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.

Communicating Demisexuality

The theme for this month's Carnival of Aces is Language and Communication.

I've decided to focus on demisexuality because it's such a controversial orientation/inclination/thing, and really brings the subtleties of the language describing sexual and romantic orientations into focus. Much of this post will be personal - and talk about my own journey with finding words to describe how I tick - so please don't expect too much academic rigour here.

As I've explained in the past - a big part of what being on the asexual spectrum is about (for many people anyway) is some form of disconnect between sexual and affectional ("romantic") orientations. What does this mean, exactly? Ahhhh, let's take a look at the following picture...

When I first saw this picture - I must have stared at it for a good half hour. And then eventually it hit me: I've never been directly sexually attracted to anyone!

Language: Affectional vs Sexual Orientations

It's probably very hard to relate to if you're a reasonably mainstream sexual person who is oriented towards a certain gender, but affectional and sexual orientations can actually be completely separate things. Certain rare people even have separate sexual and affectional orientations for different genders, while for most people on the ace spectrum - it's usually more just a case of them having an affectional orientation - while their sexual orientation is weak, missing, or highly abstract (as is the case with demisexuals).

What affectional orientation sans sexual orientation means is, essentially, that you might find people of a certain gender cute and attractive and you develop crushes on them and "fall in love" with them, but it's not a sexual thing for you. For most people the two aspects of attraction run together so closely that there isn't any need to think of them as separate things - while for some of us they're distinct enough that they require separate attention.

Language Difficulty 1: "Romantic"

I don't particularly like the term "romantic" when talking about affectional orientations. The problem is that it tends to conjure up the mainstream image of what "romance" means to most people - which is almost always a sexual pair-bonding thing. I like the term "affectional orientation" because it's slightly more exotic, and people who are new to the terminology of asexuality usually need to look it up and check up on what it's about - while "romantic" causes confusion because it comes with a lot more cultural baggage.

Indeed, in my case "affectional" feels particularly poignant, because really this is all that my upfront attraction to any new girl can be about - desire for intellectual, emotional, and later sensual affection. Nothing beyond affectionate contact such as cuddling, in the physical realm of things. Not for a long time anyway.

Language Difficulty 2: "Demi-"

The word demi means "half". Some people think it's misleading because it implies that demisexuals have an "incomplete" sexuality, but I actually don't mind the term too much. 

Although it doesn't quite describe the dynamic of how demisexuality works, it does sort of embody the point that demisexuals can be either asexual or sexual, depending on the relationship context that they're in at any given time.

For me personally, this is exactly how it is: between relationships I'm as good as asexual. Right now, there is literally not a single person on the face of this entire planet who I'm realistically interested in having sex with. But when I'm in the right emotional headspace with someone in a relationship, I can become essentially no different to anyone else in a standard sexual relationship. So it's like my "sex life" is potentially dominated by either asexuality or sexuality, half-half.

In Defence of Demisexuality

Finally, I'll address the controversy: is demisexuality really a necessary label? Or is it overkill? And are we heteroromantic demisexuals just "normal" - albeit somewhat sexually conservative, heterosexuals - and being special snowflakes demanding attention with this label?

To some degree, I can actually see both sides of this. And as I've explained in previous posts regarding my "label fatigue", I do sometimes wish it was all unnecessary. 

But then again, this is what language is all about. Different groups have different specific words for highly specific nitpicky things that have meaning for them (eg. Apparently some Australian Aboriginal languages have dozens of words for different types of tree bark, because it was such an important material for them). There is nothing wrong with words sometimes seeming too specific out of the context of a given in-group, as long as they are useful within the in-group. Or to get a certain point across to outsiders, or to the world at large.

So is demisexuality a unique orientation? Or "just" an inclination? It doesn't really matter to me. I'm happy to just say it's a thing - and as long as it's ever useful to communicate something and avoid potential misunderstandings in relationships, it was a useful piece of language.

My Relationship Anarchy

The theme for this month's Carnival of Aces is non-traditional relationships and polyamory. This is something I've been meaning to blog about for a while, but never quite knew where to start, because my own theories on this are still a bit of a work in progress.

I should probably start by explaining my actual history with this...

Early Beginnings

It all started a couple of years ago (before I knew anything about asexuality) when I finally realised that my attractions to women are never immediately sexual - and do not (necessarily) fit the typical sexual pair-bonding paradigm. Indeed, my immediate pattern of attraction to a new girl is virtually indistinguishable from something like...simply wanting a kind of "close friendship with cuddle benefits".

(The term "romantic friendship" sounds about right - although this often refers to a particular form of this which was common in the 19th century, so I'm sometimes hesitant to use it because of the historical baggage confusion. But it seems to be getting reclaimed these days as a more broad term for these types of relationships, so I'll use it here).

When I discovered asexuality (and my own demisexuality), and that it is indeed quite possible for relationships not to be based on the standard sexual pair bonding script, a huge light bulb went off in my head. There wasn't any particular epiphany moment per se, but at some point in early 2012 I just knew that I'd never look at relationships the same way again.

This article in "The Atlantic" is what really sealed it for me. Especially the following passage:

"If we stop defining our significant relationships only as those that are romantic or sexual, being single will take on a whole new meaning. If we broaden our emotional focus from the person we share bodily fluids with to the sum of our friendships, acquaintances, and colleagues, our communities will grow stronger. If we stop treating penetrative sex as the be all and end all of physical intimacy, we will experience greater heights of pleasure. And if we can accept that although sex can be ecstatic and affirming and fulfilling, it is not all those things to all people all of the time, we will relieve it of some of its cultural baggage."

