One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

An asexual view of sexuality.

“I knew I liked girls when I was four years old,” a lesbian woman says. “I had my first crush on a boy in pre-school,” a straight woman says. “Shego from Kim Possible was my bisexual awakening,” a bisexual woman says. “We were born this way,” they all say. “But something happened to you.” 

“No,” I can’t help but think in these moments. “You were probably born just like me, but your track of development happened to include a certain type of gravitation toward other people, a gravitation that would later be reflected on and understood to be the emerging of your sexual orientation as defined in the modern era.” 

That was my view from the outside, anyway. The view of the people around me gradually losing their minds to what I’m told is an intrinsic part of being human. Running off with the milkmaid and all that. Classic young love. Something celebrated these days when just a couple of centuries ago it was cautioned against because of the extent to which it could derail the stability of the larger clan. The path of Romeo and Juliet was not a recommendation, is all I’m saying. One wild weekend of hormonal absurdity and they both ended up dead (spoiler alert). But I digress. 

Sure, something happened to me. Something happened to all of us. Development is complex and beyond anyone’s control. How you feel about others is not a choice, but I also do not think who we grow up to fancy is pre-determined by our DNA and, to my knowledge, no one has been able to provide biological evidence that accurately predicts a newborn’s eventual sexuality or any number of feelings that would make up one’s emotional profile. Insisting otherwise for the sake of publicity and political causes is one thing. But it’s just us here right now. You and me. So I’m trying to be real. 

With that in mind, let’s continue.

I’ve been unsure whether or not I should write this piece mostly because I don’t wish to sound repetitive in what I put on this Substack. I’ve certainly written quite a few things that allude to or tie in sexuality in one way or another despite my professed lack of credentials for speaking on the topic at all. Another way of saying that would be that I’ve told stories for which these terms and feelings were relevant to the tale. But I don’t feel like I’ve ever pulled up a chair and talked about it outright. A big part of me did not want to. After all, one complaint I have is that people talk about this stuff far too much.

But I guess I’m setting out to be a hypocrite no matter which way you slice it. Because for all people talk about this stuff, I still feel like I perhaps have something of value to say for someone out there who might stumble upon this. Two works from others that have motivated me to do this are a RedFem podcast episode titled “Asexuality, the Logic of Pornography,” and the second part specifically of a four-part blog post from StoryEndingNever titled “Forced Sexuality.” I definitely recommend subscribing to both the RedFem podcast and the StoryEndingNever blog.

While I obviously might not always agree with everything the three women behind these works have to say, I find engaging with their work valuable because it is informative and enlightening and I’ll be referencing these two works at various points in this post. I’m a little concerned that compared to them I might come off as stupid or, at the very least, not academic. But this Substack was never meant to be “academic.” It’s mostly me telling stories and indulgently speaking of my own experiences, often leaving the ground more or less open for what any given reader derives from such stories. I imagine the result of this piece will ultimately be similar.

PART I: PURPOSE OF TERMINOLOGY

I’ve always thought that it’s a bit strange that there is a special word for someone who has never had sex. These days, I’m far from alone in that thought. The existence of the word “virgin” is not too much unlike the designation of “Mrs.” versus “Miss” in the English language, these markers put on women to denote their property status. Now of course we have “Ms.” Good for us, I guess, keeping it ambiguous. But with “virgin” you inevitably run into matters of wider purity culture which goes hand in hand with rape culture which all serves a male value system under which women, just like animals or a field of crops, are a resource to be relentlessly mined until we are destroyed. 

But even beyond that, what are other examples of words that specify someone who has never done something? I could list a few words for people who don’t take certain actions currently that hold an implication that they also plan to not take certain actions in the future. But they speak nothing of the past. They speak nothing of someone’s entire history up until that point. 

A celibate person is someone who doesn’t have sex. A sober person is someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat meat. Is there a word for someone who never went to college? Is there a word for a person who never murdered anyone? Is there a word for someone who never learned how to ride a bike or how to swim? Someone who can’t cook? Can’t hunt? Can’t grow things? Can’t get a fire started? How about someone who hasn’t yet lost their baby teeth? There might be a medical term for that, but I’m unsure (I’m going to bring up those teeth again later because I’ve got a bone to pick about that - pun intended). 

