Out of Office Reply

I'm taking a vacation far away from the wild internet this week, so there'll be no podcast. Hold on tight though, I've got something good cooking for when I get back.

I got the following message from a listener a few days ago:


I just listened to the second podcast - I found it really interesting - and that it really spoke to me and my problems/concerns with identifying as an asexual. I think that I struggle against labelling myself, and remain hopeful that sexual attraction will happen for me someday (unlikely as I am 23...), b/c I want to have a relationship like the ones my sexual friends enjoy just without the sexual part. You know - that one relationship that you value above all others...I gathered from what you said, that you don't think that's necessary or, maybe, even possible with an asexual relationship. Let me know if I've misinterpretated what you said, though...

Interesting thing though that I wanted to share with you - an observation I have seen from watching my friends and my behaviour when we are out. If we go clubbing or something and have a little too much to drink - most of my friends will end up (or will want to end up) fooling around with someone on the dance floor or going home with them... I, on the other hand, end up meeting complete strangers and having the most bizarre, philosophical conversations...

weird, eh?


I wouldn't go so far as to say that committed partnered relationships aren't possible for asexual folk, a number of us seem to be doing that just fine, but I do think that we're forced to think about commitement in a few ways that most sexual people are not. There is a lot to admire about straight-up partnered intimacy, but it's also far from the only way to do your business.

...the conversations that you talk about being a case in point. Functionally the conversations that you're having and the hooking up that your friends are doing may be very similar- both give you an excuse to meet new people, go through all the fun parts of getting to know them, and then spend a good deal of time just letting yourselves be vulnerable and exploring one another.

#2- Confessions of an Asexual Slut, Part 1

Time for Episode 2. You can catch the latest news from the asexual world and hear a reading of this week's article by listening to our latest podcast. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe.

I’ve come to the realization recently that I got ho tendencies. I mean this in all but the classic sense, having been literally (if nonpenatratively) in bed over the course of the past month with more individuals than I have enough fingers to count. If, as the asexual community has been wont to posit from time to time, one can get just as intimate without sex as with it, then hot damn do I get around.

Really though.

One of the quirks of being asexual, I’ve found, is that classifying and prioritizing relationships becomes a mite tricky. Though not all sexual people choose to employ it as such, sexual activity can serve as a neat marker of importance, something that, for better or worse, is saved like fine china for the really special occasions. The same cannot be said of, say, intellectually intense emotively reflective discussion, which is more my bread and butter. I’ll have an interesting discussion at the slightest suggestion, and will get intellectually intimate with anything that has a pulse.

Is that so wrong?

For all the wacky rules we’ve managed to cook up about sex, there seem to be relatively few about actual down-to-earth intimacy. If someone I’m interested in, say, has a boyfriend, the rules about nonsexual messing around are vague at worst and nonexistent at best. Not interested in my gender? Not a problem. Juggling two relationships at the same time? Always room for more. Even I’m disturbed by what I can get away with.

Not that it started out this way. Even I was a naïve and inexperienced little asexual once, which is not a fate I would wish on anyone. From the moment that we begin to learn about sexuality it is made abundantly clear that it is NOT an optional endeavor. As far as our eventual happiness is concerned, finding a good sexual relationship is up there with having a job and owning things. And just as it is our sworn patriotic duty to get good grades and know what sorts of things to buy, we must start on our toilsome journey to eventual committed sexual bliss.

This is not what you want to hear when sex seems about as natural and fun as doing your taxes. The message is a pretty bleak one: without sex our relationships won’t matter. No matter how good a friend we are or how close we become to someone, they will eventually privilege their (sexually) significant other over us. Passion, romance, and falling in love are all things that require sexual activity, which means that for us asexuals they flat-out won’t work. All that we can ever be is friends, with a big fat “just” slapped on for good measure. We can either try to force ourselves to start liking sex, or give up on the possibility of our emotional lives ever getting interesting.

