Demisexual Sex Positivity

The theme for this month's Carnival of Aces is "Sex Positivity".

This is actually a very interesting topic for me, considering that I've got an internal inclination which tends to mimic "conservative" sexual attitudes and behaviour. Indeed, for most of my life I was actually quite confused about where I fit in - on one hand I was always ideologically fairly sex-positive, and on the other my own internal gut feelings always made me hold back sexually - by modern "hookup culture" standards at any rate.

I'll mostly discuss my own personal history and experiences here, and what sex-positivity means to me.

Background

I grew up in classic modern Western sex-positive circumstances: comprehensive sex education at school and at home, open-minded attitudes all around, and no particular shame or prohibition mentality with anything sexual at all. It wasn't quite a case of "just use protection but otherwise go out there and go nuts", but something relatively close to that. It was an environment where it was assumed that teenagers would experiment - and the focus was on keeping them safe if they do - rather than trying to prevent them from doing it in the first place.

The first memory I have of being a bit "different" was when I was sitting there in high school Health Education class, during a term when sex education was being discussed. Being comprehensive sex ed, it went into all the gritty details of teenage pregnancy, STDs, etc - and the mechanics of how to avoid them. I remember sitting there thinking - "Well, what's the big deal? Why not just not have sex?". At the time I simply didn't realise that this probably wasn't a very typical reaction for a 15 year old boy.

Mind you, it certainly wasn't a lack of purely physiological "drive", if you catch my drift. That was all there and working (raging more like it, teenage boy and all, pardon the TMI) - it just wasn't connecting to a psychological and emotional desire to have partnered sex with anyone. On some level I just felt that sex is something that would eventually happen in a certain kind of loving relationship - and this whole idea that people seriously want to do it relatively casually with others of a given gender just never really gelled properly with me. I remember thinking that maybe I'm just more "restrained and disciplined" than others are, or something.

Of course, over time this clash between my external environment and internal inclinations eventually started taking on a strange mixed ideological life of its own. I was still relatively sex-positive in theory, but in practice it started to look extremely strange and undisciplined to me what people were doing to themselves. Especially when I started seeing the fallout of unplanned pregnancies and such, in my later high school years.

The Clash

So basically from my teens, right through to my early 30s when I finally discovered demisexuality, I was living in this weird twilight zone - where I was more or less sex-positive by philosophy, but also quite judgemental and seemingly "conservative" about certain things - especially when things "went wrong" for people. My conversations about sexual attitudes always followed this pattern: 

Everything is fine so long as it's safe and consensual, but then X, Y, Z...

And the XYZ conditions were usually things that actually made me sound decidedly sex-negative. Or at least conditional enough to clash with a more clear-cut sex-positive attitude, which usually annoyed people. Unsurprisingly, I annoyed both sex-positivists as well as traditional sexual conservatives, because in both cases I wasn't really taking a coherent position for one side or the other.

This effect is still hard to shake sometimes.

Enter Demisexuality

Once I discovered that there is indeed a "thing" which makes my natural sexual inclinations not quite usual - I actually felt quite humbled by some of the borderline sex-negative attitudes I sometimes held. I realised that I'm not so much "disciplined and restrained", but rather simply oblivious to the very motivations to take partnered sex in a "casual fun" way. Not physically necessarily, but psychologically and emotionally. Outside of a certain kind of deep emotional connection, I'm as good as asexual. So there is nothing to be "disciplined" about. Nothing to be tempted by and have to turn down.

Almost overnight, I became more sex-positive than ever. My attitude now runs along the following lines:

Casual sex is all good fun and awesome, as long as it's:

1. Safe.
2. Sane.
3. Consensual.
4. Doesn't involve me!

This isn't necessarily any different to how I used to feel before of course, but now it's just more explicit. And now I know that the reason why I don't want it to involve me isn't some kind of self-discipline or moral superiority - but simply an inherent lack of interest in taking sex in a certain casual way in the first place.

What "Sex Positivity" Means To Me

The above set of conditions more or less summarises it I think, but just to expand on it, what it mostly comes down to for me is simply this: Not treating a sexual act as inherently "morally charged", simply because it's a sexual act.

So for example: if a sexual act has X chance of a bad outcome, and a non-sexual act has the same X chance of a similarly serious bad outcome, I don't believe the sexual act needs to carry any particular cultural baggage of "extra" shame or seriousness, just by virtue of being a sexual act.

This is deceptively subtle, but when you honestly run things though SSC conditions, it's easy to see how a lot of "sexual things" that society has a problem with don't really have much solid logic to them. It often really is just a case of cultural taboo based (non)thinking.