#20- Is asexuality radical? Interview with KL Periera

A pretty awesome interview with KL Pereira, the reporter for Bitch magazine who recently wrote an article on asexuality. We discuss everything from radical feminism to hot asexuals to gender neutrality.

Once more with feeling

Sorry folks, this link to Episode 19 should work now...

#19- Love and Economics

A new episode finally! I'm trying to wrap my head around the ways that relationships are not only a way to feel good but a way to make things happen in an economic sense.

#18- Asexuality and the Sex Positive Movement

Thanks to the good folks at Skype and PrettyMay I can now do interviews! This gives me an excuse to have long conversations with cool people, like Nora Dye, who biked across the friggin' country talking to different people involved in sex education and sexual health. We had a really interesting discussion about asexuality, sex positive sex educators and how we could be friends.

Also, news:

• AVEN has endorsed a United ENDA, which is our first formal political act in history. Find out what that acronym means at: http://www.unitedenda.org.
• Big Mouth Films wants to do a documentary on asexuality.
• Playboy Magazine is trying to start some shit.
  

#17- This Asexual Life

This episode I'm going to talk about a crush, Ira Glass style. Give it a listen.

#16- Sexual Shame Variety Show

I've got a two-parter for you, from a blog I've been helping out with that focuses on sexual shame.

Sitting with Desire

by David Jay

I’m a sucker for grocery store candy.

Whenever I’m in a checkout line all of those bright, gleaming packages just jump out at me, massaging and probing desires I didn’t even know I had. Do I want any Peanut M&Ms? Ya know, maybe I do. Before this desire can fully articulate itself, before I can feel anything interesting about why I want Peanut M&Ms or whether I really want them or how how they will improve my life the bright yellow package is in my hand and my desire, still just a waning “maybe,” has been summarily executed.

In a way, desire isn’t something that I ever learned to think about, just something I learned to either satiate or ignore. I can identify an endless stream of snacks and gizmos and elixirs and archetypal relationships that are supposed to make my desires a thing of the past, but banishing desire isn’t really the same as understanding it. I’ve never fasted for Ramadan or given up something I wanted for Lent. I’ve had few opportunities in my life to really learn to love my desires, to just let myself get caught up in the tension and pleasure of wanting. It’s a shame, because desire matters. If I leave the Peanut M&Ms on the shelf and take a little journey into my sweet tooth I can sometimes come away understanding myself that much better and experiencing pleasure that’s that much deeper.

It’s probably not a shock that in a culture grounded on mass consumerism these sort of journeys of desire are not that encouraged. If I don’t have some candy or a Mini Cooper or an iPhone I’m supposed to get one, and if I’m stuck just desiring one I’m supposed to feel ashamed about it. When it comes to our material desires, shame is a big part of what keeps us in line. Exploring our desires and ourselves may make us happier, but it certainly doesn’t make us better consumers.

I bring all of this up because sexual desire seems like a sure-fire way to break this trend. With a million variations layered inside the infinite complexity of human relationships sex is so rich and so complicated that instant gratification isn’t really possible. You’d think that sexual desire is something that can’t be neatly avoided, that when it comes to sex everyone (or at least 99% of everyone) would have to delve into all of the pleasure and frustration that goes along with desire. Openly exploration and discussion of sex should be taking a massive bite out of consumerism, transforming our desires into things too deep and too varied for marketing departments to tackle.

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I can see why it’s beneficial for our culture to objectify and commodify sexuality with one hand and shame it with the other. Shame keeps our desires simple and predictable. So long as we’re ashamed to think about sexual desire we’ll be a little bit ashamed to think about desire, period. We won’t understand ourselves or what makes us happy or how to demand it. But if we can learn to question that shame, if we can learn that desire can be fun, then we may just unlock something revolutionary.

Shameocalypse: Sexual Shame And the End of the World

by David Jay

When I was in school, I learned all about sexual shame and the end of the world. Shame, after all, is almost always grounded in fear. Homophobic and transphobic rhetoric often talk about the breakdown of the most fundamental rules of our society. If left unchecked, sexual desire is so strong and gender exploration is so all-consuming that they could rip through our society like wildfire, leaving everything from the family to country to the food supply smoldering in an orgy of ash. Sexual shame is the bulwark, the lining around the fireplace that keeps us from utter, all-consuming entropy.

In practice things aren’t nearly that easy. A lot of sex is boring or awkward or not worth the effort, and the wildest orgies tend to take a lot of meticulous planning. Sexuality doesn’t spread like wildfire because it only really feels good under specific circumstances. Sexual shame isn’t keeping sexual desire at bay, just keeping us from better understanding where it makes sense and where it doesn’t.

