What You Didn’t Know About Asexuality: The Testament of an Asexual

                As my bio on this website states, I am an asexual. For most of my life, I identified as a heterosexual. Since I subscribed to the falsehood that boys who like girls are heterosexual. Yet, there was a culture around me obsessed with things I had no interest in. I thought girls were pretty and wanted to be romantic with them but while the fantasies of the boys around me became ever less innocent, my fantasies remained surprisingly innocent. I often would qualify my label of heterosexual with the explanation that I was more romantic than sexual. The culture would express their ever more pornographic sexual wants of girls acting in the most objectified ways with boys claiming that they just wanted naked women and that any frills and cuteness was a means to the end of climaxing. Many will probably say they enjoy some foreplay but, mostly, males express their primary wish to rub genitals in various positions and in various contexts.

                As the years passed, I became ever more alienated from masculinity and the culture, generally. That single difference made it difficult for me to relate to the culture due to the culture’s overwhelming addiction to explicit and hardcore sexuality. While they listened to hip-hop and pop about the lower dreams of asses, titties, bitches, and pimping. My fantasies remained, at most, PG-13, and were set in vintage, classic, and/or modern pretty elegant upscale scenes of cute romances. For some reason, my lips were stuck in a fairy-tale and my penis was surprisingly unimportant. Not that I was unable to get it in the required state for sexuality, many asexuals can do that and it’s useful for avowed sober people with PTSD but, for me, doing that was Aspirin for a gunshot wound while for truly sexual people it would be more like alcohol.

                Another thing I began to notice is that other males were much more driven to woo women and much less concerned with being labelled “creepy” for asking them out. Like I said in an earlier article, it surprised me that with the bulk of the female population always complaining about boys asking them out that other boys weren’t dissuaded. It seemed that while I liked sipping the sweet tea and shoot slightly harder espresso, from my perspective, the other boys were the subject of some magical spell tantamount to a drug addiction. The only times I had anything approaching an attachment to a girl was if it involved fear, not lust. I did claim to have crushes on girls but in my autistic mind that meant any girl I thought was attractive. I never had deep emotional attachments to girls outside of fear.

                Generally, the feeling was that I was sober while the bulk of the male population was possessed by a spell. That I had a clear and rational mind and was surrounded by partial zombies who were not totally rational. It was surreal. That over the course of adolescence, I had kept a clarity, sobriety, and coolness of mind that my male peers had lost. That is not to make a value judgment but to describe how it felt. I was alone, too. There was little in the media that said people like me existed and there seemed to be an active campaign to explain, specifically, that we don’t exist. Everyone from comedians to gender studies people tended to overlook our existences and claim that men just wanted base sexuality and everything else is a Potemkin lie.

                Asexuals, ourselves, were studied very little and the diversity and nuance of our people went unknown. The few articles and inspections of us in the popular media portrayed us according to the stereotype of us being uninterested in physical intimacy. Not that this caused much acute anxiety, I had much bigger problems, but it did make Platonic relations with women more awkward since they expect men to be interested heavily in having sex with them which means when I wish to approach them or get closer to them in a Platonic manner, they have resistance and pull back. Due to the horniness of other boys, I have a more difficult time making friends with girls. Since I prefer female platonic friends (not exclusively) this has caused impediments. Furthermore, when making friends with males, when I do, I prefer in coed cliques for many reasons but among them is that all-male cliques tend to be meaner and coarser.

                I hope that, in the previous paragraphs that I have helped people understand what it feels like to be asexual. I did not explain the experience of every asexual but I explained a case of representative nuance and complexity and thus give a better notion of what asexual actual means and what the typical asexual feels. That I helped dispel the misconceptions that we lack physical attractions or romantic feelings. We do have them and I hope that I helped described what those romantic feelings and attractions are like on the asexual side of sexuality.