I’m trying to think of things considered important by global society consistently throughout history and coming up with blanks. I guess if you can’t read you’re called illiterate. But that’s just a modification of “literate.” What’s the opposite of a virgin? Not a virgin. Not college educated. Not a murderer. See? I don’t think that counts as a word or phrase in and of itself. So “virgin” really is a standout, something that immediately highlights the level at which sexual intercourse is valued. One’s first time marks a turning point that changes one's entire designation. Somewhat similarly, I’ve found it strange that of all the things to have a special word for, we have an increasingly complex list of terms to describe who any given person would like to engage with sexually, virgin or not. But let’s rewind a bit.  

For a long time, even before the first Tribe Member of the Month was crowned after figuring out how to make fire happen, it is my assumption (given my distinct lack of anthropological knowledge) that the way of the world was that the strong would rape the weak and continue on with their day. Everyone else would have to just roll with it. As is observed in many other creatures, that essentially always means that males would rape females or weaker males. If females escaped this fate, they would simply live out the rest of their short lives and die off. They’d be removed from the gene pool through not reproducing. Lost to the stars. But for those who couldn’t get away, the cycle of violence would continue. 

Her daughter would be raped, as would her granddaughter, and so on and so forth for thousands of generations until over time, getting caught may even be seen as the more desirable outcome due to various social factors. Or it may even feel organic. Getting caught by one male over another male might be preferred even absent any intrinsic sexual desire. As StoryEndingNever pointed out quite bluntly, males will fuck anything. There are plenty of emergency room stories to support that claim. But for men to fuck a woman specifically comes with added benefits that can’t be provided by a warm piece of bread or an unsuspecting farm animal. 

That is likely why at some point over those thousands of generations, given the fact that males will fuck anything, some males in the group would no doubt find it beneficial to rein that behavior in a little. For among males, there is always a hierarchy and within that hierarchy, the quest for power and control is neverending. Thus, in my uneducated opinion, organized religion was born and all dominant religions of the modern era just so happened to have a lot to say about what males should be fucking and under which conditions the fucking should occur to maintain a properly functioning male society. 

Normal males became distinct from afflicted males. Normal males would fuck females, even ones they technically weren’t supposed to be fucking. Afflicted males would fuck other males, inanimate objects, or their own fists. Females are not real people within the context of male rule, so their desire is irrelevant at best and outright denied as a thing that exists in the first place at worst. They are objects from which to mine resources like offspring, male sexual satisfaction, and all labor related to those two things.

Male worship of their own penises evolved. Honorable males kept up appearances enough to satiate their social circle. Chivalry or other professed codes of honor became a thing in some places. The status quo grew to punish males who put their dicks in the wrong places (funny that sodomy is its own special word too). Females, widely considered crazy already if showing any resistance to any of this would be deemed particularly crazy for wanting to engage sexually with other females (though even today this is often not considered to be “real sex” because no dicks are involved). 

Nonetheless, progress was made after another hundred generations or so and within the past hundred years in particular. A decent amount of people began to admit that yes, they masturbate. Heterosexuality was coined to describe the default (though after thousands of generations of rape, male rule, and the ideologies that keep the machine going, I hesitate to agree with that for many of the reasons more articulately outlined by StoryEndingNever), homosexuality was coined to acknowledge the affliction later upgraded to be a simple difference in preference in some parts of the world. Then came bisexuality and the rest of the alphabet… including asexuality. 

So considering the ordeal of everything I just outlined, I am making it known that while I certainly understand why these terms exist, and while I certainly understand the communication benefits of using such terms, and while I don’t deny that consistent patterns of sexual interest exist in most people, I personally maintain that no matter how “progressive” we make sexuality terminology it remains a product of male culture. As such, I find it exhausting that this all remains so central to our conceptualization of humanity and our most valued relationships. I also wonder what language would look like in an alternate timeline where things did not play out as they did in our own reality. Star Wars, as a flimsy example that is far from a feminist utopia but claims that sexism is not a thing there despite clear examples pointing out otherwise, does not canonically have any in-universe sexuality terms. Though the people in the Star Wars galaxy have certainly noticed that they experience certain patterns of sexual interest and often say so quite plainly to the audience who then go wild assigning the corresponding terminology and flags of our own world to them. 

