bi, trans, poly 🏳️‍🌈
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will either use way too many words or say absolutely nothing
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host of quiz nights & games tournaments
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have agoraphobia & anxiety (as well as sleep problems, caffeine addiction, depression, some undiagnosed stuff...)
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UK-based (unfortunately)


Anime Reviews, but Youtube
www.youtube.com/@YoshiAnimeReviews

shel
@shel

Very recently, I came to the conclusion that I am grey-asexual. It's somewhat embarrassing to be changing my sexual orientation labels around this late in life, as someone who had come out as gay at age 14 and trans at 18, but here I am. Looking back at things, it's somewhat obvious. Exes I've told have been like, "yeah, that makes sense. You seemed way more into the not-sex parts of sex than the sex parts of sex." The question of course is then, why did it take me so long to come to an asexual-spectrum identity? If I already knew that my relationship to sex is the way that it is, why didn't I parse that as being asexuality?

Recently, when I was trying to figure out what kind of asexuality label best fit me, I had some incredibly frustrating conversations with asexual people that drove me absolutely bonkers and made it incredibly difficult for me to understand what the fuck "asexual" is supposed to mean and if I am it or not. The problem, to me, is that the asexual community defines asexuality in a way that is philosophically unlike how any other LGBT-etc. identity is defined. In order to accept these definitions of asexuality, one must accept some extremely grand and impossible to prove assertions about supposedly universal human experiences. I've known that my sexuality is different in these ways my whole life but I never took on an asexual identity because the way it was defined to me just didn't make any sense

Social Scripts and Subversions

All queer identities come together as a set because they represent someone not following the social script as dictated by Western cisheteropatriarchal society.

  • You are assigned a sex and corresponding gender at birth based on the appearance of your genitals to the naked eye. Some babies may be operated upon to make their genitals better conform to one of the two options.
  • The two sexes are male and female, and their corresponding genders are man and woman respectively. Both binaries are socially constructed, although the former has some biological basis that the social construct further constrains and exaggerates.
  • You are not to change your assigned gender or sex at any point in your life.
  • There is a set of behaviors that are acceptable and desirable for men and only men.
  • There is a set of behaviors that are acceptable and desirable for women and only women.
  • Some behaviors are forbidden to men.
  • Some behaviors are forbidden to women.
  • There is a set of activities that men are only to do with other men.
  • There is a set of activities that women are only to do with other women.
  • There is a set of activities that men and women are only to do with each other, and not with other people of their shared gender.
  • Men and women must participate in the set of activities that they are to do with each other. It is treated as the ultimate and most important part of life itself.
  • The way that they do this is also heavily restricted and scripted.
  • I hope you want to do all of these things in these particular ways because even expressing dissatisfaction with it is socially punished. You should perform being happy with this script. But not too happy, if you're a man. Men aren't supposed to express strong emotions like that.

LGB

Despite western society (and many other cultures too, in their own ways) have written out the story of your entire life before you were even born, the true reality is that human beings are infinitely diverse. Even if 90% of humans are able and willing to fully conform to their assigned stories and be a performative happy man and happy wife with happy children (and this is a big If!) there will always be people for whom this is so difficult, so miserable, so unnatural to their nature that they will ultimately refuse to conform.

Alfred Kinsey famously found in his research that 46% of men are to some degree bisexual, and 10% are exclusively homosexual. 11.6% were perfectly bisexual, with equal attraction to both men and women. While 37% admitted in confidence to having had a sexual encounter to a man, we of course observe that far less than 37% of men identify as gay or bisexual. Most men identify as straight and even the most progressive straight men will often admit to a level of heteroflexibility but not consider it salient or important enough for them to assume a queer or bisexual identity. They are content to ignore the parts of themselves that are not aligned with the heterosexual social script in order to maintain a self-image that is fully acceptable to society. His research on female sexuality was less fruitful because women at the time weren't comfortable discussing this sort of thing with a man. Some topics should only be discussed amongst your own gender.

We do not typically consider 46% of men to be "closeted bisexuals." The closet only applies when someones desires are so strong that they are not content to ignore them. When not pursuing those desires make them actively unhappy. The desires which do not conform to the heterosexual script are the first component to a gay, lesbian, or bisexual identity, but it is acting upon those unacceptable desires in some manner that cements that they are not merely naturally sexually fluid in the way most people are, but actively gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

In this manner, I do not truly need to understand how someone experiences their desires to observe their gay, lesbian, or bisexual identity. Their identity is in conflict with society and thus meaningful and defined because they are expressing forbidden desires and acting upon those desires. And I consider expressing those desires to be a form of acting upon them, even if your desires go unfulfilled. To say "I actually want to have sex with men, and not women" is acting upon that want. I don't really need to know why you want it, or how you experience it, that you want to do something society does not allow you to want or pursue draws the contrast between you and the average person. It makes you abnormal.

There is certainly some level of biological wiring that determines sexual orientation, and some level of nurture-driven emergence of desires as well. But what defines the category, how you know that you are in this category, is that these desires are clearly contrasting with the observed desires of others. You cannot freely share these desires. They are forbidden.

T

Transsexuality, gender non-conformity, non-binary identity, and gender transition follow the same pattern as sexual orientation but broader. Desires and actions around relationships with others is one component of the script, and another component is how you express who you are as an individual, how you shape your body, and all the sets of behaviors permitted and forbidden to your assignment.

Again, most people appear to be content to accept their sex and gender assignments, ignore the parts of themselves that desire something that is not permitted, and to align their behavior with their assignment. However, due to the infinite diversity of humanity, once again there will always be people whose desires and subsequent behaviors do not conform to the script. Some people are so dissatisfied with their assignment that they experience the misery we call dysphoria.

Jane Schoenbrun, among other artists, creates films that try to communicate what gender dysphoria feels like. Ultimately, though, it is not the experience of dysphoria that socially marks the T. Nobody needs to know why we ultimately desires to cease conforming to our assigned gender or sex. We become socially marked when we express the desire to be something different, or that we feel like we are truly something different, and when we take actions to become different than we are "supposed to be."

It is not merely the desire to wear a dress that makes someone assigned male into a trans person. It is when that desire is so strong that it becomes unacceptable. I don't need to know how that desire is experienced. It is merely the resulting failure to conform to the script that creates the contrast and abnormality.

The "closet" in this case again only exists for those whose desires are so strong it makes them unhappy. I don't need to know the internal understanding of how that unhappiness is felt to understand that someone is unhappy. The contrast is drawn by the discontent being so severe it cannot be ignored. Subsequent actions, whether it be expressing this discontent, or actions being taken to change one's gender expression or sexed body traits, are what mark someone socially and make them transgender/etc.

We don't need to know what it feels like to be cisgender, we only need to know what we desire in life and to pursue it.

Let's talk about the A

"Asexuality Handbook" dot org has a very extensive glossary that feels pretty indicative of how most asexuals seem to like to define things.

asexual:

adj. Of or relating to asexuality.
n. A person whose sexual orientation is asexuality.

Well that doesn't mean anything to me. Let's look up "asexuality" next.

asexuality: n. A sexual orientation where a person doesn't experience sexual attraction towards anyone.

Now this is different. The other definitions are based around the presence of desires (and subsequent actions) which go against the social script. It is not defined by a subjective experience, but an objective expression and behavior. Others can observe you as different from the outside, and you can observe yourself as different on the inside. You know what you desire is "wrong."

The asexual community does not define itself based on if they desire sex, or if they have sex. They define it based on if one "experiences sexual attraction." Asexuals will tell you that you can be asexual and still:

  • Have a sex drive that makes you want to have sex
  • Be attracted to someone of specific genders romantically, aesthetically, emotionally, physically, and "sensually."
  • Desire sex (just not with a specific individual?)
  • Have sex
  • Have a preference for who you have sex or romance with based on gender
  • Want to have sex with your romantic partner

So what remains that makes someone asexual? It is the absence of the internal experience of "sexual attraction." Which is not the same thing as liking how someone looks, wanting to have sex, wanting to have sex with a specific person, having sex, etc. etc. it's not something you can infer whether someone experiences it or not based on their behavior it is entirely a subjective internal experience. It exists only in their mental phenomena.

The issue here is that since it is an absence of something, we must then declare that allosexuals do experience this thing described as "sexual attraction." You cannot merely observe that 90% of people seem content enough to have reproductive sex, you must make a statement about not just that those people actively desire to comply with that directive but also how they experience it internally. You must describe that which you by definition never experience, and define it based on entirely internal attributes you've never felt, and then say that's how everyone else is.

