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Teen Vogue - What being asexual means to me


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scarletlatitude

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-asexuality-means

 

22 October 2017

 

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“Do you fantasize about sex, though?” A friend asks as I explain asexuality to her late one night.

 

“Um…yeah. But it’s never me,” I respond. She can tell I’m uncomfortable and apologizes for getting too deep. “Oh, no,” I say. “It’s just that I hadn’t really thought about that before.”

 

That being how fantasies go, what sexual attraction feels like, and how people are sexually attracted to strangers on the street. There’s a lot I had never thought about before I learned that I’m asexual, or ace.

 

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) defines sexual attraction partly as a desire to share your sexuality with someone else. Bisexuality is the first sexual orientation I found a home in, but

asexuality has become the most comfortable one because it honors what I consider the defining aspect of my sexual identity.

 

For years, I avoided discussing my sexuality, partly because it wasn’t anybody’s business and partly because there wasn’t anything to talk about. I skipped over the phase of puberty when new sensations swell in your nether regions and showers require just a few more minutes. I spent my late adolescent years thinking there was something wrong with me. I even considered that I had some seriously repressed childhood abuse, though I don’t. I’ve identified as asexual for roughly three years, but every day I have a new question that I can’t explain. A lot of those questions turn out to be things sexual people wonder, too. So I called up Dr. Lori Brotto, PhD — a registered psychologist and an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of British Columbia — to discuss my “sex sense.”

 

The medical community has not found evidence tying asexuality to sexual dysfunctions or trauma, Brotto tells Teen Vogue. Last year, Brotto, executive director of the Women’s Health Research Institute at the University of British Columbia, published a widely-circulated review paper classifying asexuality as a distinct sexual orientation.

 

As I researched my new identity, I was surprised to find that I actually had no idea what sexual attraction was. I assumed that the way I “liked” people was the same way everyone else “liked” people. My wedge of the ace umbrella sounds most like autochorissexuality, though the term fits better some days than others. Autochorisexuality is a lesser known subset of asexuality that’s understood as a disconnect between oneself and the object of sexual arousal. Sexual fantasies take place in third person, and in my case, there’s usually a proxy or stand-in for me. Anyone else present is never, ever, ever anyone who exists in real life — whether I know them or not. It’s like reading erotic fiction and identifying with the characters, feeling all of their feelings, but without becoming them.

 

In technical terms, I’m a biromantic asexual: I’ve felt butterflies in my stomach, but no one makes them flutter down below. For demisexuals, sexual attraction comes after an emotional bond forms, not necessarily a romantic one. Aromantics don’t experience romantic attraction, but they may feel sexual attraction. Some don’t feel any butterflies at all.

 

Even Brotto was surprised to learn that, though they might develop at the same time and in similar ways, romantic and sexual attraction don’t go hand-in-hand. “We’re sort of schooled as young people that [the goal is] being in [a] partnership or an arrangement,” Brotto says. “And yet we have aromantic asexuals that teach us that, no, not everyone wants that or desires that. If folks can be attracted to someone, why [can’t they] be attracted to no one?” Brotto notes that even though most studies focus on the diversity in sexual orientation and sexual attraction, researchers have found a lot of gender diversity in the ace community, such as people who identify as nonbinary, agender, pangender, or other gender identities.

 

I wouldn’t describe a lack of sexual attraction as a conscious decision, but more like an instinct, like a fight-or-flight response. No matter how deeply you want to make one choice, you’ll always default to the one that feels the most right and the most natural. For me, that means a hard no to sexual touching.

As I got older, I developed a sex drive. Some ace people masturbate for sexual gratification, and some don’t know why they do it. Some don’t even draw pleasure from it. Brotto says research shows sexual and asexual female-identifying people respond with almost identical levels of physical arousal — “a robust genital blood flow response,” as she put it — when presented with a sexual stimulus. “But that doesn’t mean they’re attracted to what they see, or that they want to have sex,” she clarifies.

 

Brotto and I muse on how someone can be sexually aroused without sexual attraction. “I think that this is where there is a gap in our science, and not just among the ace community, but among the sexual-identifying community,” she says. “And [the question] is, how does arousal translate into attraction? Or is it the other way around, is it attraction that leads to arousal?”

 

There are still a lot of unanswered questions around asexuality, both for me personally and scientifically. The jury is still out on whether I’ll have or enjoy sex in the future, and I haven’t figured out exactly how I feel about that. While some aspects of the ace spectrum fit today, they may not fit months or years from now. In the meantime, I’m getting used to having questions and letting those questions go unanswered. But I share the answers I have any chance I get in the name of visibility, because you can’t see yourself if you don’t know what to look for.

 

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