Needless to say my emotionally randy self was less than pleased with this prognosis. I didn’t know precisely what nonsexual intimacy was or how it worked, but I wasn’t about to sit around virginally waiting for it to walk up and invite me to coffee. It wasn’t long before my close friendships started to look and act like dating, and it wasn’t much longer until they broke away from that and started to act like something else entirely.
Relationships, I realized, can be fun, in much the same way that I imagine sex is fun for sexual folk. New types of pleasure started popping up all over, and it seemed like there would never be time to explore them all. They ran the gamut- from the intellectual to the physical, from the deeply empowering to the utterly frivolous. Anyone who thinks that the word “pleasure” has a sexual connotation needs to get out more.

I liked pleasure, and so long as I had a willing partner I could do it however I wanted, whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted. My life, contrary to what I’d been told in middle school, had most certainly gotten emotionally interesting. What to DO with it all was another question entirely. With all that pleasure flying around, more and more relationships were pushing that “just friends” barrier, and raising a whole host of questions in the process.

I was all too familiar with the quant little distinction between “friendship” and “dating” that all the sexual kids had so much fun with, but had never been entirely certain how it applied to me. With so many types of connection gumming up the picture there was no way I could draw that clear a line- was deep trust more important than hanging out and having fun every day? Should I give the person I cuddle with some special status over the one who finishes my sentences?

As it turns out, the language of the sexual world was poorly equipped to deal with a loaded asexual social calendar, so I had to start making my own. What does it mean to be “more than friends” without the nookie? For me it all came down to the three T’s:

• Time- Check your dictionary, the word “date” is mostly about time. Time makes relationships, and the relationships that matter are the ones that I make time for. For me, becoming involved with someone means that we play a significant role in each others’ day to day lives.
• Touch- Sex aside, there’s a lot of fun that two people can have with their bodies. Cuddling, dance, basketball, sparring; the majority of my closer relationships involve some sort of physical affection, and many also involve working up a sweat.
• Talk- If I really want a relationship to get out of hand, I acknowledge that it exists. I’ll tell someone how I feel about them, I’ll talk about what I want from my relationship with them and I let them do the same.

When I see someone I’m interested in, these are the three things that are on my mind. They’re what I gossip about to my friends, how I think about my relationships progressing- my own asexual answer to the base system.

The astute of you will note that in this setup “monogamy” is a somewhat shady concept. It’s kind of hard to be sexually committed to one person when you don’t have sex. Town bicycle that I am, I tend to favor communities over individual connections, never letting one relationship overshadow all of the other things I’ve got going on. I wind up thinking not in terms of boyfriends or girlfriends but in terms of networks, entire communities with which I am in some way intimate. Why hang on by a single rope when I can settle down in a spider’s web of connections enforced by a few particularly strong threads? I have every intention of raising children, why not build them a village?

Conventional wisdom is that none of this will work. The people I’m involved with could all wind up dropping me for someone they can sleep with (in the usual, penetrative sense), my solid social networks will disappear into neat bundles of monogamy, reachable only in polite passing company. But conventional wisdom has been proven wrong before. As my relationships begin to move from talking about emotions to talking about commitment, as my friends begin to get married and don’t fall off the radar, the likelihood that I’ll wind up alone seems slimmer and slimmer. Surprisingly enough, the sexual people I am involved with feel just fine (and even a little liberated) taking their intimacy à la carte. Though they’ll certainly experience sexual frustration from time to time, there’s no particular reason for them to direct it at me. It turns out that when everything else works, sex just isn’t as important.

Love’s a funny thing. In a world where sex is overcrowded with expectations, guidelines, layered meanings and predefined scripts, an intimately active asexual such as myself is faced with a vast expanse of open, unexplored territory. If you want, we can head back to my place for coffee and talk about it. www.asexuality.org

Call me.

#1- You don't wanna ML...

If you like, you can listen to an audio recording of this week's episode here.

Welcome to the first-ever episode of Love from the Asexual Underground, here with a perspective on love, sex and romance from the rapidly growing asexual community. Because this is our first show we’re going to go over some of the basics. Love, what is it and where does it come from?

My housemate, Eli, hates the phrase “making love.” If you say it around him he shudders in mock disgust rolling his eyes and declaring that this house is not the place for that kind of filth. The second a scene starts to get a little…sensual, the moment those violins start playing he’ll get up in a huff and exit the room. “Oh God.” He’ll say, “they’re totally gonna ML.”

