It takes a real man to buy a shower gel

So I've not been posting in this blog for quite a while, although my relationship to asexuality continues, I just don't write about it. I've had various realizations along the way, and in my mind I've been composing an "all-encompassing theory of everything" gender and sex related, that makes sense at least to me, and I hope to post it here in the not too distant future. I also came across this recently created site by someone who is pursuing a degree as a sexologist, and identifies as asexual: please go here and help them out with their research to put asexuality on the map.

Anyway. While I haven't been posting here, I've been coming out more and more clearly as not-female-not-male, and investigating the implications of that. Recognizing my own conditioning around how I do certain things because I was socialized as female. So today I found myself in need of a body wash product. And I was in a large supermarket chain that shall remain nameless. Okay it was Smith's. As I habitually drifted through the voluptuously curvy pastel bottles of the feminine section, looking for my favorite shea butter based gel, I realized how half of that isle had always remained alien to me, off limits, wrongly gendered, not for me. And noted that there was in fact no good reason whatsoever for me not to open myself to the whole world of possibilities that those angular, easy-to-grip, bottle-of-engine-oil resembling packaging in serious dark hues might hold.



Sniffing along the masculine smelling (whatever that is supposed to mean) brands, I soon learned from the labels that if I buy one of those, it is likely to cause me to be the subject of unlimited and unrelenting female attention. (And that would be a feature, not a bug.) Not only that, but I will get late nights, I will be ready for all sorts of nocturnal adventures, I will smell just how she likes it, and if I use this product in every shower, she will turn into a man-eater, because this is how dirty boys get clean... I will keep her intrigued and then all I will have to do, will be to rise to the occasion - because the cleaner I am, the dirtier I get... Washing myself with this is sure to bring out the lasses. It's proven to attract, and pheromone infused - need we say more? If my grandfather hadn't worn this original product, I wouldn't exist! Axe products are the worst offenders here, with ridiculous sexual innuendos out the yin-yang. In addition to promising to increase my sexual prowess, the labels are replete with battle imagery: murdering dirt and odor, I will win, odor will lose; I'm gonna maim those pesky odor causing elements, and all that will be left after the carnage, will be the fresh smell of victory.
I was having a good time reading these and laughing out loud and taking notes... Just got me thinking how much time can you really spend in a supermarket having fun? Granted, not all masculine products are that overtly machistic. Dove strikes an interesting balance for example. I mean look at the name for a start. Dove? Really? Like, what kind of 'real' man identifies with a 'dove'?


/picture of "Dove-men" from the web/

Where do you see a group of virtually naked men standing close together and touching in a friendly way? Most of the men I know have plenty of hang-ups about touching other men, even with all their clothes on. I've been conditioned well enough by this society to know that Dove is no label for a grunting, beast-hunting, women-by-the-hair-dragging symbol of pure maleness. I mean, they created a pouf for men. Good job of trying to reconcile that with masculinity. They don't call it a pouf - they make it look serious, call it a "shower tool", reinforce it with rubber on the side - dark gray rubber at that. BTW, is it a coincidence that pouf is also a word for a homosexual man?



Dove for men focuses on lauding the moisturizing properties of the products, and urges you to save water while you shower. Seriously, as a product of the society that raised me, if I had been socialized as a man, I would be afraid to buy this because people might think I was a 'fucking faggot'. (Sorry, no offense intended.) In fact I become grateful that I was not socialized as a man, because men seem to have a lot to prove.
Conversely, women's products were all about nurturing the skin, being healthy, soft, smooth, moisturizing, replenishing, restoring the skin - in other words, descriptions referring to actual product properties, rather than outrageous claims of product suitability for mating purposes, obviously not checked by any consumer protection agency. The closest any women's product got to hinting at mating, was some vague reference to feeling irresistible.

Here's what all of this implies but nobody is saying outright: Body care is traditionally considered a feminine activity, while real men are supposed to smell dirty and sweaty from just having battled and killed an enemy. The only excuse a man can have to be clean and smell good, is to score with the chicks. Then maybe it's worth the sacrifice. Some men feel insecure and emasculated about buying body care products, so these must first be imbued with a proper aura of masculinity, which will allow for their consumption by such 'real men'. The aura of masculinity is achieved by associating such products with getting sex and victory in battle. By extension, many male-born persons unwittingly pick up the implicit assumptions in this advertising, and create an imaginary picture of what it means to be a man, and sadly believe that they should live up to that ideal.

I ended up buying Old Spice Pure Sport. I liked the smell best of all, and as an added bonus, the bottle happens to not have any gendered language or other unbearable hype on the label.

What DO you mean by sex?

