a certain set of sex-associated traits. But the rest of us resign ourselves to the fourth orientation category after all the trails that seem to lead to androsexuality, gynecosexuality, bi or pansexuality peter out and leave us in the woods, looking back through the dense growth and wondering if there was ever really a trail at all, not just an occasional ambiguous sign that confused us.

stubbornly unspeechless

We come up with words for what type of asexual we are. We’re not non-libidoists, probably, not and having this dilemma, though of course some non-libidoists still feel desires their bodies can’t comply with, opening them up to this wide space of attraction that’s far more complex and breathtaking than most people who fit into normative allosexuality will ever catch a hint of. We perhaps have a romantic orientation. I’m bi/panromantic and perhaps bi/pansexual but really I’m more romantically oriented toward people with masculine features yet get aroused by female-normative traits in 2d but never or almost never in real life… ah, I’ve already lost the contours of the simplistic definitions I was trying to fit myself into for the sake of this paragraph. But bi/pan on both counts, still, because there are exceptions to the rules of what genders spark something in me even among the cis, there are trans lovers of all body types, there are quieter slow-burns of attraction that develop over time that are weak, certainly, but enough for me to act on because my choices of who to date and bond with aren’t actually determined by uncontrollable attractions.

Going back to the vague asexual “we” I’m using here: we could be aegosexual (I am, but not entirely, and I now laugh at the idea of only claiming labels I fit 100%), fictosexual, cupiosexual, aceflux, acespike, ace-spec, gray-ace, graysexual, demisexual, more I can’t remember. We categorize our forms of attraction into a neat little list: sexual (none), romantic, alterous, sensual, aesthetic, emotional, platonic, as if anything we ever feel could fall so clearly into just one topic. By the way, if you like the humor of the absurd, of the necessity of accepting the absurd as sensible and real because it is, consider the definition of alterous attraction––attraction that isn’t platonic or romantic but somehow somewhat in both categories, in between, ambiguous. People feel this way and feel the need to communicate this precise imprecise gradation of feeling, desire, want, imagination, and came up with and shared a word for that purpose. Honor that.

I said before that most allosexuals would never see the vast space of non-normative intimate experience and desire and repulsion that has left us speechless, to which we responded by enterprisingly creating all this terminology, but I hope I’m wrong about that. I hope you, the hypothetical allosexual reader I’ve been addressing in lieu of the asexual friends I know will read this, live your life joyously in the full space of possible connections and disconnections outside compulsory sexuality and compulsory romanticism. I hope you already know that intimacy and desire cannot be neatly sliced and diced into boxes, that none of us has the same experience forever and no two of us truly have the same experience. I hope you let relationships transition in and out of categories without worrying too much about social constructs and norms, that you can stop wanting someone you used to have sex with and still be in a partnership with them, that you can be friends with someone you love and let the romantic (or alterous) feelings ebb and flow, that you’re wise enough to know that what is romantic vs sensual vs aesthetic vs emotional attraction often shifts phase the moment you name it, wise enough to know that that’s as things should be.

A lot of asexuals (and even more outsiders) complain about the “microlabels”. Why should you (I’m part of the “you” now, this is them talking) get to call yourself “aegosexual” when you could just say asexual? Aren’t your fantasies and erotica consumption none of anyone’s business, especially when you’re not going to be having sex with them? You’re making us look like freaks, like perverts who are just in denial and trying to seem pure or feel better about their own inability to find a partner. Doesn’t it make the community stronger if we all use the same label, if we don’t break solidarity by engaging in the disavowal that comes with terms like “gray ace”? (That last sentence faded back into me talking, me reflecting on my past self, who identified only as gray because I thought I didn’t meet the overly-strict asexuality.org definition of “asexual” as “a person who does not experience sexual attraction” and therefore didn’t belong, but also because I thought I could hold the asexuality at bay by acknowledging that side of me but sticking on the light side of “gray”.)

I do have serious criticisms of the split attraction model (which brought us romantic orientation, and sensual and alterous attraction, and the difference between sexual attraction and all these other categories). I don’t think human experiences of being drawn to or desiring someone fall into neat boxes, and I think everyone has to figure out for themself which types of attraction experience (such as a racing heart, double-taking at someone’s beauty, or thinking at them all the time) indicate that they might want to have sex with someone and which are more suggestive of a cuddle session or regular 3-hour political debates. There’s something fundamentally flawed and very culturally specific in the urge to create discrete categories for fundamentally overlapping relational experiences like friendship, romance, and resolved or unresolved sexual tension. These categories work best in certain very specific negations: “I do not experience sexual attraction,” “I do not experience romantic attraction,” which are judgment calls and statements of intent—the person uttering them has decided to step off the culturally-prescibed path of constantly searching for “the right person” who they’ll be able to relate to in ways required under compulsory sexuality and romanticism. The judgment call is that one has truly never felt and will never feel something that’s a prerequisite for these overpoweringly important social relationships––it would be hard to give up on, or at least socially justify giving up on, these pursuits without being able to declare success impossible. So we wrest the absolute from the ambiguous.

But I think the thing critics miss about microlabels and the proliferation of difficult (preferably impossible)-to-grasp terminology to describe our many asexualities is that the sheer number of them, as they get defined and interpreted and re-interpreted in varied and not-uncommonly conflicting ways, as individuals each accumulate many of them and twist and shift their understanding of them, creates surrender. You (this “you” is all of us, though I’m sure some will refuse what I’m about to say you have to do) have to take the labels lightly, have to acknowledge their fragility, their incoherence, their overlap, their complete inadequacy in describing the greater mysteries of true human experience behind them. You have to let go of single definitions and instead grant the label-user epistemic autonomy: You listen to them and understand what the label means and how it fits them in their narrative of why they use it, and you listen again when context or life experience changes that meaning, or when they change labels. We collectively co-create the definitions of these words, as language-users do with all words, and none of them hold the exact same nuances of meaning for any two people. Labels for asexualities are personal and collective just as all words are personal and collective.

My favorite stereotype about asexuals is that you’re not sure what that is and want to know what it means for me.