Asexuality

I think its confusing when someone says theyre asexual but still like sex etc, or that asexuality is a spectrum

Why is it confusing?
I'm not asexual, it's a term I've only recently become aware of thanks to on here, but it seems to me to be describing someone who has no initial sexual attraction to anyone?
That's different to enjoying sex when you start doing it, surely?

Aren't you describing what in less enlightened times was called being a late developer?

It sounds like labelling yourself as asexual and incorporating that into your identity would have been counterproductive.

It wasn’t until my late 20s that I had the experience of being sexually attracted to a person. I guess I could have described myself as asexual. Prior to that I had relationships, I had sex that I quite enjoyed but it was not the same as feeling real visceral physical attraction.

To be totally honest I think a large part of the change was because I had a period of working away from home. This was pre internet with no TV in my room either so I had a lot of time to masturbate and really tap into my fantasies and what turned me on, and discover my own body. This just seemed to feed into my relationships and I found myself feeling real sexual chemistry with people and developing passionate relationships.

So from my own point of view I’d just say that people can change.

Loops, I'm working my way through the thread so apples if this has already been answered...

I can't reconcile being asexual with having a high sex drive as you said earlier on. Surely having a high sex drive = desiring lots of sex, the opposite of asexual?

I can understand that for various reasons an ace may have a lot of sex, but surely they wouldn't by definition desire a lot of sex?

I saw this thread and decided to read it to find out more about what asexuality is and I am now far more baffled than before I started.

Asexual = not sexually attracted to anyone. But you might still actually have sex with someone? Sounds like there’s a conflict of interest.
I spent years having sex with a man because I was too worried about what might happen if I told him I didn’t find him sexually attractive anymore. These days, that would be classed as marital rape.

I worry so much about young girls in particular being coerced into having sex with others by being persuaded that you can be asexual and yet still have sex to please your partner. I’d make my partner his favourite meal even if I didn’t like it, or buy him an album off his favourite band, or buy him tickets for a football game - all things I don’t enjoy. But have sex with him to keep him happy? Nah. That’s all kinds of wrong.
No means no.

The need for / trend towards / desire to commodify or categorise every aspect about one's life is worrisome. If A does not acknowledge their friend B's differences then A may be viewed as [whatever]phobic or intolerant or hateful when A is nothing of the sort but simply does not care about B's sexuality but likes B as a friend.

The need to label a person's lack of libido seems odd but I can't quite figure out why.

It's fallicious to say that because we wouldn't say that being homosexual and being heterosexual come from trauma, we could not say the same about someone who considers themselves asexual.

For one thing, we can't even assert that with total confidence about those other categories. No one really knows what influences people's adult sexual identity, as much as some would like to say we do. And it may well not be the same for everyone.

But it is just a serious misunderstanding of how these kinds of categories work or came to exist to assume that a new one, asexual, is equivalent to those others.

These are not ideological or ethical questions about causes, they are materialist and scientific and causative.

One prediction I will make. When the conversion therapy Trojan Horse issue hots up, the asexual identity is going to be useful to the genderists because they'll be able to argue that for asexuals conversion therapy can mean corrective rape. The goal here will be to argue that conversion therapy applies in much the same way to whatever is under the whole queer/trans umbrella.

I do wish people wouldn't make comments questioning whether asexuality is a result of childhood trauma, sexual abuse etc... it feeds the narrative that sexual attraction is 'normal' and not experiencing it must make you broken. This is exactly what people said, and in some circles continue to say, about homosexuality and the justification used by many people for conversion therapy.

'People' didn't say anything like that. One person asked whether there had been any studies into the effect of childhood trauma on sexual desire- bit of a leap from that to justifying gay conversion therapy.

It's not reasonable to assert that never feeling sexual desire is 'normal' and therefore any investigation of possible causes is some sort of prejudice.

I also think the ubiquity of online dating has had an enormous impact on people's desire to self-categorise. This is why behaviours and personality traits that everyone kind of intuitively knew they were navigating pre-internet (like relative levels of sexual appetite or desire) have suddenly become Great Big Tribal Labels.

30+ years ago people met in person, felt some sort of attraction (instantaneously, or growing slowly over time), and dated. It was a process of trial and error, and loads of people discovered quickly or slowly that their initial attraction might not have legs over time. Now people online shop for what they want, so they need to be able to define what they're looking for. Therefore, they need to self-define first. In theory, this should save time.

