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Aesthetic Attraction (Q for Aces and Non-Aces)


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I read this [kind of long] blog post about asexuality and aesthetic attraction and, really, non-asexual people being unable to experience aesthetic attraction (my summary below link)

https://thethinkingasexual.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/aesthetic-attraction/

So he defines aesthetic attraction as an almost magnetic pull to look at someone's face (for example). And romantic attraction as a magnetic pull to be romantically intimate with someone. And sexual attraction as a magnetic pull to have sex with someone. He says everyone (aces and non-aces) can have aesthetic recognition, which means that you think someone's pretty or whatever but don't have that pull to look at them. He says, though, that only asexuals can experience aesthetic attraction because non-asexuals are inherently sexually attracted to everyone they find physically attractive.

I was really torn about this because I know I feel that aesthetic attraction thing he talks about, and if I could add a third branch to my identity, I'd be asexual graypolyromantic hyperpanaesthetic, and I've talked to a bunch of non-aces about aesthetic attraction, and they didn't seem to know what I was talking about. However, I hadn't explained it as clearly as he does in the article, and I think it's just as likely that I wasn't clear than that they didn't experience it.

So non-aces: have you experienced aesthetic attraction according to his definitions? If so, was it at all sexual?

And aces: have you had conversations with your ace and/or non-ace friends about something like this? What was the outcome of the conversation?

And everyone: how do you feel about both binary groups (ace and non-ace) being represented like this, in accordance with your experiences?

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I've heard non-ace people say "They're attractive but I wouldn't sleep with them". Is that what you mean? (Also obviously heard a lot of ace people say that too for obvious reasons. :P)

I mean, isn't it similar to a straight women finding other women attractive? To me that would be aesthetic attraction - These women aren't attractive to women but can still admire someones beauty.

I find LOTS of people aesthetically attractive. Sometimes walking down the street is difficult - I'm at risk of whiplash. :P

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Well, I don't know about sexual people, and I'm not 100% sure if I'm ace or not, but I've found many people aesthetically attractive. It's just that sometimes it's a different kind of attraction, if that makes sense. It's like I can acknowledge that someone is beautiful, but I personally don't find them attractive, like saying that your mom is beautiful for example; and then there's other people who I find so incredibly attractive that my mouth just drops open when I see them and I get a dopey smile and I just want to keep looking, but I don't want to do anything with them. There definitely has to be something like sex appeal with that second type of attraction though, it's just that I don't feel the drive to act on it; I'm happy to just..observe it? I don't know if this made sense :lol:

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That asexual guy

My non-ace friends just think I find someone attractive. But, yeah, I know what you mean. I stare at them and find it a pleasant experience. And from talking to my friends, I think the article may be spot on. When they stare at someone it is with thoughts of sex. I know because they make a point of always telling me. :blink:

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Aesthetic attraction for me is extraordinarily rare (probably two or three people in my life) but this is probably down to the fact that I am likely to be demisexual (for simplicity's sake), so I really don't care what people look like. But I understand the aesthetic recognition that you mentioned (even if my response is, I know that person is attractive by society's standards but people are people).

A lot of the sexual folk I've talked to about aesthetic attraction don't see it as separate from sexual, but then again they also didn't see romantic attraction as something else either.

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What I gather from that article is that aesthetic attraction as he describes it is something that most of us sexuals also experience. The notion that we sexuals feel absolutely no difference between being attracted to someone and desiring sex with someone is a bit silly. I also think that describing that thing as "aesthetic attraction" is total BS, because as he says, it's completely different from admiring something for its aesthetics, so the term is very misleading (I always thought people were talking about what he calls "aesthetic recognition" when they mentioned the term).

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I agree with the blog.

Psychical attraction is a vague word and can be meant or interprited as sexual attraction, sensual attraction, or aesthetic attraction. So we dont use it. The uninformed public word it as physical attraction because they're not informed of other attractions and typically feel them all at once.

But this makes me curious, I'll have to ask my friends.

Perhaps compare it to a mesmerizing landscape to your friends.

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I've heard non-ace people say "They're attractive but I wouldn't sleep with them". Is that what you mean? (Also obviously heard a lot of ace people say that too for obvious reasons. :P)

I mean, isn't it similar to a straight women finding other women attractive? To me that would be aesthetic attraction - These women aren't attractive to women but can still admire someones beauty.

I find LOTS of people aesthetically attractive. Sometimes walking down the street is difficult - I'm at risk of whiplash. :P

I'm not sure about the people who say "they're attractive but i wouldn't sleep with them"; it all depends if they have a fixation on them or not. As said, it is different from recognizing someone as attractive. I'd compare it to recognizing charming features about someone that others can find romantically attractive vs. actually finding that person romantically attractive.

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I've heard non-ace people say "They're attractive but I wouldn't sleep with them". Is that what you mean? (Also obviously heard a lot of ace people say that too for obvious reasons. :P)

I mean, isn't it similar to a straight women finding other women attractive? To me that would be aesthetic attraction - These women aren't attractive to women but can still admire someones beauty.

I find LOTS of people aesthetically attractive. Sometimes walking down the street is difficult - I'm at risk of whiplash. :P

Exactly. You know when straight people say they have a "gay crush" on someone, even if they'd never think of having sex with someone of the same sex? I feel like that often might be their aesthetic attraction reaching beyond their sexual attraction. :P

Edited by MishMeesh
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I've heard non-ace people say "They're attractive but I wouldn't sleep with them". Is that what you mean? (Also obviously heard a lot of ace people say that too for obvious reasons. :P)

I mean, isn't it similar to a straight women finding other women attractive? To me that would be aesthetic attraction - These women aren't attractive to women but can still admire someones beauty.

