This is a guest opinion piece. The views expressed are those of the writer. We hope you enjoy the piece.
I found out that I was asexual aged fourteen, when I – to my horror – discovered that my friends were not, in fact, joking when they talked about wanting to ‘rail’ or be ‘railed’ by various celebrities. This, to me, was an insane thought, because I’d never really got past the ‘sex is purely for reproduction’ stage. I couldn’t see how wanting to have sex with a total stranger made any sense, and to me, the whole thing seemed like a waste of time if it didn’t have a purpose. Pragmatically, it was nonsensical.
I was then taken aside by another aroace friend and informed of what ‘asexual’ means, and that when you look it up in the dictionary, there’s a little picture of me beside it.
Asexuality is defined by a lack of sexual attraction, which is something that I have genuinely never felt, and baffles me to this day. I never had the typical ‘I’m broken’ asexual angst – Instead, I leapt straight from, ‘you’re all insane’ to ‘thank god I’m not expected to feel this way’, back to ‘you’re all insane’. My Miranda-style prudishness meant that my friends didn’t even blink twice when I came out to them – in fact, I have had somebody guess within five hours of knowing me that I am asexual, so I’m guessing it’s not exactly subtle. It’s just that, to me, looking at somebody – especially a total stranger – and wanting to do something so intimate with them makes no sense at all, and I have spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to justify it from an evolutionary perspective in my head.
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I have been called ‘pragmatic’ and ‘logical’ by many people in my life – particularly doctors, and sometimes my parents – which some might expect feeds into my asexuality. In a way, it does. My mind processes logic before emotion, and therefore I have a tendency to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of doing something before considering how I feel about it.
I also admittedly have a tendency to intentionally suppress emotion in order to favour this way of thinking. Both of these things contribute to my own unique experience of my sexuality, whether the fact that I am a lesbian (homoromantic, if you want to be hyper- specific) or my being asexual. For me, it is hard to think of any practical application for recreational sex, and I was shocked when a friend showed me the statistics for how often people in each country are intimate with their partners, finding three or four times a week to be far too time consuming – my friends frequently find quotes from me on such topics amusing, such as the exclamation ‘making out for three hours – who has time for that?!’, recorded in what we have dubbed The Quotebook for posterity.
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It should not, though, be taken as the reason for my asexuality. Many asexual people I have met are baffled by my rather hard-headed approach to life, and I am not, in fact, a robot. I do experience other strong emotions, such as love, grief, joy, anger, and excitement – just not in the perceived ‘right’ ways. I do think, though, that I have been extremely lucky, in that rather than finding out for myself what asexuality was after feeling that something was wrong with me (as so many do), a friend who’d had a similar experience intervened. Realising I was asexual allowed me to look up other people’s experiences and find connections with people who also thought that making out for three hours is a waste of valuable time where you could be, say, writing essays on your favourite cartoon characters instead. I was able to form a supportive community, and explore my boundaries safely, without trying to conform to what is ‘normal’ or ‘expected’ of me – something I have been known to do in the past. I have read stories about people who didn’t realise who they were until they’d already tried to ‘fix’ themselves, by putting themselves in vulnerable and upsetting situations, and I always feel grateful to have avoided this. Not only that, but I was able to explore my options. I figured out pretty quickly that I was extremely sex-repulsed, but that there are ace people who are happy to have sex, and even pursue it as something they enjoy. The lack of attraction does not equal a lack of drive. Importantly, though, I also found a lot of reassurance that there is nothing wrong with sex-repulsed people, and that the right to say ‘no’ is just as important to the sex-positivity movement as the right to say ‘yes’.
No two asexual people are the same, and of course, my experience may be completely different to that of others – in a way, while we have inside jokes and memes and things in common, there is no monolith ‘asexual experience’, only the personal experience. However, as a community we are often derided and told that our experience does not matter, that it’s ‘just a phase’ or we’re ‘late bloomers’ – or worse, ‘attention seeking’. As a teenager, I have been informed that everyone’s horny-juice is at its highest – it is massively ostracising, in a way, to be unable to understand that, but this inability to comprehend what everyone else is on to be acting this way is proof, I feel, that I understand who I am. If they’re old enough to know that they want such and such to ‘rail’ them, how am I not old enough to know that I don’t want any part in that? It can also be difficult to know whether something is supposed to be there when you don’t know what that thing is – so being told ‘you’ll feel it someday!’ is daunting, a little like when the ‘it’ in a horror movie is brought up. By nineteen, you’d expect that I’d be trusted to know my own mind and body, but instead, I am still told that I’ll grow out of it. This is the case for many queer people, and is always particularly grating when you know who you are, and others refuse to accept it.
Many people also seem to think that asexuality is something made up for clout (thank you, JK Rowling), a claim that’s been repeated loudly by some high-profile commentators, that people swear off sex, something that seems to be massively important to a lot of people, forever just for the attention. This could not be further from the truth. My asexuality is just as much a part of me as my being gay, and honestly, I wish that I came under less scrutiny and got less attention for both of these things. Asexuality is not a ‘trend’ any more than being gay is a ‘trend’ – it is an important part of my, and many others’, identities, and in denying people the autonomy of defining themselves and choosing how they want to live, self-proclaimed ‘sex-positive’ people are simply showing their hypocrisy. It is an inherently queer feeling to experience attraction in the ‘wrong’ way, and it is as integral to me as my love of writing, or certain cartoon characters whom I may or may not write essays about. Overall, the asexual experience is the queer experience – yes, the memes, but also the strength to stand up and say who you are, and say it with pride. I am asexual, and I am proud of that, and nothing anybody says can ever change that.
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Jenny (They/Them) is a freelance journalist and writer based in Sheffield, England. Their work focuses on themes of choice and identity, which have absolutely nothing to do with the five-year-long gender crisis that was their secondary school years, and they spend most of their time writing stories about gay little aliens.