If you take away sexual shame the world doesn’t come to an end, your relationships get better. You don’t just turn into a raging sexual juggernaut, you learn to more openly discuss sexuality on your own terms. (And if your terms happen to be those of a raging sexual juggernaut then more power to you.) All that sexual shame does, in the end, is impair communication and make relationships that much choppier.

And I’m not just talking about Relationships with a capital R. Lurking behind sexuality are emotions and desires that are just as present among friends and coworkers as they are among romantic partners and one-night stands. I’m talking about messy things like intimacy and power and negotiation, those fundamental building blocks that are present in human relationships regardless of sexual status. Sexually or otherwise, getting along with other people ain’t easy. It takes work, it takes experience and it takes skill to build something like a marriage that works or a community that stands the test of time. When we’re ashamed, afraid and isolated it’s that much harder to build those skills, and we need them now more than ever.

That’s because there’s a very different type of apocalypse in the works, one that substitutes the fires of hell with the fires of the internal combustion engine. Scientific debate is long over, climate change is hard, urgent fact. The world is getting hotter faster than almost any time in human history, and we have to simultaneously stop contributing to the problem and prepare for the impact. In his book Deep Economy Bill McKibben proposes an elegant way to do both.

As the world gets hotter and fossil fuels get rare and more dangerous to use we’re going to have to start depending more and more on our local communities. We’ll have to shift from cars to public transit, we’ll have to shift from fast food to farmers markets, and we’ll have to shift from a culture based on individual consumption to one based on sustainable communities. The planet just can’t afford to give us all our own individual cars and lawnmowers and washing machines- we’re going to have to start working together to manage the resources that we have available. We’re going to have to start sharing. And if we want to share, we’ll need good relationships to do it.

When you get right down to it things like intimacy and communication are more than romantic minefields, they are fundamental survival skills. If we know how to articulate our desires and negotiate those desires with others then we can survive and thrive. If we don’t…well, fear, isolation and shame may just become things that we can no longer afford.

Home-Cookin' and the Economics of Intimacy

Unfortunately my microphone is on the fritz, so I'm not going to be able to podcast (which was taking forever and stopping me from posting anyway.) I'll try blogging for the time being and bring the podcast back once I can find equipment.

Home Cookin’ and the Economics of Intimacy

There's nothing quite like a home-cooked meal. In age when it’s usually more efficient to just buy food and plop it on the table, there’s some something that drives us to take extra time and make food with people that we love. We’re used to thinking about relationships as emotional things, but they also have a certain sort of economic functionality. Every time we make dinner together we engage in a sort of emotional economics, at once exchanging goods, services and intimacy.

Relationships matter. In business they practically matter more than money. Take another look down the frozen food aisle and think about the sheer number of relationships that went into each item. (insert bit about love in the frozen food aisle.) Whether in business or politics or entertainment, webs of relationships play a huge role in defining our world, and power tends to go to those who can build and maintain those relationships effectively.

There is a catch to all of these powerful relationships. Getting all of that stuff done tends to put a hamper on any sort of emotional intimacy. It's not that we're not allowed to feel things in our professional relationships, we're just not allowed to feel anything that might get in the way of transacting business. It's not always pleasant, but succeeding in any sort of professional environment means knowing how to take emotions out of the workplace and dump them somewhere more suitable.

That's part of why having a personal life is so important. At the end of a long day you can step away from all of those productive, emotionally dry relationships and cut loose. Our friendships and romantic relationships may not be raising any third quarter profits, but they let us explore a range and depth of human emotion strictly forbidden in relationships that have serious work to do.

And emotions, after all, are kind of the point. We spend all of that time slaving away in a professional environment in large part because we need money to spend on our loved ones. In a very big way we are hard-wired to be social creatures, and we sustain and fulfill ourselves by forming rich, loving relationships with the people around us. In these small communities of family and friends we are liberated from the harsh dictates of economic production and can focus on creating another sort of value. We can have fun, we can fall in love and we can have the sorts of experiences which make life a lot more meaningful than an earnings statement. Relationships, in other words, can either be emotional or they can be functional. They can't be both.

Or can they?

Let's head to the kitchen. There my sister is making mashed potatoes, I'm prepping some mushrooms and my friend Poonam is mussing around with sauce. Amy and Alex ring the doorbell with some wine, and when we finally sit down at the table we have, well, something of a paradox.

There's no doubting that the few hours we just spent together had some tangible economic value. Between the farmers market, the convenience store and the cheap wine isle, the three course meal we're about to enjoy put us back around five bucks each. In raw economic terms, the labor that we put into preparing our food increased it's value from five dollars to the roughly fifteen dollars (with tip) that we each would have had to throw down for dinner, wine and dessert at a restaurant down on Valencia St.

