the idea of two aromantic platonic partners having a “convenience marriage” is like my favorite thing right now I’m both getting really excited and cracking up over the possibilities I mean just imagine:
“we got married because of tax benefits”
“we got married because it gave us an excuse to have sleepovers every night”
“we got married because it seemed convenient to ‘pool our assets’ (aka our library is now twice as big, as is our collection of Disney movies)”
“we got married because it gave us an excuse to ask for toasters from people as wedding gifts”
Sex Positive: I don’t feel sexual attraction but I do enjoy the physical sensation of sex. (Maybe even crave it!)
Sex Neutral: I can have sex but I don’t need it. To be honest I have no strong feelings about sex. But a slice of pizza would be better.
Sex Repulsed: I don’t like sex. I don’t want to have sex. I’m not going to have sex with you. I understand that people enjoy sex but I do not.
The presence of a libido does not invalidate any of these orientations. Dicks jokes and sexual humor do not invalidate these asexuals. These orientations are a SPECTRUM and are very fluid. Asexuals can and do exist in between theses definitions.
Trying to figure out if you’re ace or aro can be so much harder than other
sexualities because it’s like, trying to find the absence of something. Imagine
you’re at a pond and you want to know if there are any turtles, or fish. Say
you find a turtle and you’re like “great! Now I know there are turtles.” Or a
fish, now you know for sure there are fish. Or you find both, and now you know
for a fact there are both turtles and fish in the pond.
But like, if you don’t find any turtles it might be that there are no
turtles or maybe you’re just really shitty at looking for turtles and maybe you
THINK you saw a turtle over there or maybe it was just a stick. Maybe there are
only a few turtles. Maybe you need to do something special to find the turtles. Maybe a bunch of these rocks are actually turtles but you couldn’t tell them apart.
Maybe there are no turtles. You have no idea. Meanwhile some people are saying “Oh
there have to be turtles! You’ll find them eventually ;)” or “How many turtles
have you found in your pond?” or “Try planting some vegetables at the shore to
attract the turtles.” Or “Oh no! What disaster happened to your pond that there
are no turtles?” And you’re just standing there wet with an empty net and a
tired expression.
But whatever because whether there are turtles or fish or not your pond’s
ecology works just fine without them because that’s what eco-communities do
they form a system around what they have. You aren’t missing anything if you
don’t have turtles you just have a pond system without turtles. If someone
tried to change you by pouring a bunch of turtles into your pond it would
probably fuck something up.
So you don’t have to be entirely sure. You don’t have to search every inch of the damn pond before you can decide there are probably no turtles. If you want to take the aro or ace label because you think it fits go for it. And if you do find your turtles you can rename the pond. That’s fine.
Being female-assigned, female-presenting nonbinary on International Women’s Day just highlights how much our language fails people with liminal identities.
There aren’t easy words to describe people whose identities are tied together by our external experiences. We’ve got acronyms– FAAB or AFAB– to describe our physiology, but that feels blank and statistical, and assuming external experience is associated only with physiology is flawed and gender-essentialist in its own way. “Woman” and “female” both belong to people who share an internal identity I don’t share. Female-presenting centers the absence of identity, makes me feel as if the only way to describe myself is as an empty facade. Femme is inaccurate; femme is a word that belongs to a different type of identity that I don’t inhabit.
Self-describing “as a woman” not only erases my own nonbinary identity, but also does a great discredit to transgender women by suggesting that “woman” is a descriptor tied to physiology or external experience rather than identity or expression.
What we don’t have is a word that ties together all of us who share an external experience based on how we are perceived because of our gender assignment and/or perceived presentation. That’s not womanhood, not for all of us, and it’s not the only kind of womanhood. Womanhood, our understanding of womanhood, needs to belong both to women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned female and women who were never seen for who they were because they were assigned male.
I share a kinship based on experience with both cis women and trans women, and some things I share more with cis women, and other things I share more with trans women, and some things I share with both and other things I share with neither. But we have no language that lets me relate simply and accurately, because my internal identity isn’t theirs, and we have words to describe internal identity, but none to describe experiencing the same things as a group without truly being part of that group– none that feel right, none that feel inclusive rather than sidelining ourselves by definition. And it makes it hard to claim and relate experiences, even in places where I feel welcome, without feeling in some way deceitful or erased.
