Here's a reel a friend sent me on Instagram. Watch it, and read.
It sounds to me like what he really just said is that given the ubiquity of most peoples experience of sexual attraction according to clear and simple patterns in in a hetero-normative framework, the fact that you *simply don’t* experience it, makes your relationships with others *complicated*. Which if I’m going to be blunt, is the definition of a you problem.
I have a friend who’s openly asexual. And there are a host of issues, most notably, a completely tenuous grasp on social boundaries, rules, and norms, it begs the question whether she knows better, or doesn’t, or whether she knows better, but doesn’t care.
I think that if someone has done something to you to stunt your sex drive or destroy your relationship to members of the opposite or same sex, a chaotic morass of displaced, not energy exactly, but energizing mechanisms are going to sublimate themselves in some way. And on an intuitive level, I assume that the pattern of behavior is going to look like a ping-pong ball bouncing all over the screen had a very high rate, not going very far. This is how human beings work, we have energy. We expend it, sometimes productively, sometimes not.
This is not to say that people who are asexual or unproductive, often the contrary. The question is a definitional one of what productivity means and the role of objectivity and unconscious collaboration (or competition?) in defining goals. Build a family is a collaborative goal; grow to defeat the competition is a competitive goal; Tease-me, chase-me, catch-me, is clearly both. All three of them incorporate objective reality beyond the existence of a consciousness, emerging through awareness.
To put it in yogic terms: the external parts of the self (chita), which are ultimately made of matter (prakruti) must be harnessed by the soul (parusha - the pure awareness part of you) to then complement the reasonable expectations of others’ given the similarities of others external mental and physical attributes to our own; so that on a deep material level we conform to the ubiquitous (though sometimes diverging (especially when that divergence is gender)) manifestations of human desire and what the following mean for the people in a given situation: “mutual understanding”, “engagement”, “passion”, etc.
The awareness of togetherness (or involvement–or mutuality–or presence—pick your term) between the two (or more) “souls” (“awarenesses”) involved is not a sexual thing. It is a thing that emerges out of the functional achievement of removing the prior lack of external (physical/situational/psychological) complementarity between them given their differences. Good sex means different things to different people. But sexual attraction, regardless of its presentation to the observer, is still one of the building blocks of good sex. There’s a reason you don’t take your vibrator or your fleshlight out for a $500 steak dinner. If it were just the mechanical feeling that you were able to accomplish with this tool, it wouldn’t matter. It’s the fact that the person across the table from you a candle lit dinner is a free agent and building a moment with them so that you can homogenize your energy levels and the relationships to the space and moment towards the same vibe.
“Sexual attraction” and “sexual desire” —and other terms that you could use for those attributes of human affairs that connote a “final cause” to behavior humans would recognize formally as “sexual”— these terms all try to encapsulate the process of homogenizing the external parts the multiple selves involved, so that as was once aptly said by one of my own mentors, “you and me as we become an us.”
What makes it complicated is that the human beings themselves are complicated.
And as someone who knows, let me just tell you, the moment you stop being complicated, you become boring. Because that which is interesting is that which is unattainable. There’s nothing unattainable about a guy who lifts weights, watches the ball game, drinks a beer on the couch and belches. There’s nothing unattainable about a, mama’s girl who doesn’t do much to make herself interesting. All you need to do is just sit there and validate her feelings, say “yes, dear.”
And so to that extent, let me just spoil some of life’s mystery for most of you reading…. Where you’re going, unless you fuck it up, and you might, I very well might even by writing this, you’re basically just destined to be part of an old married couple. And the reason for this is because there is a deep mammalian need for companionship, and the external attributes of your physical, mental, and emotional make-up, will through the force-of-inertia cause you to NEED constant companionship, or chronic assertion of your own individuality. It’s basically a conflict between the body’s will to survive, and the soul’s desire for harmony with those around you and to feel held like a baby in your mother’s arms.
So like, here’s the thing. Everyone gets old. And if you’re not completely destroyed by life, when you do get old, you wind up feeling a sense of oneness with others. There’s always a chance that you wind up like Frank Gallagher‘s mom, “I should’ve ate more salads,” and you truly just don’t give a shit about anybody else around you. But, for those lucky few, balance in the world is achieved, and it becomes possible to basically see yourself in others, and inspire and nurture and recognize that we are all one.