The social dictate relevant to asexuality has been labeled amatonormativity. Queer theorists have other terms for it as well. It is the social script about which social bonds you should value most and what you should do and not do in those relationships. It is tied into the heteronormative script pertaining to getting married and having kids. It is tied into monogamy and patriarchy. The insistence on the necessity of sexual virility of men to be valuable men and the mandate of sexual availability of women to be valuable women. To refuse to conform to this social script will result in social consequences. Some pretty violent ones.

So if like the other two categories, asexuality is in reference to people having desires which go against this social dictate and acting upon those desires, then this is very easy to understand. But this is not how the asexual community generally definea asexuality.

They define it as "not experiencing sexual attraction." This is an absence of an imagined internal experience shared by people who are not you.

So what is sexual attraction? When I asked the asexuals whose advice I sought in determining where I fall on the asexual spectrum, one of them literally said "I define sexual attraction as sexual attraction." Well, buddy, how do I know what sexual attraction is if it's an entirely internal experience that I, perhaps, have never experienced?

Most LGBTQ glossaries have no definition for sexual attraction. The Asexuality Handbook gives us this.

sexual attraction: n. An urge to have sex with a specific person.

So an asexual person can desire sex, have sex, enjoy sex, have a romantic partner, and consent to having sex with said romantic partner because they want to please their partner and want to have sex (which... implies a desire to have sex with their romantic partner...) but this is still asexuality because of their entirely internal subjective experience of not having had an urge to have sex with specifically their romantic partner.

Now bring in that it's a spectrum. Bring in the abro, grey, flux, and demi identities and this becomes soooo narrowly distinct from just... what allosexuality possibly is? Someone who does experience an urge to have sex with someone they're emotionally close to? So they can experience a desire to have sex, and romantic attraction, they just don't feel an "urge" to have sex with a "specific" person if that specific person isn't someone they know very well. And then you have "it fluctuates if this is experiences or not" and well... this is when we start getting into my big philosophical disputes with the asexual community.

The asexuals who I talked to when trying to figure out my own asexuality were not making claims about how they live and experience the world, they were making claims about how allosexuals live and experience the world. They told me that what they don't experience is "looking at strangers and imagining having sex with them right away." Now, since when is it universally agreed-upon that the vast majority of people in the world are immediately imagining having sex with every single person they see of their preferred genders? They described having "a desire but not an urge." Now since when was it universally agreed-upon that the vast majority of people experience the world in this way?

Doesn't this imply that the western cisheteronormative script is in some manner innately biological to 90% of the human population? Is this not rooted in the infinite diversity of humanity? It feels like it asserts a natural homogeneity to humanity with asexuals as being some sort of special more rational type of person.

The more and more I asked them to unpack their language, the more they made universal declarations about the internal human experience of the world to the level of thoughts, feelings, and emotions completely detached from any observable behavior or actual statements on behalf of the people who are being described. If asexuals don't experience sexual attraction, then how can we define what sexual attraction is or how it is experienced? Or what is feels like? If by definition we do not experience it? How can you define yourself by the lack of an experience only you have described as existing for anybody else?

When I tried to describe my own experiences and feelings that have led me to question if I am on the asexual spectrum or not, I was told how I experience the world in ways that just didn't ring true. My own subjective internalities were rejected authoritatively. I was pushed to sort things into if they are "attraction" or not, and which kind. Not if they are desires, or enjoyed, or done. But if I experience it as an "attraction."

This led to bizarre sentences like "You can be allosexual and not enjoy sex" and "maybe you're just traumatized" which to me feel like entirely perpendicular to if I am living an asexual life. Isn't this the kind of thing asexual people often complain about being told? Why should the cause of one's desires determine their validity, as opposed to whether those desires align with the social script or not? This brings us to the social function of identity labels.

And this is besides the point that, under the traditional conservative western cisheteropatriarchal script, you actually are not supposed to desire sex outside of very specific circumstances with a very specific person. "Marital coitus" isn't even supposed to be enjoyed depending on your sect of Christianity. What draws the contrast with asexuality?

The sociolinguistic pragmatics of identity

When I tell someone I am heteroflexible, it serves a clear social function. It is not merely descriptive of my experiences, but it tells someone something that might be relevant to them.

I am mostly only interested in doing the sexy romantic kinky things with men. But I'm not making any promises that I exclusively stick to this. There may be exceptions. Non-binary people exist and can be attractive to me.

Now, if you were attracted to me yourself, or interested in doing this or that to me, you now know if you're possibly in my pool of candidates or not. This might be relevant to some people. There is a social function to this. I am expressing to you my desires. I am telling you something about myself in relation to social scripts.

When I tell someone I am transgender, there is also a social function.

I had a certain experience of gender. I was assigned something different and may have different biology than you expect in some regards. The ways I want you to refer to me might be different than you assume.

If I don't think me being trans is relevant, I might not mention it. But there are times when it serves a social function. I might be explaining that I am infertile, or face discrimination. When I was pre-op, it may have been important to explain to a prospective sexual partner what organs I had. At a doctor's appointment, it matters what organs I have, or what meds I'm on. "Transgender" serves a function when I tell someone that that is what I am. I am expressing something about myself that is relevant.

If I define "asexual" based not on my behavior or desires but entirely based on if I have a vague internal experience or do not have that experience in this very nebulous and narrow way that I can never truly know if anyone experience this thing how we are defining it let alone the majority of humans... then what social function does the identity even hold for me? If this nebulous internal experience doesn't imply anything about my desires on what I would like to do with other people, or on what I am willing to do with other people, then what does it communicate?

Hey, I am telling you that when I look at strangers, I do not immediately feel an urge to have sex with them, and I don't suddenly imagine having sex with them either.

If you said this to most neurotypical allosexual people, they would have no idea what you are saying. What social function is this? I think most allo NTs, especially straight people, would just say "that's normal" or "I don't usually do those things either?" I'm not sure if they'd be entirely honest but... that's certainly what they'd say. You aren't supposed to tell people if you did experience something like that. Sex is a cagey topic. I don't think anybody would say "What?! No, it's a universal human experience to always think about fucking every single person you look at and to want to fuck them, constantly, no matter who they are to you or how you're feeling, or the time and place, so long as they're pretty and the right gender."

I think mostly people would categorize it as normal to only sometimes have that experience, or to have "high standards" for who you find attractive, or to only really do that with a spouse. Culturally, I think that it's seen in most western and east asian cultures as impure, wrong, or immoral to fantasize about having sex with strangers upon seeing them, especially if you're a woman. The standard is you're only supposed to want to have sex with your spouse after you marry them. What is labeled as demisexuality might not actually be normal, but it's what is supposed to be normal.

And, importantly, what is actually accomplished by telling me this? OK so you're not imagining fucking me, but you want me to know you theoretically could still want to date me and/or have sex with me, you just don't feel an "urge" to "upon seeing me"? Well, there's nothing for me to do with this information. As an identity, it has no function.

De jure and de facto definition

Oddly, even though the asexual community tends to be very adamant that this "sexual attraction" concept is how asexuality is to be defined, without any variance for weirdness around sexuality, I don't think most asexuals are actually using the identity this way. When you see memes about asexuality, usually they orient around the not-having of sex, the not-thinking-about-sex. The not-knowing-about-sex. They are quick to affirm that you are a valid asexual if you have sexual fantasies, everyone is very taxonomically valid here, but the identity and community serve a true function of de-prioritizing sex.

I think a descriptive definition of asexual people, and the asexual spectrum, when factoring in how people use these identities and what they mean to you when someone identifies as such, calls for a very different definition. When we consider the parts of the social script that we are going against and contrasted against, we end up with different definitions.

How I would like to define asexuality, and my place on the asexual spectrum

I think it would be most accurate and useful to define asexuality by how one values and desires sexual intercourse. I use "desire" here not in terms of sex-repulsion but just in terms of like, if someone literally wants to do it or not, for whatever reasons that they want or don't want it. Whether it's experienced as "attraction" or not is not my concern, just if you want it.

Asexual: I do not value sex in my life and relationships, and do not desire to have sex. If I went my entire life without sexual intercourse, I would be fine with that. It's not important to me. I may still desire other forms of intimacy with other people, it's just sexual intercourse that I'd rather leave out.