Of course added economic value seems like a fairly harsh way to talk about what all of us experienced as a couple of friends getting together and having a good time. As we were increasing the value of all of those mushrooms and spices we in some intangible way increased the value of our relationships with one another. We all had fun, we all got a little bit closer to one another and there was no rigid professional creed keeping the meal in check.

Of course, we could just go out to eat. It’s almost always easier and faster to skip working with your friends and just buy things with them. After all, spending money together is at the heart of how we think about intimacy, from the classic date (dinner and a movie) to the classic family vacation (a hotel in Disneyland.) If all you care about is having fun with people you care about then money (if you have it) is the way to go, it’s just that stable intimate relationships are about a lot more than just having fun. There is a point where spending money on your relationships with people just doesn't make them any better. I'm reminded of my recent trip to Disneyland, where at least a few frazzled parents and kids seemed to feel like, as much as it had been custom engineered for optimum family fun, the most magical place on earth could stand to be just a little more magical. On some level parents paying to have their kids entertained aren’t really getting any closer to them, and kids being paid to be entertained won’t necessarily feel loved. Separating economics and emotion can be incredibly convenient. Worrying about making money all day at work and then going home to spend it on the people you love works pretty well, but there comes a point at which you simply can't squeeze any more love out of money.

Speaking personally, there something missing, something hollow in relationships where all we do together spend money. On some basic level, I like to have other people around because they make my life better. Don't get me wrong, spending money with other people, whether I'm eating out or shopping or seeing a movie, tends to be more fun and more meaningful than just spending money by myself. If I couldn't spend money with other people, or show off the things I had bought with it or talk about the movies I bought tickets to money beyond what I need to survive would probably lose a lot of its point. Still, I've become extremely fond of those moments when relationships are both intimate and functional, when the people I love and I can be more than just conversationalists and co-consumers.

Disneyland has nothing on the magic of building something together, especially when that thing and the process of building it makes both of your lives better in some measurable way. When love takes a role in the economics of my day to day life it's, well, around in a way that some romantic abstraction of love never seems to be. I don't need roses and a candlelit dinner to get in touch with love in my life, it's there when I shop at my friend's convenience store on the corner, with the people I design websites with and talk about the news with and learn to bake bread from. At the end of the week, learning how doing things and feeling things can complement one another means that I get to do a whole lot more of both.

#15- Confessions of an Asexual Slut Part 3: Doin' It

Let’s talk about doin’ it.

See, MTV was interviewing me the other day and they wouldn’t let up with questions about what I do with the intimate regions of my schedule. Now, whatever scruples I may have had about throwing my personal escapades to the paparazzi feeding frenzy have long since passed. I set out in this world to create discussion about all the details of this whole nonsexual thing, and when it comes to dropping public discourse my own, shall we say, personal experience is that the dirt makes the diva.

When it comes to explicit aerotic details of nonsexual intimacy you all know that I just love the language. I’ve got the kind of mind that loves nothing better than dreaming up new, provocative ways to describe the way that intimate things go on. Deep down inside my own personal mission, let’s call it a hobby, is to make you see so much possibility outside of the bounds of bump-n-grind sexual relationships that you break out in a sweat. There’s a reason words are one of the favorite nonsexual tricks I keep up my sleeve, they can unite whole communities, caress emotions, they can redefine love in the very moments you are having it. But baby, I wouldn’t want you to think that words are all I got.

Just ‘cuz I can talk dirty doesn’t mean that all I know how to do is talk.

See, I like doin’ it. And that’s good because I’m doin’ it every night of every week and for most of the day on weekends. Don’t get me wrong, I provide serious attention to my professional responsibilities and I am dedicated to the work that remains to be done on AVEN, but my number one priority is exploring every possibility and every sensation that my relationships can offer me. Every interesting possibility anyway. So get nice and comfortable, we’re gonna take a little guided tour of my nonsexual experiences in the field. A warning for anyone new to asexual relationship dynamics or otherwise squeamish about nontraditional methods of getting’ it on: all of the intimate relationships I’m going to talk about are with sexual people and none of them involve sex.

I engage in something called Community Based Intimacy. That means that what most people do in their relationship with their boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse I do in my relationship with my entire community. Because I’m asexual I couldn’t date in the strictly traditional sense even if I wanted to. And for a long time that was really confusing because without dating I had no way to know which people I was supposed to be in love with and which people were just my friends. Without a system like to think about their relationships many people feel alone and isolated. For this reason people who can’t engage in strictly traditional dating, like asexual people, seek out less traditional ways of thinking about relationships. These range from simply dating without having sex to mixing elements from traditionally sexual romantic relationships and traditionally nonsexual friendships to radically redefining the way that relationships are described and categorized. Community Based Intimacy is a system of thinking about relationships which holds that special significance can not be given to one boyfriend or girlfriend, or even to a small cadre of partners. The core idea is that every relationship has to be thought about the same way because every relationship matters. Here’s a snapshot of what that looks like for me right now:

I have three primary relationships, about a dozen secondary relationships and another hundred or so people I keep in touch with. One of those primary relationships is with an individual and the other two are with groups, which means that there are a total of about nine people that collectively make up what for most people would be a girlfriend or a boyfriend. This has its advantages and its disadvantages, it’s relatively stable and there’s lots of variety, but scheduling can be a nightmare. More on that later.

