Month: June 2014

Asexuality and Pleasure

I’m writing this post for the June Carnival of Aces, which has a theme of “pleasure.”

Asexuality is something commonly perceived as antithetical to a variety of relational experiences: polyamory, romance, intimacy, desire, sensuality, and pleasure. 99% of the human population is sexual, and thus we live in a world where most people accept the popular association of these different experiences with sex. According to the sexual majority, not having sex means not experiencing pleasure, romance, intimacy, desire, or sensuality. (Personally, I find this sad because of what it implies about sexual people: that they’re not experiencing any of those things apart from sex.)

The sexual world narrowly defines pleasure as sexual/genital/orgasmic. Like the other commonly sexualized and romanticized words, “pleasure” has a silent “sexual” attached to it that everyone is supposed to hear and be aware of. This belief and way of speaking are problematic for several reasons.

1. It implies that all sex is pleasurable.

Not all pleasure is sexual, and not all sex is pleasurable. That’s the bottom line. When you make “pleasure” a definitively and exclusively sexual thing, you’re implying that all sex is pleasurable, which immediately invalidates and threatens sex-repulsed asexuals, sex-indifferent asexuals, sex-repulsed allosexuals, survivors of sexual abuse and rape, people who have medical conditions that make sex painful or uncomfortable, etc. Defining sex as inherently pleasurable places an expectation on people: that every sexual experience they have should feel good to them physically, emotionally, and psychologically, and if sex doesn’t feel good to them, there is something wrong with them rather than the sex.

This is not simply an issue of consent. Consent has nothing to do with pleasure. Consensual sex can be painful, traumatic, abusive, uncomfortable, and unethical. We cannot place the dividing line at consent and claim that all consensual sex is pleasurable, and any sex that isn’t pleasurable is rape (and therefore, according to mainstream sex-positive followers and most feminists, not even really sex). Doing so erases sex-repulsed asexuals, sex-indifferent asexuals, and sexual people who do not feel good when they have sex, for physical, emotional, or psychological reasons.

Nor should people who experience sex as pleasurable feel the need or the right to urge people who don’t into seeking a “cure.” Demanding that all human beings not only have sex but experience sex as pleasure is an oppressive form of policing other people’s bodies and sexuality. There is no natural law recorded anywhere, written by some higher power with cosmic authority, that says sex should be pleasurable for everyone all the time. Believing that there is, is the only possible reason that anyone could think sex-repulsion or an inability to feel pleasure through sex needs to be “cured.” And it is a totally irrational reason.

2. It fails to understand asexual (and celibate) experiences.

The sexual world imagines asexuality and celibacy as ascetic existence. Not having sex, to them, requires self-deprivation or repression. I’ve written before about how asexual celibacy is fundamentally different from a sexual person’s celibacy, and that difference doesn’t occur to most sexual people when they’re imagining how terrible it must be to live life without having sex. They project onto asexuals what their own experience of celibacy would be, assuming that we would miss out on pleasure in the same ways they would. But celibacy is not deprivation to us. It’s our natural default. It’s the most comfortable way of being for us.

No matter what your orientation, pleasure can be experienced in an infinite number of ways. There’s physical pleasure, emotional pleasure, intellectual pleasure, spiritual pleasure, creative pleasure. There is the pleasure of eating delicious food, of having an excellent conversation, of completing a great piece of art, of making a new friend, of feeling good about your own appearance, etc. None of this pleasure is inaccessible to asexuals.

Pleasure is an important part of human existence, no matter how you want it, and asexuals who do not have sex deserve to experience pleasure on their own terms. Asexuality is not a pleasure desert, even when it is paired with sex-repulsion and celibacy. To equate pleasure with sex is to assume that asexuals neither experience nor desire pleasure, when nothing can be further from the truth. Asexuals desire and experience pleasure physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.

For the record, some asexuals have a libido and masturbate. A small portion of the asexual community enjoys partnered sex, too. So it is even inaccurate to believe that asexuality completely excludes genital or sexual pleasure.

3. It erases physical and sensual pleasure in nonsexual relationships.

Pleasure and physical, sensual intimacy defined as sexual and orgasmic excludes a vast range of touch. The idea that a nonsexual relationship (romantic or nonromantic) is an essentially nonphysical relationship is so ridiculous, it’s almost laughable. Sexual people, even in their own romantic-sexual relationships, fail to acknowledge and experience nonsexual sensual touch as valuable, possible, and pleasurable. If they’re not having sex or getting ready to have sex, they’re not touching. To them, the only point of intimate or sensual touch, the only appropriate context for it, is sex. That’s the attitude behind those stupid stock photos of angry-looking couples sitting on a bed and facing away from each other that have accompanied articles published about asexuals in the past. You don’t have sex with each other? Well, that must mean you never touch.

