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James121

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1 hour ago, Telecaster68 said:

And yep, when someone tries to justify something by only alluding to one of those things without acknowledging the other, I'm quite happy to gotcha their ass.

There is a fundamental difference between “people like to f**k” and “for most people, sex is a large - maybe even essential - component of the emotional ‘glue’ that keeps relationships together.”

 

Likewise, there is a large fundamental difference between “I need to get my rocks off” and “if I’m in a relationship and don’t have fulfilling sex regularly, my overall mental and physical health suffer.”

 

The publically-visible US messages about sex are the first in each pair.  People with a fuller experience may read the second part into the messages, but it’s not what’s there by default (and, in broad US culture, getting mushy about and mixing feelings in with the sex is actually mocked).

 

With sports, there’s not just this second-hand, surface experience.  There’s much more opportunity to participate in ways that allow and even encourage direct comparison of feelings.

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49 minutes ago, anisotropic said:

Sex-repulsed asexuals may be uncomfortable with the omnipresence of sex and feel something is wrong with them. Because sex matters to them, in a negative way, and hearing about sex keeps reminding them if it.

 

But sex-indifferent asexuals might merely feel "not super into it" in the way that someone might not care for sports (but sees it's popular with others) -- neither seeing it as an important thing in either positive or negative way.

Yes, and also the demographic of people in the US who feel the culture is overly sexualized includes many, many people who are sexual... so falling within it is often more reflective of religious/moral beliefs than it is personal practice.

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12 minutes ago, ryn2 said:

The publically-visible US messages about sex are the first in each pair.

If they're remotely similar to the ones in the UK (and they are, because we share most of our cultures), they're not just about that. But it seems like you and many other asexuals miss the bits that are about more.

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33 minutes ago, James121 said:

The purpose of coming on a forum isn’t always so that you can opinion changed. If I directed you t a forum called ‘I changed an asexual in to a sex lover with great sex’ would you change your opinion about things if people kept telling you to?

Are you saying that everyone whose personal, lived experiences do not align with your viewpoint is lying?

 

Opinions are personal viewpoints.  They may be true for individuals, but that doesn’t make them universal facts.  E.g., you’ve mentioned that (while you are not homophobic), you find the idea of male/male sex repulsive.  That’s your opinion.  It’s true for you, but it can’t be extended out to the broad statement “male/male sex is repulsive” (without the qualifier “to james” or “to some people”).  Conversely, I don’t find it repulsive.  That’s my opinion.  Likewise, it can’t be extended to a universal statement.

 

We don’t agree on male/male sex.  I doubt I’ll change your mind; I doubt you’ll change mine.  That doesn’t make either of us liars (or even incorrect, as long as we don’t try to extend our personal beliefs into general “facts”).

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Just now, Telecaster68 said:

If they're remotely similar to the ones in the UK (and they are, because we share most of our cultures), they're not just about that. But it seems like you and many other asexuals miss the bits that are about more.

...which is my point about the difference with sports.  We all live sports to some degree (here in the US).  We only live (largely non-candid, too) discussions about sex.

 

There’s a lot lost between experiencing something yourself and only hearing it talked about, especially when it’s talked about in a fairly formulaic way.

 

I’m not even ace, by any definition used here.

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1 hour ago, ryn2 said:

Are you saying that everyone whose personal, lived experiences do not align with your viewpoint is lying?

Oh please! Does it say that?

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11 minutes ago, James121 said:

Oh please! Does it say that?

What it did say wasn’t clear to me, hence why I asked.

 

To be more specific, it wasn’t clear in context.  You were asked “why come to a forum if you won’t believe what those with lived experience tell you?” and your response was that the purpose of coming to a forum isn’t always to have your mind changed.

 

The latter isn’t really an answer to the former so I wasn’t (am not) sure what you meant.

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3 hours ago, Telecaster68 said:

If they're remotely similar to the ones in the UK (and they are, because we share most of our cultures), they're not just about that. But it seems like you and many other asexuals miss the bits that are about more.

If we believed movies and music were true portrayals to learn relationships by then....

 

Best way to get a lasting relationship is to hate each other first, then have sex and it magically turns to love.

Jealousy is sexy.

Love triangles are hot.

Sex is either a bone anyone cause horny, or a thing done after a romantic moment.

