Implied gender, and why I’m not “bisexual”

(Some more attempts at trying to explain myself to the heteronormative world...)

"Heterosexual", "homosexual", "bisexual" - what are the implications of using one of those labels about oneself? What are the underlying assumptions of the system wherein these labels exist? Describing yourself with one of those labels essentially says: "There are two (biological) sexes in the world: male and female. Males have penises, women have vaginas and breasts. Every person belongs to either one or the other sex, based on their chromosomes. Every person is sexually attracted to a whole class of other people based on whether their biological sex is male or female. Most people are attracted to people of the opposite sex to their own (heterosexual), some people are attracted to people of the same sex as their own (homosexual), and some people are attracted to people of the same sex as well as people of the opposite sex (bisexual). The nature of this attraction is that some level of interest exists in wanting to do sexual things with the other people."
THAT is the subtext that I'm finding so difficult to relate to. And is the reason why I don't feel "bisexual" really fits me.
Although I am biologically female, the whole idea of dividing people up as attractive and not attractive based on whether they have XX chromosomes like me, or XY chromosomes, makes no sense to me at all. To illustrate, imagine that you live in a world where it is terribly significant what color your eyes are. Let's say your eyes are blue. Let's say that since you were a little child, everyone has subtly and overtly let you know that you are expected to be attracted to people whose eyes are brown. Then you would be hetero-ocular. You start to make a big deal out of that and you enhance and give more meaning to your experience every time you find you like someone whose eyes are brown, and you downplay your experience every time you find you like someone whose eyes are blue. Because if you liked someone whose eyes are blue, you would be homo-ocular. Until one day you realize: "What's all this eye-color crap? I like a lot of people, and I so don't care what their eye color is!" And when you declare that, people tell you: "Oh, so you are bi-ocular then!" But calling yourself bi-ocular is meaningless to you because eye color simply has no relevance to you. Truly bi-ocular people are attracted to people BASED around their eye color in relation to their own eye color, and are able to find blue as well as brown equally attractive, each for their own reasons. Whereas to you, eye color is not something you pay much attention to.
The nature of the attraction is supposed to be an interest in doing sexual things. I've been with this question a lot, what is the attraction that I experience towards people. Trying to understand what is sexual attraction. Growing up and I think through most of my twenties, I implicitly believed that I was sexually attracted to EVERYBODY. I experience this potential for enjoyable touch with, basically, everybody that I spend even a little time with, and with all of my friends. Physical expression of affection is very important to me and my whole life I have experienced frustration about social norms allowing what seems to me to be only a very limited display of affection between people who are "just friends". Yet at the same time, I would never fantasize about actually having sex with someone. When I am really attracted to someone (in my own way), I want to gaze in their eyes, I want to touch them in a most tender and loving way, hold them, kiss them and caress them, I want to talk with them and share truth and authenticity. I want to be comforting and comforted, nurturing and nurtured. When I feel longing for them, I feel it in my chest rather than my genitals. While I feel open to being sexual, it is something I enjoy vicariously rather than for its own sake, and it is not something I have ever felt like I missed, or needed, from anybody. The expression "going all the way" makes no sense to me, because it does not feel like I'm going down any way that has any end-point. I don't understand from inner experience, why relationships in which genitals are touched, deserve a special name and status and are elevated above relationships in which genitals are not touched, as if those other relationships were somehow second-class and less real, or less loving. I do feel like I have a powerful intimacy drive, and yet sex is not my favorite expression of intimacy.