And finally, we get to the actual title of this blog: What DO you mean by 'sex'? I’ve found myself slightly irritated and offended when I hear the word ‘intimacy' used as a synonym for ‘sex’. It sounds as though that negates and cheapens so many other things that are intimate, and very meaningful, to me. As if ‘sex’ were the pinnacle of human relationship. So, what is ‘sex’, actually?
As traditional mainstream thinking would have it, the most narrow definition of ‘sex’ would be 1) sticking a penis into a vagina. This, for some reason, is believed to be an act of great significance with long-ranging relational ramifications. It is the ultimate test of so-called fidelity in a relationship and sometimes used as a trump card (“Okay, so we may have done A and B and C, but we never ‘had sex’”. Voila.) The narrow definition can then sometimes be expanded to 2) sticking penises into other human orifices and/or penetrating vaginas with other objects (in a non-medical context) - still the focus is on penetration and penis/vagina. All of this can still land you in jail if done without consensus. A definition broader than this would then be 3) rubbing naked genitals in some way, genitals including vulva, penis, anus, testicles, I suppose, the infamous “Down There” region (somehow this brings up images of “He Who Shall Not Be Named”). There’s something about this obsession with genitals, I don’t know. I’ve sometimes described myself as “lacking a genital fetish”, as opposed to most of the population. But even if I expand the definition further and say oh, you know, touching other naked parts of the body, or French kissing, that’s also a form of sex. And I could come up with a list of behaviors and actions which could be considered sexual. But for me, that just doesn’t cut it.
Sex, the way I relate to it, is so not about body parts. All of this can be done with me and I still don’t experience it as 'sexual’. I don’t begin to desire that genital involvement when ANY part of my body is touched, in any way, by anyone. Nor is it about physical arousal. I’ve found that I can be quite physically aroused (increased sensitivity through the body, alertness, wetness) as a symptom of feeling close and connected, and I’m still pretty indifferent to all the above concrete actions. I know even sexual men can become physically aroused simply through stimulation – without any desire to engage in the above acts. Nor is what I call sex about wanting orgasm. That is something that just doesn’t compute for my body, no matter how much sensual stimulation it experiences, there’s never this sense that there is too much tension and it needs to be released. For other people, those who masturbate and consider themselves asexual, masturbation is not seen as an inherently sexual act only because it involves the genitals. It is seen simply as a function of the body, an itch that needs scratching.
When a person loses their head over me or gets all passionately hotly sexual over my body, I don’t actually experience their desire as pleasant – I experience it as disconnecting. Like, they are having their own trip, but I’m not really involved, they are not really seeing me, they’re not really there with me. I’ve heard of mutual masturbation, and that's kind of what regular sex seems like: a solitary experience in the company of another body. It can be interesting to watch, as long as I’m not required to be turned on by it. I don’t really desire to stimulate anyone in a way that makes them need to orgasm. Feels kind of distasteful, like I’m using them, manipulating them. Like I have power over them. And it feels slightly repugnant to me to be invited to use that power imbalance to make their body do tricks.
So, in my world, it’s not about climax, it’s not about physical arousal, it’s not about body parts – and yet there is still something that I experience that I will dare to call sexual. That I will be able to relate to myself next time someone says that humans are inherently sexual beings. Rather than deny that statement, I will simply take the liberty of defining how I experience my sexuality, and what that word means to me.

...