This now has a very clear social function and it's defined by something that is clearly understandable and observable without having to make assumptions about how someone experiences their own cognition of the world. It doesn't matter why they don't desire sex, or in what manner they experience the lack of desire. They don't want to do it. It's not something they want. That's all you need to know. It also fits in very neatly with the other LGBT-type labels without telling allosexuals how they're supposed to experience their attractions with split-attraction model stuff. It's intuitive to understand an asexual gay man as a man who is gay... but just doesn't want to have sex. We don't need to know the rest.

If we define asexuality based on value and desire then all those other labels fall neatly into place how you know if you are them or not via the ability to observe other people and if you are like them or not.

I can look at the asexual up there and think... well... I wouldn't say I have 0% desire for sex, but it's certainly not something I value or want as badly as other people seem to, in such a manner that it's worth communicating to prospective partners that this is the case.

Outside of the asexual community, I think the normies would call this "being high libido" or "low libido" honestly, but I think that identifying it as a place on an identity spectrum can make a lot of sense. It's a little more firm and specific. Feels less negotiable.

It's also contrasted with the social script. We can then clearly see how this is not in alignment with the way virility is a scripted value-measurement of manhood, or being a sexually-available object is a scripted value-measurement of womanhood. This way of living is out of alignment with the marriage-and-children script. It is out of alignment with what forms of intimacy are supposed to be valued.

Demisexual: I do not value or desire sexual intercourse most of the time, but it might be something I'd like to do with someone who I am very emotionally close to. It's not something I can do casually or quickly, and I'd like to not be pressured into doing it. There are other kinds of intimacy I'd rather participate in.

I think this definition better covers how most demisexuals I know use the label functionally. It sort-of functions as a "please let me lead this conversation" request. If you're going to be disappointed if you can't have sex with someone a lot and quickly, then you should avoid courting a demisexual, who is communicating that while it might not be entirely off the table someday, they'd really rather focus on emotional intimacy. Someone courting a demisexual should be content to not be having sex indefinitely.... even if maybe someday it happens.

Phrasing this as an identity amongst the LGBTetc. also functions to tell someone "I don't want to follow the script. I want to write this together like gay people do." It's a cultural shift.

Abrosexual/Aceflux: It's very strongly inconsistent if I want sex or not. I can't really explain why I sometimes do or don't. Sometimes there are long stretches of time where I feel one way or the other. Sometimes it changes moment to moment. But I'd like to not feel bad about not wanting it when I don't.

This is closer to how I've seen people use abrosexual/aceflux in terms of its social function. That they do not want to be dependably seen as a sexual person, but that they are sometimes. They want to set expectations that while they do want to be asked, the answer will often be no. If this is a problem for you, then move along. Given that frequent sex is a socially valued component of a relationship, this draws a contrast. Someone who simply, for very long stretches of time, actively wants to not have sex, and to not have that seen as a relationship failure.

Grey-Asexual: I do not value centering sex/sexuality in my life/relationships. It's not something I desire in a way that I'd position over other things as important to me. Whether I'll enjoy it or not has nothing to do with emotional closeness to someone, it's just that in general I like other forms of intimacy a lot more than this one. But still, it's not something that I never enjoy or never want. It's just one of many things someone might do. Being expected to do it all the time gets tiring or boring to me. Sometimes I want to eat pasta, but I don't want to put pasta on a pedestal as the food, and I like garlic bread a lot more.

This is how I define grey-asexuality for myself and what I am socially communicating by identifying this way. I would like things to not always be about sex. Sex, to me, is not a must, and I'd like to often pass on it. I'm not saying I'll never do it or enjoy it, but it would be tiring to me to do it all the time. It's not my favorite. I'm happy to eat a waldorf salad. It is not my favorite food and I would not enjoy eating waldorf salad for every single meal. I enjoy waxplay, but it's not fun for me for every single intimate moment to lead to waxplay all the time every time. The are some things, like cuddling or kissing, that I just enjoy quite a bit more than sex and probably would enjoy doing every day if it did not have an expectation built-in of it leading to sex.

This is something observable (my ex-partners certainly noticed it) and it affects my relationships to others. There's a contrast with the social script, and it affects my desirability and social status. It doesn't matter what my internal experiences are when I do or don't experience a desire to participate in the activity called sex. What functionally matters to other people is what I want or don't want to do with potentially them/other people; and any subsequent behaviors as an expression of those desires or lack-thereof.

I realized that I'm grey-ace because, when I was doing stuff with an asexual person recently, which is new to me, I kept having the thought "it is so wonderful how I get to do all of the parts I like the most without the pressure to do the stressful parts I don't like that much." This, to me, is certainly indicative of some form of asexuality, but according to the classic definition of asexuality based on "attraction" it would be irrelevant. I hope you can see my perspective on this.

There are other ace-spectrum labels but these are the ones that seem to be most common. The other side of the split-attraction model, the aromantic/demiromantic/etc. labels, are not ones I feel comfortable trying to redefine because I truly don't understand them. They confuse me even more. I didn't understand what a romantic relationship really was until I was 25 because of autism, and then at 28 felt like I once again was questioning and relearning what it is or can be. Most importantly, I am still exploring what I want it to be in my own life. Understanding what "romantic attraction" means is thus even more confusing to me. I can't call myself aromantic. I do desire romance. But I don't see romance as something innate and biological to me; but as something I've logically concluded seems enjoyable and pleasurable and worth pursuing. I can't possibly fit this into the existent label boxes on the aro-spectrum. It makes more sense to me to just say "I'm autistic." What would I be communicating with an identity? I don't see what I'd be communicating with aro-boxes as things I want to communicate, even if the asexual community would look at my descriptions of my internal experience and say "you don't experience romantic attraction. You are aromantic-spectrum." How can you say what I do or don't experience? You hardly know what you experience yourself.

Conclusion

I highly doubt my new definitions for these labels will catch on, especially since they're paragraph-long definitions written in the first person. But sometimes I feel like I can do something better and then feel the need to do it, especially when it pertains to how I express my own identity.

Here is a shorter attempt at writing definitions.

Asexual: Someone who does not desire sex nor values sex as central to life and relationships.
Demisexual: Someone who does not desire or value sex without the context of a close emotional bond.
Abro/Flux: Someone whose desire for sex may be frequently absent, or absent for long stretches of time, and does not see sex during those times as valuable.
Grey-asexual: Someone whose desire for sex is substantially diminished compared to allosexual people. They do not value sex as something worth centering in their life or relationships any more than one would value and center eating a delicious waldorf salad.


YoshiKyon
@YoshiKyon

i gotta be honest, i'd never actually heard the term aceflux before and like... h u h.
by the definitions Shel uses (and I completely agree with the way she gets to those), that... is exactly how I've kinda always felt.
so hey, uh, i guess this is a coming out post of sorts? ^^;


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in reply to @shel's post:

The "this is what labels are useful for" bit is extremely helpful for me, I struggle with the idea of them or using them because they seem so reductive of internal experience, and the reverse perspective of "they're for other people" is a big dose of clarity. Thaaaaaaaaaaanks

Really great analysis of the terminology being used. I've long identified as demisexual and your descriptions of how that fits into things socially really aligns with my personal experience.

Yeah pretty much 100% cosigned as someone who's identified as ace (demi + gray) for nearly a decade. I love descriptivism in identities, I think being able to explain something to other people who don't have that identity is a really important part of it, and I think you've done a good job on the ones you've defined.

When I try to explain ace-ness to people, I tend to lean towards math/science definitions, due to my background. I like to say that sexual orientations are like vectors: they have a direction and a magnitude. While other sexual orientations indicate a direction (or ever-changing direction, or a reliance on the direction not being important) ace is all about the magnitude. A few examples below:

"I'm attracted to the gender that our culture expects of me, but not as much (nor in the same ways) as they expect me to be."

"I like looking at, finding emotional intimacy, and expressing my love for people regardless of gender, but I have no interest in ever having sex with them"

"I want to fuck everyone who I see who is not my gender, and I like making people of my gender feel loved and cared for and would cuddle or kiss them, but I will never have any interest in having sex with them"

I've had friends come to me and ask about what the difference between urges, desire, and attraction are and I can't define them super well. I wish the definitions were different.