While I don't feel that "bisexual" describes me very well, and I would feel it would be deceptive to use this word about myself, perhaps I could say that I'm "homo-genderal" - attracted to people of the same gender, that is, a gender somewhere close to neutral, neither male nor female. Regardless of whether they are biologically male- or female-sexed. And what that attraction feels like, is that I want to be around them, touch them, be affectionate with them, relate to them, care about them - I dig them, I feel comfortable with them and at ease. I feel like I belong.
Basically, sex = your genes, xx, or xy, and your physical male or female characteristics. Gender = your subjective feeling of maleness or femaleness. For most people, the two seem to be so welded together that there is never a reason to make any distinction. You are born with a penis, and you feel male, and you are attracted to women. End of story, you never question it. However, some people feel strongly about their gender being other than their sex - and this identity seems to be something they know even as small children, before they ever enter puberty and become sexually attracted. For example, a biological female may feel that their gender is strongly male, and may have a sex change operation to become male. Irrespective of this, they could be sexually attracted to either men (androsexual) or women (gynosexual), regardless of their own gender identification. (The point: it's not being attracted to women that defines your subjective gender-maleness, being attracted to women only defines your sexual orientation. Sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity, get to be three different unrelated things in this model - whereas for most people they are one thing (the inadequate hetero- homo- bi- model).) Some transgender people feel alternately male or female, or both at the same time, throughout their lives. While some people (like myself) never quite grasp the idea of belonging to a gender, and feel that trying to be either male, female, or both, is a misrepresentation of how they feel. Okay, imagine this. It's like you're born and you're given one of two choices, to be either a republican or a democrat. While you often vote democrat and are in general aligned in superficial appearance and behavior with many democrats, you still feel no affiliation with the democratic party, and don't feel comfortable being labeled a democrat. That's kind of how I feel about being labeled female. I don't feel either like that, or like the other option.
The traditional labels of hetero, homo, and bi, are based on the assumption that THE defining thing in my attraction to people is the relationship of my biological sex to their biological sex (different, the same, or both different and the same). Whereas their biological sex to me is as irrelevant as the color of their eyes. The defining thing in my attraction to people is a sense of emotional and spiritual resonance, a similar degree of self-awareness and willingness to trust and self-disclose. Physical appearance plays a role to the degree that a person is more attractive to me if they are well-groomed and healthy and looking content and comfortable in their body. Also, a strongly feminized or strongly masculinized physical appearance may put me off, for no other reason than that I feel I am being perceived by them inside of that same binary, and that I would have to play a very traditional female role with them, which does not come naturally to me.
Another way to look at it is to see people as colors. Imagine a color wheel. In a color, you can measure not only its hue, but also its brightness and saturation. It’s as if the traditional model divides people by whether they are blue or pink (bio males or bio females), and considers that to be the most important factor.