In reality, a lot of asexuals desire and enjoy physical touch. A lot of us can be very sensual in a physical way when we feel safe and free and comfortable in a relationship. That goes for aromantic-spectrum people in nonromantic relationships too. Touch is a huge desire and need for me, one of the most important components of a happy friendship. It is emotionally and physically pleasurable. Few things are more pleasurable to me, in fact, than loving physical intimacy.

Ironically, if asexuals miss out on physical pleasure they actually want, it’s usually because sexual people deny us nonsexual touch, affection, and intimacy unless they think sex is in the cards. We say “no” to sex, which is only one kind of physical pleasure, and then sexual people go, “Well, there’s nothing else on the menu, so starve.” To which asexuals respond: “Wait a minute, there’s plenty of other stuff on the menu. Look at all this. Why can’t I have any of this, just because I don’t want that one thing?”

What kind of touch is left, when you take genitals off the table?

Holding hands, hugs, cuddling with clothes on or off, kissing on the mouth, kissing the body, caressing the body, massages, leaning against each other, dancing together, running your fingers through the other person’s hair, biting, squeezing, trailing your fingertips over bare skin, sleeping in the same bed, bathing together, tickling, wrestling, etc.

I figure most romantic-sexual people view most or all of those touches as innately sexual and romantic and would never do them outside of a romantic/sexual relationship or unless the touches were leading up to sex. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual abstract nature of the touching or asexuals’ ability to use those touches in nonsexual and/or nonromantic relationships. It’s a mistake in logic that sexual people make: believing that because they can’t imagine being physically intimate or sensual in a nonsexual relationship, that it is simply impossible to do.

In an interesting twist, the nonsexual spectrum of sensual touch may actually be something that (sex-repulsed/celibate) asexuals have access to BECAUSE we don’t have sex. Instead of ignoring nonsexual touch and sensuality in favor of skipping right to genital sex, as many sexual people do, we explore and use those different touches and forms of physical intimacy because it’s all we have. We can take nonsexual physical pleasure in our relationships to heights that the average sexual person will never experience.

Imagine this: I’m in bed with an asexual friend of mine for a few hours. We’re stripped down to our underwear. We cuddle, we kiss each other’s body, we run our hands all over each other’s bare skin, we’re looking into each other’s eyes and smelling each other’s scent and feeling each other breathe. We are emotionally connected to each other on a level that we can’t talk about and don’t need to talk about. We feel as close and intimate with each other as we can possibly be with anyone.

Now, that isn’t sex. There’s no genital stimulation. There’s no sexual orgasm. There’s no lust. But it’s sure as hell pleasure.

4. Pleasure is removed from friendship.

There’s often an intersection of sex-related bullshit with romance-related bullshit, and this is one of those times.

So, some friendships are sexual. Some romantic relationships are nonsexual. Romantic friendship is a thing, different from romantic couple relationships, even the nonsexual kind. All of these “alternative” relationships make it clear that the phrase “platonic love” is shitty and problematic.

Nevertheless, equating sex with pleasure often means limiting pleasure to romantic relationships because according to the majority of people:

a) romantic relationships are supposed to be sexual

b) sexual relationships are supposed to be romantic

c) there’s already an attitude that even nongenital touch is sexual and romantic in nature, so don’t do it unless you want to fuck the person you’re touching and/or be in a romantic relationship with them

d) intimacy, passion, sensuality, and desire are all sexualized too and they are connected to pleasure

This means that “pleasure”–if you’re sexual society using that concept as a euphemism for sex–has no place in nonromantic/nonsexual friendship. If you can’t include pleasure, physical or otherwise, in a relationship without also making it sexual and/or romantic, then you are effectively rendering an entire category of relationship less pleasurable than the category that does include sex and romance.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one critical reason why society views friendship as less valuable and desirable than romantic-sexual relationships. Keeping pleasure out of friendship is a tool of the Romantic/Sex-Based Relationship Hierarchy that places romantic-sexual relationships at the top of the hierarchical pyramid. This is getting into the philosophy of human relationships that dates back to Ancient Greece: if the two major measures of a relationship’s value is utility and pleasure, then it logically follows that the more a relationship pleases us or the more we can use a relationship for our personal gain, the more we will value that relationship. I’ve already explained that there is a vast array of pleasure that falls outside the physical and sexual kinds, but human beings place a big emphasis on physical pleasure because it is the most viscerally experienced type. Prohibiting physical pleasure from friendship severely limits its greatest potential value, not to mention its emotional intimacy. Even on a subconscious, mental level, treating “pleasure” as exclusively sexual causes people to think of friendship as less pleasurable or even anti-pleasure, without realizing that they’re thinking that way and why.

