Problems With Asexual Identities: Part 1 of 634

Before you string me up as an asexual-hating bigot, please carefully re-read the title of this post.  I'm not saying asexuality is a problem, but I want to have a discussion about the issues that asexual identities raise.  This is not saying that asexuals are faking it, or there's something wrong with them, but an attempt to examine and yes, at times, critique what is a chosen social identification and the issues it brings up for non-asexuals, particularly women and queer people.

Because the fascinating thing to me about asexual identity politics is how it often challenges and appropriates concepts from other movements, particularly queer movements.  And I should start by saying that from my perspective, how one identifies is a choice.  This doesn't mean I don't believe there isn't (usually) a biological or inborn component to queerness - or asexuality, for that matter.  But identity - how we choose to label ourselves - is a choice, within a social context.  This applies to virtually any category of person on the planet, really.  Today we tend to take the categories "gay," "straight," and "bi/pansexual" as gospel, forgetting that these are actually modern concepts.  While there have been people who have engaged in same-sex relationships throughout history, our concept of "gay" is actually a pretty recent label to describe a group of people who have always existed.  Likewise for "asexual."  And I reject the notion that exploring the validity and appropriateness of these labels within a political or activist context is inherently negative, although it's often incorrectly dismissed as "identity policing."

My goal is not to say, "asexuals don't exist" because I very much believe asexuals' own reports of their own orientations and identities.  But I don't think it's inherently oppressive or even mean-spirited to explore what informs a person's choice to identify as asexual and to think about ways in which such an identity may be problematic.  I think this is an important distinction to make.  There is a huge difference between disbelieving a person's reported person experience, and critiquing the ways in which they present that experience to the larger world.

One of the most pressing problems with asexual activism online is the insistence by many that asexuality is fundamentally queer.  Many queer people feel this is approprative and deeply offensive, particularly given the nature of "queer" as a slur reclaimed by the people it's directed against. Queer activists who feel strongly about this define "queer" as someone who experiences same-sex attraction, and do include homo and bi/pan-romantics under the queer umbrella, but reject the notion of asexuals who do not experience same-sex attraction or relationships as belonging in the tent.  Some asexual activists counter this by claiming that they're not straight, since the definition of straight is "heterosexual" and they aren't sexual.

That refutation is inherently troubling, however, because it falls into the fairly typical asexual trope of defining non-asexuals on the basis of their sexual activity (and I can't fail to point out here that this is something that homophobic society does all the time to queer people to begin with).  As I mentioned in the previous post, the standard word asexual activists use to describe non-asexuals is "sexuals", which is also really fucking offensive for a number of reasons - even more so when applied to queer people specifically.  I am a rather slutty woman with a higher-than-average libido who hasn't experienced an ounce of personal shame for my sexual behavior in a decade yet even I bristle at being categorized as "sexual".  It feels so reductivist and simplistic.  My sexuality is a lot more complex than "person who has sex."

And this leads into another problem within the asexual community, which is the somewhat understandable yet still often offensive misunderstanding of the spectrum of how non-asexuals experience sexual attraction, desire, and sex.  This is particularly evident when discussing demisexuals, or people who define themselves as a variety of asexual who only experiences sexual attraction once an emotional bond has formed between them and the desire object.  Of course, this is how a huge part of the world experiences sexual attraction, and most of those people wouldn't dream of identifying themselves as the identity-within-an-identity that demisexuality claims to be.  The implicit statement within the definition of demisexuality is that all non-asexuals experience sexual attraction to people they don't know (or don't know very well).  While some of us fall into that category, it's not true for most of us, and it really calls into question whether demisexuality is a useful identity with regards to political activism, particularly given that it mirrors heteronormative and misogynistic notions of how womens' sexual attraction is supposed to function.  I've spent the last two weeks reading endless wanks on Tumblr and blogs about the validity of demisexuality and yet I haven't seen a coherent, convincing argument that what people call "demisexuality" is not simply a rather common sub-group within the non-asexual group.  One does not have to experience sexual attraction to everyone, everywhere, at all times to be a "sexual" person, yet many asexual activists still seem unwilling to listen to the voices of non-asexuals who are sharing their experiences of sexual attraction and desire.

But the problem is, this variety of asexual activist has adopted the framework and language of other oppressed groups, particularly queer groups, to claim that they are actively oppressed by non-asexuals and as such do not need to listen to or empathize with the experiences of the "oppressor."  This is also the argument that is used to justify calling non-asexuals "sexuals" despite repeated pleas to recognize how offensive this is.  Next time we'll examine the concept of "asexual oppression" and "sexual privilege" in-depth and also hopefully get around to talking about the intersection of sexual dysfunction and asexuality and the problems that exist there.