It’s downright bizarre to see so many people pushing this unidimensional vision of human sexuality. I could call it regressive, and it’s reminiscent of the men-want-it/women-don’t paradigm that the Victorians loved so much. But it seems much more strange than that. It seems like the tumblr ace crowd doesn’t have much to do with humanity, period. It seems like you’ve never been through an adult relationship, or even had adult friends. Every description of “I want this, but not that or the other” attempt to locate a- or demisexuality somewhere has involved three components of common human sexuality in a common human configuration. I’m sorry, but this is a distinction without any difference.
This is really interesting to me, especially given that you mention the men-want-it/women-don’t paradigm, because I had this experience with that paradigm:
I came out as asexual in my early 20s after a period of dating (men, since I thought I was straight) in college. One relationship in particular was “serious,” and we made plans for the future. He would mention, sometimes, that he was attracted to me; specifically, the words “I want you” stuck in my mind, and while I knew what he meant, it was as if I couldn’t get from point A to point B, because he was describing a way in which I did not want him and could not quite get my head around. My conclusion at the time was that the regressive tropes were true, and men really did have greater sexual appetites and desires than women. It was only after I realized I was asexual that I also realized my lack of sexual desire for my partner was due to my asexuality, and not to my gender, and that those regressive tropes were just… regressive.
And, to reiterate, I still don’t know what the OP that missvoltairine quoted was trying to get at, but zhe certainly wasn’t speaking for the ace community or making a generalization that I think many of us would agree with. I’m not particularly interested in deprioritizing my orgasm in sexual encounters, and I do not agree that there’s any connection between being asexual and deprioritizing orgasms.
I think it’s regressive even if you divorce it from sexism. That standard was a problem not only because it placed the onus of desire on one half of the population and the onus of restraint on the other. It was a problem because it defined “sex” as something that very few people want in an uncomplicated way and many people often don’t want much or at all. It’s like defining appetite as ravenous hunger only, and insisting that everything else is degrees of a-hunger, and that some people are only half-hungry or part-hungry. Your ex-boyfriend is not a good paradigm for any of us, and “I want you,” is a pretty shallow description of sexual interest. That kind of reductive definition will tend to hurt marginalized groups—e.g. women—first, but it affects everyone in profoundly negative ways. And it leads to terminology that is either so broad that it is meaningless or so limited that it is virtually inapplicable.
And why not, though? You’re implicitly referring to someone who does have some interest in sex and who does enjoy and want orgasms during sex. How is that person’s level and type of sexual interest distinct from the general category of sexual interest, such that it should be described as a-sexuality? How is that not a kind of sexuality?
This is the problem: sexuality includes wanting sex for reasons other than desire; wanting components of sex but not sexual contact itself; enjoying sexual gratification but not feeling an intense need to have sex; low or virtually absent libido; relationships that include sex but are primarily platonic, emotional, or intellectual; and attraction to any number of small details of human connection or physicality. It can also include feeling these things all the time. There’s no level of interest below which you’re only half-sexual or cross-hatched-sexual; there’s no level at which you become fully sexual.
Sexuality is shades of gray. It’s all shades of gray. And we pathologize a lot of facets of human sexuality, but saying that they’re therefore not-sexuality makes about as much sense as saying that same-gender sexual desire is something besides sexuality.
(Source: missvoltairine)
