Or am I just old and out of touch?

[snowdropsandcrocuses]

DD 15 has a group of friends consisting of all girls except one male. He's a lovely kid. I guess if I described him I would say good kid, loner, long hair, skinny. He's a nice boy but not particularly sociable.

So we're chatting about her friends and she says her male friend (we will call him Jack) is pansexual. I had to Google this to discover it meant he is attracted to both sexes. She then told me, in all seriousness, he is Aromantic.

I had to pause for a second and confirm she meant he does not like/do romance to which I got another honest, straight faced 'yes'

So wait, there is a 15 year old boy in your friendship group (all girls except him) that is attracted to both (all?) genders and is not interested in romance. In other words, he wants to shag but not date?

I swear I don't get it. She cannot see any irony in the term 'aromantic' for a teenage boy. And I want to stop the train and get off!

Does she like to hug people naked in bed, but not shag? I don't know. It all seems a lot of info to tell a parent anyway.

Agree, it's going overboard. People can't just be. There's a need to label or have a diagnosis for everything.

It was a much simpler time in my day when aromantic was just 'can't be arsed' and pansexual was 'shagger'. Required no research.

I said on FB that I like to wear joggers, and I love sci-fi.. and that I don't wear make-up or get my hair all done up. I got told to do some research as there was probably a gender for that.
Um, no. I am XenoBitch. That is literally the only label I need... my name!

He wants to have sex with boys, girls, those who are gender fluid, zebras even? who knows?

It used to be called having a personality, and your sexual orientation was something you found out for yourself as you grew up without the need to declare it on your social media profile at 12 years old!

@Whatsnewpussyhat Nobody expects the same of heterosexual people though, do they? Literally nobody would bat an eyelid if a 12yo girl said she had a boyfriend, or vice versa.

Adolescents have crushes; for LGBTQ+ kids it’s very likely they may have them on people of the same gender. Much better for them to have the vocabulary and knowledge to know that this is ok than for them to feel isolated and othered and like they can’t talk about it.

I know a lot of female students who have said they're greysexual. They're using it as a 'safe' way to turn down boys they don't want to sleep with because everybody has to respect identities like that. It's sad that they believe that that will be respected more than just saying "no", and even sadder if it's true.

I was once asked if I thought I was demisexual by a friend, but I said I was just very fussy.

Ah. Aromantics. Used to call em Fuckboys in my day 😂🤦🏼‍♀️

If you’re one of those people saying there’s no need for labels, and you’re also heterosexual and have never questioned your sexuality/gender… maybe you just can’t see the need for them because you are the norm?

I said in a pp about my friend's daughter who came out as bi, pan, asexual, graysexual and poly.
No one questions that anyone has never felt like that. What is being questioned now is all the various labels, flags and badges for it all.

The need to label is tiresome imo, but there’s nothing wrong with wanting a sex life without having a relationship. As long as you’re upfront about it I don’t see the issue 🤷🏻‍♀️

You're right I've never really questioned my own sexuality and I don't make a point of questioning anyone else's unless I'm romantically interested in them.... because I have the humility to realise how mind-numbingly boring it actually is to most other people and how much it's none of their business...

2n + 2 where n is the number of electrons? #chemistrygeek 😂

Yes.

Straight people doing what (many, not all obvs) straight people do and assume that expressing your sexual and romantic preferences is something bad but only when non-straight people do it.

No different to people up in arms about kids learning about ‘sex’ if the Prince in a book kisses a prince, but not batting an eyelid if he kisses a princess.

Literally nobody would bat an eyelid if a 12yo girl said she had a boyfriend, or vice versa

I would actually. If my daughter came home at the age of 12 and said she had a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, I would be concerned.

My daughter came out when she was 12 and that doesn't bother me at all. She fancies females. So what.

But if she told me she had a girlfriend at the age of 12, 12!!!! Yes I would bat an eyelid. Straight, gay, bi, nobody should be in a 'relationship' at that age.

So you’re assuming everyone here is heterosexual and has never questioned their sexuality? Nice one.

Don’t you think that (a) it’s pretty impressive that anyone can know their “micro-identity” anyway as a teenager with the usual limited life and sexual experience of that age; and (b) attaching a label like “demisexual” simply assumes that no-one else has similar feelings/experiences — when in fact, if you cared to ask, you’d find out lots of people do?

