A Casualty.

It seems to be a little of a trend that many blogs on asexuality end up drifting towards gender-realted topics, or at least exploring the intersection of gender and sexuality, and this blog hasn't really been the exception. However, I'm sort of loathe to make this a permanent Thing - gender is something I'm sort of hesitant to speak about, because although I'm much more genderweird than a 'properly cis person', it's something I want to let lie for a bit.

However, whenever I sit down to write a post, I feel like that is the only thing that is going on at the moment. I've basically come as far as possible in my small pond - I educate people, have repeatedly come out, and pretty much reached the end of the road regarding my small peer group. Until I go to college this September, I'm sort of stagnating - the only possible I can see until then is family, and I am most definitely not ready to tell or show them any of my thoughts and concrete feelings about my romantic identity and sexuality.

I admit I'm a little scared of starting the cycle of dealing with everyone anew, but I'm also excited, too (apart from the obvious reason of being excited about staying in a wonderful house with a wonderful lodger family and going to a wonderful college, of course!) - sure, the pressure to conform will be larger, and sure, a larger lot of people might not be the kindest ever, but I'm going to be older and I hope, less inclined to repeat any mistakes.

Why Pinning Down Aesthetic Attraction is like Herding Cats

For me, my lack of being able to pin down whether I found someone attractive or not was basically what led me to identify as asexual. I'd look at a conventionally 'hot' guy, and think they looked okay enough, then double-take and not be able to understand why. It was very ephemeral; blink-and-you-miss-it, type of thing.

Even now I'm aware that I don't have a broken sexuality, just a lack of one, it's still very hard to pic down. When look at pretty people, there will be something about them, but there's none of the 'phwoar' my friends express when they see a 'faaaine individual'.

I don't have a type, or at least, I think not. There are a far-ranging and wide list of things I find awesome, but it's by no means a list or a type. And without sexual attraction I'm pretty much lost, because I can't be sure if the 'pull' towards a pretty face is actually there or not, because whenever I focus on the elusive feeling, slips away from me, like jelly in my fingers.

How do you feel about aesthetic attraction?

Asexuality and Gender; Teenager's Redux

Last week, I found myself educating a schoolfriend on the trans* spectrum (blame the yadas). She'd been following the FtM arc on Hollyoaks and was lovely and just so willing to correct her misconceptions, so that was fun. But as I was earnestly talking to her about cisness and trans*ness** as we walked round a field, she (well-meaningly) turns to me and says, "so are you cis?"
I wasn't really prepared to explain anything to her, nor was it important, so I sorted of shrugged it off with a "I suppose. Haven't really thought about it." Now, this understandably confused her. She 'hadn't thought about it' either, and yet when I told her about the concept of cisness, she was quick to go "Yep, that's me!". And when she voiced this, I felt pressured to think about a little more.

If we go by stereotypes, straight ladies are girly and sweet. They flutter their eyelashes to attract their boyfriends and watch chick flicks. Likewise, straight dudes have 'Lad's Nights' and work out at gyms, blah blah ad infinitum. If we get even further into harmful stereotypes, we have camp gay guys who have little purses falling out of their mouths and who like musicals, and butch gay girls who rode motorbikes and are part of the police force.

So, uh, where does that leave people who are (sexually or romantically) attracted to less or more than one gender? An asexual is sexually attracted to no gender, so where's their stereotype?

I myself am panromantic, so going by this I am even more lacking for a box to fit myself into (woooo). I can't define my gender presentation as a "___ who likes ___" in my form, really? Does this contribute to my yadaness? Eh, I don't know. But I think I've found a (personally) satisfying-yet-simple explanation for the next teenager who comes to me (the schools' ~*~Resident Queer~*~, yay) wanting to know about sexuality or gender after watching Hollyoaks or Skins.

--
Speaking of which, the fact people have been asking me stuff like this because of these shows is freaking awesome. Yay visibility!

