It's Asexuality Awareness Week
Oct. 26th, 2013 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fufarawI really only learned about asexuality in the last five or six years. I mean I knew it existed, but I thought of it as celibacy, as a choice one made. But once I started to read and research, a whole lot of my life started slotting into place. As when I learned about ADD investigating my son’s symptoms, or when my org. made everyone test Meyers Briggs, or I had a couple of Aspberger’s evaluations, discovering more about asexuality was an Aha! moment.
I don’t think I’m weird or abnormal anymore. I know there are reasons for the way I perceive the world and react to it. I’m grateful for the knowledge.
But I am aware that some of you look at me funny when I react predictably (for me) to something others are upset or puzzled or angry about. From where I sit, I just don’t get it.
I never had sexual fantasies. The dreams and fantasies that get me off emotionally are ones of meeting people I admire, scientists, writers, activists, artists of all stripes from Muppeteer to sculptor to actor to musician, and finding a cozy corner to sit and talk through the night, looking around at dawn and feeling guilty for cheating, hollowed out by the experience, but exalted, too.
I have had one sexual partner; I married him. It was my incredible fortune that he was attentive, inventive, experimental, and focused on my pleasure. He wooed me with gallantry, humor, devotion, sentimentality, hilarity, shared interests, and a focused beam of affection and admiration for a long time before he moved our relationship toward sex. I trusted him—and still do—more than any human on earth, and for me, the sun rises and sets with him, even when he exasperates me.
I have always admired, appreciated, even loved the human form. It’s been a detached sort of love, though. I used to “collect heads,” of people I found attractive. My mental gallery of this actor’s face in teak, that athlete’s flank in bronze, her breast in marble, his hands in a pale wood, lightly stained to enhance the shadows. The curve of an ear, a buttock, the way her hair fell, a forehead, shadowed eyelids. It was all appreciation and fondness for…parts, with an utter disregard for gender, race, age, ethnicity, or personality.
The other side of the coin is, I fall in love so easily with personality. I hang on a turn of phrase, the sound of their laughter, the way their mind processes information, turns it, makes connections, and presents it as a stunning conclusion. With their voice, or the sound of the instrument they play, the words they combine in a song, a poem, a paragraph. I want to pat their eyelids and cheeks tenderly with my fingertips, share their air in a moment of communion. I want to make them smile, laugh, with the depth of perception we share, or perhaps rage at the same things.
I love a person, the identity who lives inside the flesh robot they inhabit, regardless of whether that cage has a penis or breasts or comfortable padding or bony protruberances. I fall in love with the light behind the eyes, the brain and the personality that lives there. The shell, the container, doesn’t matter to me, though I want it to be healthy and comfortable for the wearer. And although touch—hugs, the texture of hair in the light and between my fingers, the warmth of skin and the way muscles move, the heat of breath, the smell of the back of the neck, the inside of the elbow, the cleavage, the beat of a heart in close quarters—is part of experiencing that person, none of that leads, for me, to the act of, or even the desire for, sex. I fear I disappoint expectation sometimes, but sex has no place in the amazing sensations both physical and mental I feel for those whom I love.
So when I read or hear people argue about who can or can’t marry, who a person can fall in love with, want to be with, who is sexy or attractive, I am puzzled. As if that matters. I understand if a person feels trapped in a body they can’t be comfortable in, and I want them to be free to be whom they want. It makes no sense to me that any human can’t love whom they love, as long as we’re all past the age of consent and nobody is being hurt.
Seriously, I don’t get it. What is gay? What is bi? From where I sit, which has always felt like the fringes of human experience, those are mysterious distinctions. So intellectually, I understand those distictions matter mortally to people who inhabit them, and who are restricted by stupid laws and conventions because of them. Intellectually.
Emotionally? Why should they matter? I regret the existence of such conventions; they get in the way. They don’t help. They hurt people.
So there you have me, in all my weirdness. If I make a comment that seems senseless or naive or uninformed, this is why. I don’t know how else to be, but I’m still exploring, and reaching for understanding.
I don’t think I’m weird or abnormal anymore. I know there are reasons for the way I perceive the world and react to it. I’m grateful for the knowledge.
But I am aware that some of you look at me funny when I react predictably (for me) to something others are upset or puzzled or angry about. From where I sit, I just don’t get it.
I never had sexual fantasies. The dreams and fantasies that get me off emotionally are ones of meeting people I admire, scientists, writers, activists, artists of all stripes from Muppeteer to sculptor to actor to musician, and finding a cozy corner to sit and talk through the night, looking around at dawn and feeling guilty for cheating, hollowed out by the experience, but exalted, too.
I have had one sexual partner; I married him. It was my incredible fortune that he was attentive, inventive, experimental, and focused on my pleasure. He wooed me with gallantry, humor, devotion, sentimentality, hilarity, shared interests, and a focused beam of affection and admiration for a long time before he moved our relationship toward sex. I trusted him—and still do—more than any human on earth, and for me, the sun rises and sets with him, even when he exasperates me.
I have always admired, appreciated, even loved the human form. It’s been a detached sort of love, though. I used to “collect heads,” of people I found attractive. My mental gallery of this actor’s face in teak, that athlete’s flank in bronze, her breast in marble, his hands in a pale wood, lightly stained to enhance the shadows. The curve of an ear, a buttock, the way her hair fell, a forehead, shadowed eyelids. It was all appreciation and fondness for…parts, with an utter disregard for gender, race, age, ethnicity, or personality.
The other side of the coin is, I fall in love so easily with personality. I hang on a turn of phrase, the sound of their laughter, the way their mind processes information, turns it, makes connections, and presents it as a stunning conclusion. With their voice, or the sound of the instrument they play, the words they combine in a song, a poem, a paragraph. I want to pat their eyelids and cheeks tenderly with my fingertips, share their air in a moment of communion. I want to make them smile, laugh, with the depth of perception we share, or perhaps rage at the same things.
I love a person, the identity who lives inside the flesh robot they inhabit, regardless of whether that cage has a penis or breasts or comfortable padding or bony protruberances. I fall in love with the light behind the eyes, the brain and the personality that lives there. The shell, the container, doesn’t matter to me, though I want it to be healthy and comfortable for the wearer. And although touch—hugs, the texture of hair in the light and between my fingers, the warmth of skin and the way muscles move, the heat of breath, the smell of the back of the neck, the inside of the elbow, the cleavage, the beat of a heart in close quarters—is part of experiencing that person, none of that leads, for me, to the act of, or even the desire for, sex. I fear I disappoint expectation sometimes, but sex has no place in the amazing sensations both physical and mental I feel for those whom I love.
So when I read or hear people argue about who can or can’t marry, who a person can fall in love with, want to be with, who is sexy or attractive, I am puzzled. As if that matters. I understand if a person feels trapped in a body they can’t be comfortable in, and I want them to be free to be whom they want. It makes no sense to me that any human can’t love whom they love, as long as we’re all past the age of consent and nobody is being hurt.
Seriously, I don’t get it. What is gay? What is bi? From where I sit, which has always felt like the fringes of human experience, those are mysterious distinctions. So intellectually, I understand those distictions matter mortally to people who inhabit them, and who are restricted by stupid laws and conventions because of them. Intellectually.
Emotionally? Why should they matter? I regret the existence of such conventions; they get in the way. They don’t help. They hurt people.
So there you have me, in all my weirdness. If I make a comment that seems senseless or naive or uninformed, this is why. I don’t know how else to be, but I’m still exploring, and reaching for understanding.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-02 10:42 am (UTC)