 

I never really put a lot of value on media to tell me what a healthy relationship looks like, personally. Especially female focused media where it sells well when the man slaps you across the face and throws you into bed to ravish. Just never thought "huh, this stuff is what is important to people". 

 

And given a lot of people do experience responsive desires, if they dont feel it up until sex is a thing then they may still want it. I feel indifferent to sex up until my spouse does something to set it off. My oldest female friend feels indifferent except once a month when she wants it (low libido). 

 

And if you arent that into it and ask friends / family / coworkers - at least everyone I asked - said its normal and I shouldnt worry beyond buying a good vibrator or finding a better lover. So people should dismiss the advice of people they know and listen to songs and movies ? Huh? 

 

It is really hard to know you dont want something, unless you really dont want it (averse or repulsed). Especially with how complicated sexuality is. If you only experience responsive desire for example (like me), then without being in a position to have sex, how do you know you want it? 

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7 hours ago, James121 said:

The purpose of coming on a forum isn’t always so that you can opinion changed. If I directed you t a forum called ‘I changed an asexual in to a sex lover with great sex’ would you change your opinion about things if people kept telling you to?

That's like going to a gay mens forum and telling all the gay people that they're not gay, they just haven't fucked the right women yet. And when they tell you 'oh, no, some of us even lived as heterosexuals for years because we didn't consider we were gay. We didn't realise we were gay until we actually had gay sex' and you're like 'THAT'S NOT TRUE YOU MUST HAVE KNOWN' and they respond 'well we are trying to tell you we didn't know. Why do you think you know better than us about our own experience?'.

 

That's exactly what you're doing here. You're trying to tell us you know what it's like to be asexual. Yet most of us here have actually lived asexuality so as much as you hate to accept it, we do know more than you about this particular topic. 


I don't think any of us even care if we can 'change your opinion' at this point. We are just sick of you seeming to think you know more than us about something we have actually experienced and you haven't.

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@Telecaster68. This might help explain how an ace can not realise they don't want sex and don't feel the same about it as others do despite what they see on TV and in popular culture :)

 

8 hours ago, Telecaster68 said:

I'm genuinely confused 

 

9 hours ago, Telecaster68 said:

I'm a little skeptical of this.

 

 How is it possible for someone who isn't interested in sex to be oblivious to the difference between themselves and most other people?

 

It's exactly the way @Ceebs. didn't initially know she was gay, pretty much!

 

There are many sexual people who go for years having hetero sex they're not really enjoying but they just assume they're hetero because they don't have any other experience. They're like

 

'well I'm not getting anything out of this but I also don't hate it so it must be how sex is meant to be for some people anyway. I know I've seen screaming orgasms on TV but of course they're not going to show the people who find sex kind of boring, who would want to watch that? Just the same way the female detectives  on American TV are almost  never fat and walk around crime scenes in heels even though  in real life, lots of people have a bit of pudge and you have to wear silly booties in a crime scene' *shrug*.

 

I've met people who thought they were hetero well into their 40s and just never realised there was this incredible aspect missing from sex until they finally had it with someone of the same gender for the first time and that's when the light bulb finally went off. But they'd never registered that there was anything missing all those years. They just came to accept that as normal. And that's exactly what it's like for aces in many circumstances too.

 

I mean, look at me. I was in perpetual, agonising pain during and after sex. I was giving it to my ex twice a day, every single day, and would have to eat painkillers like candy, drink booze every waking moment, and had to use extra strength ligocaine gel on my hoohaa to numb it just so I could walk properly. All that just to deal with the physical agony i was in from sex. And that was before he also forced me into sex work in conjunction with everything else.

 

I didn't only not desire the sex because of the pain though. Even without the pain I just never wanted it before it started no matter how much I was enjoying other forms of intimacy. None of this seemed wrong or weird to me though. No aspect of what I was experiencing seemed like something a normal hetero wouldn't experience. I wasn't necessarily naive, I'd masturbated from a young age, had seen a lot of porn, and once I started working at the brothel some of the other girls there enjoyed sex so much they even orgasmed with random clients. BUT I STILL figured that what I was going through was a pretty normal experience and that some women just have to deal with that kind of thing. Obviously that's not the kind of thing they'll show on the TV, right? It's not the type of thing they'll write about in romance novels. And a doctor did tell me I just need to relax more and keep having more sex until I learn to enjoy it. And some people said 'oh yeah, women really don't enjoy sex, they just give it men to keep them happy', stuff like that. And it's true that that's shown on TV sometimes too especially in movies set in the old days. So despite everything, I still figured I was normal sexually.