…

So what exactly does it mean to… ML? If love, as the Care Bears taught me so long ago, is the most powerful force in the universe then how do you go about making it? Maybe it’s just me, but the very notion that each of us has the power within ourselves to make love seems completely preposterous. If each and every one of us can really make love then why does it seem to be in such short supply? There must be some catch. Does the process require some raw materials? Or is making love like printing money, which drops in value for every dollar you mint? I’m confused.

Let’s back up. Does everyone really have somewhere deep within themselves the power to make love? Well… no. Some people, like me, are asexual. Asexual people, according to common knowledge and most experts in the field, cannot ML. Love, it turns out, is manufactured through a sort of chemical process which engineers and people in the industry refer to as “sex.” Asexual people, for the most part, do not have sex, and therefore can not generate a steady supply of love.

As you can imagine, this has turned into quite a hot political issue in the asexual community. Love, as the Care Bears pointed out, is a major source of power in the world. Long before money was invented as a system to organize power, people were motivated to do things because of the relationships they had with one another. The ability to make love meant the difference between survival and comfort in a strong community and starvation out in the cold. As humans it was our ability to form relationships, our ability to make love, which allowed us to find strength in greater and greater numbers, create cultures, teach our young about the tools we had built, and eventually, some say, dominate the globe. Even though money allows us to organize, gather together and wield our power it is ultimately love which leads people to buy products, swear oaths, flee dangers and march in the streets. Even today those with the ability to make a great deal of love and distribute it on a massive scale wield a sort of power stronger and less tangible than those who can merely make money.

As an asexual person my inability to make love seems almost too daunting to comprehend. If the ability to ML has given human beings the power to define our world, if making love has for all intents and purposes made us human, than what does it mean to be without it?

According to my housemate Eli, many people who are not asexual are also unable to ML. This is because love is made, distributed and consumed in exclusively in a special place called a romantic relationship.

A romantic relationship is a structure, like a factory, a contract, or a legal system. People who are not asexual construct romantic relationships so that they can have a place to ML. Once they are able to successfully construct a romantic relationship, sexual people are able to manufacture love and truly become human. Though all sexual people have the capacity within them to make love, the creation of these structures is an expensive, difficult and hazardous process, requiring advanced training, very precise materials and a lot of dumb luck. For this reason many people, even people who are not asexual, often find themselves unable to make love, and will go without it for long stretches of time. Like many other practices of modern industry, modern love-making has left some with an overabundance and others with scarcity. Like scarcities of food, water or civil liberties, these scarcities and the systems which produce them often create discontent among members of the populace, like Eli.

Eli has a girlfriend named Ana. Together they have built a structure called a romantic relationship where they engage in the chemical process known as sex. Because they find it distasteful, however, Eli and Ana do not make love. And even though they do not make love, both of them report that love is produced in their relationship. Because Eli and Ana find the process of making love distasteful they have adapted, and discovered new ways to introduce love into their lives.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Making love without MLing? Surely there must be some alternative explanation for this freak instance. ….but no! Since the mid 70s, researchers around the globe have documented isolated cases of love being produced outside of the industrial ML process. In 1982, Georgi Papov discovered the first love-outputting reaction outside of the context of a romantic relationship in Nyovosebersk. In 1996, under controlled laboratory conditions, a team at the University of Indiana actually managed to produce a romantic structure which created love without the use of sexual chemistry.

The asexual community, which is unable to ML using standard industrial practices, has been at the forefront of research into alternative sources of love. As we speak, the top asexual minds from around the globe are engaged in around-the-clock research, testing alternative structures, distribution systems and chemical processes. Successful field-test are underway for romantic relationships which function entirely without sex. Clinical trials are currently being arranged on a type of love produced without sex or a romantic structure.

Given the importance of love-production to the economies of both the developed and the developing world, and with countries like the US in what many are calling a “love shortage”, the emergence of these alternatives could have far-reaching consequences.

Every week we’ll be tracking the latest developments in the global love industry, as well as posting breakthroughs and research updates from asexual researchers around the world.