We want pleasure. It doesn’t matter if that pleasure is physical, sexual, or emotional. It doesn’t matter if it comes in the form of intense cuddling or deep love or emotional vulnerability shared with another person. Pleasure is one of our priorities, and when it comes to relationships, we will spend the most amount of time and energy pursuing the kind of relationship that will yield us the greatest amount of pleasure. We rank our relationships based on how pleasurable they are, among other things. Creating a set-up where only romantic-sexual relationships provide us the opportunity to experience the physical and emotional pleasure we crave inevitably means that as a society, we view romantic-sexual relationships as superior to all other relationships because nonsexual/nonromantic relationships simply don’t please us as much or as intensely. The bullshit message that romantic-sexual culture blasts into the collective social consciousness all day every day is:

“Friendship can never be as good or as important as romantic-sexual couplehood, because friendship can never be as pleasurable as romantic-sexual couplehood. Why? Because you can’t get sex (or intimacy or sensuality or passion or love) from friendship. You can only get it from romantic-sexual couple relationships. Romantic-sexual couplehood is better than friendship.”

Well. Fuck that with a grizzly bear’s claws.

Not only can get you get pleasure–physical pleasure, emotional pleasure, intellectual pleasure, spiritual pleasure–from nonsexual relationships. You can also get that pleasure from nonromantic relationships. Aromantics, regardless of sexual orientation, can and do experience and create pleasure in their nonromantic friendships, whether the pleasure is sexual or nonsexual. I would like to see more asexuals break free from romantic-sexual society’s false rules limiting pleasure to romantic relationships and start to explore pleasure in nonromantic friendships that already don’t place the burden of sexual expectation onto us. We do not have to do friendship the way romantic-sexual society does it. We do not have to create a bind for ourselves, where the pleasure we want can only be found in romantic relationships that we either can’t find or can’t enjoy because we don’t want to fuck, so we’re left with nothing that we want.

As far as I’m concerned, friendship is the most pleasurable experience in life, and there is no limit to the amount of pleasure that I can experience in friendships, including and especially physical pleasure.

The importance of asexuality (and celibate/nonsexual lifestyles) in the understanding of pleasure cannot be underestimated. Asexuality redefines pleasure as an experience that reaches far beyond genital, orgasmic sex.

The ability to self-determine our own pleasure is a critical part of asexual empowerment and well-being. Instead of submitting to sexual people’s ideas of pleasure, instead of being passive participants, we can and should assert ourselves as people who create and appreciate different kinds of pleasure. Expanding the definition and practice of pleasure, especially physical and interpersonal pleasure, to support sex-repulsed/sex-averse asexuals and other celibate individuals is an expression of asexual agency, asexual power, and asexual ownership of our own bodies.

I am not your dirty secret

This is a very important post about the need to protect, support, and give visibility to sex-repulsed and sex-averse asexuals when educating the masses about asexuality. There’s this really weird tendency that’s cropped up in asexual spaces online the last couple years where sexually active sex-indifferent and sex-enthusiastic aces will actually put down their fellow aces who don’t have sex/don’t want sex, as if they care more about impressing upon sexual people that aces are sexually available to them than they are about liberating asexuals who don’t want to have sex, from compulsory sexuality. It’s fucked up. It’s wrong. I don’t care if certain aces have sex or like sex, but it is absolutely fucking ridiculous for those aces to be the ones at the forefront of visibility and education efforts when the majority of asexuals DO NOT want to have sex ever and are some degree of uncomfortable with it. Yes, asexuality is an orientation defined by attraction rather than by sexual behavior, like all other sexual orientations, but when asexuality–the one and only orientation that’s about NOT experiencing sexual attraction to others–is pushed to become more like the other sexualities, that’s bullshit. It’s symptomatic of internalized compulsory sexuality and a sick need to be validated as “normal” by the sexual majority, when it’s asexuals themselves trying to make that push and silence sex-repulsed/sex-averse asexuals.

My activism is not about assimilation. Fuck assimilation. Asexuals are not and do not have to be and should not want to be identical to sexual people, just so that they can be easily accepted and romanced by those sexual people, without anything changing in our culture regarding attitudes toward sex. I, for one, am not here to be accepted or validated or proclaimed “normal.” I’m here to fucking revolutionize the world, for the better. I’m here to set myself and everyone like me free. I’m here to improve the world, not perpetuate the shitty status quo.
I’m an asexual, I’m a virgin, I’m committed to lifelong celibacy, and I don’t care who you are, I won’t fuck you. And I don’t give a shit what you think about that.

