discussion What do you think of asexuals?

They mostly seem to be heterosexual girls/women who are horrified by how toxic, dangerous, and degrading sexual relationships with men are.

Some are adolescent males who are socially inept and unable to start or maintain relationships with girls/women and kept getting rejected if they tried.

And some ace of both sexes may be young incipient lesbians or gay males terrified of how sickeningly awful homophobia has become everywhere they turn.

Asexuals are valid but they aren't LGB. LBG people all have the common experience of same-sex attraction, asexuals do not. Asexuals have never had to protest or fight for the right to not have sex or to refrain from intimate relationships in the way that LGB people have had to fight to decriminalize homosexuality and legalize same-sex marriage.

I don't think that asexual is sexual orientation. It's not the same thing. Most of them are still straight. This term can mean many things such as live style, statement, trauma, maybe something else.

I might be over the line here but it's been my impression that ace is a thing because our culture has completely marginalized adult humans who choose to abstain. imagine if you were a young person who just didn't want to have sex. would you rather tell your peers that you are " celibate " or " choosing abstinence " if you could also choose the popular and edgy sexual identity of ace.

I'm not saying I really know what's going on here, but if I were young I know what I would pick.

I certainly find it very odd that not being interested in sex makes you gay now. Because gay aka same sex attracted is what LGB etc used to be about.

The "ace" thing, as I've seen it, as invariably three things:

/1/ aimed only at Women and Girls; nobody is trying to limn any notion of "ace" males

/2/ never accompanied by commonsense messaging saying that singlehood and celibacy are perfectly acceptable lifestyle options

/3/ alws with some mention made that "asexuals can still have sexual rls" with some patently insincere happy-ass joywashing about 'intimacy' and 'bonding' and other such phenomena that are clearly real parts of a healthy rl, but that here are offered as the proverbial bill of goods in a mutual exchange with asexual pu$$y—where (let's all be shocked!) the 🐈 is duly received but none of the billed emotional and spiritual goods are tendered.

Putting these together, the entire thing is pretty clearly a front intended to trick or lull a Woman into a "«'relationship'»" in which She gets not only no sexual pleasure at all, but moreover no effort or attentiveness or attempt at bettering either of these from dude-o, and purpose-built to coerce Her and wear Her down into believing that this kind of one-way street is a legitimate 'orientation' rather than what it is, which is an endorsement of abuse and neglect.

As the world's worst imaginable 'bonus' for Lesbians the entire edifice of the cotton ceiling is tossed right in there, in raw whole undiluted form.
For straight Women it's "only" horribly bad, totally unsatisfying, and actively toxic. But at least it's mutually heterosexual on paper! Not that that's actually a plus🥴 although, on a basis of pure wild-eyed speculation, I would guess that this does actually make everything incrementally less bad than for Lesbians because at least the entire nature of attraction is "only" ignored, not actively traduced.

I haven't mentioned bi Women because there are only two possibilities, /1/ bi is exactly the sum of the two parts and is no more and no less, or /2/ a synergy (of any kind at all) exists in which the hetero and lesbian attraction modules talk to each other as it were.
If it's /1/ then it's already covered in discussing impacts on straight and lesbian Women. If on the other hand it's /2/ then i know nothing (but want to know everything!) and shall happily defer to another Woman who can tell that story.

The concept of asexuality has always seemed like a label for what is a very normal response from young women about the pornified world they are expected to participate in. Especially when young people proclaim their sexuality as a part of their public image on social media, and where internet identities are pillars of social identity, how would you feel if you just didn't care about sex or didn't want to participate? A good many cases seem trauma-related. In general though, it is absolutely normal for young women to feel more apathetic than not about sex. I remember feeling like something was wrong with me when I was in my late teens/early 20s, because I had only slept with one person and didn't have 'enough' experience. I had to [falsely] convince myself that I wanted to have a lot of sex, due to the messaging that this was 'liberation'. Again, this is a scenario where young women desperately need to connect with older women who have perspective.

Most people are just abstinent or happy not to be sexually involved with others. The way the world's gone makes this even more extreme. Sex and sexuality has become really distorted, for women specifically. We're being targeted all over and it's why most asexuals springing up are women.

Of course there's levels of sex as well. You don't have to be down for everything and anything, some people are just happy with touching, some don't ever want penetration, some do. Patriarchy and male sexuality dominates the conversation, and creates a weird fixation on how men have sex. The entire framework for sex and sexuality is built around males and penis. And that's how women think of it and eventually think of themselves sexually defined by what a man does to them, especially with his penis.

Exploring your own body and what you actually enjoy and how you respond to pleasure is important I believe. And it doesn't have to be an identity or make you feel like you're not normal. You are, it's the world that's fucked and you're just reacting to a messed up reality. Our bodies, and how we view and embody them shouldn't be defined by male ideals. And truthfully I think asexuality is something that has sprung up from those ideals. That isn't to say there's not people perfectly content with not having sex, but the way it's defined, and the narrative really shows it to be a reactionary sort of thing.An opposition to male dominated sexuality.

I'm really just thinking aloud here, but I've been on this track of how men have completely distorted the way we see sex, and the relationship we have with our bodies and our sexuality. There's just a lot to unpack.

I see several problems with the term 'asexual'.

1. It does not have a coherent definition. Depending on the person asked, it will be something like not experiencing sexual attraction, or not experiencing sexual arousal, being neutral towards sex, being repulsed by sex...on and on. It is not a meaningful term because it could mean any number of things. Someone telling me they're 'asexual' only really tells me that they feel different to their peers.

2. The second is the structure of the word itself: -sexual. The word links itself with bi-, homo-, and hetero-sexuality, but it's fundamentally different. Not having a sexuality isn't a sexuality. It doesn't make sense.

3. It also creates a binary of sexual attraction/arousal/interest rather than a continuum. Ie, some special women are 'asexual' and have a legitimate excuse for being uninterested in sex, but most women then don't have an excuse. I want all women to be free to avoid sex to the extent they want to without need for explanation, justification, defensiveness, labels, and identity.

3b. In a similar vein, being able to say 'some people are just asexual, shrug' lets us off the hook for investigating why that is, as we assume it's 'natural' and therefore cannot be questioned. How does putting so many young, young girls on the pill affect things? How about SSRIs? How about rampant pornography and the pornification of the media and society?

So no, I certainly don't think there's any such thing as a 'true' or 'real' asexual person. People who haven't experienced attraction, sure. People with no libido, sure. 'Asexual'? No.

Regarding your second point, would such people really be considered asexuals? If a bisexual person has faced trauma caused by men and now they are repulsed by men and only want women they are still not a lesbian. They are still bisexual. Similarly a person who is straight but feels repulsed by sex due to trauma is not the same as a person who just never experienced sexual attraction at all. That doesn't seem like real asexuality to me