Let’s start with my most traditional primary relationship, which is with my friend Karuna. Karuna and I have had a strong creative bond ever since we met. Both of us are people who put ourselves out there, and our relationship is built around supporting one another when we need to go out on a limb. We sing karaoke, improvise elaborate routines on the dancefloor and spend hours sipping tea and reflecting on our lives. Whenever we get together there’s this powerful creative, supportive energy that I’ve come to count on. She’s a part of why I don’t sweat appearances on national television.

W e hang out once a week or more, usually in a way that involves a lot of laughing and expressing ourselves in public. We’re affectionate and have committed to being there for one another, at least for the foreseeable future. Karuna also has a boyfriend and there’s a clear sense of how her relationship with him and her relationship with me compliment each other. I’m working my way to becoming friends with him as well.

My next primary relationship is with On Your Left (or OYL), an activist crew that’s in to gossip, dancing, elaborate adventures and causing trouble. Because the relationship is with three people instead of one it’s more reliable (since at least one member of the group is likely to be around), but it’s harder to get the kind of intense emotional connection going that a one-on-one relationship can have. And that’s not a problem, support and safety and reflection are what I do in my relationship with Karuna, my relationship with OYL is a place for pushing limits and breaking laws, though we only really break laws in the service of social justice. We get together once a week to ride 14 miles through San Francisco on a mix of bikes and rollerblades. We spend the first half of the trek discussin political issues in San Francisco and around the world and the second half gossiping about our love lives. We also get together on weekends to go dancing and eat dinner, and out activist roots make us a hotbed for political activity. A couple of hours ago we all got together to take on a multimillion dollar corporate PR campaign, with some pretty amazing results.

So, I’ve got a place to be safe and a place to be excited, the only thing left is a place to be comfortable. Intensity is all well and good, but in my experience the hardest thing to do in a relationship is to get comfortable hanging out for no reason. My relationship with the Hotpocket, a group vaguely constituting my housemates and their close friends, is my family and my foundation here in the Bay. In the year and a half I’ve lived here we’ve build up an amazing rapport, and I know that whatever else happens I’ll have a place where I sit back and crack jokes and let everything else slip away.

It’s called the Hotpocket because when I first moved in someone commented that with three bachelors living in an apartment the only thing in our fridge would be hotpockets and beer. We do things like bread and fry all of our vegetables and watch anchorman. Actually we do exactly that at least once every six weeks. We’ve gotten a kick out of decorating our living room (pirates), our kitchen (pictures of pork and pork-related products) and our bathroom (movie stars in bathtubs/awkward-looking porn.) We cook for each other, go on trips together, and have accrued more house traditions than a kibbutz.

Those three relationships make up the core of my life. I do something with each person/group once a week if not more, and between the three of them they provide a good chunk of the experiences that I want my life to consist of, everything from dancing to fighting for what I believe in to cooking elaborate dinners. For most other things there are my secondary relationships, friends I see more rarely and friends out of town who fill in the rest of my life and calendar. These are people and groups that I hang out with every other week to once a month, these relationships run the gamut from professional advice to performance art to up-and-coming relationships vying for primary status.

Do the math: if I have a full time job, devote one night a week to each of my three primaries, one night every two-to-four weeks to my secondaries, have occasional conversations with the hundred or so other relationships floating in the ether, put in 10-20 hours a week on AVEN and leave time to meet new people I wind up having to move at quite a clip. It can be overwhelming at times.There are definite disadvantages compared to more traditional romantic ways of doing relationships. It’s harder to keep track of what’s going on, and even though there’s a lot less at stake in each individual relationship it’s almost guaranteed that at any time there will be some sort of drama going on somewhere in the social network. For better and worse there isn’t the kind of intense emotion that people feel when they just focus on their partnerships, I don’t fall in love the way some of my friends do because falling in love like that means that for a brief moment you have one person be everything.

On the flipside there’s a lot more that happens in most communities than could ever happen with one individual person. A whole community won’t leave a nasty note and storm out the front door- whenever one relationship fades there are plenty of others to keep things steady. Because I’ve got lots of relationships to call on I’m rarely without the support that I need, and because things are always changing I never feel trapped or bored.