But it is what it is. Avoiding these words, as demonstrated in Star Wars, would do little but perhaps attempt to obscure a readily observable reality just like, in my opinion, coming up with the ownership-neutral alternative “Ms.” which also obscures a readily observable reality still reinforced by things like wedding rings and naming conventions. So no, I’m not coming for anyone’s words. But I do think that’s what makes it particularly interesting that when it comes to asexuality, the simple usage of that word can sometimes be seen as controversial. 

PART II: DEFINING SEXUALITY AND ITS ABSENCE

At first, I was surprised that out of all places to begin a larger discussion about asexuality, the hosts of the RedFem podcast, Jen and Hannah, decided to start with Stonewall’s definition of the word. Given how essentially every other organization in the Western world advocating for any and all things “queer” can’t even define what a lesbian or a woman is anymore for that matter, it’s funny that Stonewall, unpopularly known as a champion of transing children, would be seen as an authority on defining asexuality. 

Despite saying that, Stonewall’s definition is unfortunately consistent with the popular understanding of the word in its context as a sexual orientation. Compared to “homosexual” or even “lesbian,” “asexual” hasn’t been used to describe humans for nearly as long. Some feminists used the word fifty years ago here and there but they used it primarily as a secular alternative to the term “celibate” rather than to describe someone who seemingly lacked sexual inclinations outright which didn’t happen until the 2000’s and did not gain any traction until the 2010’s. Not because it’s a new thing, but because I figure most people (me included) never organically thought to give this lack of feeling a special name that described a wider phenomenon. That left more than enough room for the definition of asexuality to become effectively meaningless as inclusion warriors flooded in and decided that an asexual person is someone who either doesn’t experience sexual attraction or someone who only experiences sexual attraction… sometimes. This encompasses literally everyone. As such, an asexual person is anyone who identifies as asexual. 

Prior to that, ever so briefly, it was defined as someone who does not experience sexual attraction, full stop. And out of all the crazy terms being thrown around in modern circles concerned about such things, presuming that somewhere out there in a world where there are people who experience attraction to one sex or both sexes, the thought that there must exist some number of people who do not demonstrate attraction to either sex doesn’t seem like a big leap of logic. If I were a betting woman, I’d bet on it. It’s nowhere near as much of a leap of insanity as believing that some women actually have the internal gender spirit of a man. But the former contradicts the steadfastly held belief that we are all sexual beings as a prerequisite for being human and the latter coincidentally in a roundabout way helps set things straight for those who maintain that a man and woman being together sexually is the natural order of things if the alarming amount of lesbian women considered to be “masculine” (yet another term rooted in male doctrine) suddenly discovering that they’re really men are anything to go by… ignoring the fact that the whole idea of “masc-femme” or “top-bottom” homosexual pairings is not a rule of engagement.

Hannah reads through the Stonewall explanation that asexuals might also use terms like lesbian, straight, gay, or bi in conjunction with asexuality opening up the discussion on the concept of split attraction (that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are two distinctly separate things). Jen chimes in right away that it is impossible to be an asexual lesbian because if you are a woman who is not sexually attracted to other women, how are you a lesbian? But shortly thereafter, Jen brings up her own definition of sexuality that is not defined by who you want to have sex with but describes it rather as a larger both conscious and subconscious thing that touches many areas of life. She tends to agree with the theories laid out by Sigmund Freud who I believe was instrumental in her PhD work. 