 

Now take away the pain and how the heck is someone meant to have any indication something is wrong??? If I couldn't work it out even WITH that perpetual, agonising pain (I truly just believed other women deal with it for the sake of orgasm, even women who love sex) then how is someone with no pain meant to think 'i don't think anyone else experiences sex this way, something must be wrong here!!'. Especially if they're an ace who truly doesn't dislike any of the feelings of sex, they're just emotionally not that engaged in it.

 

 

It's very easy just to think what you're experiencing is totally normal, is what I'm getting at. Because despite what we see on TV we know that could very well be fake (and a lot of it actually is quite fake. Let's face it. Very few women are ready for sex as fast as they always are on the TV!! Just as I'm sure very few female detectives have Botox in their lips and walk around crime scenes with their perfectly styled hair weaving around, while wearing stilettos lol).

 

I truly thought I was normal and that there was nothing wrong, despite feeling like I'd had boiling water poured inside me during and after sexual activity (and the skin would go raw and red and swell up etc, just like I had a scold burn, yes even with lube). If someone can think even that's normal and it's just something that normal women have to put up with, I can see how easy it is for aces who don't experience that pain to have no idea they're different. Just like gay people who don't realise they're not hetero even after years of unpleasurable, unsatisfying hetero sex.

 

Does that help clarify the matter at all? :)

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I kinda get the feeling that anything short of "normal heterosexual experience" is going to be dismissed by some. It seems you have to know what you want or dont want sexually from birth, rather than figure it out along the way. 

 

Sadly, life isnt that easy to figure out for everyone. 

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8 hours ago, ryn2 said:

What it did say wasn’t clear to me, hence why I asked.

 

To be more specific, it wasn’t clear in context.  You were asked “why come to a forum if you won’t believe what those with lived experience tell you?” and your response was that the purpose of coming to a forum isn’t always to have your mind changed.

 

The latter isn’t really an answer to the former so I wasn’t (am not) sure what you meant.

Well that doesn’t justify your suggestion that i think everyone is lying.

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3 hours ago, Serran said:

It seems you have to know what you want or dont want sexually from birth,

No just from the point that you start dating adults and agree to marry them. Slightly different 

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7 minutes ago, James121 said:

Well that doesn’t justify your suggestion that i think everyone is lying.

I didn’t suggest it.  I asked if that’s what you meant.  What *did* you mean?

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7 minutes ago, James121 said:

No just from the point that you start dating adults and agree to marry them. Slightly different 

Not in practice, because it’s not something you’d typically learn in the time between birth and well into one or more relationships.

 

It’s not going to knock you over the head in childhood.

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5 hours ago, ryn2 said:

Not in practice, because it’s not something you’d typically learn in the time between birth and well into one or more relationships.

 

It’s not going to knock you over the head in childhood.

And yet there are many many asexuals on here who've never had a relationship. 

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9 hours ago, Ficto. said:

That's like going to a gay mens forum and telling all the gay people that they're not gay, they just haven't fucked the right women yet.

.....no it’s not.

 

its like going to a gay forum where a bunch of gay men married woman and me saying “I don’t believe that you didn’t know or suspect something was up”

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5 hours ago, ryn2 said:

It’s not going to knock you over the head in childhood

Most children around the age of 6 start developing crushes and having little boy or girlfriends. It doesn’t knock you round the head but then again, over the 12 years from 6 years to adulthood, you generally have what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time to work things out.

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25 minutes ago, James121 said:

Most children around the age of 6 start developing crushes and having little boy or girlfriends.

They do? Source please.

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Hah, yeah, I sure didn't.  It can happen, but most are too busy fretting about "cooties" at that age than anything else.

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1 hour ago, James121 said:

Most children around the age of 6 start developing crushes and having little boy or girlfriends. It doesn’t knock you round the head but then again, over the 12 years from 6 years to adulthood, you generally have what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time to work things out.

😂 Wow uh nope. Not me.

 

how the hell does a prepubescent child have the faintest clue about sexual attraction? Romantic maybe?

