Definition Debates

[Gifted With Singleness]

7 hours ago, Sally said:

I just wonder if anyone ever fit that label -- i.e., once a decade/whatever. It just doesn't sound like it's needed.  

I don't like micro labels, so I agree that "once-a-decade-sexual" doesn't really need to be a label. My point was essentially that we don't need to split hairs between "no sexual desire" and "negligible sexual desire". If you have to ask whether or not you would ever want to have sex ever in your entire life, then go ahead and call yourself asexual if you want. I say this for my own sake so that I don't have to deal with random thoughts of "What if this bizarrely specific and completely unrealistic scenario happened? Would I desire sex then?" At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. If I never felt driven to pursue any kind of sexual activity with anyone in my life, and if celibacy seems like the easiest thing in the entire world for me, then that pretty much settles it.

 

All of this may sound like I'm treating asexuality as a spectrum, but not really. This "spectrum" is so incredibly tiny that it doesn't even remotely compare to the full range of the sexuality spectrum. Asexuality is the single point of zero sexual desire, and there are edge cases near it that might as well be called "asexuality" for convenience.

 

I don't have a problem with the term "asexual spectrum" used in that context. What I do have a problem with is people trying to lump perfectly typical sexualities into this spectrum. You're not aspec just because you don't want to have sex with literally everything that moves. You're not aspec just because you're not constantly aroused 24/7. And you're not aspec just because you don't have an irresistible desire to immediately have sex with a stranger you literally just met two seconds ago.

[Sally]

6 hours ago, GiftedWithSingleness said:

I don't have a problem with the term "asexual spectrum" used in that context. What I do have a problem with is people trying to lump perfectly typical sexualities into this spectrum. You're not aspec just because you don't want to have sex with literally everything that moves. You're not aspec just because you're not constantly aroused 24/7. And you're not aspec just because you don't have an irresistible desire to immediately have sex with a stranger you literally just met two seconds ago.

But I can't see talking about "asexual spectrum" just so you don't exclude all those "what if I woke up 23 years from now and felt that I might want to have sex with someone at 4:15 PM if it isn't raining" possible situations.  Inclusion for inclusion's sake just dilutes the meaning of every word, not just asexuality.  

[rainbowocollie]

I would think an "almost asexual" person might in one example have no innate desire for sex but may experience a sort of sexual attraction with no desire to act on it. It's hard to come up with specific scenarios off the fly, and I think some of the grey-a labels shouldn't be included ever--cupiosexual for instance is definitely a flavor of allosexual. But I do think some of the grey labels are valid, and that the grey spectrum exists for a valid reason. Basically I think people who are truly on the grey spectrum couldn't function the same way a total allosexual would in a relationship, because they don't have the desire for sexual connection

 

I'm having a hard time articulating exactly what I mean

[R_1]

15 hours ago, Sally said:

I just wonder if anyone ever fit that label -- i.e., once a decade/whatever. It just doesn't sound like it's needed.  

As always, the brain is changing among people, and it's not off the possibility that there are cases like these. They don't need a label, but it's one of those cases where asexuality and sexuality are blurred. A one-time-thing only doesn't make them sexual, and it does no favor to anyone to support them considering them sexual when that just mislead people.

[Snao Cone]

See, when people come to AVEN to ask questions like "I had a passing sexual thought once while on cocaine in the 80s, can I still be asexual?" they're looking for reassurance and a sense of community in people who don't want sex. If we tell them "Sure, if that's the only time you wanted sex, then you're probably asexual" it's not like they're going to shout to the world "ASEXUAL PEOPLE ONLY WANT SEX WHEN THEY'RE TIME TRAVELING ON COCAINE!!!!" They're not going to do a disservice to us if we tell them "Sounds legit, welcome to AVEN my gender-neutral dude!" It took me weeks to sign up for the forum because I was worried that my past sexual experience and intellectual interest in sex made me Not Asexual Enough. I hate to think of all the brilliant memes and time traveling cocaine jokes we may have missed out on because other people like me felt pushed away by interjections as they work through a difficult topic.

[Gifted With Singleness]

11 minutes ago, Sally said:

"what if I woke up 23 years from now and felt that I might want to have sex with someone at 4:15 PM if it isn't raining"

Oh, please, you call that bizarrely specific? That's baby stuff.

