Everyday Ignorance

I’m seeing this too often and I want it to stop.

I talk about asexuality and someone responds with “I know what that’s like, because sometimes my sex drive is low and I don’t want sex at all.  And you don’t see me calling it ‘asexual.’”

A demisexual person talks about the difference between normative sexuality and demisexuality, and someone responds with “I sometimes have sex with people I’m not attracted to.  And I didn’t want to have sex with my partner until I knew hir better.  You don’t see me calling it ‘demisexual.’”

A gray-asexual person talks about the difference between normative sexuality and graysexuality, and someone responds with “So what?  Sounds like you’re just really picky.  I don’t want to have sex with everything that moves either, and you don’t see me calling it ‘graysexual.’”

People, people.  The reason folks are identifying with these labels that seem so useless, irrelevant, and redundant to you is that they are not having your experience.  They are using these words because they relate to sexuality differently than those with normatively sexual relationships.  What are you getting out of it by walking into a room and saying “Excuse me, I don’t understand your experience or why you say it’s any different from mine, so I am going to assign you a Special Snowflake complex whenever I can’t process your reality”?

Enough with the anecdotes, folks.  We understand that you don’t get it.  We understand that you think we simply enjoy creating microcategories to describe ourselves, perhaps because (like many people who confuse behavior with orientation) you believe we think sexuality is icky and that we want to separate ourselves from being lumped in with icky people.  We understand that from the outside, asexuality looks like abstinence, demisexuality looks like slow-growing normative relationships, and graysexuality looks like being picky.  But that’s the point.  From the outside, that’s what it looks like.  That’s what it looks like if you judge us by what you see on the surface instead of listening to what we say.

From the inside, moving through a sexual world without relating to it normatively is significant and influential, especially during our formative years.  People who are gray and demi identify that way partly because they experience the world the way non-gray/non-demi asexuals do much or most of the time.  They have a partially or primarily ace experience in their lives, and they find it useful to involve themselves with other ace-spectrum people who get it.  I haven’t seen as much confusion here over non-gray and non-demi asexuals as long as they don’t have sex and make everything “confusing,” but for what it’s worth, asexuals who aren’t willing to have sex often get told they’re either gay in denial or not-at-all-special straight prudes.  We’re really not trying to look special by using these words.  We’re trying to communicate with you, and hoping you’ll understand our experience instead of mocking it.

But here’s the thing.  We’d love you to understand us, but we’re not asking for your permission.  On the inside, we find these divisions and labels useful while talking about our attractions or lack thereof.  On the inside, we have helpful and enjoyable conversations about our experiences once we have the words to describe them.  On the inside, we find fellowship and understanding, and we don’t need anyone’s blessing to do that.  We aren’t specifically “trying to exclude” anyone by acknowledging that there IS an inside.  Don’t take it as an offense that you are naturally excluded from a group that’s having a different experience from you.  Don’t look at us and say “I don’t relate to this at all, and I don’t like that they’re naming it and acting like it’s real.”  We’re not doing that to you.  We acknowledge that you exist.  We don’t try to tear you down and say your relationships don’t need words.

If this is not your experience, you are outside.  And that’s completely okay.  It’s not a fence that’s dividing us.  It’s not a suggestion that we’re on different levels of any kind, or that any group has a right to look down on the other.  It’s not some wall we’re putting up to tell you to stay out of our space—that isn’t what we’re asking.  But when you—you who identify as a majority-group sexuality—look at a minority group and tell them to stop annoying you by talking about themselves, you’re telling them that only your experience is real and important.  And you’re doing that with the power of the status quo behind you.

There’s nothing wrong with just telling us you don’t share our experience.  We aren’t asking you to.  Ally with us, or ignore us if we’re just too annoying to you, but don’t tell us to stop using words to talk about who we are, and don’t reduce our identity to a childish ploy to shame “sexual people.”  We don’t think of it like that at all, and the main places I’ve seen that attitude thrown around are cases of non-ace-spectrum people putting those words in our mouths.  (And I’m sure someone could find an ace person behaving poorly and quote hir while representing hir words as our prevailing attitude, but seriously.  No.)

If you’re quoting our definitions and telling the world how you just don’t get why our experience is in any way non-normative, you’re by definition not having our experience and it’s therefore not yours to describe.  If your experience isn’t our experience, don’t tell us how to talk about it.

Not from the outside.