Regarding your questions around demi-ace definitions, I like to think of being demi as experiencing a sort of metaphorical staircase between meeting someone and getting to a level of comfort and interest in having sexual involvement. There's no guarantee that you'll ever get to the top with anyone (hence why it's an ace identity, and why it's important to set expectations by mentioning the identity to people), and there's no skipping stairs. Now, exactly how many stairs, what is required of each stair, etc varies from person to person. Non-demi people can skip stairs or may not have stairs at all. My stairs involve becoming friends with someone before ever having a crush on them (though performative horniness or performative crushes makes this murky), having an intimate platonic friendship (being able to hug, spend intentional time together in public with no expectation of kissing or proclaiming romantic feelings or love, sleeping under the same roof as you might in a slumber party, etc), having a romantic relationship (intentionally spending time alone in intimate settings, flirting, bantering, sharing intimate secrets with each other, kissing), and then having a sexual relationship (all other sexual touching, acts, etc)

This metaphorical staircase describes the sorts of "rate(s) of change" that my vector analogy from before might change its magnitude. It can be hard to tell for demi people whether you have any feelings (I'm lumping together attraction/desire/urges here for simplicity) for certain genders because you may have just never reached that stair with that person before.

I have lots of thoughts about this stuff and would be happy to talk to you in comments or DMs if you'd like!

I am alas an autistic person who communicate pretty much exclusively through incredibly academic lengthy overly verbose words and I struggle to condense my thoughts to smaller more basic words without just getting even more verbose.

You know that thing that's like "How do I know if what I call red looks the same as what you call red? We both agree an apple is red, but what if the way an apple looks to you is what I'd call blue? We can never know if we experience colors the same because we only live through our own eyes and we can only share experiences via language and art which are limited in their ability to replicate what we feel and see."

I'm saying that that also applies to things like what "attraction" "feels like." If you've never experienced sexual attraction, well, you can only ever know what it feels like to be someone who doesn't experience it. But the people who do experience it have no need to define it. So the people who don't experience it just have to guess at what it feels like to experience the thing that they by-definition do not experience. In doing so, they are just making huge assumptions about how everyone else experiences the world that might not actually be true. It makes everyone out to be the same.

Defining an identity on this doesn't work because how can you say you don't experience something you don't even know exists at all as you imagine it is for other people?

With eight billion people in the world, it could very well be that there are eight billion versions of "red" and eight billion versions of "attraction" and categorizing people on how they experience these entirely personal internal things we can never perceive and only partially describe will always be a fruitless endeavor.

Instead, I just focus on how these experiences result in different desires and behaviors as they relate to and are relevant to other people. What makes you abnormal. What makes you not follow the straight 1950s nuclear family path painted out before you the moment you were born. What other people should know about you and how you want them to relate to you.

This is really great! As someone who identifies as demi-romantic and ace and has been slowly drifting from how the general ace community defines things, I found a lot of this very insightful. If I may add my own perspective, the way I define attraction is focused on intent and draw. Basically, what draws me into a relationship with someone else is never romance or sex, I am interested in a person because I want to be their friend. I am start wanting to make a closer bond with someone with an interest in being romantically involved, but like you said that is not the priority. That’s how I usually explain it. If I am initiating or deepening a relationship, it is because I want to share friendship first and foremost. Of course another part of the definition is reliant on the expectations of the society around you and as society changes, I think the definitions will change too.
Also to comment on the “you’re just traumatised” phrase because I have heard it in the ace community and it infuriates me, I think it’s completely valid to identify as asexual after a traumatic experience. This is specifically because I believe sexuality is more flexible than how it is generally portrayed. If someone’s trauma causes them to deprioritise sex in their relationships, then that is extremely valid and cool, and they are ace if that is what they identify as.

  1. thanks for sharing, sincerely, this is very interesting

  2. the choice of the word 'urge' is so odd to me. like maybe this is writer brain or just an idiolectal quirk but i'd never describe an everyday, ordinary feeling of any kind as an 'urge'. to me 'urge' implies a sudden and hard-to-control need, maybe even a foreign or unexpected one; often a socially unacceptable one... it's a relative of 'urgency', 'urge' (v), etc.

to me 'urge' implies a sudden and hard-to-control need, maybe even a foreign or unexpected one; often a socially unacceptable one... it's a relative of 'urgency', 'urge' (v), etc.

This is just describing me in high school. I'd be sitting in class, enjoying my life, and then it's like a light switch was flipped and I'd be consumed with an incredible horny lust, unfocused but coursing through my veins. Took me years to figure out how to let them wash over me and pass uneventfully. Now that I'm 30 or 40 years old, I don't feel the intensity the same, but the "out of nowhere wellspring of desire" can still happen.

This is a really great post, thanks for sharing! I've tried to explain asexuality to my spouse and found myself floundering with the more circular definitions; this lays it out really well and ties it back to other queer labels in a great way. :eggbug:

Really good post, and I definitely agree with your definitions of the labels! I've thought a lot before of the social functions of labels and it's why I end up never bringing up mine (that together with possible weird expectations of them that I don't wanna navigate), but I've never stopped to dissect it like you did. Really appreciated the read.

As for why a lot of asexuals associate the identity with "attraction", I think part of it is because there is also a lot of societal pressures on performing attraction. The first time I started thinking there was something wrong with me wasn't when I was in a relationship with someone that had different expectations, it was when I was chatting with friends and I just couldn't relate to the way they talked about other people.
I only learned about the label after being in relationships and also experiencing the clash of expectations related to sex, so I had both experiences in hand to relate to, but I can imagine a lot of younger people assume the label just from that first set of experiences (which is valid! I used to feel like an alien when growing up)

I think perhaps what's really going on is "most people assume the identity as teenagers" eg when they do not yet understand things like sex and romance at all in the first place, are still developing what they want, and have yet to be exposed to the vast complexities of human existence and how vast things can be.

If teenagers are left to define it then yeah I expect it to be philosophically wanting. If it's being based not on life experiences but a vague sense of alienation from peers (something that is truly universal to the teenage experience I think, just different what you think is alienating you)

Like, I wonder how many abro/flux people assumed that identity after identifying as asexual as a teenager then later developing sexual attraction and desires. "I guess I'm fluid or it changes?" And they're trying to fit their experiences back into the boxes

Yeah exactly. I think it's a specially weird subject because it also relates a lot to physical condition and it's bound to change a lot during life. I've accepted that a lot of my asexuality is related to my ADHD and that my headspace makes me fluctuate between being sexually available or sex negative, but in the end I'm sure a lot of allos are the same and just don't feel the need to pick up the label

Off topic:

I think I might be autistic. I struggle a lot with anxiety due to the possibilities of misinterpreting what I'm reading. Also applied to my writing or speech, I constantly feel the need to clarify something I've said, not because I'm apparently being misunderstood, but because the ways I can be misunderstood could easily snowball and jeopardize what I'm trying to say, and it's hard to know if I'm being understood or not. My mind usually is too chaotic to be sure I'm expressing my thoughts accordingly.

With that said, I really like the way you write because it didn't happen a single time. It was comfortable.

Just an absolutely great post! I've had problems with current asexuality descriptions, but I was never able to figure out why I felt this way. This post explained why I've had this feeling, and by and large, explained why I've never felt comfortable in the ace community.

This has given me so many things to think about, I might come back to this to write a more thought out response when I have the time.

I am glad for this post, thank you. I would agree with you that particularly your definitions of demi/flux are closer to how people actually USE them than how they are traditionally defined (and are therefore of greater objective worth). I feel much happier with the way you define grey-ace (a thing I ostensibly am) through the ACTIONS it involves, rather than the thoughts (which seems to be how it is defined elsewhere). it just seems right!

years and years ago when "demisexual" was a relatively new term gaining popularity it often felt very strange how people tried to describe it. because like you said, it seemed like many people assumed that allosexuals are just like, constantly having to hold themselves back from fucking every person they ever see, or something. i think you really hit the nail on the head as to why a lot of the discussions and definitions of the ace spectrum feel off at times - like people are talking more about what they assume other people want than about their own experiences

Thank you, this post is very thoughtful and articulates struggles I've had myself with figuring out if different labels on the ace spectrum would apply to me, or if they could apply, would they even be useful to me (in understanding myself or in communicating things about myself to others) the way similar labels like "trans" "lesbian" or even "autistic" are.

A big stumbling block for me has always been the seemingly narrow yet vague definition of "actual attraction to specific people", like, how am I supposed to know if I experience sexual attraction if I don't know what that is? How am I supposed to know what it is if I may or may not experience it? This is further complicated by having repressed a lot of personal sexual desire since I was a teenager because I thought it was wrong/gross/rude to have sexual thoughts about a real person without their permission - so if I fantasize about sex with hypothetical bodies not attached to real people, does that count as "attraction to specific people" or simply "wanting sex but not experiencing attraction" - or is the point moot because I might have more "urges" about real people if I wasn't scared that just having them would be a violation of their agency somehow, so it's not "really" asexuality it's "trauma"? And what if I do find someone attractive but I'm not in the mood for sex right now, I'm certainly not feeling an "urge" for sex but does that mean I'm gray-ace or that I'm allo and don't have high libido or I'm just not in the mood?