But honestly, practicalities aside, my biggest turn-on is power. Whenever a job opens at VolunteerMatch people around the office will submit a spattering of resumes from their friends and acquaintances, I’ll forward on five or six. Every electoral cycle I’m worth anywhere from a hundred to a thousand votes to a candidate or issue of my choosing once my community is mobilized and we’ve hit the pavement. There is a lot that couples can do together, but communities’ unmatched ability to come together and change their world makes the possible things that I can do with mine virtually limitless. So if any of you out there are hording your hopes and dreams on that special someone, take some time and think about what could happen if you share the love.

#14- Why We Have Big Brains

I don’ t know how many of you have read “The Tipping Point”, a pop-science treatise that has worked its way well up the New York Times best seller list. One section mentioned a study that I want to talk about today, I think it has some very cool and very interesting implications. As I understand it in 1992 a guy named Robert Dunbar decided to tackle the question of human brain size. We’ve done pretty well with our massively enlarged frontal lobes, but what advantage did they give our primate ancestors? What advantages were primates in Africa getting from bigger and bigger brains?

I’ll read from a summary (http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html)

“One theory holds that our brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to gather food in more complex ways. They began eating fruit instead of grasses and leaves. This involved traveling long distances to find food, and required each species to maintain a complex mental map in order to keep track of fruit trees. More brainpower might have been needed to determine if a fruit was ripe, or to discern proper methods for peeling fruit or cracking nuts.

The problem with this theory is that if one tries to match brain size with the eating habits of primates, it doesn't work. Some small-brained monkeys are eating fruit and maintaining complex maps and some larger brained primates are eating leaves.

What does work, apparently, is group size. If one examines any species of primate, the larger their neocortex, the larger the average size of the group they live with.

Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has done some of the most interesting research in this area. Dunbar's argument is that as brains evolve, they become larger in order to handle the unique complexities of larger social groups. Humans socialize the largest social groups because we have the largest cortex. Dunbar has developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species - the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain - and the equation gives us the maximum expected group size for each species. For humans, the max group size is 147.8, or about 150. This figure seems to represent the maximum amount of people that we can have a real social relationship with - knowing who another human is and how they relate to us.”

Apparently groups of about 150 show up everywhere, from hunter-gatherer societies to factories to the army. Dunbar and his associates make a big deal out of this number, but I want to focus on a broader implication of the study:

People evolved big brains to form relationships. Computers are good for a lot of things, but they’re best at mathematics because that’s what they were first built to do. Even those early computers could far outpace the human brain in doing mathematics quickly and efficiently, but even modern supercomputers are incapable of understanding and navigating simple social situations. Our higher brain functions are built from the ground up to be very, very good at thinking about relationships. And not just one or two relationships, lots and lots of relationships. We’re built to handle complex communities, whole societies. While most of us deal with far more than 150 people in the course of our lives, juggling 150 relationships allows to have a pretty firm hold on much broader social systems which touch everyone on the globe.

The evolutionary advantages of this kind of a social system are obvious. We’re able to build complicated technologies like computers not just because we’re smart, but because we’re born into a society that has already figured out things like mathematics and electronics. Without complicated societies we’d have no collective memory and no venue for the free exchange of ideas, and our big brains would be still be stuck inventing stone tools. Arguably this ability to form relationships is our most powerful, most valuable and most defining trait as a species. Community is what we’re hard-wired to do, at the same time our super power and the site of many of our most basic and most primal instincts.

Stop for a second and think about all of the vastly complicated relationships that you navigate every day. When you meet a friend for coffee you immediately start crunching more data than MIT. Your friend’s facial expression, the inflection of their voice and the entire history of your friendship are all instantly cross referenced and analyzed without you so much as breaking a sweat. While you’re busy recounting the details of your first day at work, your subconscious is busily referencing and editing a massive pile of information about your friend, a set of information that lets you know what to expect from her, how to act around her and give you the general sense that you “know” her. These relationships with friends and coworkers, most of which “just happen” without any conscious effort, are so complicated that they put moon landings to shame.

Navigating these maelstroms of information is more than just what we’re good at, it’s who we are. Think for a second about our strongest, most fundamental emotions and how deeply tied they are to the people around us. Love, hate, jealousy, comfort, happiness; all are tied deeply to the relationships that we form with others. Emile Durkheim, considered one of the fathers of sociology, made a name for himself be driving home this point. After in depth research he concluded that suicide was a result not of depression or anxiety, but of something he termed “anomie,” which is the feeling that one doesn’t have a place in society, a state where norms are confused, unclear and not present. According to Durkheim relationships with those around us are so fundamental to our understanding of ourselves and our well being that without them we literally cease to exist.