**talking to someone who doesn't know anything about trans* individuals until now except that they previously thought of them as extreme crossdressers who 'wanted to be men/women [for a laugh]' is quite fun. For example, being a true Yada I took it one step further and told her about the binary, fluidity, neutrons people et al. Weirdest lunchtime snippet:
"So, there's actually more than two genders."
"Woah, Woah! What?"
"Yup."
"How many, then?"
*flounders* "A million! Sort of."


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone.

Ack.

I've made three posts in January, and all of them have apparently been eaten. Lucky I refrained from posting one of them or I'd have lost that, too.

BEEEEEEP~

Asexy Meetups: Redux

Tomorrow I'm going to be going to my second 'official' meetup, which is in the same place and pretty close to the same time -albeit a year on- as the last one. I've also tried my highest to attend a few others and met awesome asexual outside of the official meetup setting.
One of the things that I'm struck with (and was almost put off by last year) is the fact that I'm quite young. Apart from the wonderful world of not being able to get very far under my own steam, I remember looking at the meetup threads on AVEN and seeing people in their twenties worrying that they were too young to attend. Where did that leave me? What would there be to talk about? I was a bit ambitious in fact that I decided to get over the location barrier by hosing my own darn meetup, and I remember feeling sick with worry as I travelled up- I'm pretty you'd now, and this was a year ago! Everyone was brilliant, though, and didn't even mind that I ended up leading them on a wild goose chase, amongst other things (a my two posts from last year show). AVEN's quite a close-knit community, in he sense that even though the membership spans thousands, you see familiar faces and can build up a picture of everything. It's not a forum for people who share love of an obscure hobby, it's where people quite often end up discovering themselves and puzzling out new and shiny things to do with their gender and sexuality how it pertains to them (yadas, step forward, please). It's a lovely experience to meet a small crossection of the people who make all this up, and I've come away with a couple of new friendships I though I'd never have.

One of my resolutions of 2011 was to attend at least one more meetup (which I can cross off tomorrow!) and I'm definitely planning to, age gap or not.
This time around, though, I'm not even pretending to organise the meet, and for that I am very grateful.
What are your thoughts on asexy meetups? Have you attended any, organised any, or bailed out from them? Do you worry you're too young or too old?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, because my Internet isn't safe anymore. Please excuse typos, but feel free to point them out for correction.

Gender

I know that this has been covered in a lot more depth and with much more eloquence before; but today I'd like to talk about aces and their gender.

I can only really speak for myself and from the experiences I have seen of those on AVEN, tumblr and the yadas, but from what I have seen, a lot of asexuals (and other people who don't use gender to define their orientation, like pan or bisexuals, though that's really only something I have personally observed and is a tenous thing at best) seem to have a much higher of instances of people identifying as in some way being trans(whatever, sometime) or genderqueer in any myriad of ways.

Personally, I have been spending more and more time in the last few months interacting with a set of people on and off of AVEN, and naturally have sort of been sitting back and looking at how I feel about gender. And I really think that in my case at least, it is/was a case of convenience and assumption. Society said that I was a heterosexual girl, a girl who liked boys, the opposite gender.

It's why I was also invisibly told that 'Hey, you like the opposite gender, so you have to be different, and like *insert stereotypically feminine thing here* as opposed to *insert stereotypically masculine thing here*', and I internalised it, the same way that I have heard about so often than gay teens internalise the heteronormative message that they are wrong.

Of course, in your conscious mind you don't want to think that there is something wrong with you, or that social constructs dictate something as personal as your gender, but humans are social creatures. We like to be validated, whether or not the validation is a kind or true one.

On AVEN I likened the feeling to having gender as being two rafts in a river, one cisfemale and one cismale, which the majority of people are tied and/or clinging onto; with other people crossing between the two, or swimming different places in the river between the two or even drifting on the river in their own little vessels. I was saying how I seem to have recently realised that I'm not actually tied to the 'cisfemale' raft, and have rather been clinging on for convenience rather than necessity; as I've taken more and more time to think about it, I seem to be drifting away from the relative safety of the raft and am now at the mercy of the current, a bit.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, because my Internet isn't safe anymore. Please excuse typos, but feel free to point them out for correction.