 

What if I became close friends with an expert psychologist who also had exactly the same interests as me and who understood every single complicated detail of my confusing emotions better than even I could? What if this led to the one and only instance in my entire life where I experienced a truly romantic crush, shattering my entire perception of reality so fundamentally that I felt like an entirely new person? What if my relationship with her was so absolutely perfect that I inexplicably felt a strong desire to marry her, despite having absolutely no longing whatsoever for romance growing up? What if it turned out that she was also a licensed massage therapist and, on our honeymoon, she gave me such an awesome massage that, when combined with the impossibly deep emotional connection we've established, it suddenly awakened a powerful responsive sexual desire within me that had been completely dormant my entire life up until that moment? If being asexual means that I have literally zero, zilch, not-in-a-million-years, not even the teeniest, tiniest, itsy bitsy not-even-a-literal-miracle-could-awaken-it sexual desire, then can I really call myself asexual if I can't conclusively, 100%, without even the slightest shadow of a doubt, entirely disprove the very logical possibility of this very specific scenario with the rigor of a mathematical proof?

 

Yes, I can call myself asexual. What's more likely, that I have a sword-in-the-stone sexuality that can only be "pulled" by the precisely perfect person, or that I'm just asexual? Even if it is the former, it's just not worth worrying about if that scenario isn't going to happen anyway. I've got more important things to do.

[Sally]

I'm getting confused in what I said on this thread and on another similar thread.  But my main point is that when people propose such odd situations like the "time-traveling-cocaine" thing Snao mentioned above, I just wonder if those situations EVER happened.  Why go to that extent to try to expand the definition of asexual, or to say that people who have such a thing happen can use that label?  To me, it seems reasonable that if someone isn't interested in having sex unless they become involved with someone they really like, they are sexual.  Asexuals would simply feel either romantically attracted to that person, or just want to be very good friends.  

[rainbowocollie]

Still, you have people who are romantically involved with someone and have zero sexual desire for said person until literal years into the relationship. I've seen accounts on this site from people like that. That's clearly different from asexual, but it's also clearly different from the experience of allosexuals.

[Snao Cone]

1 hour ago, Sally said:

But my main point is that when people propose such odd situations like the "time-traveling-cocaine" thing Snao mentioned above, I just wonder if those situations EVER happened.

It's part of the process of working through realizing things about our lives and our selves. People who didn't really feel sexual attraction while on cocaine (but rather drug-induced enthusiasm for something they were told was supposed to be good) might have spent so long convincing themselves they did that they need to put some work into undoing it. If the message right off the bat is "Oh, you felt sexual attraction before? Not asexual" then that's not going to help them learn about asexuality or themselves. I went through a process like that. I don't know what your experience was like when you found out asexuality was a thing, but I would imagine that you had to rethink a lot about how you perceived yourself in the past. Discussions about what "counts" should allow for this growth process. I'm not saying these things need special words or that asexuality is a spectrum from "hasn't pretended to want sex on drugs" to "has pretended to want sex on drugs" (in which case I'd be firmly in the latter) but that discussions on it need to consider this emotional process for people. In the end I hope anyone who thinks they had that one lone experience will conclude that it's so anomalous to their overall identity that it's probably misremembered, and that they don't need asexuality to be understood as a spectrum of its own to call themselves asexual. 

[Gifted With Singleness]

2 hours ago, Snao van der Cone said:

It's part of the process of working through realizing things about our lives and our selves. People who didn't really feel sexual attraction while on cocaine (but rather drug-induced enthusiasm for something they were told was supposed to be good) might have spent so long convincing themselves they did that they need to put some work into undoing it. If the message right off the bat is "Oh, you felt sexual attraction before? Not asexual" then that's not going to help them learn about asexuality or themselves. I went through a process like that. I don't know what your experience was like when you found out asexuality was a thing, but I would imagine that you had to rethink a lot about how you perceived yourself in the past. Discussions about what "counts" should allow for this growth process. I'm not saying these things need special words or that asexuality is a spectrum from "hasn't pretended to want sex on drugs" to "has pretended to want sex on drugs" (in which case I'd be firmly in the latter) but that discussions on it need to consider this emotional process for people. In the end I hope anyone who thinks they had that one lone experience will conclude that it's so anomalous to their overall identity that it's probably misremembered, and that they don't need asexuality to be understood as a spectrum of its own to call themselves asexual. 

Yup. I resonate with this a great deal. I've never done drugs, but I have spent a long time convincing myself that I was sexual when I absolutely was not.

