asexuality as a framework

A submission for the August 2023 edition of the Carnival of Aces, with the theme “Asexuality and Orientation.”

---

You know that feeling toward the end of the semester when you think you haven’t learned anything in class, and then you talk to someone outside of school and realize your entire worldview shifted without you noticing?

A long time ago (May 10, 2011, according to my diary) I thought I might be asexual. Specifically, I thought I might be asexual homoromantic, because I had a massive crush(?) on my best friend at the time. I mentioned to her that I thought I might be asexual and she texted back: “it’s fine if you’re asexual I’m just against lesbians.”

So then I tried to convince myself I wasn’t a lesbian, and wrote things in my diary like, “what qualifies love from love if gender is out of the question?” I was asking, how do you tell if it’s romantic love or not if you can’t make the distinction based on the gender of the person you’re attracted to?

It didn’t occur to me until later that the issue was I couldn’t use sexual attraction to figure out if it was romantic.

In 2015 I wrote that I knew for sure I was asexual, and I might be quoiromantic, but I kept asking if maybe I was just “too scared to be a lesbian.” (I didn’t realize I might be arospec until last year.)

But at some point I stopped identifying as asexual. I think I was upset because I came out to my mom and she interpreted it as me not being interested in dating and I was sure that wasn’t true, because I’d written like 200+ gay love poems. Surely I wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t interested in dating, right? I didn’t want people making assumptions like that about me.

And there were other things that made me feel like I didn’t fit in with the ace community. I didn’t vibe with the cake analogy. A lot of descriptions by ace people seemed to conflate sexual attraction with libido. It seemed like no other ace people were reading E-rated fanfiction. Everyone was talking about how all their friends were obsessed with sex while they weren’t, but I hadn’t had that experience. (Probably because my friends were also ace.) And besides, I maybe experienced sexual attraction for a few minutes toward one person that one time, so was I even really ace?

More importantly, was identifying as asexual useful to me?

Or would it just make people make assumptions about me, like assuming I was uncomfortable hearing about or talking about sex, or I never wanted to have sex, or I wasn’t interested in a relationship, or worse, I wasn’t relationship material, or I was naive and immature, or—

I could probably use some super-specific label to feel like I fit in with the ace community. Like, I know about gray-asexual and demisexual and aceflux and even aegosexual. 

But I’ve never liked being categorized, or having people use a label a shortcut to knowing things about me. I don’t like being tied down to something I said once. I don’t like when people say that your identity is immutable and it can never change, and that it’s never a choice. (It’s complicated—I’ll be writing more on this later.)

Today, I rarely identify as anything other than queer and nonbinary. I don’t want people to make assumptions about me, and I want to be able to change my mind.

But being asexual, and especially growing up asexual, has changed my worldview in ways I don’t always realize.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what “romance” is. I don’t believe in the romantic/platonic binary and I think “romantic” is some socially constructed concept that is different for every person and that’s why no one can agree on what it is and how you know when you’re experiencing it. But I wouldn’t be having this conversation at all if I hadn’t been forced to think about what “romantic” means outside of a sexual attraction context, to interrogate whether I was feeling it (and whether I was gay).

I’ve also been thinking about polyamory and relationship anarchy and what relationship structures might look like and what it means for arospec people to be polyamorous. I was halfway into the research for a class paper on this when I realized that I was thinking from an asexual perspective—that sex isn’t necessary for something to “count” as a relationship, and there is no having sex/not having sex relationship binary. I found articles where polyamory was defined based on having sex, like those were the polyamorous relationships and everything else was “just friendships.”

This was a wakeup call to me that actually, asexuality is a huge part of who I am. Even if I don’t always wear an ace flag button and I don’t have an ace ring, and I don’t list it off as part of my identity, it has shaped my entire worldview.

Asexuality isn’t just an orientation; it’s a framework.