The Asexual Agenda

Content warnings: mentions of sexual violence, but no specifics

Fellow aces, we need to have a discussion about how we treat sex-averse and sex-repulsed aces. Sex-repulsed and sex-averse aces are by no means a minority in the community–according to the AAW census, 65% of asexuals, 51% of grey-As, and 37% of demisexuals are either “somewhat repulsed” or “completely repulsed.” And yet, as several people have pointed out recently, sex-repulsed and sex-averse aces are consistently “viewed almost as a dirty secret the community should be ashamed of.” This treatment of sex-repulsed aces goes hand in hand with a series of ideas: Being indifferent is the Real Way to be ace. If you’re sex-repulsed, there’s something wrong with you, and you need to see a medical professional. If you’re sex-repulsed because of experiences of trauma or sexual violence, then you definitely need to see a medical professional and sit…

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Why Positive Nonromantic Sex is Important

Creating and contributing to an environment where safe, ethical, positive nonromantic sex can happen is important to me. I’m a celibate asexual who only wants to create nonsexual/nonromantic relationships with people, so why do I care about casual and friendly sex? Because we can’t have a liberated society that offers everyone flexibility and the power to find the kind of lifestyle best for them, without supporting nonromantic sex, just like we can’t have that kind of society without supporting voluntary celibacy, asexuality, and sex-repulsion. I care about casual and friendly sex because I care about aromantic allosexuals and their right to be respected, supported, understood, and empowered. I care about casual and friendly sex because I want to dismantle the romance supremacist, amatonormative, pro-monogamy system of relationships currently installed in our culture. I care about nonromantic sex because I care about freedom.

The sex I’m talking about in this post is any sex that happens outside of a romantic relationship. That covers casual sex between strangers or acquaintances, one-night stands, sexual friendships, sex work, sex had with third parties in an open romantic relationship, sex had between two people who are casually dating but not yet a couple, etc.

Supporting nonromantic sex matters because aromantic sexual people matter. Supporting nonromantic sex matters because varioriented sexual people–those with mismatched romantic and sexual orientations–matter. Supporting nonromantic sex matters because nonmonogamous sexual people matter. Supporting nonromantic sex matters because sexual people who choose to have sex outside of their romantic relationship with a sex-repulsed asexual partner, matter.

Anyone who wants to have sex outside of a romantic relationship should be able to comfortably, safely, and freely do it. I am not saying I think everyone who has sex should have nonromantic sex. If you only want to have sex in romantic relationships, that is your choice and you’re entitled to make it. But if you are someone who wants to have nonromantic sex, then you should be able to do it safely, easily, and comfortably. You should be able to do it without catching judgment from other sexual people who want to police your sexuality, your body, your relationships, and your life.

Our cultural attitudes toward sex are complex and multi-faceted, and I’m not pretending that the choice to have nonromantic sex, even if you strongly desire it, is simple or isolated from bullshit like sexism, racism, misogyny, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, fat shaming, rape culture, abuse, slut shaming, sexual illness, etc. But the goal should be to destroy that bullshit, not avoid nonromantic sex altogether while the bullshit stays in tact. Nonromantic sex is tied to a lot of problematic, prejudiced thinking, which is one of the reasons why it’s so important to create a world where nonromantic sex is supported.

Yes, a lot of nonromantic sex that happens today is harmful–but that isn’t because nonromantic sex is, by nature, destructive or dangerous or unhealthy. It’s because people are abusive, unethical, rude assholes. It is not the fault of casual sex if you treat someone you fucked like garbage. It is not the fault of casual sex if you’re too stupid or too selfish to wear a condom. It is not the fault of casual sex if you fail to monitor your own sexual health. Your bad behavior, your prejudices, and your irresponsibility are your fault. It is possible to have healthy, ethical, satisfying sex that is respectful of everyone involved.

See, I’m not just saying nonromantic sex should be accepted. I’m saying that nonromantic sex should hold all sexually active people to a higher standard of conduct. I’m saying good nonromantic sex can only happen between people who are ethical and respectful, who care about their sexual partners’ well-being, and who take responsibility for their own actions. I’m saying good nonromantic sex only happens between people who are willing to communicate with each other. Good nonromantic sex depends upon a lot of things that everyone, including people who only have romantic sex or who don’t have sex at all, should be practicing in their daily life.

Creating a culture where nonromantic sex is truly supported and where people are taught how to do it well would mean creating a culture where people treat each other with care and respect and consideration because that’s how human beings should treat each other; where people get into the habit of communicating clearly and effectively what they want and don’t want; where slut-shaming women is no longer acceptable and where women have complete ownership of their bodies and sexuality; where rape is considered unacceptable regardless of the context in which it happened, including contexts of casual sex or paid sex; where everyone actively practices safe and healthy sex; where people who are not wired for sexual monogamy can live their preferred sexual lifestyle instead of trying to be monogamous and failing and hurting their partners in the process; where sex can ultimately be viewed as just something that some people like to do and not a big deal or a magical ingredient that elevates a particular relationship to superior status.

