As sexy as they get

This depressing thought struck me as I was waiting at the platform of the train station in the rain.

I am an attractive young man.

I have no deformities, nothing that would repulse the shallow or unsuspecting. I am tall, dress smartly, my hair finally looks like it was grown by someone who realises that hair can be aesthetic. I fit narrow, Euro-centric, even Aryan beauty standards. Careful choice of glasses hides the things I hate about my face, and careful choice of clothes hides the things I hate about my body. I am skinnier than I think, even if I will never take the massive time/money/pain investment that leads to a great body. I am reasonably healthy. People who know me well wouldn't call me confident, but various strangers have loved my confidence so much that they crushed on me. When I talk with passion, when I reveal what I tend to hide, I can feel people responding to that.

When I realised this, I felt as if I'd been gutted. Because that's it. Battle over. Goodbye, irrational complexes, see you again sometime in middle age. Have fun.
Because I've spent so long looking at uber-pretty men, I can't bear to accept that this is it. This is how far I get. This is attractive.

I don't feel any different. I don't feel like I always imagined attractive men to feel. So therefore I don't feel like I'm attractive.

It's sort of like the myth of thin, which I read about somewhere and now cannot find (prizes to whoever provides me with a link). You keep putting your life on hold, thinking 'when I'm attractive, I'll have this amazing and successful life'.

Well, I'm attractive.

It's time to start living.

On redefining queer, and who's allowed to use it

First off, a quick asexy link, courtesy of my friends at American Virgin. I think I've heard about this film before, and I'm guessing the first place they came to fundraise was AVEN, but, in case you haven't heard the trailer, go and take a look.

Anyway, I forgot to write down the big list of topics I had to write about, so now I've forgotten them all, and I'm back to writing whatever comes into my head.



How does this reclaiming the word queer thing work, guys? Are we still meant to be slightly disapproving of anyone who uses it and doesn't fit in the LGBTQ crowd? Does it still hurt too much that we don't want to give others a free pass to use it?

I ask because I may one day decide that asexual is too confusing a shorthand for demisexual etc, and decide queer would be better. If I label myself queer, am I defining myself by a word that over half my friends can't even say? Cos that sort of sucks for them. It sort of sucks for me, as well, when they try and explain what I am, and can't use the actual word that I find most helpful.

Is it free to use, but you have to be prepared to grovel the instant any non-hetero-cis person takes offense?
Or is it based on how progressive you are? Feminists and sex-positive people get in free? Do you have to donate a certain amount to gay rights organisations (in which case, I'm not entitled, and won't be until I have some actual disposable income, in several years time [hopefully])?
Maybe you have to have a seal of approval by an actual queer person. If so, we could get little cards printed. That would definately save on confusion.

Or maybe we could just say 'ok, a word's a word. What's more, it's the only word we've got for a concept that needs expressing*'. If it's used in hate, sure, point out the hate, same as you would if someone viciously spat the word 'gay' at you, but just agree that the word itself isn't offensive any more.


*And a concept that needs expressing is a concept that EVERYONE needs to be able to express.

The demi closet

So, quick recap:

In the last post, I promised my next few posts would be short. I then wrote a post that I thought would be really short, and it ended up the same length as the others.
In the post before that, I promised to make things less asexual-based, or at least more wired towards a readership that I don't assume to be asexual. That's also notably been failing.

Today, I hope to meet promise #1, if not promise #2.


I've been thinking about how little I really mention the sexual side of my demisexuality on this blog. A lot of what I write about is written from the 'asexual perspective', and I almost seem to be trying to aviod the part of me that's, well, normal. Seriously. Second-guessing how sexual everyone really is makes my brain hurt, but I reckon there's happily sexual people out there with the same level of sexual attraction to me. I know that my feelings are the only ones I can comment on, but the more I let them be what they are, the more they seem to mark me out as subversively on 'the other side'. It doesn't mean I'm not asexual, the label is still the most useful to me without getting complex (like demihomosexual), but maybe that I'm less asexual than my deliberate persona.

I think it's a matter of bravery. I don't want to stand up and say "This is who I am" because it goes against the idea of the Ideal Asexual. Or maybe, if the Ideal Asexual is the asexual sexuals want to see, the Pure Asexual, the one who's as asexual as possible, who has earned their place at the table of the sexless.

And then there's the excuse. The excuse being- we live in a society with screwy notions about sex (especially queer sex), and I know that I can never rely on this blog to be anonymous. I want the worst real-life experience I can come away with to be "Yes, I blogged about asexuality for several years. God, I was privileged, time-wasting and self-obsessed back then" and not to be "You've read my blog? Oh, great. Now you know way too much about how I think about sex." I draw the line very high so I have a little further to slip.