They will say that heterosexuals are people who look for contrasting hues, homosexuals look for non-contrasting hues, and bisexuals look for both contrasting and non-contrasting hues. In any event, it's about hues. Whereas I perhaps perceive and parse the color spectrum along a different axis altogether. Maybe what is of primary significance to me as a color is not my hue, but my saturation. I’m attracted to other people who are unsaturated colors.



The fact that this happens to overlap with both contrasting and non-contrasting hues, is beside the point for me. I perceive people who are strongly based in a gendered identity, as more saturated, and less interesting. Maybe I also see more hues than just pink and blue.

Sexual attraction

Since declaring myself asexual about a year and a half ago, I have done more experimentation, had more candid discussions and experienced more diverse situations involving sexuality than in my whole previous life. And I have been able to do that because I now felt secure in the knowledge that the only thing that is required of me, is to follow my own natural impulses, and there was no pressure to act in any way that I might have previously thought I needed to act, out of an obligation to comply with “normal”. So I want to shout that from the rooftops to “experts” who fear that asexual people are closing themselves off prematurely: I and many others share your value of self-exploration. Very much.
I am fortunate to have experienced a trusting, emotionally intimate and mutually supportive relationship with a close friend, who does feel sexual attraction towards me. Now that I know that a) I am not required to respond, and that b) I am free to have any reaction, people who are attracted to me no longer freak me out, and I feel quite comfortable addressing this. I feel open to receiving and feeling whatever is being felt by them or me.
I’ve found that although it never occurred to me to have sexual ideas (I may have wanted to be more physically affectionate) before my friend’s attraction was made explicit to me – I am able to respond to the feeling of sexual attraction. My body senses and resonates with the longing, and feels a quickening of energy when near, which is enjoyable. At some point, I want to write a separate post about the concepts of “proceptive” and “receptive” sexual desire – I seem to lack proceptive, the initiative and drive part, but am capable of receptive arousal. At the same time, I can’t seriously imagine initiating something like this without a strong desire on the part of the other: I just wouldn’t believe myself.
So recently I’ve been feeling the feelings that this brings up. It still doesn’t really involve sexual fantasy in terms of body parts, but it does involve an attraction to something. It occurs to me that the desire I feel, is basically for surrender. It’s a desire to be completely open, free, loving. Desire for absence of any conflict and tension, utter flow and total intimacy, absolute nakedness in the sense of having nothing to hide, being completely real. I imagine these are desires shared across sexual orientations. I may or may not express them through sex – it would not be my first choice, as I lack the primary drive.
The presence of this person inspires a great openness in me. And I think I get now that what is commonly referred to as “sexual attraction” is when you think you need that particular person to cause these wonderful feelings of letting go, openness and unguardedness for you. I find that problematic. It places the responsibility for feeling your feelings, on an external stimulus. Whereas in fact, the way I see it, what’s primary is my longing to be completely open, real and transparent. The reason there is attraction to a particular person is because we somehow only ALLOW ourselves to feel those feelings around them, because we consider that person safe. We close down around other people because we consider them unsafe. I realized this in the middle of a wave of gripping desire to be close to my friend. That what I really wanted, was not this person per se, it was the feelings I am able to have with them. I realized: “I’m really longing to surrender.” And what came to me was – “Just be the openness.” Allow yourself to feel that much intimacy and flow, right now, with yourself. That switch was very soothing and nourishing and pleasurable, and released the obsessive focus on the person instantly.
This is not to say that I intend to just be by myself all the time. Only that there’s a possibility to share this intimacy with each other freely, rather than obsessively, rather than believing the other person has to provide it for us.

How does asexuality feel

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DO THIS SURVEY, IT'S INTELLIGENT

So I have several ideas what I want to blog about here, but I never get around to it. It's much easier for me to produce text if I'm responding to something or dialoguing, rather than creating content from scratch. So I'm plugging my answers to the survey here, to fill this blog. But don't read them until you've completed the survey yourself, okay?


1. How would you define/describe asexuality?
This is a tricky question. It assumes that there is an "asexuality" out there in the objective world in the same way a "table" is out there in the objective world, and can be grabbed and defined. But the word only means what anyone uses it to mean. So when I use the word, I don't want to imply that I am referring to something objective out there.
People use the word to mean various similar things, the one thing there seems to be some consensus on is that it is a "lack of sexual attraction". That of course brings up the question "what the hell is sexual attraction", and people who ostensibly don't experience any, are poorly qualified to describe it.
So while this definition may make sense to people who experience sexual attraction and know for sure what that feels like, I feel a sore lack of a definition that would describe the asexual experience "from the inside". We are forced to define ourselves by the absence of something we don't understand to begin with.
If I try to approach a definition, I would have to say something like "asexuality is a way of relating to the world that does not refer to sexual relationships or to oneself in a sexual context, as a means of seeing or defining oneself".

2. How would you define/describe sexual attraction?
Good one. I don't know. I've wondered that myself. I used to take it for granted that I knew what sexual attraction meant. It took me several decades to figure out that what other people mean when they say this, may actually not refer to anything in my experience. I used to think I was sexually attracted to pretty much everyone I felt friendly towards, because I wanted to touch them. That was embarrassing and I unconsciously believed there was something wrong with me. After some intense soul-searching and frank conversations, it turns out that people referring to sexual attraction mean a kind of magical pull towards someone that overcomes them, they have no power over it, and they begin to fantasize about how pleasurable it would be to engage in sexual activity with that person. I started to consider the strange possibility that maybe I don't know what that means.

3. How would you define/describe sexual desire?
It seems to be a clear wish that you want to have sex with someone. Which seems strange and arbitrary, from this perspective - how can it be so clear to you that you want to engage in that particular activity with someone? Having the need for a term for "sexual desire" seems like having a need for a term for "desire to make peanut butter jelly sandwiches with someone on Tuesday afternoons". Like, how do you know that's exactly what you want? I mean, it might be fun or interesting if you did that, but how often does it come up as such a clear expression?

