Personal Thoughts on Sexual Orientation Labels
December 30, 2021
It is very odd that sexual orientation is defined solely in terms of the sex of one's partners. I don't think I can assume anything about another person simply because I've been told she or he is bisexual, heterosexual, or homo-sexual. A person's politics may be conservative, liberal, radical, or nonexistent, regardless of sexual orientation. In fact, a sexual orientation label tells you nothing about her or his sex life, for God's sake.
-- Gay Men, Lesbians, and Sex: Doing It Together by Patrick Califia
This quote brings into frame the issue with the way people have most recently started to use the term Asexual, a problem that when I look closer at it, applies to all sexual attraction labels. For the purpose of setting the framework for the points I want to make, I'll start at the beginning.
The terms Heterosexual, Homosexual, Bisexual, Pansexual, and so on, these are words people use to describe the person you are sexually attracted to. It says nothing of what your sexual preferences are. Nothing about what your preferred roles are, what sexual activities you like, how often, or even what your romantic inclinations are. It is only about what your sexual attraction is, yet we've long since conflated the two as being the same.
When people say Asexual, lately I've noticed this assumption that it describes both your attraction and your sexual activities, or lack there-of. Based on what I just described regarding the rest of the terms, it is odd to me that Asexual is supposed to be this dual meaning in a more egregious manner than the other sexual orientations mean this. And this is a more recent thing, I'm going to emphasize. The word was meant as another type of sexual attraction: a lack of one. It had no baring on your sexual preferences or activities, yet more and more people are using it to mean both without attraction and without sex and it has leading to a frustrating sort of confusion.
This was the whole reason why there was motivation to create different 'scales' of Asexual such as the ABCD types, listed on AVEN's wiki. (I myself would fall in type C) So there was supposed to be this separation between sexual attraction and sexual desire, but now it's merged the two together and the people doing this don't seem to realize what this is doing for the word. And in the grand scheme of things, we do it to all words related to sexual attraction.
Going back to the quote, the mention of a sexual attraction does not describe the sex acts a person wants to engage in and this is rarely brought into consideration. And the reason I draw attention to this is because this is about keeping the door open to the concept of others to designate their sexual interaction beyond just their primary form of sexual attraction. For example, someone that is sexually attracted to or is aroused by men, but doesn't have the desire to have sex with them, this possibly makes them heterosexual, homosexual, or androsexual,(only to name a few) but because we have so tightly knit the mere existence of sexual attraction to be exactly the same as the thing you want to participate in sexual activities with, there's no word to describe having the attraction and arousal, but not the desire to engage. At best you have maybe AndroGreySexual but this goes back to transforming the attraction label to a sexual activity label. This assumption that sexual attraction will always equate sexual impulse/desire is probably why the assumption about asexuality has grown worse in recent years that 'if you have no sexual attraction that means you have no sexual desire and that's the default'.
Talking about all this, too, ties into why I feel more in line with 'Heterosexual with an Abstract Attraction Model' than I do 'Asexual'. I may not experience primary sexual attraction, but I do experience abstract sexual attraction, and it only ever happens with men. I can't even really say Gray Asexual Heteroromantic because I'm also Gray Romantic. My romantic attraction and inclinations are very mild, I love affection and I like platonic closeness, though there are some affectionate acts I consider more intimate that I do prefer to reserve for my partner. I can't even say that I'm exclusively romantically attracted to men because I have no idea what it's like to be romantically attracted to someone without sexual intimacy because those NEED to go hand-in-hand, for me. Because of that, it feels disingenuous for me saying Gray Asexual HeteroRomantic because that makes it seem like my attraction to men is romantic focused when the truth is, it hinges on sexual desire. My sexual appetite and sexual desire is at the forefront of my attraction, I just don't experience it in the form of primary sexual attraction. So saying 'Heterosexual with an Abstract Attraction Model' makes it feel so much more like my sexual draw towards men, even in an abstract way, is the crux of both my sexual and romantic desires, because it is.
Even describing that, this goes back to the original quote, that none of this explains how my sexual relationship even works. This doesn't scratch the surface of the fact that I'm sexually submissive in situations, and even saying sexually submissive still doesn't cover the way I participate in that submission. The description of my sexual attraction doesn't list the caveat that because I'm sexually submissive in a way that is to be sexually overwhelmed and passive means that I'm also amicable to the hypothetical idea of anyone other than a man being dominant because while I may not be sexually attracted to them, my sexual submission super-cedes that in a temporary setting that I could be someone's plaything without any attraction. But, I could never have a relationship with them because I am not attracted to them, and my romantic and sexual desire go hand in hand. There is no singular word or even small phrase that can define this, only this very paragraph I just wrote, can explain this.
We all want to find ourselves, to have community where we belong, to have that one word that describes us and our experiences. Some singular thing or label that finally describes us that we can build a community around. But when you really get into it, there really isn't. I think everyone is going to have maybe one or two words that fit and the rest is not a single word but a paragraph and I feel like that is the normal thing. I feel like the concept people can, somehow, condense the entire experience of human love and sexuality into a single label is the one that's weird.
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