I'm rambling/reiterating some of your points but that is all to say, these are things I've worried about (at least in the past, some of them are moot now) and I'm glad to read an essay that addresses a lot of them and provides a framework for thinking about them. I'm not even sure if I agree with all your conclusions (that's not to say I disagree, but rather, I need to mull it over and process) but this essay is really thoughtful and helpful to me in thinking about the subject myself.

I do feel like part of the reason asexuality as a whole is often defined around "lack of attraction to specific people" may be because of how LGB identities are defined by who a person is attracted to, and trying to fit asexuality into that framework, so I especially appreciate your explaining how their usefulness doesn't come from just the internal experience of attraction, but from friction between internal experience and external expectations. A very useful framework to work in.

the model you present here is sound, but i think the criticism you level at "the ace community" speaks to an ignorance of the circumstances under which our language first emerged. for example:

It doesn't matter why they don't desire sex, or in what manner they experience the lack of desire. They don't want to do it. It's not something they want. That's all you need to know.

this may be true morally, but it was blatantly untrue socially when asexuality was first finding its rhetorical feet in society. it mattered immensely why we didn't desire sex, because if we could not justify this absence of desire it would not be respected. much of the language you express frustration with emerged as a defensive response, as we adopted the language for asexuality that many of us were already using and finding small success with for our other experiences of queerness. you may as well have a dispute with the trans community for focusing too much on gender as an "identity" rather than as a lived experience or set of social relations; most of us are not theorists, and we generally build vocabulary to defend our choices in a society that does not understand choices as valid except when made by those with appropriate identities. many of the "claims" ace people make are in fact reports of what allos describe as normal—often what allos describe as normal specifically to invalidate or disrespect us and our desires, except rephrased to convey that we don't share their disdain for our identities.

And this is besides the point that, under the traditional conservative western cisheteropatriarchal script, you actually are not supposed to desire sex outside of very specific circumstances with a very specific person.

i also think this represents an excessively-narrow view of the heteronormative script as a singular thing existing only in conservative religious contexts, rather than a set of scripts applied in different settings. many of the scripts which apply to casual settings do, in fact, demand the active performance of heterosexual desire; it's a classic source of gendered bonding among both men and women. you can call this a liberal heterosexual norm if you prefer, but it would be ridiculous to dispute its existence; it's the same impulse that drives young closeted lesbians to select "safe" male crushes instead of just saying "i'm not interested." silence isn't sufficient to live up to the heteronormative ideal.

more broadly: i think much of the supposed incoherence in asexual language is explained by understanding that it must establish asexuality as an identity that justifies the behavior we engage in, and that aces generally believe it should be broad enough remain accessible to all who need it. of course people can "desire sex, have sex, enjoy sex, have a romantic partner, and consent to having sex with said romantic partner because they want to please their partner and want to have sex" and still be ace; the point isn't that to draw stark lines between aces and allos but to allow room for most non-normative experiences of frequency, intensity, and priority associated with sexual desire while being able to defend those experiences in a society that only respects them when associated with the correct types of people. it may be true that trying to meet both these constraints produces a somewhat-contradictory philosophy, but no more than than it does among trans people, and i think suggesting one has a philosophical dispute with the trans community would be similarly ill-conceived.

Hmmmmm I think it makes sense why this framework would emerge given historical context but it still just feels... unhelpful to me I guess. I'm also skeptical of the idea that big glossaries of terms that tell other people how they supposedly feel and experience the world is what is effective in garnering acceptance? Most aphobia I've seen in queer spaces usually comes entirely from people taking issue with definitions which make statements about how allosexuals experience the world.

I think also that my approach to typologies is such that I don't care if people's actual behaviors align with their identities. If a lesbian has sex with a man I don't really see it as a problem. The identity doesn't need to be scientifically accurate. The self-identification serves a social function regardless of accuracy. If someone identifies as asexual but has sex etc sometimes I don't think it's my business, if the word is still clearly serving a useful social function. I don't feel a need to create a new definition that allows for people being inconsistent. People can just be inconsistent. A straight identity doesn't mean someone never has sex with people of the same gender... it means they don't want to communicate to you that that's a salient part of them.

I also do take issue with how a lot of trans people define gender and talk about gender.

asexuals making statements about how allosexuals experience the world is itself frequently a response to allosexuals simultaneously insisting that ace experiences do not meaningfully differ from theirs while also marginalizing and alienating asexuals for our differing experiences. are these statements philosophically resilient? i imagine many are not; they are meant to provide immediate defense against open disrespect and derision by both heterosexual society and the communities we might've otherwise expected to be our allies. if you believe that the things you'd say in similar circumstances would consistently stand up to the sort of interrogation you conduct in this post, then kudos to your confidence. i do not believe it is reasonable to expect the same of most people.

as for the point i am making when i invoke transness: i have no doubt that you disagree with other trans people. who among us doesn't? we are not a monolith. for anyone to suggest they had a "philosophical dispute with the trans community" about gender, as if we all held precisely the same ideas about the topic, would be ridiculous, and even more so if it were based on a quick perusal of the wikipedia article for gender identity and some dozen-odd conversations with trans people online.

ultimately the thing i am saying here is: much of what you implicitly describe as the philosophical position of the ace community is both

  1. not designed to hold up as social theory
    and
  2. not representative of our actual self-conception

you are trying to interrogate a compilation of big-tent statements deployed by specific people and groups and massaged into something that might read as legible to an often-hostile audience, and holding the ace community writ large responsible for the fact that it doesn't live up to your scrutiny. i hope it's clear that such behavior reads as condescending!

Hmmmmm.....

See, I've experienced pressure to have sex (with a specific person who is doing the pressuring) but I've never had an experience where people were pressuring me or anyone to express an experience of attraction to another person (like "what celebrity do you have a crush on" situations). Whenever I've just said "oh, I don't really get celebrity crushes" "I don't watch porn or get anything from looking at it" or "Oh I don't really think about if someone is attractive when it's not relevant" people have always just accepted that? And maybe I'm just around very progressive people but I can't say I've ever seen someone be challenged for expressing their desires or lack-thereof. Everyone is always talking about the importance of consent in the spaces I spend time in. If someone just says "I do not want to have sex" they have expressed a lack of desire and therefore trying to push them to want it would be bad consent.

Like, idk I really do feel like "I don't want sex and it's not important to me" holds up much stronger in an argument about how someone could possibly not be a sexual person than "You experience life this way that I'm imagining and I don't experience life that way." Because the latter can be contested by the person saying "that's not how I experience the world either" while the former can't really be argued with? "I don't want to" isn't an ontological statement about how the world works. It's a personal statement about one's own life. You can't argue with me not wanting something. I just don't want it. And again, maybe this is just from me spending all my time in very progressive spaces, but telling someone they're wrong for not wanting something is just a jerk move that makes you look bad.

While taking on the grey-asexual label seems useful to me now as a way to set expectations in advance, I can't say I've had issues with people not taking my desires at face value when I've raised them. When I say "I don't like being touched in this way" people just don't touch me in that way. I've experienced a lot of pressure to be attracted to women specifically, but usually that pressure is pressure to do stuff with women and not with men.... not pressure to express attraction.

I think I can understand why the asexual community came to the definitions they did as a rhetorical strategy, but what am I trying to get at is that I am an asexual-spectrum person who has felt alienated from asexuality by this sort of philosophical framework the community has adopted. It was the writings of Devon Price and Ana Valens on asexuality that helped me really understand asexuality better. But their writings also don't use the framework of "attraction" they use a framework of arousal and enjoyment.

And while I do understand how someone could find my essay condescending (especially since my general writing style and way of speaking has been described as condescending for my entire life even since I was a small child and I have tried a lot to change that to little success) I don't think that it makes me wrong or that it makes what I'm saying not worth sharing. I don't think it hurts asexual acceptance to highlight that where we butt up against society and face oppression is in our desire (or lack of desire) to participate in socially mandated activities, and not in our internal experience of a nebulous innate biological attraction that is considered distinct from a rational desire. But it could also just be that because of asexuality I just truly struggle to conceptualize what sexual attraction feels like.