 

I grew up in the church (and I'm still a Christian to this day), and one thing I kept hearing in various sermons was that we are all sexual beings. Lust was described as "every man's battle", and I've also often heard that God gave us our sexual desires as a gift (even though they've been distorted by sin and all that). It's been said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. I believed the lie that I was sexual, that I had those feelings and desires. But I constantly encountered evidence to the contrary due to our hypersexual culture (and being surrounded by horny teenagers in school), and this resulted in extreme cognitive dissonance.

 

Being an asexual person in a hypersexual world is incredibly confusing, and because I'm a very curious person by nature, this confusion led me to look at porn. I assumed that everyone else was in on a massive inside joke, and if I only watched enough porn, I would get the joke. That didn't work, and I felt ashamed that I wasted my time looking at that stuff. I would look up Christian resources on how to stop looking at porn, and they kept talking about it as if the only reason you could possibly look at porn was to entertain your sexual fantasies. This led me into a vicious cycle.

 

Step 1: Be confused by something sexual.

Step 2: Seek answers by looking at porn.

Step 3: Feel ashamed.

Step 4: Blame lust.

Step 5: Repeat.

 

I had effectively used my porn habit to resolve my cognitive dissonance, and I became fully convinced that I was a sexual person in a battle against lust like everyone else.

 

Then, after I discovered asexuality, everything started to make sense, and I felt liberated. But it didn't happen instantly. Even though I'm asexual under both definitions (since they're basically synonymous), I actually found the "attraction" definition more clarifying, since it emphasized that sexual desire is typically directed at another person. After all, if I felt sexual attraction, who was I attracted to?

 

Well, there was that one girl from college I tried to ask out. But I didn't have any sexual feelings toward her. I didn't even want to kiss her. But I did have a crush on her, so I guess I have a split orientation. Heteroromantic asexual. Yeah, that works. Or maybe I am actually capable of sexual attraction, and I just haven't been close enough to her for those feelings to kick in. So maybe I'm not really asexual, but demisexual. Gray-heteroromantic demi-heterosexual, if I want to be more precise. So, basically straight, but in a weird way. Actually, why would I call myself demi if I haven't ever had those feelings yet? I'll just call myself asexual until I encounter sufficient evidence to the contrary. Also, gray-heteroromantic seems like an unnecessary micro label, so I'll just say I'm a heteroromantic asexual.

 

Except, wait a minute. If romance and sex tend to go together for most people, then maybe I didn't actually have a crush on that girl. Maybe I just saw her as a friend and forcibly interpreted those feelings as romantic due to the societal pressure I felt to get a girlfriend. Actually, that's exactly what happened. Alright, so I'm also aromantic. Aromantic asexual. I don't want to burden people with too many labels, though, so I'll just say I'm asexual and bring up the aromanticism later if I need to.

 

And that's basically what my questioning process looked like. Sure, I had a brief flirtation with micro labels, but that only happened as an excuse for me to deny my asexuality, rather than as a way to shoehorn in people with very typical sexualities into the asexual community. So while I am against micro labels and treating asexuality as a spectrum, I can't be that against it, since I've been there myself.

[Sally]

4 hours ago, Snao van der Cone said:

 I don't know what your experience was like when you found out asexuality was a thing, but I would imagine that you had to rethink a lot about how you perceived yourself in the past. 

When I discovered (heard about, on TV) that there was actually a word, I immediatelly thought "Oh!  That's what I am! And there are other people!"   Knowing there were others was really helpful, because although I was very clear about my feelings about sex (which I'd had a lot of by that time), I'd thought that for some unknown reason, I simply wasn't doing something right.  

 

Although the years of feeling  kind of incompetent at sex were distressing, my recognition once I knew was speedier and less confusing BECAUSE I'd had sex.  I can understand that for those who haven't, they can be confused about what's happening -- or not happening, and what they'll feel like tomorrow, or next year.  I had a long history to refer to.    

[Snao Cone]

5 hours ago, GiftedWithSingleness said:

I assumed that everyone else was in on a massive inside joke, and if I only watched enough porn, I would get the joke.

This is a great way of putting exactly how I felt, but about relationships instead of porn. 

[Acing It]

On 9/15/2019 at 8:27 AM, Sally said:

Of course.  But I haven't seen too many people-- in fact, I can't remember any -- say they'd rather kill themselves than have sex.  

I'd rather kill myself than have sex 😁

[Sally]

3 hours ago, Acing It said:

I'd rather kill myself than have sex 😁

OK, I've now "seen" one.  

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Sally said:

OK, I've now "seen" one.  

*raises hand*

 

Depending on the type of sex (anything involving my own genitals in a situation with another person), I, too would rather kill myself than have sex.

[iff]

@firewallflower

 

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