I believe building a world where people are both educated about how to have positive nonromantic sex and where they feel supported in having it if they want it would actually dovetail with creating a kinder, healthier, and more ethical world. Positive nonromantic sex can only exist amongst people who are respectful of others regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, ethnicity, etc; who are observing radical, genuine consent; who know their own bodies and can confidently communicate with anyone about what they want, like, and dislike; who are doing everything in their power to regularly take care of their own health and therefore the health of everyone they fuck; who treat people, even people they only want to have sex with, like they matter whether they are in your life for 2 hours, two months, two decades, or forever.

I am disturbed by the attitude that only romantic relationship sex is appropriate, safe, healthy, and nurturing because romance is not some magical repellant for abuse, rape, disrespect, miscommunication, selfishness, etc. You’re living in a fucking fantasy land if you think that all romantic relationships create an environment of respect, care, nurturing, ethical behavior, and love. You’re delusional if you believe that people in romantic-sexual relationships can’t give each other an STD or an STI, including AIDS/HIV. You’re dangerously ignorant and wrong if you believe that rape can’t happen in romantic relationships or that other coercive, abusive sexual encounters can’t happen in them.

I’m also disturbed by the idea that restricting sex to romantic relationships solves problematic sex or renders people’s prejudices and problematic treatment of others irrelevant, benign, or nonexistent. Romance does not excuse you for being a misogynist, a rapist, a slut-shamer, an uncaring person, or anything else. If you’re logic goes, “People should only have sex in romantic relationships because that way, no one would ever feel sexually objectified, no woman would be slut-shamed, no one would be raped or abused by someone who only wants sex from them, etc,” you’ve got a fucked up approach to bad, inexcusable behavior. Not to mention, you’re just wrong about romantic relationships preventing it. Instead of attacking someone’s sexism, someone’s slut-shaming, someone’s abusiveness, someone’s disrespect or dishonesty or rudeness or insensitivity, instead of actually ripping out the problem by the root, you want to just remove an obvious trigger for that behavior. That’s not a method for creating a kind, caring, ethical society where everyone supports each other’s well-being.

As for the health and physical wellness aspect of nonromantic sex, the rules shouldn’t be any different than they are for romantic-sexual relationships. If you’re having sex, you should be using condoms, lube, dental dams, gloves, and whatever other tools of safe sex appropriately, regardless of whether it’s in or out of romantic relationships. If you are sexually active, you should be getting tested for STDs/STIs at least once a year. Period. I don’t care if you fuck one person a year or 20. You are an irresponsible douche bag if you have sex with anyone, without knowing whether or not you’re clean, and don’t give me that shit about “Oh, I’m monogamous in romantic relationships and never have sex when I’m single,” because most people do have sex when they’re single and even if you aren’t cheating, your romantic other might be. Even if you’re clean when you enter into a monogamous romantic relationship, your partner might have an STD/STI and pass it to you. It only takes one person, one sexual encounter, to contract something, and most STDs/STIs are curable. Some of them are completely asymptomatic, so you could have something and not know it unless you get tested. All genital contact counts as sex: oral sex, anal sex, manual sex, penetrative vaginal sex, etc. If you’ve done any of that with anyone, you should get tested. If you can’t afford to get tested, than stop having sex until you can. That’s the bottom line, about being a responsible sexually active person.

Here are the most important points I want to make:

Nonromantic sex can still be caring sex. Nonromantic sexual relationships can still be caring relationships. When most people think about “casual sex” or “one night stands” or “fuck buddies,” there is this silent assumption that the sex is meaningless, careless, disrespectful, and that the people having the sex don’t give a shit about each other at all, don’t view each other as people, don’t take the time or make the effort to be considerate of each other, and pretty much view each other as disposable objects to be used for sexual pleasure. That is not categorically, universally true of nonromantic sex and people who have it. It’s just not. There are people who have casual sex or nonromantic sex who certainly fit that bill, but they are not definitive of nonromantic sex and people who have nonromantic sex. Romance is not the same thing as caring. Romance is not the same thing as respect.

Aromantic sexual people are capable of caring about their sexual partners and treating them like human beings. Aromantic sexual people can even love their sexual partners nonromantically–because hey, loving friendship is a thing. Romantic people of all sexual orientations, including asexuals, often make this fucked up assumption before they take the time to get educated about aromanticism and aromantic allosexuals: they assume that aromantic sexual people don’t care about anyone, including the people they have sex with. They assume that aromantic sexual people feel no emotional attachment to their sexual partners whatsoever, that it’s just superficial attraction and lust in the aromantic person’s experience. That is absolutely, completely fucking false. First of all, not all aromantic people feel the same way about sex or about relationships with others, so while some aromantics might not give a shit about their sexual partners, that isn’t a dominant norm in aromantic sexual people. Second of all, if you’re an aromantic person, it doesn’t mean you have no feelings; it means you don’t feel romantic attraction. Aromantic people can care about and love others in a variety of ways and in different relationships, and that includes their sexual relationships. Some aromantic sexual people actually prefer to form one steady sexual relationship with someone at a time, regardless of the lack of romance, because they don’t actually like or feel comfortable with having a lot of stranger sex or casual sex. Some aromantic sexual people love the idea of having a best friend who they can also fuck, and they may even strongly prefer that the relationship be sexually monogamous. Are they in love with their friend? No. Do they want to do all the standard romantic crap with their friend? No. Does Celine Dion speak to their feelings about their sexual friendship? No. But they sure as hell can still feel attachment, closeness, caring, even (nonromantic) love in a friendship with someone they’ve known for months or years and who they’re having sex with on a regular basis.