And the problem is that it's quite a good excuse. The chances aren't all that remote, especially as I remain openly asexual, if someone just decides to google asexuality and do a lot of reading on it. I'm probably blowing the effects out of proportion, I'd never planned to be any sort of graphic sex blogger. After all, that would isolate some of my asexual audience (see promise #2, above) and be practically impossible, considering I'm not reckoning on having a sex life to write home about any time soon.

But anyway. What's courage and what's foolishness?

And, looking back, I'm less convinced that I've met promise #1, or that I've not met promise #2. The moral of this story is- I always break my promises (must be because I'm an evil demisexual aromantic).

Sexual aromantics and asexual romantics- guess which are the bigger bastards

Note on the title: Yes, I'm perfectly aware most asexual romantics don't agree with the people quoted here, and the ones who I have quoted probably didn't think about it in this much depth. Now I've got your attention, I'll put away my broad brush and start painting with the narrowest implements I have. Which would be the knives.



So I spent three weeks on holiday and what feels like another half a week catching up on all the internet stuff I missed out on (and that only includes the blogs I have feeds for- the busier ones I tend to just check whenever I have time and inclination- that’ll take me months!). Anyway, I tend to compose my subjects for blogging away from my computer, so I have two or three short things that will basically write themselves, and one big, epic post I want to make about heterosexual masculinity, and am building up to.

When I came back, I noticed Charles (I’m avoiding Pugnacion because it’s harder to spell), who has been the most admirably busy asexual blogger in my absence, had linked to a thread on sexual aromantics on AVEN.

I’m demisexual a?romantic, I’m probably the closest anyone has come to self-identifying as sexual aromantic, and I want to use that thread as a springboard for some of my thoughts on the matter.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, to be fair. Only two or three comments were actually offensive, a lot of the rest were telling the offensive ones that they were wrong.
In the manner of a very effective presentation on pedophilia that Pretzelboy recently linked to, I’m going to re-phrase each negative statement made so that it reads as a statement about you, the reader. This is effectively what the AVEN thread was saying about me as I read it:

I find you rather horrifying, and I think many people here would agree with me on that count.

The emotional aspects mean absolutely nothing to you. You trick people to get them into bed and then never call them back or talk to them again.

There may be people like you who do not come off as sleazebags, but I'm not entirely sure how that would work . . .

I think you are horrifying, or disturbing in the very least.

The final quote is one I’d like to pull out for further analysis:

“it would be so much simpler, if you wanted to satisfy sexual desires, not to be so focused on the other person. Sex for the sake of pleasure rather than the intimacy and focus of love and whatnot.”

Ok, so there’s a whole load of stuff about how I don’t feel the right thing. I can’t feel love. I’ve said how much that hurts. In its place, I have (a small amount) of lust. And that’s bad. That’s shallow. That’s wrong. Thank you. Thank you for reminding me where I stand.
I’ll skip over that for now, I’m certain I’ll come back to it later. What overwhelms me are the misconceptions. According to the quotes above, someone who feels sexual attraction but not romantic attraction:

-Tricks people and lies to people
-Does anything possible to get people into bed
-Is incapable of human connection
-Is incapable of self-control
-Is always and irrevocably selfish in bed

And, I know, asexual people aren’t the best at understanding how sexual attraction goes, for obvious reasons. And AVENites are often not on the same page as me regarding sex-positivism. But how are any of those things linked directly to sexual attraction? You can have casual sex without deliberately hurting or deceiving your partner. You can be sexually attracted to someone and want them to be happy in bed. That’s how it tends to work, in fact.

The ideas in that thread were based on two paradigms. The first is that a sexual relationship without love is inevitably destructive, and that people (often interchangeable with ‘women’) will only have this destructive sex if they think they’re tricked into getting love. The second is that sexuals cannot control themselves- sexual attraction, sooner or later, is a matter of selfishness, especially when not balanced out by the healing and benevolent and entirely unselfish powers of romantic attraction.

A lot of gender/sexuality blogging seems to be about picking out the paradigms behind what someone thinks, and then pointing out that the paradigms are wrong, to a load of people who already agree with you that those paradigms are wrong.

They’re wrong. See. You agree with me, don’t you?

God, I’m good at this.

Picture-pretty

So I've finally been browsing some of the Hot Pieces Of Ace videos, although youtube seems to be messing up and stopping me watch the majority of them. As I said, I'll tune in on a topic of particular interest to me, and long-term followers of the blog may know that aesthetic attraction is something I think about quite a bit (basically, whenever I see someone incredibly pretty).

For example, I agree with the little scenario in Ally's video where her friends are like "Oh, he's cute, I want to have sex with him" and she's like "Oh, he's cute, I want to... like... look at him! Oh, maybe we could have a conversation!" and that's ditto for me, even down to the excited "best thing evar" voice.