What makes it hard, as I alluded to earlier, is that we are all unique in our own circumstances, and by virtue of being unique in our own circumstances, we find ourselves in different circumstances in which our energies are out of balance, and it becomes a question. What is the counter-balance to our vibrational frequency, or the counter-balance to our situation, that brings us to balance, optimal, a feeling of being truly and totally present. Freudians would say “What brings you to a complete cathexis of libidinal energy?” Jungians would say “how is their shadow reflecting your light?” The people who read that book The Secret would say something like “are you literally on their vibe?“. And the @creativename_sooocreative and school would just ask “Is there true complementarity between the desires of person A and person B?“. And to be clear that question is to be asked on multiple levels.
There’s an added question of where people go after they achieve the balance. And the old crotchety married couple, don’t go anywhere in the world, they stay where they are, and they have each other. On the other hand, the young talented adventurer, has his catharsis, and moves on to the next quest. Male or female, doesn’t matter the point is that there is a sense of independence that is more important than the togetherness. Because probably of a sense of alienation that emerges out of some deep recesses of your mind or emotional-history.
To recap, let me just say this: I broach the fact that everyone gets old because it really seems to me like what these Asexuality advocates are actually saying is
(1) asexuality is a condition or set of conditions under which the ordinary experience of sexual desire and sexual attraction is not experienced.
and
(2) concordantly, such relationships, confined as they are to to the pure, relational, soul-based, Parushic, aspects of relationship. In essence, friendship, companionship, but not sexual appetite.
And I guess the first thing I wanna do is clarify something about statement 2. There is nothing energetic or material about these relationships in the ubiquitous sexual-desire sense. The majority of the building blocks of these connections are probably conscious. While they may be emotional; they are emotional, but not physical.
Or, to put it another way,
the emotional informs the conscious,
the conscious informs the emotional,
and the physical (libido) is completely independent, nothing in the phenomenology of sexual experience breaks through the closed loop of this independent (asexual) person’s framework of reality or their self-image, which
—due to the manifest interrupt between the physical aspects of self (and the rest)— is disconnected from the typical, ubiquitous, dare-I-say commonplace stage-craft of psychosomatic desire experienced along gendered dimensions in other couples.
All of this brings me to an important point, which I’ve been making for years, and which, ultimately, I cling to only because there is a misguided, though perhaps well-intentioned approach that I think humanity is taking with all of the LGBTQ plus stuff. I’m old, experienced and adventurous enough to refer to it in trivial terms.
But first, let me tell you the tale of Procrustes. Letting chatGPT take it from here:
“””Procrustes, also known as Damastes or Polypemon, was a bandit in Greek mythology who lived along the road from Athens to Eleusis. He lured travelers to his stronghold and offered them hospitality, but he had a sinister motive. Procrustes possessed an iron bed and insisted that his guests fit perfectly into it. If they were too tall, he would cut off their legs; if they were too short, he would stretch them to fit. His brutal methods earned him a fearsome reputation until he was eventually defeated by the hero Theseus, who subjected Procrustes to his own gruesome treatment, ensuring that the tormentor met the same fate he had inflicted on others.”””
Ok I’m back. Where was I, oh yes…
At the heart of progressivism, sexual liberation, gay rights, trans rights, [pick any group and insert their rights here], is this idea that there should never be a Procrustean, confining, tyrannical, framework mandating what is and what is not acceptable between people who love each other. That’s a good goal. I even support it.
But it is also true, that any, and all of the myriad kinds of relationships you can describe must involve more than one person with a consciousness. Additionally, it’s also true, that the animating force between those two people to actually do anything (other than sit in a chair next to each other, holding hands) is the possession of differences or distance which then requires *compensatory action* of any kind. Your partner is horny, you please them; your partner wants to feel heard, you listen; I tell you I’m bored, you entertain me, or we play a game, whatever… The point is that these differences, the technical term is usually “polarities”, are REAL building-blocks of the human experience.