So we’ve established two things: forming relationships is very, very important and we all just so happen to be very, very good at it. Form relationships well and we can navigate society with ease, zeroing in on the people and resources that we need to live our lives and fulfilling our emotional needs to boot. Form relationships poorly and we wind up stuck at home alone with no one to fix our computer, get our foot in the door jobhunting, cook us dinner or talk to us about the game. So how do we make sure that we wind up with the relationships that we need? How do we as think about the relationships that we form?

Because we’re such social creatures a good way to understand how we think about something is usually to listen to the way we talk about it. We all intuitively understand that a ball falls to the ground when you drop it and that it travels a ways and then falls to the ground when you throw it. If we want to do something more complicated than throwing a ball, say throwing a ball really far and hitting a precise target, then we need a language to talk about what’s going on with the ball, a language like physics. And when you get down to it that’s all that physics is, a set of words and concepts and equations that people use to talk about how things move around. Having a better language about how stuff moves let’s us have a better conversation, which let’s us build cooler airplanes and cell phones and vacuum cleaners. And it’s not just physicists that soak themselves in technical jargon. Walk into any room of computer programmers, fashion designers, sports fans or teenagers and unless you happen to be one too you’ll feel like you just got off at the wrong floor on the tower of Babel. That’s because experts in things (yes, being a teenager requires expertise) NEED that nuanced language to describe what’s going on. Learn the language and you’re pretty much an expert yourself.

So if we’re all such experts at thinking about relationships, how do we talk about them? A lot of this language is nuanced. Bosses have words like “synergy” to talk about their relationships with their employees. We all have works like “obligation” and “trust” to talk about our friends and family, but usually only when those relationships are going sour. The curious fact of the mater is that for all of the effort our ancestors spend evolving the ability to think about relationships we spend remarkably little time actually talking about them, with one notable exception.

Tell a friend that you want to meet them for coffee and talk about a relationship, and they’ll probably assume that the relationship involves sex, or at least that it’s on its way to involving sex sometime in the future. When it comes to relationships that involve sex or that might involve sex there is tons of jargon and everyone’s heard it. Flirting, dating, friends with benefits, breaking up , marriage. As soon as a relationship has a whiff of sexual potential we approach it with the lexicon of a trained medical doctor, noting every phone call and every tonal inflection like we were treating a patient with cancer.

This poses a very interesting question, one which (to my knowledge) has yet to be the subject of any serious academic research: Why do we spend to much time and energy talking about relationships that involve sex and so little time and energy talking about relationships that don’t? Remember, we got our big brains not so we could think about one sexual relationship or the four or five relationships that constitute a family but so we could think about the dozens and dozens of relationships that constitute a community. Actively thinking about only one relationship, or even about three of four relationships in a family is a little like buying a high-powered laptop to play pong; it doesn’t make pong any easier, and you can do a lot more.

For the moment let’s avoid speculation on how this verbal discrepancy between sexual and nonsexual relationships came about and talk about how, well, WEIRD it is. You hang out with someone, everything is chill, you introduce sexuality and suddenly you’ve gone from throwing a ball back and forth to calculating a moon landing.

This transition doesn’t seem to make sense to anyone. To be sure sexuality is important to a lot of people, and it certainly has it’s own set of neurochemical implications, but given the prevalence of relationship-free sex throughout history it seems unlikely that sex and love share a purely chemical bond.

Love.

There’s a proverbial moon landing if ever there was one. Finding, maintaining and fully realizing love is one of the hardest, most important and most fulfilling things that people do in their lives. And even though most of us love our friends and our families we only actively look for love in relationships that involve sex and it’s that search for love that makes sexual relationships so marvelously complicated.

Remember-we’re basically walking talking relationship-forming machines, it makes perfect sense that our instincts would be geared towards a search for companionship. It also makes sense that that search would be really, really hard (that’s why we have these big brains to begin with.) What doesn’t make sense is why, when we’re built to be part of a big, complicated community and when big, complicated communities are such an integral part of our emotional and material lives, we would cram all of our need for companionship into such a tiny box. Communities were the secret to our prehistoric success and they’re just as powerful today, wielding a level of political and social power that few individual families can match. Communities and the networks of friendships that they encompass can provide much of the stability and emotional support that we look for so desperately from relationships that involve sex, so why do we talk about relationships like communities and friendships don’t matter?

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the language we use to talk about relationships sucks.

Take a moment and try to envision a world where the way that we think about and talk about relationships was more reflective of the way that they actually happen. The word “single” would be stricken from our vocabulary, along with the awkward, narrowly focused social scenes designed with single people in mind. Rather than setting out on a hell-or-high-water quest to “find the perfect someone”, people would leave home confident in the supportive relationships that they already had and excited about building new relationships to expand their community. Rather than looking for one sexual relationship to do everything (and probably coming home, or at least waking up, empty handed) they would look for a relationship that could do something and expect everything to happen once all those somethings were added together.