I also have tried to enter the asexual community before and just found it to be a frustrating experience of people not being willing to let me describe my own experiences in my own words. "I define sexual attraction as sexual attraction." My attempts to explore and figure out my own identity was often met with people arguing with me and telling me that I'm wrong, when I was describing my own experiences and not how anyone else experiences the world. I found that condescending too. This essay is about me trying to express my frustration and alienation from asexual community (as an asexual person!) in the way that I communicate (as an autistic person who is overly verbose and philosophical and always has been)

And like... sure I can see how some asexual people might say "well you weren't identifying as asexual in 2011. You weren't on the AVEN forums. you don't know how hard it was who are you to show up and try to rewrite the definitions" that makes sense.... but the reason I didn't take on the identity is because of everything I described. I'd say "hmm maybe I'm asexual" then go look at AVEN and get very confused and go "I guess asexual doesn't meant what I think it means." And like I said in my essay.... I don't expect anyone to actually adopt my new definitions. They're just there to communicate how I conceptualize things in a way that does make sense to me.

And... by and large I'm getting a lot more positive response from other asexual people than I am negative responses. Though of course it's probable that people who liked the essay are more likely to interact in ways I can see than people who don't like the essay and don't want to start an argument with me about it

maybe I'm just around very progressive people

yes.

I think I can understand why the asexual community came to the definitions they did as a rhetorical strategy, but what am I trying to get at is that I am an asexual-spectrum person who has felt alienated from asexuality by this sort of philosophical framework the community has adopted.

it is not a "philosophical framework the community has adopted;" it is a set of defensive rhetorical techniques developed by necessity.

And while I do understand how someone could find my essay condescending...I don't think that it makes me wrong

your model of sexuality is not wrong. your picture of what the ace community collectively believes is wrong, in that you assume the things we say to an often-hostile public are an accurate representation of our most nuanced thoughts. in truth, our most nuanced thoughts are varied and many of us disagree with each other about the nature of our identity.

Okay I think I better understand what you're trying to communicate than I was before. That what I'm taking issue with is not actually the dominant ideology of the community but a front being put forth. Similar to how the trans community often describe gender in a very watered down simplified and not quite accurate way when talking to cis people versus each other. I can accept that the asexual community is doing the same thing.

I guess in that case I'm just confused as to why whenever I would enter asexual spaces and say "I think I might be asexual and this is what I experience" why so often asexual people didn't put away the public facade version of asexuality and talk to me about the complex nuanced stuff that would better help me figure out my place on the aspectrum. It's frustrating that I was getting people saying "I define sexual attraction as sexual attraction" to me in a private asexual space when I said things like "I don't understand what sexual attraction is let alone if I've ever experienced it"

Maybe it's just one of those situations where my way of speaking due to autism pisses people off and they won't just say that. I have a group chat of friends who are all aspec and it was only one of the people in that group chat who actually talked to me about her feelings in a way that actually engaged with me on the terms of describing one's own experiences to find common ground as opposed to describing imagined experiences of people who aren't in the room

you have successfully identified the point i'm making, yes.

i can offer no hard answers about the beliefs of any ace people who aren't me; our community is especially fractured. loose speculations include:

  1. trans people also sometimes present a simplified and not-quite-accurate picture of gender to questioning trans people on the basis that simplicity will make things easier on the questioning person; perhaps these aces were incorrectly assuming that a simplified picture would be more helpful to you than a complex one
  2. by coincidence, your sample of asexual people mostly wholeheartedly believes in the attraction-as-attraction framework, in the same way that some trans people do genuinely believe in the simplified theories of gender we present to cis people. not every sector of a highly-fractured community is going to keep pace with every model of asexuality.
  • as a variant of the above: perhaps you are the first ace person in your particular social circle(s) to articulate things in precisely this way. maybe your group chat would be jazzed about this post, like "i have had similar thoughts but you're the first i've seen say them this way!" again, fractured community.
  1. many of the people who dismissed asexuality as a community that needed organizing or experienced a unique form of oppression identified as asexual, and often used that identification to bolster their own dismissal of aphobia as a concept. ace identification does not provide the same reassurances about a relative lack of open hostility to ace theory/community that transness does for trans theory/community
  2. "ace theory," insofar as such a thing exists at all, is relatively young. julia serano is basically considered to be the founder of modern transmisogyny theory, and whipping girl came out nearly 40 years after sylvia rivera got her start in the gay liberation front. AVEN, by contrast isn't even a quarter-century old. we haven't had a chance to theorize, formalize, and disseminate an asexual theory of identity free of the vitriol of mid-2010s ace discourse; fuck's sake, i've seen people say "i thought we roanoked the aces, why are you all still around" as recently as six months ago.
  3. some mix of the above

you are also, of course, welcome to disagree with me outright about my claim that these ideas are a front. i am one woman, & though i have a relatively long experience of asexual identity (~10 years) it remains a singular one. but if you do, you will hopefully at least do so with a better sense of historical context than when you wrote this post.

I appreciate the context! I think your speculations are probably correct. I think Ana Valens has been doing a good job at formulating some kinds of Ace Theory. Sorry if my frustrated tone in my essay came across as disrespectful of the actual diversity among ace people. I tried to recognize that people don't actually use these identities how Asexual Handbook Dot Org defines them but I think I failed to make that part fully a like "actual ace people don't seem to all agree with this framework"

also aaaa we are hitting the cohost comment point everything gets very narrow lmao

thank you so much for saying this because i also took issue with the broad generalizations on what asexuals say that OP takes here.

i think you've nailed why there's such weirdness in the different asexual definitions too- it's reactionary to the fact that not a single group had our backs. it doesn't make the traditional definitions of asexuality "correct" or good enough to keep, especially because most of the aces i know... don't really talk like that either.

"Finally, something that makes sense!" was what shot through my mind paragraph after paragraph. I am not asexual myself, the opposite in fact (but my "a-" is followed by "-gender" and I do relate to the pain of not finding good definitions).
Your definitions are so, so, so much better than what I got when I myself asked around. This is better. This should be on the dictionary, on the gender identity wikis, on everything I can think of. And this entire post is excellent. Thank you, seriously.

i'd like to chime in as an aroace (aromantic asexual) person to say that this post lines up well with a lot of thoughts i've been having about asexuality. i never had much involvement with spaces labeled as being for asexuals, and i always felt something of a disconnect with the way people in those spaces often talk about themselves and their experiences. it seems that everyone you ask to define attraction has a different answer, which always made me frustrated.

personally, i like the idea of defining labels in terms of observable differences one has from others and how they affect interactions and clash with the social script we're faced with. i primarily consider myself aroace because being someone's partner has never seemed appealing to me, i have no interest in having sex physically, and most of the things that people describe as romantic don't interest me. the label communicates to others that crushes will not be requited and the only relationship i'm interested in is friendship.

i'd even say that i don't really understand the appeal of having a partner in general. i like to float freely between different groups without firm attachments and be a little of a different kind of person in different spaces. to devote yourself to one person or small group of people feels like too much commitment to me, i don't think i would want to be tied that much to anyone in particular. but it seems that's important enough to most to be considered extremely desirable, some even call it the meaning of life! it's remarkable how varied human experience is

Howdy! I'm not the person who originally said this, but this post also writes me out of the community I've been part of for over a decade.

My lack of sexual attraction has been a big source of pain for me, to the point where I tried changing medications multiple times to see if that was the culprit. No matter how badly I desired desire, it didn't happen for me.

Through my entire teens and early 20s, I was sitting around and patiently waiting to experience the thing that it seemed everyone around me understood already. I thought my friend Mollie was joking when she asked which of the people in the room I'd let sleep with me, I didn't understand my friend Lauren when she asked which of the LotR actors I'd fuck, I was confused as hell as to why my brother would want to make out with my friend Bridget. I kept waiting and waiting to understand, but I never did.

Eventually, I said fuck it, I'm not waiting to experience desire- sex can just be a fun bonding activity with my friends and partners, and it releases the good chemicals my brain likes. I actively desire sex, I'd be quite upset if I never got to fuck again, and I do value it as part of my relationships.

From what everyone who doesn't identify as ace has told me (and I've asked and asked and asked) my experience was abnormal compared to theirs.

I think this is a really interesting post that makes a lot of good points about the way the community attempts to define itself, but I also think the lack of sexual attraction is an important part of the extant definitions. It's a definition in opposition to what we've been told is the norm, I think quite similarly to the way "Queer" is often defined.

In any case, I will always advocate for expanding the community to people who, for whatever reason, have an experience of sex where it doesn't gel with (what people repeatedly have told me is) typical. So welcome, we're unfortunately like 95% discourse here.

