Asexuality: A Brief Introduction

Also, I want to note that these thoughts or experiences should not be taken as some sort of manifesto of the unquestioned and unified belief system of all asexuals. They’re not necessarily the right experiences or the wrong experiences, and certainly, some of them may be misguided or born out of ignorance. I am writing about them here because some asexuals have passed through these thoughts on their way to discovering their identity, and I felt it was important to mention them for those people still making the journey and who may currently be thinking the same thoughts.)

Personality and Identity

In this first installment, I’m going to talk mostly about personal thoughts, thoughts about yourself and your identity.

You don’t think about sex.

When thinking about activities you’d like to do with a romantic interest, sex rarely makes the list. You might not catch the punchline to a dirty joke, because you’re not operating in that frame of reference. When other people start talking about sex, you have to take a second to remember that other people think about that sort of thing. When you hear that old statistic that people think about sex every seven seconds, you only think about how wrong that statistic is.

You realize that everyone else thinks about sex in a completely different manner than you do.

One day, I was talking with a friend about some sex scene on a TV show I’d seen the day before. I was trying to figure out the positioning and mechanics of what was supposedly going on because it didn’t make sense to me. As the conversation went on, it became apparent that I was focused on the wrong thing, that it wasn’t meant to be about the impossible and/or uncomfortable contortions required to make the scene believable, it was meant to be about the sex.

This, in itself, wasn’t weird. I’ll often find things odd about scenes in movies or TV shows and try to sort out the problems afterward. What was weird is that at no point in the conversation did I ever think anything like “Oh hey, sex! Yay!” I realized that I never really did think that way. Ever.

So I started rewinding my life, going over various sexual situations from my past. What struck me was how, in almost every single one of them, there was something that made me feel different. Left out. One or two things over the years might have just been a fluke. A handful of things bunched together during one summer might have just been a phase. But here, in event after encounter after situation, consistently, for close to 20 years since the start of puberty, there was something different.

I don’t find people “hot”.

My girlfriend had to be very persistent to convince me to have sex with her.

I find most porn to be boring or unappealing.

I zone out of most conversations about sex.

I never had “urges”.

I never saw the point of a bachelor party.

And on and on the list went. It became absolutely clear to me that my views on sex were completely different from anyone else I’d ever talked to. It wasn’t some isolated thing. There was something fundamentally different about me.

It was because of that realization that I went out to try to discover exactly what it was that was going on with me, which is how I discovered asexuality.

You think of sex in anthropological or scientific terms, rather than romantic or erotic terms.

You might be interested in sex, but interested in the same way one is interested in geology or zoology. You see it as an area of study, rather than an area of participation. You might want to know everything about it and read everything you can about sexual activities, practices, variants, and combinations, yet at the same time, you’re not really interested in actually doing any of them. You’d rather watch a Discovery Channel documentary on sex than a porn movie. You’d rather read the Kinsey Report than Penthouse.