I just finished reading Angela Chen’s excellent new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, & the Meaning of Sex. As a seminal asexuality text, it’s everything I could have hoped for – which is to say, among other things, that it made me ponder my own place on the asexuality spectrum.
If you don’t know, asexual people are people who don’t experience sexual attraction. This does not mean they never have sex (some do) or that they never get into romantic relationships (some do) or even that they don’t like sex (some do). It just means they are not attracted to anyone on a sexual level, which doesn’t necessarily preclude them from developing attractions on aesthetic, platonic, or romantic levels. They differ, in this way, from allosexual people (i.e. non-asexual people, i.e. the majority of people).
One of the more philosophical points made in the book is that the feeling of sexual attraction can’t be fully grasped by those who’ve never experienced it – which is part of why so many ace folks take a long time to realize they’re ace. (The other, and more pressing, reason is that asexuality just isn’t very widely known about or understood.) This concept reminds me of how lots of color-blind people don’t realize they’re color-blind until a test tells them so, or of how you can taste a food that’s new to you, like black truffles or guava fruit, and realize that you had no way of even predicting what those foods would taste like because you can’t really imagine something you haven’t experienced. I’ll never know whether you see the same color as I do when we both look at a blue flower. I’ll never know whether cinnamon creates the same sensations on your tongue as it creates on mine. I’ll never know if your sexual attraction feels anything like mine does.
This is the reason I’ve struggled to place myself on the asexuality spectrum time and time again. I’ve definitely wanted to fuck people before (many people), but often it’s less a tactile desire to touch/kiss/penetrate them and more a desire to connect with them more deeply, reward their brilliance, or have an adventure. I definitely have a libido, but often it’s slow to rouse and not directed at anything in particular. I definitely find sex pleasurable, exciting, and satisfying, but often it’s about intimacy, sensations, and catharsis more than it’s about animal lust.