If in between finding someone to go hiking with and someone who shared their obsessions with The Doors they happened to find someone to have sex with they would be able to focus a lot more energy on talking about how to have fun and be safe and a lot less energy on the emotional baggage that sex is forced to lug around currently. That’s not to say that sex would be divorced from emotion- a lot of people would still only enjoy sex once real intimacy was involved, but the process of finding that intimacy wouldn’t be seen as an exclusively sexual one. At family gatherings awkward questions about when you would “find someone” would be replaced by equally awkward questions about the strength of your community and the breadth and depth of your network of friends. Maybe you’d still fall in love, get married and have kids, and when you did you’d sit down with your spouse and all of your friends to talk about working together to raise those kids.

Ok, so to me that sounds appealing. Maybe the idea of maintaining close relationships with 20 people as part of your childrearing sounds like your idea of hell, the point is that the language we use to talk about relationships matters and we’re free to change it if we want to. Think about it as the software that we use for our overpowered relationship-forming hardware. By thinking about and tweaking the way that we talk about relationships we can use all of that brainpower to make our lives that much better.

#13- Fun Times Flipping the Script

No real news this week. There's some info on a useful exercise that I went through recently, a followup on last week's discussion and some very cool quistions that CJ sent in:

Please note that this is meant facetiously, and in no way should be used that human sexuality is unnatural or unhealthy— for most people it is natural and healthy. The purpose of these questions is to challenge the assumption that all people inherently are or should be sexual.

1) What do you think caused your sexuality?

2) When and how did you first decide you were sexual, and why did you make that choice?

3) Is it possible that your sexuality is just a phase that you will grow out of?

4) It is possible that your sexuality stems from a neurotic fear of dealing with people and not just their bodies, or from a neurotic obsession with physical bodies, or worse, an inability to see past a body?

5) Sexuals have histories of failed asexual relationships, not being able to deal with close personal non-sexual relating. Do you think you may have turned sexual out of fear of emotional intimacy?

6) If you’ve never had a really intimate relationship with someone without all the messy things that happen when you mix in sex and bodily fluids, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer that?

7) If sexuality is normal, why is there such huge spectrum of sexual attraction, drive and desire?

8) Sexuality and sexual activity can be indicative of hormonal or psychological problems, and even brain damage. Have you considered getting your hormones checked or having a psychological assessment?

9) Many people who have been sexually abused while children or teenagers act out sexually and become very sexual later in life. Were you abused as a child or teenager? Is that why you are sexual?

10) To whom have you disclosed your sexual tendencies? How did they react?

11) Your sexuality doesn’t offend me as long as you leave me alone, but why do so many sexuals try to seduce others into that orientation, or seduce them all?

12) If you should choose to nurture children, would you want them to be sexual, knowing the problems they would face, all the complicated things they would need to deal with in their relationships and lives?

13) Most child molesters, rapists and abusers are sexual. Do you consider it safe to expose your children to sexuals? Sexual teachers, particularly?

14) Why must sexuals be so blatant, making a public spectacle of your sexuality? Can’t you just be what you are and keep it quiet?

15) Sexuals always assign their relationships such narrowly restricted, categories of “friend” or “partner”. Why do you cling to such unhealthy and limiting relationship categories? Why can’t you just love?

16) How can you have a fully satisfying, deeply emotional experience with another person when you are preoccupied by sex and what your bodies are doing? How can two people actually be intimate if they are constantly seeing and treating each other as sexual objects, or trying to get sexual fulfillment?

17) Sexual relationships have total societal support, yet divorce and messy break ups continue to cause sexuals profound distress. Why are there so few stable sexual relationships?

18) Since sexuality and problems that stem from it are so painful for so many people, techniques have been developed to help sexuals change. Have you considered trying hormone or aversion therapy?

20) How do sexuals ever concentrate when they have to deal with the constant bother of sexual attraction, sex drive, and spending time and energy pursuing people for sexual relationships?

21) A disproportionate number of criminals and other irresponsible types are sexual. And there are so many types of self-destructive, abusive and oppressive behaviours that are sexual in nature. So how can sexuality possibly be normal and healthy?

22) So many sexual people are only willing to be emotionally intimate with someone if they are in a sexual relationship. Why are sexuals so emotionally frigid?

23) Maybe you only think you’re sexual because you haven’t met the right person. Do you think you’re only turning to sexuality because you are desperate and emotionally unfulfilled?

