What's with assexualo suddenly being a thing?

[n0wayn0h0w]

My 14 year old DD has just come to me to say she's assexual. She goes to an all girls school and is worried she's never had a crush. She said she went online, watched some TikTok videos and now feels happy to know there's "nothing wrong" with her because she's assexual.

I told her she's never had a crush because the odds are she's into boys and never meets any so there's no opportunity for crushes. I told her some people get crushes on people they don't know, based on appearance but many need to know the person in order to feel attracted to them in that way.

I also said it's normal for teens to question who they are as they're growing up.

It's so insidious, children are out there looking for answers and the internet churns out labels for them.

Anyone got any advice on this?

No, I think it's very different being (or being perceived to be) between partners, or looking but not finding a partner, or being "done with men" than it is to be known to never date. There's a lot of disbelief for a start.

This isn't about adults dating, not dating or anything else that adults do - it's about a child being fed a diet of crap on TikTok and believing that her perfectly normal lack of sexual feelings as a child must somehow be labelled. The pressures that some adults place on children to conform to one label or another is mind blowing.

But when I was an asexual child, it would have been enormously helpful to my mental health to know that asexuality was a thing, and that I wasn't a freak when I was the only one of my friends not obsessed with snogging. Just like a gay child knowing that being gay is normal.

Your mental health would have been better served by being told your lack of sexual feelings were perfectly normal for a child. Many of us didn't at that age.

That's what people DID say. And I could see they were talking bollocks because everyone else my age was snogging and groping. So I thought I was broken. Which was awful for my mental health. If I had known that asexuality was a thing, I could have thought maybe I was that, which would have been correct. I did wonder for a while it meant I was meant to be a nun, as they were the only non sexual adult women I had ever heard of.

i always presumed asexual was cold turkey so to speak ?

And yet despite that, your asexual label still doesn't seem to have made you happy.

What's making me unhappy is the bigots on this thread.

And the rest.

Wow, saying a child shouldn't be given a sexualised label is now being a bigot? This is a massive problem, we can have sensible discussions without people calling us bigots.

In terms of adults being asexual, I don't care. I've got no interest my friends' and colleagues' private lives. I genuinely don't care whether they're single or not, it has no interest to me. I wouldn't wonder why and I wouldn't dream of asking. If anyone did, I'd think they were nosy and out of line. We humans are entitled to our privacy.

What I'm objecting to is a child being told she may be asexual merely because she hasn't met anyone she fancies yet. That doesn't make me a bigot.

I think "bigot" is a lazy term casually bandied around by people who have run out of logical arguments.

Straight and gay are sexualised terms, that are regularly used about teenagers. So what is so wrong with asexual? Which is less sexual than either, as it's about not wanting to have sex. And I presume you missed the posts I made about how not knowing asexuality was a thing harmed my mental health as a teenager?

Straight and gay are terms that describe a sexuality and sexual feelings. The absence of sexual feelings in children at a particular stage in their development (which is what we're discussing on this thread - not grown adults) is perfectly normal.

It is also perfectly normal, if you're going to be an asexual adult, to be an asexual teenager. The child in this discussion clearly feels that asexuality is a mental shorthand that makes her more comfortable. It may well also be the right label, given that she's already mid teens. If she happens to be a late developer, she can come up with another label later. But finding a name that makes her happy, and is accepted by her peers, is far better than the position I was in of all my age group thinking I was weird as fuck and broken. Which was awful for my mental state and significantly contributed to my teenage suicidal ideation.

And a state which still seems to make you unhappy to this day.

Children of 14 aren’t old enough to have sex. With anyone. For good reason. The aren’t fully developed yet. All children are asexual until they aren’t, because they are still children. Just like all children are single until they aren’t, because they are still children.

Adult sexuality isn’t something they can know at that stage, especially since everyone develops at different rates. Normalising a label for anyone’s sexuality at that age is inappropriate. Adults, who have settled feelings - absolutely.

But developing children, who may go through all sorts of phases of exploration and experimentation before settling on who they actually are, shouldn’t be given an adult label at that age. We shouldn’t be transposing adult sexualities onto children.

I’m very sorry that you were othered to such a degree in your childhood and that it had such a terrible impact on you. Clearly you were surrounded by quite sexually precocious children, but I don’t believe that your peer group was typical of all children, and I don’t believe it’s typical of all children now to be so obsessed by sex and sexuality as young as 14. If it is the case then parents have an even greater duty to fight back against this form of peer pressure, bullying and labelling of children.

So gay children do not exist? It all just suddenly happens the day they turn 16? 18? 21?

Plus sexuality/attraction/crushes/romantic interest and having sex /being ready to have sex aren’t the same thing. Plenty of children have little crushes or fancy someone . Plenty of children don’t. Neither is abnormal or wrong.
Deciding for a child what they are or aren’t based purely on their age doesn’t change anything, and is rather daft.

Do you really think that if OP’s DD said she likes Jimmy OP would’ve started a thread saying she’s too young at 14 to like anyone and maybe she’ll change her mind and she’s actually gay?

She hasn’t “been told”. She has certain feelings or more accurately she hasn’t (yet) and wondered if it’s normal and did some “investigating “. She found out that there is a name for it. Whether it applied to her or not remains to be seen , but at the moment she was reassured and happy that it’s perfectly normal.
She will grow up, things might change or might not. She might change , she might not. It’s not actually harming her in any way at the moment.

Will you still have a problem with it when she’s older?

it's not the same and you know it.

Having feelings for someone at age 14 = normal
Having no feelings for someone at age 14 = normal
Telling kids they are asexual if they don't crush on people at age 14 = not normal

she has been told.

She looked it up online, a search term along the lines of "is it normal to not have a crush at 14" and articles, threads and videos popped up telling her she must be asexual.

Really what I'd like to pop up would be words along the lines of "yes, it's totally normal to not have a crush at 14, lots of people feel this was and people mature at different rates".

Fourteen is very young. I went to a girls school and didn’t have any interest in boys (actual boys in real life) until I was 17/18. I was definitely someone who needed to get to know them before developing an attraction. I remember my brother asked me if I was gay and I said no and that was the end of it. I’d just tell her everyone develops on their own timeline and that you’ll be fine with whatever her sexuality is but that fourteen is too young to call it.

I agree that most people who say they're asexual and leave it at that won't have an issue changing their minds. I think the problem is when young people make it a big part of their identity. If they find a community based off that then that can go away if they later discover they're not.