You can have a sexual friendship that is just as caring, supportive, nurturing, and connecting as any good nonsexual friendship. If you’re close friends with someone and then you start having sex with each other, the sex does not suddenly cause the friendship to evaporate. The friendliness doesn’t disappear. There is not some void where romance could be. People who have sexual friendships–which are different than “fuck buddies” and “friends with benefits” in that they usually are more emotional and closer–can have a friendship exactly like any other, where they hang out for fun, trust each other, like each other as people, make each other happy, etc and the sex is just one more thing they do together, no different than playing video games or shopping or watching movies. Friends who have no romantic feelings for each other don’t stop being friends just because they start having sex.

If romance is the only reason you treat your sexual partners with care, respect, sensitivity, and love, then you are a piece of a shit. Also, if you judge other people for having nonromantic sex, you’re a piece of a shit. If you think people who only have romantic sex are superior to people who have nonromantic sex, you’re wrong. You’re also a douche canoe.

An Aromantic Approach to Love

I had an unmistakable aromantic moment today.

I was making small talk with my aesthetician this afternoon, a woman in her mid-40s who’s married to a man and has two kids. She’s been routinely giving me facials for a few years now, so while we don’t know each other well, we aren’t strangers either. I asked her how she met her husband, and she told me the story. Then, she followed up with the question: “Are you dating anybody?” And this time, I said “No,” without explanation. She replied, “By choice?” And I said, “Oh, yeah, definitely by choice.” She responded by saying, in a light and encouraging tone, “You need to go get some life experience. Go date.”

I could harp about the amatonormativity of this comment and how ridiculous or shitty it is that alloromantic allosexuals assume everyone is like them and wants to be in normative romantic-sexual relationships, that they can’t even imagine any other lifestyle than one in which a romantic-sexual relationship is the center of your universe and your primary relationship, that romantic love and sex are not only essential to happiness and fulfillment but definitive of them.

But that’s not what I want to talk about now. I just feel the need to reflect on my emotional reaction to her instruction about dating.

I had an immediate, visceral feeling of “No. That is so NOT what I want to do. That is so NOT how I want to create love in my life.”

And it’s not because I’m asexual. It’s not because I want nonsexual love or because I’m firmly committed to lifelong celibacy. It’s not because trying to form a loving, stable, long-term, totally nonsexual romantic relationship with an alloromantic allosexual person is damn near impossible.

It’s because I don’t want to be someone’s girlfriend/boyfriend/romantic other. It’s because I don’t want any of the shit that goes along with normative romantic relationships. Even if some wonderful romantic asexual dropped out of the sky in front of me and I really liked them and they offered me a romantic relationship that included a lot of the stuff I desire, I still wouldn’t say “yes” because I couldn’t be comfortable with all the trappings of traditional romantic relationships. I’m not going to get married, I’m not going to be monogamous, I’m not going to put one partner on a pedestal above my friendships. I don’t even want to be perceived as someone’s romantic other, by the world, even if the relationship itself is totally accommodating of my nature, relationship style, and preferences.

Yet I do want stable, long-term, committed domestic partnerships. I do want very physically sensual/intimate relationships that include stuff like cuddling and kissing bare skin and co-sleeping and holding hands and caresses. I do want loyalty and love and total emotional intimacy in my important relationships. I do want to feel passionate about the significant people in my life, and I want to be loved and desired and valued equally. I do want to create homes with people I love, who love me. I want to create a family, out of the people I love. I feel love deeply, passionately, with my whole heart and soul, and there are no words adequate to describe how emotional the experience of love is for me. How strong desire is for me, when I want someone.

I think for a long time, without even realizing it, I wrote off aromanticism as something that could apply to me because I had internalized the bullshit idea that you can’t be aromantic and a passionately loving person or a person who wants heavily sensual physical intimacy or a person who wants to be prioritized by another human being in a partner-type role. I’ve known better than that intellectually for a while now, and I’ve been considering myself a WTFromantic asexual, which is on the aromantic-spectrum or closely related to it. I just haven’t fully, deeply, emotionally grasped that someone like me, with my emotional experiences and relationship desires, can be completely aromantic. I allowed the stigma attached to aromanticism to prevent me from identifying with it.

