an asexual's brief rant about the anality of Anglo-Saxon culture

[chair jockey]

Somebody recently mentioned being called "good" because they abstain from sex. Most people don't know that, in pretty much all of West Europe outside the British Isles, that kind of thing would be considered hillarious. It's Anglo-Saxon culture and its Calvinist and neo-Puritan roots that make mainstream Canada, mainstream US and mainstream Britain uptight about human sexuality. In other contries you have things like topless beaches, non-censorship of nonviolent "amour" and "amore," lessons on sexual pleasure enhancing techniques in public school, etc etc etc. But what pisses me off is not the broomhandle-up-the-ass attitude that our dominant culture has about human sexuality but our blissful unawareness that IT'S WEIRD WHEN COMPARED WITH MOST OTHER PLACES SHARING OUR ECONOMIC CLOUT AND STANDARD OF LIVING. Sometimes it's harmful for us Anglos to fancy that, as the 1980s song put it, "We are the world."

So how does that relate to asexuality? The uptightness of our dominant culture about human sexuality creates an internal contradiction: on the one hand, we aces are considered "pure" because we don't have "sinful" tendencies, and on the other hand we're SIMULTANEOUSLY considered "deficient" for exactly the same reason. I don't know how some very intelligent people running countries with millions of citizens haven't yet figured out that repression of nature will cause internal contradictions as what you're repressing fights to get out into the open. These internal contradictions DO harm asexuals and that pisses me off the most.

Thank you for reading.

[Sally]

The US is not in the least uptight about sexuality. It's in every movie, every billboard, every advertisement, every TV show, every novel, and on display in the flesh literally) quite a bit in malls.

I doubt if asexuals are considered pure by anyone, and some asexuals either have or have had sex. I don't feel harmed in the least by what I see in the American world. Bored, yes, but not harmed.

[Barking Sands]

Love the rant. Different cultures are all harmful to different groups for different reasons. I wouldn't want to live in a place like Japan as an asexual, for starters, and feel a bit more at home in places where flirting is more taboo.

What bothers me about the hypocritical nature of the "pious" society that is more repressed than it should be: I feel like people want me to be in a sort of competition with them ... to join their ranking system, so to speak ... so that they can boost their own confidence by forcing me into a rank that is lower than theirs. So if I tell them that I'm not even interested in a thing, they get all pissy about it and then find some way to use that to belittle me out of spite. The hypocrisy in regards to sexuality lies in a similar vein; they want others to think that it's unethical to be sexual, and then tell themselves that those "rules" are only for "other people" so that they gain an advantage. Being a person that isn't interested in sexuality in the first place throws their entire system out of whack. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it ... :D

Where I'm coming from, I guess, is the whole class warfare thing mainly ... well, really it's all types of bigotry from gender / sex to race ... but mostly financial bigotry. I keep hearing people put down others who come from families with different incomes. "My daddy's car is WAY faster and more expensive than YOUR daddy's car" and so forth. People just have a natural tendency to apply a pecking order to literally everything, and use the very fact that other people are different from them to elevate themselves as simply the better person all around. Mainly, in the US as far as I've seen, the shaming comes from people who wear clothing from different outlet stores compare their attire with others as more "fitting" and less ... well ... sl***ty.

[dissolved]

Britain ain't uptight either... You should - at your own peril of course - Google "nudist beaches in Britain" :D

[Guest]

Haha as an archaeologist I had a bit of a WTF moment with the title there :) I don't know enough about Britain to know anything about their attitude except for the we are the world one which i get constantly from my penfriends and when i was there, but not from everyone of course. I have never been called 'pure' - it is as far as I can tell shameful even to be a virgin where i live and it is equally shameful for boys and girls.

[chair jockey]

Thanks for the alternative perspectives. The one from Denmark is particularly valuable. It's rather depressing that conformity dominates everywhere, but when you lump millions of people together, the least bad and least ineffective way to maintain order and ensure everyone can live their lives is to impose collective norms on them. I just wish some better approach were possible.

[Anthracite_Impreza]

I can assure you the old British prudishness died out about three decades ago... Quite honestly though most people I've explained asexuality to have accepted it pretty well; they just seem to need assurance I'm not trying to take away their right to bonk *shrugs*

I don't know enough about Britain to know anything about their attitude except for the we are the world one which i get constantly from my penfriends and when i was there, but not from everyone of course

Where I come from (Yorkshire) we're even worse about loving our county; we love it more than our country ;)

[Hardly any]

Heh, you said "anal".

[RHD95]

Try living in a mediterranean / latin country or region, now that's hell for an ace :( people can be pretty loud and obnoxious about sex (and in general) where I live, it gets really tiring.