One example she uses is a friend of hers who got very jealous when she got a girlfriend back in school. While Jen does not believe her friend had non-platonic feelings for her, she uses this as an example of the blurred reach of subconscious sexuality extending to other areas of life yet also likens it to the concept of sibling rivalry and does not expand further on that point. More concretely, she then points out that every asexual she has heard of still masturbates thus making them not asexual but rather autoerotic. The sexual feelings of that person fail to find an object (which is how many coincidentally define asexuality). I believe the point she’s making here is that in these examples, sexuality is muted, distorted, or otherwise repressed but still present. Should whatever limiting factors that exist go away or should the right conditions be met, these things would easily point to being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

Jen also expresses the view that should a woman be so traumatized by relations with men that she becomes unable to feel sexual attraction toward them and as a result only feels sexual attraction toward women, she sympathizes with that and takes no issue with that woman calling herself a lesbian. And while Jen maintains that there is no such thing as asexuality, she similarly thinks that anyone who feels they genuinely experience no sexual attraction to anyone at all is that way due to similar past traumas, naturally low libido, libido-suppressing drugs, or something related to those things explaining that even though she is a lesbian, she hasn’t fancied anyone in years and that most married couples stop having sex after seven years but neither of those things makes someone a newly discovered asexual. 

From my perspective, I’m really open to any number of explanations. I’ve already outlined why I find all of this terminology a bit exhausting in the first place, though because I nonetheless find the topic interesting, when discussing it I’m more on a mission to figure out how the person I’m talking to is defining things then frame myself or others within those definitions to see where that discussion might go. For Jen, I imagine I would be the low-libido person who simply hasn’t got a clue what is going on. I’m not the woman who knew she liked other women when she was four or the woman who had her first crush on a boy in pre-school or the woman who had a bisexual awakening via Shego from Kim Possible. I just simply… don’t know. Have never happened upon the right person. I have an inconclusive set of data to be understood somewhere down the line or have concocted an internal block so powerful I have managed to fool myself into my thirties. So let’s go with that. 

As a small child, there were many things said to be part of my future that were unappealing to me. The first was the prospect of losing my baby teeth. It seemed bizarre, painful, and scary. I told myself that my teeth were perfectly fine as they were. I even mysteriously already had extra teeth in my mouth which pointed even more to the feeling that perhaps I was some kind of exception with my special shark teeth. They wouldn’t simply fall out like everyone else’s. But then they did (though quite a few more were forcibly extracted to make the inside of my mouth look like it was supposed to on the charts thus kickstarting my phobia of dentists). 

Next, I learned of menstruation, another bloody affair that sounded even more horrific than the gore of losing your teeth. But I told myself that this wouldn’t happen to me. These things I am told exist inside of me are not actually there or else surely I would know about it. I was different somehow. Perhaps I wasn’t even fully human. This thing would not happen to me. But then it did. 

I’ve written before about how at no point in my childhood did I equate love with marriage. Marriage was very procedural. An important strategic move to make in one’s life and a duty to fulfill. It’s why I figured the powers that be were so against same-sex marriage. It’s against the rules and I was certainly a rule follower. Not much better than Romeo and Juliet poisoning themselves, insisting on same-sex unions would have you booted from your home and left to waste away in the wilderness. It was better to follow the script until a time when the rule book might change. 

“After five years of dating I suppose it would be appropriate to hold hands,” I said to the amusement of my family as a pre-teen. “But we would need to do that for another five years before agreeing to marry. The wedding would take at least two years to plan but at the wedding would be our first kiss,” I said, figuring that by twelve years in surely it wouldn’t kill me to kiss this faceless, hypothetical man. “Hopefully if we had enough money we could live in separate houses most of the time,” I said imagining that once marriage occurred it was within the marriage contract to have sex once or twice for the sake of reproduction for which I could be heavily intoxicated as adults like to do or just unconscious entirely. “But of course, we’d come to dinner as a couple for the holidays. And I suppose… I’d be getting buried with his family instead of with you all once I die.” That idea at the end somehow saddened me the most. 

“Yeah, you’re gonna have to give that guy a lot of money to put up with her,” my older sister tells our parents. I didn’t see the problem. I was agreeing with the terms of polite society. I was also confident that with marriage being an adult matter,  it would be a long time before any of this would become a reality or even relevant. I was focused on friendship, something incredibly age-appropriate. And if the best-case scenario for marriage was marrying your best friend (something I took literally because I thought sexuality was something only experienced by men), perhaps before all these things came to pass the rules would change and my life teammate would be a girl for all of my friends were girls and boys were very much an unknown factor at my all girls school. Or perhaps I’d just be so vile to any future suitors that I could be a failure just in that aspect of life, leaving me free to spend time with whoever I wanted, perhaps traversing the world or even becoming an astronaut rather than staying trapped in a house being raped for the good of society. 