Looking back on my life, even the years of my childhood and adolescence where I thought I wanted a traditional romantic relationship without sex and felt I was attracted to men in a way I wasn’t attracted to women, it’s clear to me that what I’ve always wanted more than anything else was a passionate friendship, in addition to several other romantic or queerplatonic friendships. It’s friendship, not romance, that has been a core desire for me all along. It’s friendship I’m interested in intellectually, creatively, spiritually. It’s friendship I look for in entertainment. It’s friendship that excites me. It’s friendship that I could spend hours talking about or reading about or writing about.

Not friendship as most of the world conceives of it. Not the kind of friendship that romantic people have. Not friendship the way it exists next to traditional romance.

But friendship, all the same.

So in the end, sex is less important than I thought it was when I was an asexual teen just coming into the community. I can relate to aromantic sexual people who have tons of sex more than I can relate to romantic, sex-repulsed asexuals who want traditional romantic relationships and hold amatonormative views of friendship and love. When it comes to creating emotionally salient friendships, I can trust aromantic allosexuals who love to be single more than I can trust romantic asexuals who follow a normative relationship style and philosophy.

Being asexual and celibate are very important parts of who I am, they affect my life in a huge way, but they are not more important than my relationship style or my WTFromanticism. They all matter, and they all powerfully determine and shape what kind of relationships I want and who I can form them with. I won’t have sex for love, and I also won’t play the romance game for love either. Ultimately, the kind of love and connection I want with every particle of my being is not found in romance.

Dating is not how you create friendship. I would argue it’s not the way you create love either, but that’s an idea for another post. For someone like me, who has super specific relationship desires and ultimately wants love that is deep and passionate and real and intimate, the concept of dating to create an amazing connection with someone in a ridiculously short amount of time can be seductive and the structure of that method can also offer a clear path to the goal that’s comforting. But that’s not how friendship is formed. Friendship is not a paint by numbers type of connection, like romance. It’s not something you can whip up in six months or a year. There is no “friendship at first sight,” even if the emotional attraction is very strong between two people. Friendship is crafted slowly and steadily. The intimacy of it, the intensity, the love creeps up on you, and you don’t even notice until you’re right in the middle of it one day. There are no rules, no pre-existing structure or model to imitate, no standard amount of time it takes to reach “super loving, serious friendship” status. Even once you get to that point in a friendship, you have to tend to it for the rest of your life to maintain it at that level, just like a garden.

Part of me wants to apply the narrative of romance to the friendships I want to create, and I am aware that I can’t do that. Even in a friendship that eventually leads to domestic partnership–moving in together and committing to that shared home and assuming the responsibilities of being someone else’s main source of support and care–there’s almost always a much slower build-up to that level of involvement than there is in romance, regardless of how quickly or strongly you like each other. It’s no use to think, “When I’m that close to my friend, when we love each other that much, then I’ll be happy and then I’ll consider my relationship desire satisfied.” It’s not logical, in a friendship, to be disappointed that you aren’t committed-partner-close yet and so your friendship must “mean less” than it would if you were partners. You’re building the friendship. Constantly. You’re on your way to that ultimate desire of having a deep, strong, committed, involved, loving bond with another person. You’re creating it, as you go through the less emotional, less serious stage. That’s it. That’s the whole process of friendship. The friendship is not a result of the process, the friendship is the process. No, you can’t do it in a year or two, like you can with romance. But that doesn’t mean you’re with the wrong friend. That doesn’t mean you’ll never get to that Loving, Primary Partner level with your friend. In the big picture, it doesn’t even mean the friendship is less significant in the earlier stages than it will be in its prime, because you can’t even get to the prime without going through the building process, however long it takes.

Romance and dating is usually, “Okay, we’ve been on 10 dates or 25 dates or whatever, we’re in love! We’ve been dating for 18 months and it’s great, let’s get married! We’re married now, we’ve arrived!”

But friendship–no matter what kind it is: normative best friendship, passionate friendship, romantic friendship, queerplatonic friendship–is: “Who are you? I think I like you. Now I know you more. I like you more. Now I know you more. I like you more. You’ve changed. Who are you now? I know you again. I like you again. I know you more. I love you. I know you more. I love you. I just saw you in a new way. Still love you.”

If I meet someone new and we become friends, I may not know that our friendship is going to be queerplatonic or sensual or a passionate friendship/domestic partnership for a long time. I may be friends with someone for months or years and not expect them to be someone I have a deep, loving, intimate, significant relationship with, and then suddenly, the friendship starts to transform. I may be friends with my future domestic partner(s) for years without realizing they’re the right ones, and then it gradually dawns on us or takes a sudden turn in a more serious direction. At no point can I really write off a close friend as a potential domestic partner or passionate friend or queerplatonic friend or whatever because at no point does it become “too late” for a friendship to develop into something deeper, more serious, or more loving. It’s possible to meet someone and know instantly that you really want to be close friends with them and that you both feel a strong emotional click or chemistry, but even in those situations, actually becoming friends takes time.