4. How would you define/describe romantic attraction?
That's more an emotional thing. It's happened to me a few times, to various degrees of intensity. It's when someone is very very important to you and you want to be equally important to them, in its extreme stages wanting to be the most important people in the world to each other. You are especially elated to spend time with that person and love everything about them, and are in heaven if they show affection or attraction to you. It's a kind of extreme form of attachment. You think about them all the time and you are totally dependent on their attention. You put all your energy and hopes in life into this person. It's tiring and distracting and addictive. This person is your euphoria drug.

5. What are some factors that initially lead you to consider yourself as an asexual?
I was considering whether I was bisexual, because I was suffering an identity crisis I guess and a failing relationship, I was trying to be absolutely truthful to myself and had to admit that I had been attracted to people regardless of their gender. I was browsing some bisexual forums and came upon the word "asexual". I linked to Aven and felt relieved to discover that it was actually possible, valid and legitimate to not have the feelings I had always been telling myself I am supposed to have, and very healing to consider the possibility that maybe I'm not just horribly repressed.

6. How would you distinguish asexuality from a sexual dysfunction such as sexual desire disorder?
Simple. If you used to have sexual desire, and now you don't, but you want to have it - then you have a problem. If you never had sexual desire and don't miss it, then you're asexual. As for distress, yeah distress can be experienced, but the distress is not inherent to being asexual, it's caused by the social stigma and feeling different and unacceptable.

7. How might you have described your sexuality BEFORE you came across the term 'asexual'?
I guess I always checked the "heterosexual" box, though I always kind of felt like a fraud. Like I'm misrepresenting something I myself wasn't exactly sure of. It's like being asked about your religion and then given three choices, none of which you really identify with in your heart, but you don't realize that it's possible to not be part of any of these religions because everyone in your country belongs to a church, and it's unthinkable that you wouldn't too. Just before discovering asexuality, I started to seriously consider "admitting" that I was bisexual.

8. What questions would you use (without describing or using the term 'asexual') to identify an individual who might be asexual but has not yet come across the term?
What a great question! This touches directly on my need I expressed above to have a definition "from the inside". Because I didn't immediately identify with "asexual", it took me a little while to overcome the brainwashing that says "everyone is sexual, you should be sexual, those [asexual] people are just broken". I would ask questions such as:
- Was there ever a time in your life from which point on it was clear to you what sexual attraction means?
- If it was okay to never have sex, would you feel deprived to never have sex again?
- Is there anyone that you consider "hot", and how would you describe what that means?
- If you have a relationship to the word "hot", what happens in your body when you see someone that is "hot"?
- Has sex ever seemed like a chore, and have you ever wondered why people get so excited about it?
- Did you often feel out of place as a teenager when other kids hooked up with each other, and you didn't know how to or what it was all about?
- Did you ever invent crushes in order to not be different from your friends and have something exciting to talk about?
- Did you ever fail to relate to all the fuss about makeup and hair and scents and making yourself look attractive to the preferred gender?
- Have you felt confused about what sexual messages you might be sending, and have felt shy about being free with your body because you never knew how it was going to be interpreted?
- Have you thought that surely, people cannot think about sex every day, or been stunned to discover that most people actually masturbate regularly?
- Have you been embarrassed by sexual jokes because you couldn't relate or didn't get the reference and suddenly everyone was laughing hysterically and you felt left out?
- Have you had the opportunity to have sex with someone you really loved, and often felt like this is something you should want to do, though if you could have it your way, you'd be perfectly happy to just snuggle?
- Have you always felt like there was something strange with you in the area of sexuality, that you felt different, though you could never quite explain what was wrong?
- Have you felt pressured to talk about your sexuality and felt like a fraud for describing how you thought you should feel, not how you actually felt?

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I’d love to hear if people can come up with more questions to ask someone who might potentially identify with “asexual” but hasn’t yet heard that asexuality was possible!

Squish!

New word to add to the vocabulary of asexual experience: squish! I get squishes!

---UPDATE---
I added "squish" to the Urban dictionary: go vote it up so it can rise in the rankings!
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Invented in this thread on Aven.

