Sexuality, Sexism and Why I Care

As I'm extremely loud about- I am asexual. I don't experience sexual attraction and, beyond that- I don't want sex, I don't have sex, I don't particularly want to hear if anyone else has sex but I accept that they do. So it might be a bit strange that I support the pro-sex movement, seeing as, by all rights, you'd think I'd be happy if everyone were ashamed of their sexuality and never talked about it, right? Wrong.

AVEN

AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, is a good resource. The wiki is wonderful and everything else is a pretty cool 101 resource. But the forum? Not so great. It made me uncomfortable for awhile, but I could never quite put my finger on what. Thankfully, Kaz did it for me. (emphasis added)

Because most minority groups, they have their spaces where everyone is going to be on their best behaviour and try to do educating of the clueless and then they have their spaces that are minority-and-clued-up-ally-only where people can let off steam and clueless privileged people who wander in can expect to get blasted. AVEN is trying to be *both* the great centre for education and visibility (in the name!) and the centre of the asexual community, and when you think about what that means it’s clear it can so very easily lead to shutting down of opinions that aren’t nice clean friendly we-all-love-sexuals-really and forcing all asexuals to be nice and polite.

AVEN is a Public Relations site designed to educate and spread visibility of asexuals to sexuals. It is not a support forum designed to create a safe space for asexuals to talk about their problems and experiences without fear of being silenced. Unfortunately, to the detriment of the entire community, it tries to be.

Asexuality and Orientation

"Sex is God's joke on human beings." -Bette Davis
"Sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love." - Butch Hancock.

I try my very best to make sure that this is not a secret, but I am Asexual. This essentially means that I don't experience sexual attraction, which is a sticky enough thing to define so I won't even try. I also don't have any personal interest in sex, and find the whole thing a bit squicky. The last one isn't a common thing among asexuals, it's just a personal issue I have.

Now, I honestly don't care if you want to have sex. I don't care who with. I don't care what objects you involve. As long as it's all consensual- it's fine by me. I also don't want to know about it, so please don't go out of your way to tell me about it. If there's something I'm telling you about that you genuinely don't want to hear about, I promise I'll do my best to stop telling you about it as well.

I've seen a lot of transgender people identify as asexual before transitioning, only to realize they aren't during or afterwards. There are also some who identified as asexual throughout, and maybe even a few who identified as sexual before but realized they were asexual afterwards. I'm totally fine with people having a fluid orientation, and acknowledge the chance that I may become sexual one day. But I bring this up because I think it's pretty unlikely that my sexuality is caused by my gender dysphoria.

My ideal body would be without genitals at all. I don't think I'll be getting this unless I become a billionaire, but that is the ideal. While sex is possible without genitals- the fact I'm not interested in having any major sex organs says a bit of something. For another thing, I really can't imagine a body that I'd want to have sex in or a person I'd want to have sex with. Even when I have "sex dreams" it's just two people who are fully clothed making out- neither of whom are me. There's just some bump where I try to reconcile "me" with "having sex". It just doesn't fit together.

However, me and dating are pretty damn reconcilable. This probably confuses a few people- I've seen a lot of "the only difference between a friend and a girlfriend is sex" sentiments out there. Well, if that was true, we wouldn't need terms like "Friend with Benefits" because that's all dating/marriage/etc would be. We wouldn't have a problem of someone cheating on their spouse with an online relationship, because if there wasn't any sex how could it be cheating? There is a difference between friend-love and romantic-love, it's just hard to put your finger on what it is so it's easier to just say it's sex. Look at it like this:

Sexual Relationship-Friends with Benefits=Romantic Relationship

In other words, I want a romantic relationship without all that sex stuff. As I said earlier- you guys can have all that sex stuff. But I don't want it. In fact, you can have mine. Here- take extra. As you can imagine, I pretty much only consider dating other asexuals. I realize that an asexual/sexual relationship is possible, but I have no interest in compromising sexually, so unless I find a fully celibate or polyamorous sexual that I'm attracted to, it really isn't worth the heartache. But to get into who I am interested in dating a bit more, just for the curious:

'Panromantic' (-romantic refers to romantic orientation) is the simplest way of putting it because gender/sex doesn't really matter to me- but I dislike the all-encompassingness of it. I'm attracted to non-conformity in terms of both gender and presentation, as well as every day life. But there really isn't a word for that. So mostly, I just say I'm asexual.