Years went by. The reality of my situation was far less archaic than I had initially anticipated. Those around me formed infatuations with others but I did not. In college, I learned through conversations with other women that there is such a thing as sexual pleasure for female humans just like for male humans. I learned that women have the ability to masturbate. I learned that sex toys are a thing. I learned that women genuinely wanted to have sex. But I didn’t. I still felt nothing. To this day I can only guess what sexual pleasure or arousal feels like through descriptions and context clues. I waited for the other shoe to drop just like I had various times before. But it didn’t. 

I never touched contraceptives, was never put on any medication aside from cold medicine or a temporary antibiotic. My skin was clear. My period came like clockwork every month. I always recieved a clean bill of health for college athletics. Life moved on. I forgot about all this stuff I was supposed to be doing. I was a roadie now, after all. Sleeping on a tour bus, traveling the country and eventually the world putting on shows of all genres and sizes. Normal people were back home doing what normal people do. But as years went by, my friends and colleagues on the road began to date. They’d tour less. They’d get married and stop touring altogether. I went from being the youngest person on a touring crew to the oldest. I began to worry what would happen to me if I ever got off the road, if I remained at home to see the reality of going off script set in. Would I be lonely? If I told a friend I wanted to be her teammate in life, or if I simply wanted to spend more time together generally, would she reject me? Would anyone even consider me a legitimate partner if sex was not in the cards? If they did, would that - funnily enough - be the key to a severely delayed sexual awakening? Am I some kind of frog prince? That’s an amusing theory. 

Without any history of sex, does a partnership have any legitimacy whatsoever? According to male doctrine, certainly not. Am I still in a limbo of not truly understanding myself? Was my willpower so strong that I managed to override these feelings that are thought to be a prerequisite for being human just like Harry Potter begging the sorting hat to not put him into Slytherin? 

Who’s to say? More than that, does this matter? Would I be having this conversation with you if we didn’t have all these special words to converse with? 

PART III: CONSIDERING OTHER NARRATIVES

There’s a book that came out recently called The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen. A self-described bisexual woman married to a man, I became aware of the book when she started making the rounds on various podcasts, eventually guesting on one that was reposted to a radfem-adjacent online space I was in. I’ve ordered the book out of curiosity for future reading, but as of yet have not read it myself. I have listened to probably five or six hours of her speaking about the book on different podcasts though so feel I get the jist of what’s going on there. 

Despite my somewhat unpopular approach to the topic of sexuality in large, an opinion I find not uncommonly held by others including by Rhaina Cohen, Jen and Hannah of the RedFem podcast, StoryEndingNever, numerous feminists I’ve encountered in online spaces, and from those I interact with face to face is that as a culture we really have put sex and romance on a pedestal which has resulted in things like friendship being relegated to something juvenile and, past a certain point, negligible or even tedious. 

What Jen and Hannah primarily describe about asexuality, is that this enduring non-definition of the word including the entire “asexual spectrum” like “demisexual” or “graysexual,” follows the logic of pornography in that no matter what the situation is, the woman in particular is always down to have sex. Porn logic dictates that everyone is wanting to have sex all the time and at any given appropriate (or even inappropriate) opportunity, sex should be occurring if you are normal. That is how for young girls in particular, anything less than hypersexuality puts you somewhere on the “asexual spectrum” which is complete rubbish and a very sad way to view life. Still, this is the result of a relentless wave of sex positivity and the neverending discourse and obsession with bestowing upon everyone some kind of sexuality label that is seen as key to understanding their true selves. 