Hmmmm.... I think this is one of those things where because I don't experience sexual attraction in a typical way and don't feel comfortable defining that which I don't experience it's that thing where I'm like... your description sounds the same as my experiences except you seem to like sex a lot more than I do.

But I guess the question I have is what the asexual label serves as a social function in this context? Like what do you want to communicate to other people using the label?

I don't really care about people having Correct or Accurate identities. If someone wants to identify as an asexual gay man and then dress in women's clothing and have sex with women I can't say I understand what they've got going on but it doesn't offend me and I'm happy to let them continue identifying however they want.

In the same way that my answer to "are asexuals a part of the queer community" has always just been "well, look at the queer community, there are clearly asexuals hanging out in those spaces. So yes." I feel like my answer to "can you be in the asexual community and still desire and have sex" would just be "well, are you in that space and hanging out? Yes? Then you are clearly a part of that community."

But also, my whole essay has been about how I've been alienated and excluded from asexual community spaces because my way of understanding my asexuality doesn't agree with trying to make statements about how allosexuals are or feel about their lives and experiences. So I'm hardly in the asexual community myself and in a position to gatekeep anyone anyway. I'm in like, a friend group chat where everyone happens to be aspec, but that's about it.

I don't think it's ever helpful to tell someone they don't belong in a community because their behavior isn't 100% consistent with what a label is associated with or socially communicates. I don't care if lesbians have sex with men. What matters is that they choose to be in a community and affiliate themselves with it and the label is just how you socially communicate something you want others to think about you. E.g. a lesbian identifies as such to (partially) communicate a decentering of men from one's sexuality, that doesn't mean they must adhere to that rigidly. I see asexuality as a decentering of sex... not an exclusion of it.

"But I guess the question I have is what the asexual label serves as a social function in this context? Like what do you want to communicate to other people using the label?"

^I think that's a good question, and perhaps the source of where our experiences with the utility of labels differ?

As a way of communicating certain behaviors and attitudes to others, I think your definitions are really effective, and (clearly!!) resonate with a lot of other ace people. For other folks though, the draw to the label is specifically to put a name to the lack of assumed desire others are repeatedly describing.

I know you mentioned you're not comfortable defining other people's experiences, and that that makes the current definition of asexuality nebulous and difficult for you to relate to, but I also think "lack of sexual attraction" is inherent to the way a lot of asexual people think about how they themselves fit into the label. Dismissing that as if it has little basis can feel pretty invalidating. Someone else said something about how it's difficult to define an absence, and that difficulty is why I waited so long for enough data points to come along that I could confidently say I wasn't experiencing this thing so many people around me said they were, you know?

So, the function of the asexual label for me is not a social one in the sense that it helps me communicate something about myself to others, but is instead a term I use for myself, to remind myself that there are others like me, and that I'm not "broken" or "a really REALLY late bloomer" like I believed for so long.

If I may speculate, I think the difference in priority between your definitions and the currently-used definitions (social communication vs internal understanding) is where the friction might be, both in your frustrations with approaching the larger ace community, and with at least my reaction to your initial post.

Please forgive me if I'm forgetting/misunderstanding part of what you said. I am, again, generally in agreement with the social utility of the definitions you laid out, as a way of communicating to other folks behaviors and attitudes. The thing that I keep bumping into is that defining something in the most socially useful way excludes a lot of folks whose experience of asexuality is a wholly internal sorta situation.

I hope I understand why and how you ended up with the definitions and understandings that you did, and I also hope I sufficiently explained why they feel exclusionary to ace folks who feel like their lack of sexual attraction is an essential part of the label's definition.

Here’s kind of what i dont get tho as someone who’s been reading these comments, like, a definition based on communicating patterns of behavior doesnt erase the interiority behind that behavior, it just makes it infinitely variable. Like people who dont experience physical attraction are still welcome in this model, they’re just not the focus, arguably, to the exclusion of anyone else who’s struggled for whatever other ace-spec reason with sex in their relationships— like that attraction model and its relative obtuseness is why this post even exists in the first place.

I feel that this post resonates the way it does bc it’s no longer about the Why someone may not want to engage and instead about respecting that they don’t want to, or have special conditions to doing so (ie demi or flux), which actually opens up the ‘why’ to literally be whatever you want it to be, lack of attraction, sex repulsion, conditional libido, you literally get to fill in the blanks with your own experience as desired.

I dont understand why deprioritizing one model is being read by some people as erasure? That makes zero sense to me & feels like an extreme reaction to what is really just an expansion of the language

So I hope it's clear from what I've been saying that I don't think the definitions Shel's put out there are erasing the interiority of people who fit those definitions. As I mentioned, those definitions do not apply to me, nor other ace folks whose behavior does not reflect a deprioritization of sex.

The thing I've been trying to communicate is the way in which this new definition differs in its priority from the current definition, and why I think both are important to consider. Personally, I don't think there needs to be a single reason folks identify as ace, and I don't much care about why people choose to do so.

I'm also not sure why this is the comment you decided to reply to, since I've reiterated multiple times that I like these definitions as useful social tools and for folks who don't want to engage with attempting to define an absence of something.

Is there something I'm not understanding about your response to me? Because I'd like to change that, if so.

Ah, I see now! Apologies, when someone responds to a Discourse comment I've made, my first vibe from it can sometimes be antagonism rather than collaboration.

Thanks for clearing that up :)

I think folks with more extreme reactions have been uhhhh a little traumatized by being ace online in the 2010s. It was a bad time, and a lot of folks ended up clinging to the '#born this way" narrative that the lack of sexual attraction definition provides.

The community as a whole had to fight to be accepted as Real, and the only way to do that at the time for a lot of people was to cling to the life saver of "this is Inherently Part Of Me, in the same way that a trans person always and forever has known they were the Opposite Gender(TM)"

I dunno, I've been thinking a lot about political lesbians vs ....regular?? lesbians??? And how the similar "I do this action so I'm this thing" vs "something inside me is Different so I'm this thing" clash shows up in various queer communities. It's a similar situation with non-dysphoric trans folks and transmedicalists, etc etc.

Our communities have been fighting about definitions forever, but since ace is so new to the mainstream consciousness it's a bit......more raw, I think.

Hmmm.... I'm trying to understand the experience of someone who desires, seeks, and enjoys sex but doesn't experience sexual attraction.... would it be kinda like... you plenty enjoy sex but you don't ever experience wanting it in a Special Way? Like I often want to play tabletop games with people, but it's not like I'll be like "Ohhhh that person feels like they'd be realllllly fun to play D&D with I reallllly want that"?

except even writing that I feel like I do experience that with tabletop games lmao. Like "oh they seem like they'd be really fun to hang out with I want to do that now." But it doesn't feel the way Arousal does. I think "I do not experience arousal prompted by physical appearance" is something I can understand. But it seems like some people don't consider "experiencing sexual arousal prompted by appearances" and "sexual attraction" to be the same thing? which confuses me. Like there's an arousal but no Pull towards doing anything about it? But then there's people saying sexual attraction is also different from "sex drive..."

I feel like in my definitions the idea of "Not wanting to center sex in life and relationships" does capture that a bit but the focus is still on the desire and not on the interiority... but I guess I just don't feel comfy categorizing unique unknowable things.

Like I definitely see how having an identity label as a way of contrasting healthy asexuality with anhedonia or medical conditions is super useful. Like "I'm not depressed I just don't do that thing ever" I'm trying to think of other things where someone might be labeled strange for not having an interior experience regardless of their outward behavior. I think maybe people talking about "not feeling empathy" is similar, though I also often feel like that discussion gets confusing and people who say they don't feel empathy do seem to feel empathy and are just calling it something else.

discussions of interiority are confusing....

I also do think that both definitions could fully co-exist.

Asexual: Someone who does not desire or value sex as a central part of their life and relationships; or does not experience sexual attraction

This feels akin to how plenty of other words have multiple definitions that overlap. Similar to

Jewish: Someone who practices the religion Judaism, or is descended from the Jewish diaspora by ancestry.

Like those are actually two very different though overlapping groups of people, but nobody seems to have trouble with both things existing in one word.

I think you nailed it with comparing the category to the term Jewish, tbh. Asexual is an umbrella term, no matter how rigidly some folks try to stuff it into a narrower box.

And as for sexual attraction, from what my friends have very patiently sat me down and explained multiple times, the best understanding of it I've cobbled together is that it's like being hungry for a specific food.