I want a word to describe internal identity, another to describe physiology, another to describe external experience, because all of those are valid things to identify with and to talk about in regard to their commonalities, but it needs to be very clear in our language that they’re all different things, and that they’re not mutually inclusive in the way our society still generally implies they must be.
So, anyway. I’m feeling very much on the outside looking in, feeling strong solidarity but no way to express it with the words I’ve got access to. But thanks to all the women out there and all the people our world defines as women for being yourselves and for doing the work you do.
oh my fucking god, thank you for writing this. mom called to wish me a happy 8th of march this morning and i felt like a total fraud. on the other hand, women’s right to vote, to abortion, to contraception – in short, everything that concerns me as someone assigned female and with a ‘female’ on my ID still concerns me and will possibly concern me for a very long time.
that’s the problem you get if you generalise and scream how only women’s experiences are valid in feminism – what about people who get some of the women’s experiences because we are assigned female?
Honestly, I actually kinda figured it out by dating!
I was only a teenager and a pretty naïve one as teenagers go, and when a boy first asked me out at age 14, I said yes because I’d never done that before and thought it was flattering that a boy liked me. We didn’t actually do anything much. We played video games and liked the same music. I thought he was boring because he would call me and then watch TV at me. We kissed five times. Because we were supposed to. Same reason he bought me jewelry; he was supposed to. He broke up with me—in a note, and we never spoke again—when he found out I was moving to another city and realized he didn’t care. Nice, huh?
I hadn’t gotten anything I wanted out of the experience, but I knew I was pretty young. Despite that, I figured I would think twice before going out with the first person who asked just because they asked, and when I found myself in the same situation the next year at my new school, I said no to the boy. And he begged for almost two years, and (tw: suicide) threatened to kill himself if I would not date him, so eventually I did. (I know, I know. Though it doesn’t help that he actually attempted suicide while we were dating, too, and my mom had to save his life. Long story that I will not tell here.)
Obviously it was an extremely dysfunctional relationship, but what’s really striking about it is that even though I cared about this guy, I did not want to date him and I KNEW I did not want to date him, and yet the pressure from all around (not just from him) indicated that I was supposed to try in order to find out if I liked it. And many of the—I’ll just say physical things we tried while we were dating were things I felt similarly about: Did not believe I would like them, did not like the idea of trying them, tried them anyway because people kept saying I literally could not know without trying, and found myself disliking the experience as expected. (Which of course didn’t help the extremely insecure boy. He would cry and demand to know what he’d done wrong and why I wouldn’t let him touch my boobies after I didn’t like it the first time. Anyway.)
What I came to understand through that experience is that knowing you want to date someone, knowing you want to kiss someone, and knowing you want to do other more sexually intimate things with someone isn’t like simply trying a new food, which you CAN’T experience without putting it in your mouth and making it part of you.
It’s more like trying a new food that has a smell.
You know it stinks. You know as it gets closer to you that you do not want that in your mouth and don’t want any part of it. But everyone keeps telling you oh no, it’s different once it’s in your face, once it’s been swallowed and is becoming part of your body. That makes it different! You can’t possibly smell it ahead of time!
But yeah, I can.
It doesn’t always stink on its own. Sometimes I actually would have to get close to eating it before I could smell it. And sometimes I could tell from a mile away that I wouldn’t want that thing near me. But for me, I feel like I would be able to smell the appetizing foods, and they would smell good to me, like they do for everyone else who gets a crush and knows they want to date that person before they actually say the words and start dating them. I don’t see why people are so reluctant to allow me to claim agency over my own inclinations. If what I want doesn’t make sense to them, I must’ve just not given what they want a chance! But what they want is what they want. They feel something I don’t feel. It’s described as pretty compelling, right? I think I’d know it if I felt it. (And even if I didn’t, it’s VERY clear to me once that nasty food is in my mouth that I do not like the taste of it.)
I tried dating. I tried it even though I didn’t want to because everyone kept telling me I should want to and that I was obviously too close-minded if I refused to pursue and put work into and tie up someone else’s feelings into something I did not desire in the slightest.
I learned, through dating, that I actually can know without trying to date someone whether I’d like to date them. Because actually dating people I didn’t want felt exactly the same after I said yes (with added, unnecessary drama). I imagine if that changes for me one day, I’ll be just as sure that I’m doing the right thing by saying yes, even though at my age (35) I’m sure it would probably be very confusing. But I AM open to new things. It’s not close-mindedness that’s stopping me from pursuing those relationships. It’s my own inclinations.
just moving along like everyone else 