StoryEndingNever describes how no matter if someone is homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, all generally agree that asexuality isn’t natural if not impossible. Further than that, she describes the obvious centrality of sexual intercourse when speaking about sexuality. Even I have written before about how on one hand, many are offended if you mention this centrality because to do so is some type of fetishization of the relationship, but the second you remove sexual intercourse from the equation it is seen as even more offensive by denying their intrinsic nature as human beings. To quote from StoryEndingNever directly:

“It is my contention that sexuality is completely contrived and agenda- and entitlement-driven. I think that all defined sexualities are choices and fuelled by pressure to be sexual beings and by falsely equating or linking love and sexual activity or sex drive. Even homosexuals are affected by heterosexual male thinking and believe that love is dependent upon fucking. If there is no sex or if the sex dissipates in a relationship, then the relationship is in trouble. No sex = no love = no relationship. Relationships only exist if there is a defined sexuality. And it is because of this that I believe that homosexuality is also enforced (i.e., if you are not straight then you MUST be gay). If you don’t choose a sexuality, then you will never find love or be loved. Queer nonsense doesn’t solve this problem, by the way.”

And she is right. In the ever-accepting online purgatory of asexual discourse, most people spend all their time hyping themselves up to have sex anyway to make a relationship happen, admit to liking sex just as much as porn might expect them to, or complain about every instance of being excluded from an acronym or flag display that, in their view, would lend legitimacy to whatever it is they’re trying to sell about themselves. It is a sea of absurdity laying there in plain sight on Stonewall’s definition page or otherwise to be ridiculed as much as it deserves. 

My main question is and has long been: What does a meaningful partnership with someone inherently have to do with sex? That is a question Rhaina no doubt encountered in the interviews for her book which included self-described asexuals and other assortments of dedicated platonic partnerships. It’s a question that maybe not a lot of other people consider because, reportedly, most people enjoy having sex at one point or another. They get something out of that kind of closeness that makes them feel valued so pursuing a partnership with that person is convenient for not feeling shitty. 

But I think the obvious answer here is that partnership really doesn’t inherently have anything to do with sex. Any two people can decide to be together for any reason. However, after a thousand generations of rape and another thousand generations of trying to assign meaning to it, and a hundred years or so of reciprocal sexual desire being acknowledged and acted upon for all types of people, we’ve ended up here where “reimagining life with friendship at the center” is framed as some kind of groundbreaking idea. Intellectually, I understand where others are coming from. But surely, I figure it can’t be that hard to intellectually understand where I’m coming from either. 

Jen and Hannah bring up the idea of sexual value and how this is something of high importance to women in particular in a male society where appealing sexually to others is the most important thing they have going for them. Jen even reflects on how not understanding this at first resulted in her giving her friends relationship advice that they were never going to follow, advice that centered on dumping the man and going off on their own to actually accomplish something which I found funny and incredibly relatable. 

Another idea that is recurring through many RedFem podcast episodes is how women place heightened importance on relationships in general, romantic or otherwise. A woman by herself is not a person, she is just a reflection of her relationships. If she has none, then she feels she has no value. They reference a thought put forward by Andrea Dworkin to counter this, one that links happiness to thinking of yourself and your life’s work in the context of lifetimes, the result of investing in something larger than yourself making your life meaningful. This is something I have espoused many times in past writings, an enduring drive and desire to be good at something, to contribute to something that I felt really mattered. Of course in the context of a male society, my younger self equated that with military service or something similar which Jen has pointed out seems to be a big draw for many a lesbian trying to fit somewhere in the world around them.   

I do however feel balance is important and care quite a bit about friendship, more than what tends to be socially expected. I’ve wrestled with the most appropriate way to go about it ever since I was a teenager and came to understand the reality of relationship hierarchies. My solution has simply been to move forward, go to work, keep in touch, and hope for the best. Do not feel dismayed playing a bigger part in some chapters of the lives of friends than others. If somewhere down the line someone I make a good team with wants to take a chance with me in a more formal sense… we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But I’m really not counting on it anytime soon if ever.

StoryEndingNever speaks about her sexual pursuits as a young lesbian and how sex was the main thing on her mind, confused when an older lesbian she was with had different priorities. But as she has aged, things have inevitably cooled down and the type of partnership she would be the most open to is one that is distinctly asexual in nature, something I believe is fairly common across the board once you reach a certain age. Perhaps at that point in life I’ll be sitting with peers over tea or cold glasses of lemonade. They’ll entertainingly bond over their similar trajectories, appreciating the journey and valuing the role it played in their lives but celebrating their return to sanity whether they be partnered, divorced, dating, or single.

After all, they were born this way.