Maybe this is oh so very autistic and asexual of me, but like... you ever stop and think about how weird it is that the current English-speaking online discourse has really narrowed the definition of “sexuality”/
Are there actually that many people for whom that’s a meaningful way to describe their sexuality & queerness throughout their whole life?
It feels very "love at first sight" repackaged, to me, sometimes. Like, sure, we’ve got demisexual and some other asexual microlabels, plus the sapiosexual folks we laughed off tumblr for focusing on the clunky, historically-fraught construct of “intelligence” instead of something like closeness or personality. But other than that, it's all attraction all the way down. My “sexuality” or "orientation", as the current discourse would define it, is just not important to my daily life. The ways heterosexist gender roles and I chafe at each other, sure. The history of partners I’ve had and the futures I can picture myself being happy in both deviating from societal norms, sure. But attraction? Why are we making communities around attraction at all?
Obviously there’s a need to group people’s disparate experiences together broadly for the sake of organizing, but I don’t think the current terms/
I think it makes sense how we got here, in a lot of ways--you have to center desire and not just actions if you want to have a queer movement that is friendly to young and closeted queer folks. The messages queer people get about “people like that” can be harmful even if the people saying them don’t know that anyone listening is “like that”.
But focusing on attraction, an internal feeling, to the exclusion of all other possible definitions of "gay", "bi", "pan", "ace", "aro", etc will also leave people behind. "I can't help it"[3] and "I was born this way" are tactics that throw various groups of queer people under the bus, and I'd like to see a continual move towards an agency-first "this is what I want to do and it's not hurting anybody else so I should be able to do it" framework. The activism around an internal feeling can only ask for a vague respect and potentially some shifts in language. I want us to demand, first and most loudly, agency to live the lives we want to live and freedom from oppressive, normative expectations. The focus on internal attraction others people who could share material solidarity but end up having to repeatedly explain their internal feelings to be granted "validity" instead.
At least for me, attraction is also not super useful in navigating interpersonal relationships, even when it's split out into subcategories like romantic and sexual. I think we could have a better vocabulary for talking about what we want out of our relationships and how we tend to progress through them, as a community, if we could sometimes put the first-impressionistic, gender & appearance-focal labels down and come from a place of curiosity.
In the asexual and aromantic communities specifically, the emphasis on abstract and allegedly-universal definitions as the major community messaging (i.e., distinguishing sexual attraction from romantic attraction from behavior) also makes it so easy to fall into the sex talk trap, and just feels very impersonal/
Does that leave attraction as just an intrusive thought? A relic of past community rhetoric? People can continue to identify with it, but it feels like a weird thing to be structuring community and advocacy around.
In the interest of doing something at least a little bit constructive here, some discussion prompts, maybe:
- How would you categorize or describe the most important relationships in your life as non-abstractly as possible, without using normative categories (romantic/
platonic/ familial/ etc) or the alternatives proposed by queer/ aspec activists? - What visual cues make you excited to get to know a person or interested in pursuing a specific future with them? How many of these are gendered?
- Are there ever situations where learning more about a person makes you more or less attracted to them?
- How much does attraction matter five years into a relationship? How about twenty?
- If you didn't have to deal with preexisting expectations or judgment, who would you invite with you to work events? Weddings? Who would you live with? Who would you raise children or pets with? Who would you want in charge of your medical decisions? Who would you go to for advice? Who would get your stuff when you die? Who would eat meals with you? Who would you pool resources or share labor with? Are there any of these categories you'd like to have "backups" for or share the responsibility among multiple people?
- What things have you done with someone that felt romantic in context but wouldn't feel romantic if you did them with somebody else? What's the difference?
- What is sex? Is wanting to practice kink with someone sexual attraction? What about wanting to make out with them sans genital contact? Naked cuddling?
- What expectations did your parents, mentors, religious leaders, or other authority figures have for your relationships that you've broken or that don't feel important to you?
- What needs to change about the world for you to be free to have the relationships you want with the people you want?
If you're not already familiar with the history of asexual and aromantic activism-via-education, maybe this is surprising. But in a lot of younger queer spaces (full of either young people or that don't have strong ties to the queer history pre-gay-marriage-legalization in the US), this is not a controversial definition. There has been, in fact, a lot of emphasis on standardizing and sharing very high-level and abstract definitions. "Asexuality is a lack of sexual attraction", the party line goes, that does not necessarily imply a lack of sex drive, sexual activity, or desire. When it comes to what attraction actually is, I think this post's distinction between attraction-as-involuntary and desire as the more intentional follow-up involving what a person wants to do or not do is the one that makes the most sense to me and most succinctly sums up the often-unstated way that "attraction" is used in queer community discourse. ↩︎
Usually, percieved gender, although some of the attempts to define this in a more trans- or gender-non-conforming-inclusive way are even weirder and more essentialist. ↩︎
Note that this link, while being a fascinating snapshot of the priorities of bisexual activism a decade ago, spends a lot of time discussing medical studies about "proving" bisexuality and about the purely physical aspects of arousal, which I think really proves a lot of my points about how certain subsets of queer activists define arousal & the way that ties into essentialism. While the article is critical of these studies, it's not half as critical as I feel. You may find it uncomfortably medicalizing. I still think it's worth the read. ↩︎