I find LOTS of people aesthetically attractive. Sometimes walking down the street is difficult - I'm at risk of whiplash. :P

I'm not sure about the people who say "they're attractive but i wouldn't sleep with them"; it all depends if they have a fixation on them or not. As said, it is different from recognizing someone as attractive. I'd compare it to recognizing charming features about someone that others can find romantically attractive vs. actually finding that person romantically attractive.

Well I'm not sure about them either - that tends to be as far as those conversations go.

I've heard non-ace people say "They're attractive but I wouldn't sleep with them". Is that what you mean? (Also obviously heard a lot of ace people say that too for obvious reasons. :P)

I mean, isn't it similar to a straight women finding other women attractive? To me that would be aesthetic attraction - These women aren't attractive to women but can still admire someones beauty.

I find LOTS of people aesthetically attractive. Sometimes walking down the street is difficult - I'm at risk of whiplash. :P

Exactly. You know when straight people say they have a "gay crush" on someone, even if they'd think of having sex with someone of the same sex? I feel like that often might be their aesthetic attraction reaching beyond their sexual attraction. :P

Yeah that makes sense to me! I'm going to do more reading on this, it's definitely interesting.

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I realise now what I was describing was aesthetic recognition as described in the article!

That's my whiplash issue and what I was describing in my earlier post regarding my heterosexual friends/acquaintances!

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I am, at best, a demiaesthete. Basically, I don't feel "drawn" to how a person looks unless I'm already attracted to them in some other way, and even then, it will never be the basis for my attraction toward said person. It also tends to be rather independent to how they actually look and is more linked to how I already feel about the person (as in, I'll probably already find them to be a beautiful person on the inside, so what they actually look like on the outside doesn't really matter as much)

He says, though, that only asexuals can experience aesthetic attraction because non-asexuals are inherently sexually attracted to everyone they find physically attractive.

Neither of these statements are necessarily true for everybody.

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I was talking to my [non-ace] friend and we determined that whether you experience/how much you experience aesthetic attraction is just as much of a spectrum as asexual to hypersexual is, and that you can fall on any point in either. Like Philip said, it's not true for everybody. Which I think was why I was so shocked in the first place when I read the article. I couldn't believe that non-aces just simply didn't feel this thing at all ever no exceptions.

My friend and I figured that it probably makes sense that more asexual people feel aesthetic attraction in addition to aesthetic recognition because there's less chance of sexual attraction happening (i.e. if an ace and a non-ace both find 3 people attractive, a non-ace is more likely to feel sexual attraction towards all 3, or two or one, of them than an ace is, which leaves more room for those others to be aesthetic attraction for the ace, if that makes sense). But beyond that, it just depends on the person. Like I had just adjusted my identity to fit aesthetic in there. If that is [theoretically] another "identity" (which I do think it is since it IS on the LGB spectrum of masculine-feminine-etc attraction), then everyone has their own very specific experience and identity and wording that fits them right.

Above, I think that a lot of us don't see the same things in the words that are being talked about, and that's probably because not only do we experience the feelings differently or in different amounts, but because the labels themselves mean something totally different to each of us. It's like some people use bisexuality and pansexuality interchangeably, and some people aren't okay with that. Some people might use aesthetic attraction and aesthetic recognition interchangeably, and others aren't okay with that. I know I'm not okay with it because it's not true for me, but if it's true for someone else, then sweet.

Did any of that make sense?

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I don't know for sure, it's hard to pin down what someone else thinks since the language behind this is still developing and rarely being used outside of asexual circles. I think people's feelings of attraction are hard to describe.

Personally I think unless you're completely a-whatever within any of the spectrums, you're going to experience some element of all of them at times. However they usually come all mixed up together and combined in funny ways, mixed in with whatever more conscious thoughts and preferences you have. It's a jumbled mess and it's not easy to dissect your feelings about a person down to its base components.

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I think there I definitely some inaccuracies in their article but then again much like asexuality, gray-sexuality, etc. there is no set in stone definition for aesthetic attraction so it's sort of up to interpretation.

For me there are levels or types of aesthetic attraction.

1. One type where it ties in with my queer-platonic feelings for someone "wow, they're so beautiful it's squish worthy".

2. Another type is when I find some visually beautiful like a painting "they're like living art".

3. And the final type is just a puzzler for me. I tend not to look or stare at people since they might get the wrong idea but it's like a full on, head turning admiration. Never can pin down why (which annoys me) but it's just a state of 'awe'.

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JohnDoe1995

I do experience aesthetic attraction quite often, but I don't think it's an ace/gray-a thing. Way before asexuality was publicly known, people used to use the term "eye candy", which mean a person is pleasant to the eye in a non-sexual way.

I did had a conversation with a friend about aesthetic attraction & he seemed to understand the general meaning, but thought that thinking men are aesthetically attractive is a bit weird or gay. I think full-fledged sexuals don't usually realize they feel aesthetic attraction because it's usually over-shadowed by sexual attraction or because it's a not-so-known concept.

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Princess_Rhaella_Stark

For me, aesthetic attraction is finding someone very good looking and thinking that they have great features. However, unless they are in front of me or I have a picture, I tend not to dwell on them or even remember them clearly! Its highly annoying in many ways. I just like to look at their distinguishing features and muse 'Wow, what a handsome face' and THAT'S IT. Never, have I ever had any thoughts that have gone beyond that. No touching, no kissing, no anything. At the most, I imagine going on awesome, life changing adventures with these guys or becoming BFFS (especially Jon).

In the GoT TV series, the men (I only like looking at men aesthetically) I find good-looking are Robb Stark, Jon Snow, Jaime Lannister, Gendry, Oberyn Martell and Renly Baratheon.

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