That’s way before we get to the fact that it’s a very recent thing to label and internalise behaviours as identities. Most people over the age of 25 tend to think of their selves as not reduced to collections of preferences or behaviours, many of which are actually undertaken in conjunction with other people, not just isolated within the self — as well as changing over time.

I might feel not very sexual at 25, feel roaringly so but very lesbian at 35, meet men I like at 40 who I want to shag but am not that in love with, then at 50 be mainly attracted to women romantically but less sexually, because I’ve met some like-minded women I get on with….The difference is that I don’t see any of those things as being part of my “identity”: they are experiences I have, in conjunction with the people I meet — but they aren’t some kind of essential aspect of my self. (If I thought they were, I’d be very confused all the time!)

Precisely.

’it’s no one’s business’

Apart from the dozens of ways in which our sexual and romantic preferences get discussed in different scenarios.

Straight people have never had to deal with that because their preferences have never deviated from societal assumptions.

What’s more, they have never had the need to identify other people with similar preferences as them in order to make sense of it or get support - 90% of people around them had the same preferences. The vast majority (until recently the only) depictions in media were of people like them. Those of us growing up queer - of whatever shade - needed to find others like us because it was the way to make sense of why we didn’t feel like society and media told us we should. And to form communities to combat the ignorant sneering so prevalent on this thread.

(I see there are even more posters on the thread now assuming we’re all straight! You couldn’t be more wrong; and that in itself shows the arrogance of this fad for labels and “identities”. Perhaps, if you cared to listen to some of the old mummies you assume are so ignorant about sexuality, you might hear something interesting and useful.)

No. I like a 'prefer not to say' on a questionnaire. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be labeled.
You don't have to fit in that box of what you describe as 'the norm' heterosexual, never questioning sexuality to think that you don't have to be defined by a label. The labels at the moment seem to be sexual or gender specific.
It's fine to identify as yourself, as diverse and as complex as that might be. Thoughts and feelings change. Not everyone desires to be pigeonholed.

All this is just a huge load of assumptions, lots of which are not true. And less of the “queer”, thanks. Lots of us have had that shouted at us as a nasty slur and don’t feel like reclaiming it; but that still doesn’t mean you can go about assuming everyone’s straight and “sneering”.

You could do with less of the making heteronormative assumptions yourself to be honest, and more of the being a bit more open to listening to others’ lived experiences.

That whole post sounds like it is also arguing against gay and bi people adopting the ‘label’ and the identity.

After all, in your example, you’re suggesting that the potential change in sexual orientation (or perhaps realisation that the original sexual orientation was never real or right in the first place) is an argument against adopting labels.

Why would it be any different for a 16 year old to come out as gay than for a 16 year old to come out as pan?

Of course both 16 year olds have other attributes about themselves - they are not defined solely by their sexual preferences (defining their sexual orientation doesn’t imply otherwise); both might in the future decide their sexual orientation has changed, or was never pan/gay to begin with and they were mistaken (but so what?).

I assume you’re not claiming even gay people should not have labels, identities and communities? So why shouldn’t pansexual and other identities have the same?

If you’ve read the thread and not concluded that the vast majority of posters are straight and wouldn’t know a queer identity if it bit them on the backside, then you’re not reading the same thread.

Of course there may be some LGBT+ posters joining in the sneering - they’re not much different to the small minority of gay people who used to (maybe some still do?) sneer at bi people - but the vast majority of sneerers are very obviously straight and all of them are very wrong.

Also lolz to the “Straight people have never had to deal with their sexual and romantic preferences getting discussed in different scenarios because their preferences have never deviated from societal assumptions”.Throughout all of recorded history women’s sexual and romantic preferences and whether they are right or wrong or normal or abnormal or societally approved of or not have been up for discussion everywhere and every which way going.

The idea that “queer” people are uniquely oppressed by everyone wanting to know about, discuss and police their sexuality, but that straight women don’t experience this, is so laughable and historically ignorant it’s almost funny. On the very day Roe v Wade gets overturned; yet somehow the identitarians still think that “cis straight” women somehow enjoy great societal freedom from having their “sexuality discussed in different scenarios” …

Me too!