The Venn Diagram of Bugs and Sex
My journey to asexuality is a long and convoluted one. It detoured to bisexuality for a year or two, made a brief pit stop at demisexuality, and finally came to a tentative stop at asexuality after coasting along a noncommittal “queer” for a couple months. If you were to ask me if I had any tips for the other questioning people out there, I would give you a bewildered shrug and a wild glance, because that question assumes that I have even the mildest idea of what I’m doing.
Asexuality, I find, is a difficult concept to explain fully, because it involves so much nuance in areas that I’m only just discovering. So buckle in for a bumpy ride and maybe a little TMI, and hopefully you’ll come out the other end a little more educated.
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Imagine eating a bug. (Maybe you like the idea of eating bugs, maybe you don’t—for the sake of this comparison, I’m going to assume you don’t.) You do know that there are definitely people out there who eat bugs and even like eating bugs, but they’re really not your thing. Maybe you’re not opposed to eating a bug—if you were in a situation where someone offered you a bug, maybe you’d try it out, because it seems like something that other people enjoy. But there’s nothing really missing in your life if you’ve never eaten a bug (though it might be on your bucket list to try it once).
If you haven’t guessed it yet, this is not at all about eating bugs.
Now imagine that this was about having sex instead of eating bugs. (See, I told you.) Although there are some ace (our pithy shorthand for “asexual”) folks who are sex-repulsed—that is to say, they find the idea of eating bugs to be awful and they’re perfectly happy never doing it, ever, thank you very much—I personally don’t fall in that category. I still don’t necessarily want sex, per se, but I feel as nonchalant about it as I do, say, the speed limit on a highway (i.e., I could go along with it, but I don’t really want to).
This may not seem like a big deal to all you allosexuals (read: non-asexual people) out there, but it’s somewhat like living in the Twilight Zone. Everyone around you seems to be subscribed to a collective subconscious that you’re not privy to, where there are certain bugs that people really want to eat and everyone expects you not only to want to eat bugs, but also to have at least one under your belt already.
(At this point, I feel like a clarification is necessary: asexuality pertains only to the experience of sexual attraction; many people who identify as asexual still have a libido and choose to have sex. In our convenient bug eating metaphor, imperfect as it is, asexual people don’t want to eat bugs, but some of them still get hungry and eat bugs anyway.)
At some point, it becomes an elaborate faking game, where you smile and nod and laugh when people talk about their one night stands or even enthuse about an actor on TV that you don’t really feel anything for. You listen to your mom telling you that you need to get dressed up and talk to boys so you can get a boyfriend. You console your friends and commiserate over their relationship problems. And you wonder to yourself if there’s something that you’re missing that’s just completely passing you by. Even though sexual attraction isn’t intrinsically tied to romantic attraction, there’s still an element of inauthenticity, a feeling that what you want and what you’re asking for isn’t a real relationship.
It also doesn’t help that asexuality isn’t one of the most visible sexualities out there. As much as the LGBTQ+ movement has fought for rights and awareness in the past few decades, those letters are the ones that have been in the limelight, not the ones that come after. (If you’re curious, asexual is the A in LGBTQIA. Not ally.) Asexual visibility is also inextricably tied to the fight for feminism as the idea of women needing to be in relationships slowly fades into a thing of the past—but still not quickly enough. And even for those who are in relationships, the struggle doesn’t end; as much as the societal pressure to have a family has lessened, there’s still an undeniable stigma not only against families who choose to not have children, but also towards those who choose to adopt.
The place of asexuality within the LGBTQ+ community also occasionally comes under fire. Given that people who identify as asexual can also identify as heteroromantic, there are some people who don’t think of asexuality as truly “belonging” within the LGBTQ+ umbrella. The result is that we not only feel ostracized by “regular” society, but also from the people who are supposed to understand us the most.
There isn’t much I can do as an individual person for these injustices. After all, how can I expect other people to understand a feeling that I’ve only just started to understand myself? How am I meant to identify the absence of a feeling, much less explain it to other people? How do I tell other people to stop when I can’t even silence the voice inside me that whispers, “Maybe it is a phase”?
I don’t know.
But at the core of the issue, asexual people are just like everyone else: we just want to be able to live our lives the way that we want to live them, without being told how. We may not have huge parades or organizations or events, but we just want you to know:
We’re here and we’re queer.
(A disclaimer: This was in no way meant to be a comprehensive guide to asexuality. For the people that resonated with this and want to learn more, the internet knows all. However, the internet is also vast and endless, so I suggest starting with AVEN and working your way out from there.)