What is sexuality like? The truth is that is a terrible question. Sexuality is not like anything. There is no such thing as sexuality. There are spectrums of sexualty and romantic attraction defined by quantity of intensity and quality of form. Alas, there is very little vocabulary in the public discourse that describes most of it. This affected my life greatly because I would often say I had “crushes” on girls but that means different things to different people and later, learning more about psychology, I determined none of those were crushes.
A crush is best defined as an oxytocin-style attachment one has to another in a sexual or romantic manner. I never had one of those. What I was describing was merely aesthetically finding someone pretty. Now, there were a few girls I publicly claimed to crush on where evidence would have misled people to believe it was true. Alas, the neurotransmitters didn’t bear them out as “crushes”. What was happening was darker because attractive women are not only useful and desirable as intimate partners but also as popular girls with social capital and for a savagely bullied special needs kid, I did pursue them for platonic friendship and ergo protection. It was darker because it was based on trauma.
They sometimes didn’t understand it that way but, for the record, I never asked any of them on a romantic date, even once. I had no oxytocin lust for them, I had scathing and intense fear. I had literally gotten urinated on and had rocks thrown at me and was accused of being demonically possessed with exocisms performed on me. My so-called “crushes” were the symptom of war-level PTSD. However, there was almost no way to convey the reality of what was happening, in part, because of the rhetorical devices available to me borne of the epistime I was inside of. That had that there were heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals. Heterosexual males were less romantic and more pornographic and erotic in their tastes, homosexual males were even more erotic, and bisexuals were so rare their stereotypes didn’t exist.
They could have given everyone Kinsey-style scales of romantic attraction versus sexual attraction and taught us about the various neurotransmitters. I would have been a 7 romantic and a 2 sexual with serotonin, as opposed to dopamine or oxytocin, as being the neurotransmittter most associated with my attractions. That was a universe away from being able to happen. There was also next to no knowledge of how the autism spectrum worked for how the PTSD worked. Most people’s understanding of the world was made by cultural stereotype. Looking back, we were Australopithicines. That is how primitive it all was. Even the adults were working on threadbare and limited knowledge that was barely, if at all, more than the kids. About everything. They didn’t follow scientific advancements or the news and some of the science didn’t exist, yet. Knowledge had by everyone was based on cultural stereotype.
When good things happened, it was largely an accident. We know MDMA is among the best drugs for PTSD and social skills. So, an anxious autistic person would take a few hits of ecstacy and win. It might help them get better grades and make friends. Or it might not because their subtypes of the conditions were not the types that responded best to that drug. Yet, there was no system to distribute information, the adults nor the kids kept tabs on the news and the adults could barely, if at all, name the three branches of government. People’s understanding of the world was shockingly unscientific and lacking in worldliness. The end result was massive, titanic, levels of preventable human suffering
The Autistic Resistance 