Kinks and asexuality

I guess it's odd that I'm posting about kinkiness. For one thing, I'm an adolescent, and for another, I'm asexual. But here I am, posting this - though don't worry, it's not explicit or 'hardcore'.

I've been thinking about kinkiness specifically because I've been thinking about asexuality, and what is is. As in, it may be the absence of sexual attraction, but what about aesthetic and romantic attraction? Romance drives? Sensuality and how it relates to sexuality?
The first two have been discussed and defined at considerable length, but the latter I have only seen talked about through fandom (courtesy of a wonderful essay by saucery at http://saucery.livejournal.com/11578.html ) and another blog written by a highly kinky asexual. I have also seen it acknowledged, at least in passing, by a few others; but definitely nowhere where people have sat down and said "We're here. Now let's talk about this."

And no, I'm not sure why I've taken it upon myself to 'talk' about it, as it were. Maybe because after a year of going 'am I really ace? Yep? Just checking,' I've gone onto a new kind of questioning, the kind where I go 'would I be willing to do this or this? Who can I see myself in a relationship with, if at all? I've questioned my gender, and those other three things- it seems that now my brain is satisfied about my orientation, it has found new things to question. Lucky me.
Of course, the side effect of this has been some welcome, unwelcome, and downright weird discoveries about myself. I'm personally of the opinion that if everyone did the same- if everyone was forced/led to explore their a/sexuality, orientation and gender like many queers folks are, there would be a lot less cut-and-dried straight-and-cis folk around (which, as I said, is a personal and frankly rather shoddy theory also vaguely supported by the 'increase' if queer folks, which is again an unreliable source, and... You get the idea). Sexuality (and all it all entails) is, as they say, fluid.

Obviously, the point of this post isn't to ramble on and on about gender and queerness and so forth... Or, it is, but of a different and specific brand.

Thinking about sensuality separately from sexuality is pretty headache-inducing. For a start, most of the time typically 'sensuous' things lead to sex. They're a pretty damn big part of foreplay, and so whilst certain things aren't sexual in of and in themselves, such as a backrub done by a professional (and done right) can be extremely sensually pleasing, but put the same backrub in another context, between 'friend's or partners, and as if by magic it becomes sexually charged. Apparently.

I think it's odd to reconcile the concept of asexuality and sensuality (even without 'proper' kink) without experience. Heck, I sometimes go 'really? This is really how I feel?' on certain days. But like it or not sensuality (as well as aesthetic and romantic attraction; and sexual and romantic drives) are not mutually exclusive. I sometimes worry about how I would potentially deal with sensuality with a partner; it's most likely that I will at any given time (in a relationship, I'm not constantly in the things) I will be in one with a sexual, and there the problems begin.
Of course, cutting straight to the heart of the issue; for me, it's the trust. There are a lot of very sensual things that I would love to share in the future with a partner: these things wouldn't be sexual in my view. I really wouldn't want to be in a potentially compromising situation as long as I trusted them to know that no, I wasn't cured of being ace, or getting carried away, and that I wouldn't like to _______ in the hypothetical situation. I know there's no-one at the moment who I could trait like that, and it's for. I'm a teenager, for goodness' sakes. I just hope that I get older that this still isn't too much to ask (as if being in a relationship with a repulsed asexual wouldn't be hard enough anyway, but that's another discussion). It probably be the worst kind if tease, as well- like I mentioned, sensual play is generally employed in sexual foreplay, and I'm sure it'd be annoying to a good few people- at bit like someone stealing the best part of a dessert. I mean, I myself don't feel it anywhere near as an important part of me as asexuality, but it's definitely an interesting conundrum.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, because my Internet isn't safe anymore. Please excuse typos, but feel free to point them out for correction.