However, I suspect that the online matching model isn't all its cracked up to be, either. When I think about what's made my own marriage work, it's a mix of compatibilities many of which we couldn't have articulated when we first met in our mid-20s. There just isn't really a shortcut for the process of finding out just how compatible you really are with someone over time.

I think its confusing when someone says theyre asexual but still like sex etc, or that asexuality is a spectrum. I dont think it is and I think that dilutes it.
Being demisexua grey romantic twice removed is bullshit, but being asexual in itself is useful to know

Gwen scientific basis for what? For sexuality being innate, for asexuality existing, for the fact that people have used the arguments that homosexuality was caused by abuse or trauma as a justification for conversion therapy?

Also yes, people can make any comment they want, I just said I wish they wouldn't.

I would hope that if I came along and said the same about homosexuality that people would report my comment as being homophobic or call me out on it.

People can say what they want, but as an asexual person I can also express the harm that views like that cause and say that I wish people wouldn't say that.

Also evidence would suggest about 2% of the population are asexual, so yes it is a normal variation and it is not common but also it's vanishingly rare.

I’m sorry, I’m really trying but I just don’t get it. Being asexual doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t feel sexual desire. It doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want to be in a partnered relationship. It doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t want to have sex. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have low or absent libido. It doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t masturbate or take part in other sexual activities. It doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have sex. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t necessarily enjoy the sex you have .....

How on earth does any of this make you different from the average person who doesn’t call themselves asexual?

on one hand, I think it could be to do with increased hormonal contraceptive and antidepressant use, and there might be lots of people that think theyre asexual but arent.
On the other hand, i think its actually quite useful to know, as I think if someone actually thinks about their level of sexual interest in general, then it could help avoid really unsatisfactory relationships

It's been known since forever that many people, for all kinds of reasons, don't have any sex, or much sex, or aren't very interested in the sex they do have, and all of this includes people in relationships or marriages. It used to actually be expected that many or most people would have some periods of their lives like this.

There has been a strain of pop culture for the last, maybe 50 years, that takes the view that all adults to be healthy and happy should be having a satisfying sex life, and there has also been a tendency to not realise that actually quite a lot of people are not having sex. At the same time there has been a loss of respect for deep friendships. People who believe all this tend to be young, or not very insightful, everyone else knows it's just false though they may feel badly they seem to be left out.

I can't help but think rather than rectifying the latter situation the whole asexual thing is actually buying into it.

They are like retailers growing their product line to preserve demand.

This is an absolutely perfect description of how some organisations are operating. And it correlates as well to actual retailers growing their actual product lines. Anyone remember the budweiser flag glasses a few prides back? Every "identity" had its own glass, there were about 15 different flag branded glasses to chose from. It was a real light bulb moment for me as to why some people have such a strong interest in the concept of "identity". We're literally having each aspect of our personalities broken down into marketable chunks, branded, and then sold them back to us. I'm not saying that being asexual is a fad or anything btw, but the desire of (mostly young) people to label each facet of their personality as an "identity" is definitely being driven by commercial interest and marketing.

I’m or going to make it worse, hopefully, by saying that for the longest time we have all made assumptions about sexuality (not having a go(!) but pp above saying gay men are unlikely to have sex with women from a desiring sexual position, is for instance, one of these assumptions- a quick google of George Michael’s own words would tell you how it goes).
I’m always interested in what people have to say about sexuality, to a degree, but it gets tedious if it’s just a lecture to tell us why we are wrong (because we probably all are, a lot of the time)

While I appreciate you taking the trouble to explain the concepts loops, I don't look at the world through the lense of genderism so I'm afraid much of it still doesn't really make useful sense to me (I understand other opinions are available...)

The hope being that if it becomes accepted to that extent then people will stop saying things about fixing asexual people or telling young ace people that they'll find the right person in the future, or that they're too young to know how they really feel.

You could swap the words "asexual/ace" in that statement with the word "single" and it could apply to hundreds of thousands of people without them having to make an identity claim based on it, and I'd also agree with lonel when they said:

I think far from promoting inclusion, labeling facets of personality as an identity is problematic as many people will experience periods in their lives when they are not interested in sex. Maybe that will change, maybe not but it is hard to go against what has been labelled as your "true self".

I'm glad to read that loopsdefruit, I didn't want to give the impression that I was having a go. This is a fascinating area and deserves careful consideration with a good amount of critical thinking.

nauticant I would absolutely agree with you there!