Anyway. Next time someone who doesn’t know me well asks me if I’m single or dating or tells me I should date or will find a romantic partner, I hope I’m on my game enough to tell them the truth: I don’t date because I want friendship, not romance.

Most Asexuals Don’t Want to Fuck You.

Dear Allosexuals (that’s anyone who is not on the asexual-spectrum),

The vast majority of asexuals do not want to fuck you. Ever. Even if they’re romantically in love with you. Even if they think you’re cute. Some sex-indifferent asexuals are willing to fuck you, in order to keep you as romantic partners, but if they could have a romantic nonsexual relationship, they would choose that in a heartbeat. Most sex-indifferent asexuals who have sex do not love it or feel excited by it or give a shit about it, even if you give them orgasms. Most of them are doing it just to please you. For that matter, there are sex-repulsed asexuals who will force themselves into sex repeatedly just to please you, and while that choice is not always your fault, make no mistake that it is a sacrifice made for YOU that causes them some degree of pain and discomfort. It is their choice to make, but you also have the ability to turn them down when they offer, if you know sex feels bad to them.

Yes, there are sex-enthusiastic asexuals who like to have sex, some who even love it, and they do it to please themselves as much as to please you. But they are in the minority. An extreme minority. They do not speak for the entire asexual community. Do not assume all asexuals are fuckable just because some are.

Asexuals who like having sex deserve to be acknowledged, but never, ever at the expense of the rest of the community. Never at the expense of sex-repulsed asexuals and sex-indifferent asexuals who err closer to sex-repulsion than not.

Asexuals are not just like you. Asexuals are not “sexual people lite.” Asexuals do not owe you sex. No, not even for romance or “love.” Asexuals cannot be converted into sexual people through sex or sexual pleasure. Asexuals cannot be converted into sexual people through romance or romantic love. Asexuals can have orgasmic or physically pleasurable sex and still hate it, still be sex-repulsed, and still consider it a traumatic experience. Asexuality is not something that can be “cured” with your magical cock or pussy or mouth or fingers, and most of us aren’t looking to be changed anyway.

Being someone’s romantic partner does not entitle you to sex. It doesn’t entitle to you any touch whatsoever. You are obliged to ask for permission every single time, no matter how long you’ve been dating someone, and they have the right and the power to say “no” whenever they want. If you nag at them, bully them, manipulate them, guilt them, threaten to leave them, or any other related behavior, in order to have sex with them, you are being coercive and abusive, and any sex that results from your behavior is unethical and wrong. If your partner says “no” when you ask for sex or try to have sex with them, and you fuck them anyway, you are a rapist. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, if your partner is male or female, it doesn’t matter if you “love” them or if they love you. You are a rapist. Period.

We are not obligated to let you fuck us. We don’t have to try sex to make sure we hate it. We are not obligated to fuck you, just because we have sex drives. We are not obligated to fuck you, even if we masturbate and like it. We don’t need to come up with an excuse for our sex-repulsion/sex-aversion that satisfies you. We do not have to let you fuck us in order to “prove” our love for you. We do not have to let you fuck us in order to be good romantic partners. That tired pop cultural trope “Romantic relationships are about compromise” is not a permission slip for you to fuck someone who really doesn’t want to be fucked or to pull out every coercive tactic in the book and use it against an asexual until they finally surrender and let you have your way.

While we’re on the subject, there are sex-repulsed gray-asexuals, sex-repulsed demisexuals, and even the rare sex-repulsed allosexual. None of them are obligated to fuck you either. Even if they did in the past or fucked someone else in the past.

If you care more about getting laid than you do about being an ethical, caring, loving human being and companion to an asexual, then do everyone a favor and never get romantically or emotionally involved with asexuals, unless they show up on your door step with a big sign that says, “I love sex! Let’s date!”

Thanks.

Sincerely,
The Thinking Asexual

Why Do People Have (Romantic) Relationships?

This is a very useful, important exercise for romantic people, whether asexual or allosexual, to do, to uncover whether or not you’re expecting too much from romantic relationships or to just understand yourself better. It could also be useful for aromantic or aromantic-questioning people, if you turned it around and asked yourself: “What is available in romantic relationships that I do NOT want or need?” or “Why do I NOT want romantic relationships?” The other questions Bish, the author, includes are also worth contemplating. I especially like the one about “Can I get some of these things I want from other relationships?”

Bish

Homework! A task for you to think about why people have romantic relationships

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