And the issue underlying all of the controversies around human affairs in the sexual domain is almost always whether or not a person is free to break free from the social straight jacket, disobey the mandate that “only certain kinds of love are acceptable”.
Where Asexuality goes too far, is in the fact that it’s trying to call an apple a dog. No matter how you slice it, an apple isn’t a dog.
In my generation, being gay meant that as a man, you’re attracted to males, whether they have masculine or feminine qualities is cause for further subdivision; being a lesbian meant that as a woman you’re attracted to females, whether they’re feminine is cause for further subdivision; being bi presumably means you’re attracted to both. Slice it up however you’d like, I don’t really care — nor do I judge — my point simply that ATTRACTION (both as a process of desire as well as a function of the class/thing/type/object to which one is attracted) is the heart of the dynamic. It’s the phenomenon around which the various definitions get filled in. With Asexuality you’re talking about people who don’t experience attraction.
Ignoring the “why” distinctions between gay and straight, I’d like to make a point about the what/how distinctions. When I say gay men are different from straight men. Here’s like the most BASIC sort of an example of what I mean.
You have three couples: one straight, one gay, one bi. Ignore power dynamics, age, and the laziness factor. They all report enjoyment giving their partner head.
This is the heart of the issue for me: Is that last sentence making one statement about six people in 3 couples, or is it making six statements about 3 couples?
There’s a characteristic difference between fellatio and cunnilingus. If you don’t believe me, go look it up on a porn website. You will see that the shapes of the things that are being operated on are quite different. There’s a difference between dominance and submission. There’s a difference between being aroused by coconut vanilla Gwyneth Paltrow “my vagina smells like this”candles, and jock-sweat.
The point is that we are all supposed to be marching in a direction where we say “Among consenting,” and I’d add enthusiastically so, “adults, each and every one of these things is OK.”
But I would note that there are two things that sensible people DON’T mean:
(1) We don’t mean that for people so broken by life that they can’t enjoy the wonders of our animal nature in its myriad manifestations, is a thing to celebrated rather than a tragedy.
(2) We certainly don’t want to ubiquitously recognize that tragedy as a classification of sexuality. Put another way, a lack of *A* sexuality does not mean asexuality is form of sexuality. It’s an absence.
Discussing individual uniqueness as a general pattern is like one of the definitions of bullshit.
The way in which I am uniquely, broken, is the way in which nobody else is uniquely, broken, and therefore my unique sense of being broken. It’s a manifestation of alienation. It’s not healthy to refuse to repair/restore my ability to enjoy, by denying the issue _in toto_, and then draw a line in the sand saying “I identify as this”. Because that’s just denial, or at a minimum refusing to adapt to your circumstances.
Now, I do get that this kind of dysphoria can be the result of a need to constantly adapt and survive. But these terms are presumably being used by clinicians; not just the 10 (10,000?) people stuck in latency, who also have Reddit accounts. And clinicians should strive to help individuals discover what-little-remains of the bodily pleasures life gifted them, rather than trivializing and facilitating the debasement and l eradication of commonplace confidence heteronormative (breeders) have in the self-evidence of the vrittis in the human mating ritual. Which has been my point for the past like 15 years.
I am a complicated person. I have a best friend, whose main advice is “happy wife happy life.”And in college, he told me “those who make it complicated never get congratulated.” There’s something that..
Sexual identity as a derivative of the Gay rights (and civil rights) movement was probably never meant to be a license for people who are so removed from basic bodily experience, numb as they are to the instinctual and perceptual mechanisms of human behavior, and their own role in it, to project their own internal issues onto normal human affairs and then claim that everyone else is wrong. Not for that matter do I feel it should inform our standard ethics, cultural norms, and or any of the other substrata surrounding our cultural presumptions as macrocosms of the species. A you problem is a you problem.
But like… all asexuality as an identity is really saying is… “once you embrace that you’re broken you can stop doing what doesn’t work and find meaningful relationships doing things you enjoy.” But like also you’re not broken you just don’t like sex which is ok. And that’s like, “duh.”
But my issue is, we’re just not served well by calling the the hole in the middle of a donut a donut. It’s a hole. It’s made of air not carbs. Eating the donut hole won’t nourish you.
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