However, there's something I've seen in a lot of the videos, and in a lot of places before, that I suddenly realised was odd.

When people ask how we can find someone attractive but not aesthetically, the response is often "I find them pretty in the same way that landscapes are pretty." And it's an answer that often works. It has the benefit of simplicity. It references the fact that we just love to look at them, like you would an amazing picture (and my love of photography and of pretty men seem to feed off each other in complex ways when I look at a good photo of a pretty man). However, I'm guessing it's often a downright lie.

See, I crush. I don't know how I know it's a crush. There's generally no (or little, depending on how demisexual I feel today) bedroom antics at the base of the crush, but my response to a pretty, confident man with a big personality is so different to my response to a basket of kittens.

Come to think of it, my response to said man is different to my response to a pretty woman, which tends to be an aesthetic attraction in the same way a picture is. It's hard to describe, but my response to the man contains something of that attraction that most people think of as sexual. But not the sexual bit.

If you want to use the "pretty like a picture" illustration, good for you. Especially if you feel it is really true for how you experience sexual attraction. Heck, looking back through my blog, I've used it myself. But, personally, I feel that I'd be lying if I simplified it to that. And it'd be one of those lies that weaves itself around you and ends up trapping you.
So my answer? Probably a "Why do crushes have to be sexual?". There's so much else involved in a crush, I'm sure, why can no-one understand that what I feel is the same thing as you feel*, except without the desire to rush of and have sex with them?

I'd go so far as to say that I think a lot of people, assuming those feelings are always about sex, self-define them so that they become about sex anyway. The "Oh, I really want to... oh no, I actually don't. There's nothing I specifically want to do" feeling is offputting.


*another simplification- I tend to assume that no-one feels any aspect of attraction in exactly the same way. Talking about attraction is like talking about pain- language fails because there can be no common references.




NOTE: So this was a random little thought that occured to me. I'd promised myself that, starting after my holidays, I was going to adress to an audience of any vaguely sex-non-normative people or allies, rather than sticking to adressing a small crowd of in-the-know asexuals constantly. As you can see, this post blatantly disregards that. Sorry. Will try harder.

Aromantic until further notice

Firstly- no, I have not posted for the last month or so.
Secondly- I doubt I will post again before my three-week internet holiday starting next week.
Two reasons: Firstly, because I decided this blog simply has to take last priority in my life. If I can't keep it last priority, I can't keep it at all.
Secondly, because I tend to write when an idea pops into my head, I mull over it for a day or so, and then set it all down. This all relies on ideas. At the moment, I have little about asexuality. My head has been buzzing about the practicalities of aromance, but not really in bloggable form, and not that much. A lot of awesome real-life stuff is happening. And now is where I sort of want them to connect. I've been over 2 years asexual and now I want my pay-off. I want to take all the theories and graphs and deeper understandings and cash in in meat-space.

I'm having to deal with the loss of social circles. At this time of year, I'm stopping seeing my friends and acquaintances (worse- friends I never made) from college, I'm reminded of this time last year when I went through the same about school. And my very best friends ever are back from university, and we're having to re-negotiate our closest relationships. At the same time, I have more circles blossoming. Two activities I've been doing for years have, for various reasons partly to do with my new independence and partly through random luck, started blossoming in various ways into something more approaching social circles. And then there's university this autumn. Whatever happens there.

And something about me is changing, and I think it's the aromantic in me. I'm getting stronger. More world-wise, more determined. I have ways of looking at friendships now that I never had before.

This year, which, you notice, has been the main year of my blogging, was all about change, independence that had been fought off too long, growing more comfortable in my skills, my place in the world. And I've transformed, slowly, and asexuality has helped me. Asexy posts like these have been the final straws.

I'm declaring myself aromantic polyamorous. No relationships, and many. I like the contradictions, but I like the lifestyle better. I like the focus I can have on creating satisfying, meaningful relationships. I like the fact that my relationships can just be what they are. And I like the fact that, with this idea in my head, this map of what the future can be like, I can start to develop the tools to make it that way.

Also, I like the fact that, after a year of transformation, this blog (and my sexuality) finally has relevance to my real world! Which means my real world, what happens to me day to day, has relevance to this blog! Which means reams of easy materal! Harrumble!

(more will follow on the actual technique of living aromance. Once I've figured it out, mostly)

First Person

My First Person post, exploring how I connect with the idea of virginity, is out on The American Virgin blog. Check it out. (The title stands better as part of the text than it does on it's own) And, if you feel you have something to say, contact them, they're looking for more First Person stories, especially from an asexual perspective.