Others have described it beautifully, so I will copy:

I've been trying for a looong, loooong time how to describe the "crushes" I get on people. It was getting frustrating having to say "I got crushes on people, but they weren't really crushes because blah blah, and so blah blah blah......." So I finally decided to just pick a word, and I'm calling them SQUISHES. I just have a desire to talk to the person and be friends with them. I may desire romance for a brief period of time, but then I'll be over it and I'll be glad that desire passed. [...] There's one guy that I have a squish on right now. He's very sexual, so I know a relationship would never work out. And that's fine by me. I don't care if he ends up with a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, because I don't want to be exclusive with him, I don't want to date or have sex with him. I just want to spend some time with him, talking and laughing.

i sort of have that when i am friends with someone but it's sort of a mushy kind of friendship, or when i'm unusually fascinated by someone i've just met, sort of a "i have really got to get to know and be close to this person." but it's just a desire for a deeper friendship, not a relationship.

I used to say I got "friend-crushes", which involve me feeling very impressed by somebody or thinking that we'd get along really well; as a result I really want to be friends with the person. I'm told these feelings are stronger than the feelings most people have for friends. But perhaps now I can call my "friend-crushes" "squishes".

>>>I hate to be the skeptical one here, but what exactly is the difference between this and wanting to be friends with someone?<<<<
There's a big difference. Maybe if you've never felt it, it might be hard to imagine... but it's just like having a crush, only platonically. For me at least (I'm not sure if this goes for everyone), I really look forward to seeing them, I think about them a lot, I have a very high opinion of them, and I really care about their opinion of me. Other friendships develop because you just happen to spend time with the person... but I will go out of my way to spend time with my squishes, and I get super-elated when I get any kind of proof that they like me/want to spend time with me.

The desire to get to know someone can sometimes be a lot more intense for certain people I know, with lots of happy fuzzy feelings associated with it. But it doesn't happen with every person that I'm wanting to get to know better.

I will probably use this. I've had squishes. For me it's the nervous, butterflies in my stomach feelings. Usually I don't want to date them, and sex was never a goal. Using the word squish would avoid all the assumptions people would make if I used the word crush.

You've made me realize that precisely because I do have squishes on them we will never be close friends the way I want us to be. I care about their opinions too much. Which sucks.

Squish is perfect lol I love it, great way to describe it!

To sum up, a squish:
- is an intense feeling of attraction, respect, appreciation and admiration
- is a desire to be close and connected and important to each other
- is not a desire to have sex or be in an exclusive romantic relationship
- gives you a nervous or excited feeling when you're with that person, and you may act kind of silly
- makes you think about them a lot
- gives you disproportionate joy to see that they like or respect you back
- makes you feel delighted that this person exists!

My squishes, in contrast, have often been on people who I did end up becoming close with, and yes, the squish does wear off in the sense that the nervousness and excitement die down, but the intense feelings of affection and appreciation remain. They are all still my squishes. I love being able to use a noun for it.

Vicarious attraction

I have to write this somewhere, it is just too bizarre not to mention. I've been noticing that in a situation where someone is strongly sexually attracted to me, I can feel it - or I feel something - through empathizing with how the other person feels, or how I imagine they feel. It's not even thinking about it, I can reproduce a physical response. I can see a picture of myself and, bringing that other person into my awareness and knowing about the intensity of their feeling, experience a thrill, a strong pull of attraction in my whole body. Attraction to the person in the picture, apparently. I get a kick out of that. I think this is similar to romantic attraction, it evokes something I have felt on occasion in my life, the rush of seeing someone or a picture of someone who was very important to me, or receiving their letter. Without being sexually aroused, I think. But with this vicarious thing, even when someone was appreciating my, um, physical attributes, I could identify with that, looking at the same picture of me and feeling a kind of tug from my core, a kind of boost of energy, like electricity, and a knowledge how satisfying it would be to merge with that body. Is that what they call sexual attraction? I just think it's weird that I can feel it for myself. (I've heard of autosexuality - but when this feeling happens, I have no desire to do anything about stimulating the body I'm sitting in - just that I see the picture of myself as if it were someone else.) It's like identifying with a character in a movie or in a book, I can re-live something akin to what they are describing - I just can't take it seriously in real life.