It was like...wow!!...this is exactly how I've felt about sex and relationships all my life - and suddenly here is a community of people who seem to be wired the same as me, and making conclusions regarding love, sex and relationships which seem completely obvious to me in hindsight.

So that got me thinking - how do I apply all this?

Dating, Romance and Sex

Probably the single most confusing thing about all this was coming to terms with the idea that "romance" and sex are totally separate things to me. They always were separate for me, but the idea that they run together was so deeply socially conditioned into my thinking that I simply didn't consciously see it. But I did, however, always feel like something was slightly "off" about how the dating world works.

This is what makes demisexuality (as well as being sexually non-repulsed) so tricky. It's not like an immediate and obvious case of Does Not Compute regarding sex, the way repulsed asexuality is. It's more that sex just seems like a totally random and unnecessary thing to (immediately at least) combine with romance - because romance is something that grows on its own for me, almost entirely from intellectual and emotional connecting. And indeed, non-sexual affectionate contact is all that I can desire (and handle!) upfront anyway.

But even more to the point, I was now being haunted by the above line from that article - "If we stop defining our significant relationships only as those that are romantic or sexual, being single will take on a whole new meaning." - Indeed. 

How do you define "single"? Are you still single if you have an ongoing romantic friendship with someone? Multiple romantic friendships? Or is it only a sexual relationship that counts? Or does it all come down to sitting down, having The Talk, and agreeing that you are in a relationship?

Polyamory

A few things happened which made me question the idea of traditional monogamy in the past few years - needless to say, none of them had anything to do with wanting to "sleep around"! 

It all basically gelled around this idea of how we can have different types of significant relationships with different people - which may conventionally qualify as "'just' friendship", "romance", or perhaps something in-between - say "romantic friendship". Then it suddenly started looking very petty and arbitrary to me to throw an exclusive bubble around just one such relationship, to the exclusion of others. When sex is in the picture, I can actually understand the value of exclusivity. After all, historically-speaking, birth control and protection were either extremely ineffective or essentially non-existent, so it did make some sense to reign in promiscuous sex. But this begs the question - why do we still have to apply this rule to non-sexual-yet-romantic ways of connecting? Which is 99% of what I'm about.

In a word - it is not sex that defines polyamory for me - it's emotional connecting. It's the idea of having close, tender emotional connections with people which have no fixed boundaries, as opposed to the traditional monogamous model - where there is a vast emotional exclusion zone around the Romantic Couple - and everybody else is "just" a friend, and has to keep a wide berth to avoid the contact from being seen as inappropriate. 

But alas, since 99% of the world is sexual, polyamory will probably always carry the "just an excuse to sleep around" cultural baggage. Hence I've sometimes been hesitant to use it, especially to identify publicly as such...

"Relationship Anarchy"

My thinking these days is probably best described by the term "relationship anarchy", and a heavily asexual-influenced version of it at that. 

As mentioned briefly in a previous post about labels, I like the idea of doing away with restrictive categories altogether - what really matters is that the people involved in relationships are open and honest with each other, and agree to their own tailored specifics. And I think that broad categories (eg. Friend vs Lover) actually get in the way of happiness here - because people end up having to accept pre-packaged things which might not be entirely suitable for a particular given connection - but are nevertheless so deeply ingrained in the culture that they never truly questioned how connecting with people could be done differently. 

This might be less true of sexuals than people on the asexual spectrum though, which I believe may be the main reason why these theories are quite controversial out in the mainstream world. 

For sexuals, it seems to run like this: You either find someone sexually attractive, in which case you'll want to sleep with them - or else you don't find them sexually attractive, in which case you'll never want to sleep with them. But more to the point - any kind of "romantic" context with them will probably seem awkward and pointless. Why? Because sexuals generally don't experience this disconnect between romance and sex that we do. Attraction is either both romantic and sexual as a package deal, or else it is purely platonic. There seems to not be much possibility of anything in-between.

I'm not entirely sure this theory is correct. I've seen some evidence of sexuals being capable of relationships which can exist in that fuzzy area between purely platonic and romance, but it seems to be incredibly rare. Whereas with people on the asexual spectrum, it seems to be quite common to at least understand the point of this - even if many still subscribe to a more traditional monogamous outlook on actually forming serious relationships.

What I'd like to explore

I currently have a kind of online version of a "romantic friendship", with an asexual girl overseas who's in a polyamorous relationship. It's actually incredibly liberating to be able to share with someone intellectually and emotionally without second-guessing whether it's "appropriate" or not - because everything has been discussed upfront and everybody has agreed that it's okay.

What would be interesting to explore is how this kind of relationship would work out in real life. Given that I'm not one for "serious relationships" in terms of wanting a permanent domestic life partnership and suchlike, I'm actually quite attracted to the idea of simply having romantic friendships while basically remaining "single" - in the practical everyday independent living sense. While I won't set out absolutes such as "living separately is mandatory", this is so close to the truth that it might as well be the case.

So yes, romantic friendships is where it's at for me at the moment. If anyone does inspire me for something "more" involved, it'll be a small miracle I think. But even then, there's no going back to traditional monogamous thinking. Although, being demisexual, I have to say that I'd have no problem with sexual exclusivity - the real impossibility is to not think of multiple relationships as emotionally significant any more. And of course, that the existence of multiple deep emotional connections is okay. Correction: Not just okay, but celebrated as a beautiful thing!