Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the chief characteristic of asexuals is innocence. I think to the vintage sex ed videos from the 1950s and 60s where a mature narrator starts talking about “changes” during puberty and it is there where the great divorce happens because the difference between an asexual and sexual worldview is one of philosophical, ideological, and cultural paradigm. It is Hegelian idealism. I think to those sex ed videos, in part, because of when they happened, at the nascence of the sexual revolution which for America and the rest of the West was the end of a metaphorical childhood, a childhood that never entirely ends for asexuals. Our brains still have a Hays Code, of sorts, and there is no loss of magic or wonder and descent into the banality and dirtiness of adulthood.
On the bio page of this blog I describe my personality as “My personality is unique but closest to a mix of Christopher McCandless and Abbie Hoffman with a lot of basic white girl mixed in.” Now, girls actually call me “creepy” more as an asexual than if I were sexual and that’s because being an asexual makes me eccentric, a bit nerdy, and devoid of masculinity. As I wrote in “Pseudocreepiness & Creepiness”, girls will not label Christian Grey a creep but Sheldon from Big Bang Theory will get the label if he deigns venture out of his league. It is less objectively what guys are and subjectively what girls like and girls like guys who have an air of not caring, are normal in their interests, and are masculine, somewhat dominant, and sexual. If a creep is the type of guy a girl doesn’t like without regards to how safe, feminist, chivalrous, or respectful they are then I am very creepy.
I am perfectly content to be found unattractive by women but I am a heteroromantic asexual devoid of oxytocin and with no propensity to violence. I am, by psychological and chemical definition, not a creep. However, if the movie Fifty Shades of Grey proves anything, it is that girls want creeps and guys who aren’t creeps they will label creeps to get them away from the perfectly happy and blissful world of metaphorical fentynal of masculine hypersexuals. They don’t have poetry, cooking, violin recitals, civics, or astrophysics on The Bachelor because women don’t want eudemonia, they don’t want metaphorical Athens; they want metaphorical Valhalla or Wall Street and anything eccentric, creative, or with sunlight they eschew and impart with poisonous rhetoric to expunge any impurities from the otherwise pure, mineral, ideal world of their deepest felicities.
Of course, it is that metaphorical Athens which asexuality opens one up to. Sexuality is fentynal and makes people so monomaniacial and obsessed that the beauty and sunlight of the world becomes peripheral and the world loses verdance and life. The proof of that is the titanic volume of media produced about sexual and romantic relationships. Outside of Weird Al, they are so obsessed with the topic their obsession belongs on the DSM-5. With regards to the entire Syrian Civil War, the greatest war of the 2010s, I don’t believe a major artist uttered a syllable in their art with empathy for those people. Lots of worthless verbage was spent on complicated breakups among rich people in Los Angeles but comparitively infinitisimal artistic work was spent on the simpler human misery in Damascus.
Sexual innocence and the innocence of the banal pettiness of adulthood is the outside of Plato’s Cave. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the temple prostitute gives humanity to a feral vagrant with the behavior of a wild animal by having sex with him. In Star Trek, The Next Generation, Data proves his humanity by revealing he had engaged in a sexual relationship. Yet, sexuality seems to make people less human, not more. In popular imagination, sexuality leads one from the metaphorical convent to the rainbow of a full human life. In what I’ve seen, more sexuality corresponds to less capacity for eudemonia. Less interest in the arts, less interest in science, less interest in civics, and turns people into the society of the movie “Idiocracy”. Innocence is the greatest source of literal and metaphorical poetry and adulthood is its perineal enemy.
The Autistic Resistance 