Like, I enjoy carrots enough that I'll eat them when they're put in front of me, or if they're part of a dish someone made me, or when my body goes "hey you should eat a vegetable", but I never look at a carrot and go "damn I really want to eat that!"

I can be hungry in general (sex drive) and imagine that eating a carrot would probably be nice, but I'll never crave carrots (sexual attraction) even though I enjoy eating them when presented with the opportunity (sex itself.)

Apparently, there are people who just really really want to eat carrots, and I am not one of them. The comparisons my allo friends made to a craving is really what made me go "oh, huh, yeah that's a distinct category of feeling that I've never experienced aside from literally eating food"

Somewhere in one of these comments or reblog said something about gay/straight/bi being about a direction of desire and ace/demi/allo being about a magnitude/velocity of desire.

It sounds like my definitions in my OP really focus on a situation of having a diminished magnitude/velocity of desire, but you're saying that your magnitude/velocity isn't actually diminished at all, it just has no direction, perhaps? It's just as big but stationary?

I liked your essay, it make sense and the definition you construct are much better to make sense of the concept. Oddly, I think a similar line of thought can be applied to the labels "neurotypical" and "neurodivergent": there is not a neurological make up that match the "neurotypical" experience, rather, it's that society expect certain cognitive task to be performed, certain cognitive attitude to be hold and certain pattern of behaviour to be performed. If you have a neurological make up that allow you to do those things, you are neurotypical. Otherwise, you are neurodivergent.
That being said, I do think the writing of the essay does not exhibit sympathy-empathy* to ace people. I can understand that it is frustrating to be told "allo people have the urge to fuck", but such definition might be part of a broader attitude that has a cause. @yrgirlkv explained it better than I can. I am not ace myself, it is just that I think it is important to put that behaviour in context.

  • there is often a confusion between "sympathy" and "empathy", so if I were to write just "sympathy" (which is what I wanted to do), it might lead to confusion. And I don't want to go on a tangent on that topic, hence this bizarre word I coined.

A really good read.
The stuff about labels and communication fits well with how I feel about labels like "woman" and "man". Saying "I'm a woman" has a strong social function, implying that i desire or value things based on my gender. Like I'm more likely to prefer certain activities or clothes or social roles.

Good write-up! I recently went through a similar thought process with the aromantic label. While my personal experience with "romance" doesn't seem to align with what is expected, I concluded that saying I'm "aromantic" is effectively signalling to people that I don't want a relationship, which isn't true at all.

Thanks for posting this. I wish this post was around 15 years ago when I was trying to figure this stuff out on my own.

At the time, every definition I saw fell into one of two categories. The "better" ones felt like a never ending chain of definitions:
What does asexual mean?
It means someone doesn't experience sexual attraction.
Ok, what does sexual attraction mean?
It's an attraction that's sexual in nature, separate from other forms of attraction
Ok, but what does that mean?

It felt like each term used anywhere had a very specific definition, and in trying to not exclude anyone in the definition, barely managed to say anything conclusive at all. However, they were better than some of the others I saw: Others were so imprecise in their language that they excluded whole groups of ace people. (e.g. "Asexual people don't want to have sex with anybody.") I knew just by reading them that these definitions weren't all encompassing, so they were no help at all: If I don't meet this definition of asexual, does it mean I'm not, or does it just mean I'm one of the people this definition leaves out?

I like that your definitions use basic language that doesn't need endless definitions. I find the paragraph format especially useful, as it lets you approach each term from multiple angles: If I'm unsure if part of a definition fits me, the rest of the definition can help figure it out.

I definitely feel this post, I remember really struggling with trying to understand whether definitions of asexuality fit my experience. I'm coming from the perspective of someone who mostly is into weird, physically impossible kinks. As such I often had a hard time with not understanding the "sexual" half of "sexual attraction", because at least in my personal experience there isn't anything noticeably different between how I feel normative vs non-normative sexual desires. As such I have often felt dissatisfied by definitions of "sexual attraction" like the one you brought up in your post, as they can feel like they reject the idea of things that are sexual but don't involve sex.

These days I feel I'm unlikely to give more than a half-hearted "maybe" to the question of whether or not I'm ace. I have to some degree given up on labels as tools for understanding myself. I tore my self in two trying to understand myself, and now I would much rather allow myself to be partially opaque to myself.

I definitely get the appeal of approaching labels in terms of their social function. There's a certain violence in demanding that people be understandable, and I would rather not inflict that on myself if I can help it.

You may enjoy the article The Asexual Fetishist by Devon Price (yes, that Devon Price). It really resonated with me and made me seriously consider asexuality. Like yeah I'm Horny sure but whenever I've tried to actually have the sex I have to find elaborate back-route thought loopholes to make myself stay interested or horny by constructing elaborate narratives that make it kinky. And then reading Ana Valens' asexual erotics article I was like yeah no it's often better when it's just the kink and not the sex

I'll take a look at them, thanks. I guess my initial reaction is that it feels kind of sad to label such things as somehow outside the bounds of sexuality, if that makes any sense. Maybe the term is useful for navigating relationships, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Ana Valens' whole article is about how intimacy and erotics can still be super horny, intimate, erotic, hot, etc. without ever involving sexual intercourse. It was really helpful as a way of like, giving me a way to think about what i want and enjoy and how to get "just the good parts"

Having read Ana Valens' article you mentioned, there's a way in which it feels like it strangely mirrors a book I recently read called "Sexuality Beyond Consent" by Avgi Saketopoulou, a queer psychoanalyst. She doesn't engage the topic of asexuality at all, but also draws a distinction between sexuality as "a set of representations and/or conduct relating to sex" and the erotic "to avoid its easy conflation with sex". However, she goes the opposite direction and instead tries to put immense pressure on that idea of sexuality, seeing it as "the conceptual taming and domestication of the sexual".

While I think I definitely understand most of what people are talking about when they describe their asexuality, I really agree with what you've said about having issues with how asexuality is often defined through constructing an image of what allosexuality is, or often what it's "supposed" to be according to cultural norms. Especially when the discourse involves normative and exaggerated descriptions of what it means to be a sexual person, it feels like instead of deconstructing these cultural norms about normal sexuality, those discourses naturalize hypersexual culture as the norm, the natural way that most people are going to always be. I feel like it reifies those narratives about sexuality, rather than challenges them.

But like I said, generally I understand the concept. The idea that people just don't have sexual desires and/or aren't sexually attracted to people seems pretty easy to grasp.

For very similar reasons you outline though, I have a really hard time grasping what people mean when they say they're aromantic. Similarly, I think it's pretty easy to understand that some people just aren't interested in anything resembling our cultural script of the romantic relationship. That's not an issue for me, nor should it be for anybody. But VERY commonly, aromantic people define "romance" as something completely foreign to me.

One part that really bothers me is when definitions of aromantic broadly define all romantic relationships as monogamous. People will say that they're aromantic because they "don't want one relationship that's more important than everyone else and always comes first" and that's just fundamentally NOT what romantic relationships are to me. Not only because I enjoy having a multiplicity of romantic relationships at the same time, but because I reject the idea that my romantic partners are categorically more important to me than my friends. By those definitions of aromantic, I'd be aromantic, because I don't believe in this normative narrative of what romantic relationships are, nor have I experienced them that way. (In short, I'm pretty aligned with relationship anarchy.) I'm FAR from being aromantic though.

There are other more philosophical reasons based on the definitions of love, but I don't think I can articulate that well right now. (I typed out two more paragraphs and deleted them.) Basically, all forms of love are actually the same thing. I get this philosophy largely from bell hook's book "All About Love". I just don't think that romantic love is its own separate thing. I certainly don't experience it that way.

I think the extra difficulty I have with discourses around defining aromanticism, more than asexuality, is just due to the fact that romance itself is a much more nebulous, socially constructed concept than sexuality is. "What even is a romantic relationship" is such a complicated question with no real answer, hence why I gave up and deleted a bunch of extra paragraphs where I was trying.

Asexuality and aromanticism though are both very valid concepts, and I think we should find ways to make those identities intelligible to others without having to try to pin down normative descriptions of sexuality or romantic relationships. It can make those identities hard to grasp though, which is a problem when it comes to trying to convince other people that they're valid. It's like, "lesbian" is a concept that we are able to understand, without having to define what exactly the essence of womanhood is. ("Sexual attraction is sexual attraction." "A woman is a person who is a woman.") It's also a fool's errand to particularly draw lines around what exactly lesbianism is, as you alluded to.