Okay, get this: did you know that gender, sex, sexuality, romance, and aesthetic attraction…that they…that they might, might…they might…you know, they….they might be related???
I honestly didn’t because I thought I was too weird and too far beyond these things. It took some really roundabout reflection to reach these roundabout conclusions.
It feels strange coming at this from all these detached positions:
- Gender: This must be its own separate thing…if it’s a thing at all. Here’s the way I think of it. If society agrees that gender is a social construct, and simultaneously that I can define my own gender, then I am confused by the implication that I should define my own gender and I reject the concept of it. Why should I value my ties to a mere social construct that I feel no kinship with? I don’t think I’m supposed to have conceived of my identity as, like, a pseudorational defense mechanism against feeling misgendered, but hey, it’s my world, I guess. You give me the option and I’ll take it.
- Sex: I am super bored by it, it never turns me on, I don’t think there’s anyone hot enough or any BDSM group zany enough to make it otherwise. So sex feels totally disconnected from my interests on any stratum.
- Sexuality: Asexuality doesn’t mean “total lack of sexuality” for everyone who chooses the label (for more info, go read a book) but it sure seems like that for me. Thus my sexuality also seems disconnected from everything else.
- Romance: It follows that sexual thrill seems to have no impact on my views on romance. I’m pretty sure this is considered backward.
- Attraction: No history of aesthetic attraction to people. I wanna hang out with them, not squeal over them.
But things seem to have changed, some at the dawn of college, others later. And reevaluating them now, I feel like these all share a gradient within me.
At one end is total explosive giddiness, and at the other end is anxiety-fueled despair. Both of these are marked by racing thoughts, keyed-up nerves, and anticipation. Closer to the center is a bland comfort. It’s not as if I feel this way about all the high-stakes things I value, either. It feels nothing like my relationship to art, for instance.
I think the difference is just the weight and type of societal expectations. These are things the world around me adores. Things it’s constructed whole narratives around. Narratives you can fall into, swooning, or kicking and screaming. Narratives which are built upon every day.
Gender
It took disavowing all preferences to learn, almost immediately, that I have preferences. And I think that if I weren’t privileged enough to have a body that aligns pretty well with those preferences, I would be feeling dysphoria as well as euphoria about it—which sounds pretty giddy/despairful to me. Still, even without dysphoria, lately I’ve returned to old questions about gender presentation, and it makes me…really nervous. I’m not even doing things in public, or in a judgmental family setting, or anything. It’s just me reading a phone screen alone.
When I am alone with gender, the terror I feel is just the terror of…“being cringe.” It’s just another phrase for being considered too ridiculous for society to accept you—another way to talk about shame.
Who told me this was cringe? Nobody! Just my own thoughts. It’s incredible how much so many social circles have changed. Most of the people I know are sharing nothing but affirmation. They haven’t called this “embarrassing” in, wow, 15 years, I’m betting.
Sex
When I realized what actually turns me on, it made me feel confused and upset. I tried writing about this really obliquely in a post last year. That obliqueness is why the post is so hard to follow. The “umbrella” in the post is anything that reminded me of this sexual interest. What I was trying to say is, seeing mundane, nonsexual objects sent me into “I can’t believe I feel this way”-type anxiety many times. And unlike gender in my own room, all the online comedians I followed and laughed along with knew it was super cringe. (The word was still “cringey” back then, but the base concept of shame is universal.)
In theory, there’s giddiness on the other end of this road too, but I haven’t gotten there yet. Let’s be honest, the solution is probably just to go draw weird porn, but there’s internalized cringe just watching myself draw something and thinking, “I can’t believe I like this shit.” I can’t even tell my therapist; do you think I can tell my own brain? (Plus, I’m busy.)
Sexuality
There’s something both refreshing and nerve-wracking about making references, where relevant, to my asexuality in conversation with others. I think it’s just nice to know that my friends believe me. It can be nice to feel that I have a uniquely detached perspective that can sometimes be valuable, or just offer me food for thought when I’m bored. It can be nice to feel that I’m not in the rat race, so to speak.
In high school and college, when I realized I didn’t feel a thing for anyone sexually, I absolutely felt despair. Usually now I just feel comfort in it, or nothing. But whenever I’m intimate with someone with a higher sex drive, they feel unwanted and I feel incompetent. And conversely, there was giddiness in finding out more, and the fact that me talking about it made a difference for others.
Romance
After like eighteen years of not giving a shit about romance, it was shocking to find myself enjoying my deepening feelings for people. I don’t know if it’s enough to call me “alloromantic” in the sense of an orientation. I struggle to define myself along those kinds of lines—like my brain is still saying, “How is that an orientation?”
It’s not the social pageantry of courting that appeals to me. It’s just learning more about the other person, the surprise behind where being with them will take you next. I remember first growing closer to others this way and realizing that, for once, something felt thrilling in the way society’s narratives wanted it to be thrilling. I felt the same weight of drama when I prepared to have sex for the first time. I went, “I think I get it. This is what it’s all about.” But sex was different in that, in the end, it was no fun to feel just as distant as I had before.
I don’t know if I’d feel the thrill of romance in something like a marriage, and I don’t know if, over a stretch of years, I’d be able to keep rekindling the spark. For most people, I guess, that’s what sex is for. Nice try.
Attraction
I could not stand and I still can’t stand the culture of celebrity worship and parasocial relationships we’re in. It was with a heavy sigh and much giddiness that I looked at a photo of an unfamiliar celebrity and thought they were stunningly attractive. Ugh… Then, caught between self-flagellation and not letting my memes be dreams, I used this person’s face as my profile picture online. It kind of felt like throwing my values in the trash, but it also felt hilarious.
Uproarious laughter is often a defense mechanism. Sometimes the harder the laugh, the greater the despair when it’s all said and done! The curse of the comedian.
(It also seemed totally wrong to only start feeling this long after middle and high school. Those are the prime N*SYNC years!)
“Stop Complaining and Just Do What You Want Already,” Said You, the Reader
Usually when I get bored and go browse WeirdStuffForumDotCom, I see an absolute flood of giddiness: art, fiction, general bizarre things that people really loudly, really boldly like. But there are confessions mixed in. People who’ve felt very anxious about it all for years, even if what they like sounds like the most minor of things.
What’s the timeline here? How long did it take for them to live their (weird) truth? It’s been like a decade and I still feel bad confessing in the sanctity of my own head. I mean, in general I feel way better than I did years ago, but it seems like some things don’t change, they only fade and flare up. It’s amazing that even though my window upon the Internet looks upon an outpouring of support for outsiders and endless positivity memes and “yeah I like X, what of it,” I can still feel this way.
Part of it is, I just don’t relate. I’ve never expressed my giddiness like “EEK I’M SO EXCITED!” and I don’t even wish I was the type of person who did. I’m very interior. Most of this positivity bounces off of me, and merges with the cynicism of “okay whatever, but you don’t know me.”
No…I think the only way to go about it is to sublimate it into my own fiction writing. Countless authors have done it before, and look out world, they’re gonna do it again. If I’m too explicitly nonfictional, the lolcow hunters win. So please expect more and weirder fiction from me by 2030!
Thank you for reading, and Patrons, thank you for Patreonning.
For more classic wallowin’ fun, try my recent post about looking for psychosexual narratives that aren’t porn (because that would be too easy…either that, or nonhelpful). Or pivot to learn the wonderful secrets of Dancercise. Or what about this review of an odd Christmas movie starring Dolly Parton? No, I’m not sure why writing so many posts about inane subjects doesn’t make me feel cringe.