And I can persuade myself to a certain extent that I'm feeling the same thing for someone who is attracted to me - but I question that, I question that it's really coming from me - because it's so easy for me to drop the idea of pursuing any kind of sexual relationship with any person. To have certainty that there's no chance of that happening, and that they don't want that with me for whatever reason, just feels like a relief and a complication taken away. Then I look around and wonder where my "need" evaporated to. Just yesterday it seemed I might be interested and willing to experiment with sexuality with you if you ever wanted to - and today, knowing that you would not want it to happen, it's a complete non-issue, unnecessary, and I feel happy to move on.

Attracted

So, our language around attraction and love is horrendously messed up, as many people who are calling themselves "asexual" would attest to. It seems to conflate all kinds of things that seem non-related to me, into one big soup. When in ordinary language I say that I'm attracted to someone of the opposite sex, and the average Joe hears that, there will be at least an assumption of being sexually attracted, and will bring a glint to his eye and a smirk to the corner of his mouth. If I state I am attracted to someone of the same sex, that automatic assumption will be less likely but still entertained as reasonable doubt which might slightly confuse that same Joe. "Attraction" is burdened with so many connotations and overtones that I do not intend. Yes, I am attracted! I'm attracted all over the place!

I used to think I was sexually attracted to all my friends, and then some people I liked, because I wanted to be physically close to them. That was a scary and embarrassing thought, I felt a bit freaky for having these urges for practically everybody. I preferred not to think about it. Until it recently occurred to me that maybe what most people are calling "sexual attraction" is not exactly the same thing as I'm experiencing. I'm imagining "wanting" somebody, wanting their body... and it just seems... disrespectful. Embarrassing. Like, not really true.

I develop strong feelings and intense attraction to some people. Sometimes more than one person at the same time. I feel urges to touch and be affectionate with people I love. In the past, I have often wondered about the intensity of my attraction, and because of this conflation concluded that it must be sexual. And I have always fantasized about people - but somehow my mind won't stay on the subject of sex. I can go on for a long time in pleasant imagination about how we are spending time together, what we are talking about, how we are looking at each other, touching each other lovingly, holding and cuddling, giving massages, even kissing if I feel very passionate. I've tried to imagine explicit sexual acts - and it feels more like a mental exercise, because I don't relate to the enjoyment that sex means for most people, so my mind strays or goes back to hugging and talking. And consistently, this fantasy happens when I'm away from a loved person - when I'm actually with them, when I can talk to them and touch them, I mostly feel fulfilled already. Doubts whether this is sexual don't cross my mind. I even don't need to touch them as much as in my imagination. And after spending some time with them, I feel kind of silly for having fantasized about such an intense physical relationship. It's like, I want closeness and intimacy with them, and symbolically, that's associated with sexual-related themes. But in reality, it doesn't have to be.

As for language that describes my experience around people: I don't know what "sexual attraction" is really, so I wouldn't use it about myself. Physical attraction is when I want to touch someone in a loving way or as a way to connect with them and communicate. This normally happens for me parallel to the development of emotional attraction, of getting to know a person and coming to care about them. Actually it doesn't work that well to break down the different kinds of attraction, because I do see it as all connected and interdependent, just one continuum. Just that so far I've never gotten to the part with anyone where I feel any strong urge to have sex. Even when I've thought what I wanted was to have sex, "heavy" cuddling has left me satisfied. And I want to challenge the assumption that sexual desire is the necessary endpoint and culmination of intense attraction. That I feel love and attraction any less strongly just because sex is not on my agenda. I doubt that very much.

So what is it that I'm attracted to in a person? I honestly don't think it has much to do with physical appearance: most people's appearance is pleasing to me, and they invariably become more physically attractive the more personally I get to know them. People I love are all beautiful people! I do have some preferences about faces and bodies that are more appealing, but that just doesn't mean very much all by itself. When I evaluate a person's appearance for attraction, it's rather in terms of how are they taking care of their body, what their face and body language tell me about their feelings, and what their external markers of identity display about their personality.

I think what I'm actually attracted to is the potential I sense for resonance, connection and intimacy. Seeing how open and transparent someone is with me, is very exciting and powerfully attractive. It can sweep me away: the feeling that I could be utterly real with another human being has me always coming back for more. That's also why I can be attracted to several people: because obviously more than one person can represent that in my life. I'd love to be able to freely explore physical intimacy as an expression of love and closeness in a context that doesn't spill over into sexuality.