 

I don't think I experienced a boner fide interest in the "D", alongside interest in attached individuals, until I was 18. I had nebulous sexual thoughts in the handful of years before that. I don't feel like I was weird, this is a fairly median age for becoming sexually active.

 

It may be more typical for cis men to know themselves shortly after the onset of puberty. But in my experience cis men are also much worse at having emotionally honest conversations with other cis men (sorry that is a bit sexist, I blame socialization) so I think it's still fairly easy for a cis man to fail to have conversations needed to recognize a fundamental difference. Especially if they are experiencing romantic attraction.

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2 hours ago, Telecaster68 said:

And yet there are many many asexuals on here who've never had a relationship. 

There are some asexuals on here who are aromantic, and/or sex-repulsed (and others who are very young, but I’m guessing they aren’t the ones you mean).  The former are likely not to be interested in relationships, either broadly or specifically, and the latter may be afraid of them.  I’ve said repeatedly that it’s likely that sex-repulsed people notice they are different much faster.  I didn’t comment on aro folks because it doesn’t make sense they’d normally end up in james’ scenarios to start with... someone who isn’t interested in romantic relationships is more likely to be “focusing on sports/school/work/etc.”

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2 hours ago, James121 said:

.....no it’s not.

 

its like going to a gay forum where a bunch of gay men married woman and me saying “I don’t believe that you didn’t know or suspect something was up”

Which is sill exactly the same thing, because as I CLEARLY stated, there are gay people who have no idea they're gay for years, even decades, of unsatisfactory hetero sex and yes, even marriage. That's a relatively common experience. They will tell you (as some aces did here) that they had no idea something was up, they just figured sex was always like this for some people so didn't question it.

 

I think you're failing to read my comments though because I already went to great lengths to explain this.

 

2 hours ago, James121 said:

Most children around the age of 6 start developing crushes and having little boy or girlfriends. It doesn’t knock you round the head but then again, over the 12 years from 6 years to adulthood, you generally have what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time to work things out.

Some people may be lucky enough to experience that certainty from such a young age but many don't. I didn't have my first boyfriend until I was 18 and I haven't personally known anyone who had a boyfriend or girlfriend before their teens. 

 

Again, you're proving your arrogance by taking our own personal experience and applying it to every person alive. You serve only to make yourself look foolish.

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2 hours ago, James121 said:

.....no it’s not.

 

its like going to a gay forum where a bunch of gay men married woman and me saying “I don’t believe that you didn’t know or suspect something was up”

And when you say that, what do you mean if not “I think you’re lying?”

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2 hours ago, James121 said:

Most children around the age of 6 start developing crushes and having little boy or girlfriends. It doesn’t knock you round the head but then again, over the 12 years from 6 years to adulthood, you generally have what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time to work things out.

Romantic aces often get crush-like obsessions with people too.

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Winged Whisperer
59 minutes ago, anisotropic said:

sorry that is a bit sexist

Not at all sexist, it's called toxic masculinity for a reason, not let's-be-happy-and-have-honest-conversations-where-we-care-about-each-other masculinity.

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1 hour ago, anisotropic said:

how the hell does a prepubescent child have the faintest clue about sexual attraction? Romantic maybe?

Yeah, that would be my take as well... that little kid “boyfriend”/“girlfriend” stuff is a possible precursor to romantic attraction.  I also don’t know that it’s “most kids.”  People here seem to look for it most in boys as proof they are not going to “turn out gay.”

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Winged Whisperer
6 minutes ago, Ficto. said:

Some people may be lucky enough to experience that certainty from such a young age but many don't. I didn't have my first boyfriend until I was 18 and I haven't personally known anyone who had a boyfriend or girlfriend before their teens. 

I didn't have my first and only relationship until I was 22! Relationships are a tough aspect of life, made more so for introverts and people with self-esteem and confidence any mental issues.

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1 hour ago, anisotropic said:

I don't think I experienced a boner fide interest in the "D", alongside interest in attached individuals, until I was 18.

*snickers at pun*

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4 minutes ago, Winged Whisperer said:

I didn't have my first and only relationship until I was 22! Relationships are a tough aspect of life, made more so for introverts and people with self-esteem and confidence any mental issues.

Yes my ex is the only 'meat life' boyfriend I've had, I was with him for 5 years. Maybe I'll have another meat relationship some day but I'm not sure, only time shall tell I suppose! :P

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