So, since I wrote the above about a month or two ago, I’ve been reframing the idea of sexuality for myself, away from genitally-oriented pleasure and release, the cultural default, and expanding the concept to an exchange of energies, a play and turning of yin and yang, a dance of delight in each other’s existence, going nowhere and serving no purpose other than being present with each other and feeling each other’s most intimate direct physical expression in a given moment, and responding to it in a cooperative way. Now I’m sure many sexuals can read that and say, yes, that's all part of good sex, of course it’s not just about genital pleasure and release, that’s way too crude. But from what I understand, apparently for most people, sexuality as they first begin to experience it in their youth, manifests itself through these genital drives, the need to “get off”, and the overwhelming desire to be sexual with particular people who they find “hot” and who cause them to have some kind of mysterious reaction in their pants. As they age and mature, they (sometimes) learn more about sex as an expression of love and sensitivity to their partner, and don’t necessarily just go for the release – although it still seems to be the norm to think that genitals must be involved or it’s just not sexual (as, I assume, in Lori Brotto’s recent survey). With me, I never followed that pattern, and so I thought something was malfunctioning and that I could ultimately not claim sexuality as part of my humanness.
I never experienced primary sexual attraction, any sex in the past was always mostly emotional for me, mostly trying to be an expression of love, the physical part was incidental, and seemed formulaic and stilted that genital stimulation would always be considered the culmination of intimacy and love. I now get the exchange and blending of energy part – it’s a very physical experience – and yet even when feeling arousal in my body, it’s still not about sticking body parts in each other and getting off. I still don’t relate to the “release” part – I’m just enjoying feeling myself with the other person, but not needing it to go anywhere, not even needing to get naked necessarily. There’s an intensified, energized feeling and a joy of communion and directness of contact and openness to each other. Which doesn’t need to reach any culmination and resolution, as far as I’m concerned. It can just continue. There’s a prevalent belief it seems that when one experiences arousal, this is always something that needs to be “taken care of”, through sex or masturbation. Not true. Not for me. I enjoy experiencing a sense of heightened arousal in the body all for its own sake. It has never occurred to me that I should mess with the genitals in order to get rid of it.
Or another experience. The first one in a series, since then. I had this meeting with someone I trust deeply. We had both agreed that we would meet and speak from complete honesty and transparency and truth, holding nothing back. I found myself so excited going to meet them, I was thinking – “this is an invitation to sex – this is sex – this is better than sex”. It was. :) To be able to be completely, completely open and available with another human being, to be entirely present with our whole minds, emotions, and bodies, to each other as we are. No barriers. Speaking from immediacy of direct experience. Then just looking in each other’s eyes. Touching not even needed. Feeling totally united and complete. Touching only becomes needed when the feeling that we are apart, and need to connect, returns.
Now I’m letting myself tentatively propose that the difference between "normal" sexuality and my sexuality is this: "normal" sexuality is driven by urges, desires to mate with specific people based on their physical attractiveness and sometimes also emotional closeness. As a person ages and gains experience, these desires can become more refined with expressions of love and less urgency to simply mate for mating sake. Many people have said to me, "I can no longer just have sex, now I only respond to making love." The same people have also expressed to me that they feel different from the average because of this. (Correct me, sexual people, if you feel this is a misrepresentation.) That is, the sexual act is viewed as having gained a spiritual significance for them.
Whereas in my world, there is no "sexual act" per se, because all authentic and deep relating with another person is viewed as equally (a)sexual, just varied in intensity: all are an opportunity to bare ourselves to each other and embrace one another, in whatever form that takes. The fact that sometimes this involves physical nakedness and arousal and touching genitals, is circumstantial.
I'm saying that maybe my sexuality has just always been more subtle than is the cultural norm. And as I say this, I mentally contract and brace, ready to be clobbered by society saying “what, you want to be better than everyone else, how dare you?” There’s this need in our conditioning, whenever something is different than the default, to immediately see it as either “devil” or “angel”, so if I assert a different sexuality, I know that many people, even well-meaning ones, will instantly go to explaining it as either “repressed, immature, undeveloped, pre-orgasmic, unwilling to let go” or “beyond the desires of the flesh, better, more evolved”. So, I consciously step out of that paradigm of linear progression towards a superior version of human, and simply say, I am a natural variation in a mosaic of possible expressions. I claim the right to be as I am.

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!

What would you ask an asexual?

I took this asexuality survey for the National University of Ireland. Their idea is to explore the experience of asexuality and sense of identity as an asexual, and I'm really glad that they provide space for essay-type answers rather than pigeonholing you into multiple choice. And happy that someone took this on, and would really like to see the results!

"How would you define your gender identity" is a relevant question, since I would expect many respondents not to have a strong gender sense. Some other questions seem largely irrelevant, like how does ethnicity or age or religion affect your asexuality. Age probably only has relevance in that people take you more seriously the older you are, but that goes for everything and not just asexuality. I'm curious about religion, as a disproportionate number of AVENites seem to be non-religious/atheist/agnostic. Pretzelboy is also making some guesses as to why so many don't have a religious affiliation. I guess the assumption many people on the outside make, is that being religious and believing you should not have sex much, makes people asexual... But in reality it seems rather the other way around. My completely unscientific 2 cents would be that a lot of religion is about instructions how to deal with sexual desires and channel them towards some spiritual ideal, doing right as opposed to wrong; and as asexuals are already living the experience of being outside of society's norm and not even having to control their sexual appetites, not fitting in and thus not having a strictly black-and-white view of the world, that kind of religion simply does not seem relevant, and has little appeal for them.

Some good questions in this survey were around relating to others, disclosing one's sexuality and how that has been accepted. How does asexuality fit into your self-concept. Other questions were decidedly too generic, like listing the good points and bad points of being asexual. And I would like to see more specific, juicier questions being researched, such as:

- When did you first realize you were asexual? Have you ever felt sexual? How did you discover this identity, and how did it feel? What did you identify as before?
- Do you ever fall in love? If you are attracted to people, do you have a gender preference?
- How do you feel about touching and sensuality? Hugging, kissing? How do you express affection and how do you view intimacy?
- What kind of close relationships would you ideally like to have in your life?
- Have you been in sexual relationships and how do you negotiate that? If you have had sex without actual desire for it, why did you do it?
- Do you want to have a family, children?
- Do you have a sex drive? Do you masturbate and how do you view masturbation? How about orgasm?
- Do you have a spirituality/religion and which? Does it bear any relation to your asexuality? How much does your (lack of) spirituality/religion define you?
- How was sex viewed in your family of origin, and do you think that has had any effect on your asexuality?
- When did you first realize that someone was sexually attracted to you, and how did you know? Are there particular areas of daily life that are confusing to you and that you would like more understanding around by people in general?

You know, lots of questions researchers could ask. Just imagine that your best friend comes out to you as asexual, what would you be curious about?

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Update: Here Pretzelboy suggests some good Topics for future research in a more methodical way than me.