24) There are so many physical risks involved with sexuality, including STI’s and unplanned pregnancy, not to mention the emotional risks and frustration especially in long-term committed sexual relationships. Why would anyone want to be sexual?

25) Why do sexuals need to be validated by having someone else desire them sexually? Why are they so insecure?

#12- Is Sex Magic?

I had a big debate with my friend cowboy over sexuality and whether it was unique. This is someone who knows and respects me, but we disagreed pretty fundamentally on the nature of sexuality. To her sex is a sort of fundamental experience, it attains a level of emotion and a level of connection that nothing else can.

Now to me this idea seemed a little demeaning, because if sex allows access to this uniquely sexual universe of emotion then there’s a whole universe of intense feeling that I just don’t have access to. I’ve heard similar things from my other sexual friends as well, that there’s nothing in the world like sex, that it’s a whole other level of connection with someone. We see this a lot within the sexual binary- the idea that certain intense emotions and intense relationships only happen when sex is involved.

So if my friend is right, and she does really experience a ton of enhanced emotions only around sex, then one of two things is true. Either I’m just not experiencing a whole level of humanity, or I’m experiencing stuff without sex that my sexual friends aren’t.

Is it that sex involves some special neurochemical cocktail that unlocks a secret part of human psychology, or that it involves a set of emotions and desires which my friends keep reserved for their sexual partners and I spread around my community? Probably both, but it’s important to keep in mind.

There’s no debating that sexuality does a lot of chemical things to the brain and that a lot of those chemical things that it does to the brain have an affect on relationships. What I haven’t seen much research on, and I’m not an academic expert in any way, is whether the things that sex does to the brain are unique and if so how unique? Are there chemicals which are released only during sex and if so how much do those chemicals have an affect on thing that matter in relationships: how we feel about people, how much time we spend together. Are sexual people basically just tripping on a bunch of chemicals that we’re not?

On the other hand, how much is it about sexual people giving a type of meaning to sex that we’re not? To a sexual person having sex means that you have access to a particular kind of sexual relationship where all kinds of interesting things can happen. There’s the possibility of forming a family, there’s the possibility of being committed to someone for the rest of your life there’s the possibility of even dating them, with all of the things that that means. When you don’t have sex, for most sexual people, that isn’t a possibility and the kind fo relationship that is possible when you have sex affects how you emotionally feel when you have sex because that sex means something. If having sex lets you give yourself permission to feel a certain set of things for people then you limit those emotions to a particular subset of relationships in our life. As asexual people we’re in a tricky position because we can’t use sexuality as a system to limit where we feel things and how we’re vulnerable. We can use other systems, but we’re forced to feel things at times when sexual people aren’t forced to feel them, because sexual people limit a lot of their emotions to relationships where they have sex.

If sex is magical for sexual people then for us that magic is taken out of sex and distributed somewhere else. That means that we are feeling things in relationships that a lot of sexual people aren’t going out of their way to feel and experience. This puts us in new territory that is potentially interesting to sexual people. A lot of the reason why sexual people get so worked up about sex is the magical emotions that are associated with it, and if those emotions could happen without sex then it might make them a little easier to deal with.

Here’s one way to think about it: when asexual and sexual people form relationships what do sexual people do with those “extra” sexual things that they feel, and what do we do with the “extra” nonsexual things that we feel? How incompatible REALLY are the sexual things that they are feeling and the nonsexual things that we are feeling, which gets back to the core question I was asking Cowboy- is sex unique? Is it magical?

This is an interesting question, because I know a lot of sexual people who seem extremely hesitant to ask it. Seriously examining the mystery around the uniqueness of sex is taboo to a lot of people who pride themselves on not having taboos. It’s where a lot of our modern concept of virginity comes from, the idea that you need to try it (or maybe try it again with the right person) in order to even participate in the discussion. I am reminded of this every time the topic of my experimenting with sex comes up around my friends, many of whom still jump at the fantasy that I will undergo some epiphany and fall in line with the established norm.

If our community is going to survive in the long term, if we are going to carve out a place for ourselves that is rich with possibility then there are a lot of tricks that we will have to pull off. One of these tricks is going to be getting a lot of sexual people out there to start questioning their assumptions, to start asking themselves why they limit so many of their strongest emotions to the realm of sexuality and to start imagining what would be possible if they didn’t.

Asex 101

Here is the lecture, view the powerpoint at:
http://101.asexuality.org

#11- Asex 101 Lecture

I’ve recorded the lecture that I gave a few months back so that we can use it as an educational tool. This weeks’ podcast is just a huge news update, since there hasn’t been one for so long.

News:

We left off on September 26 with Podcast 10, here are the headlines since then in vague outline forumat

Talk at University of Delaware a Success!

My computer broke : (

Montel, Keith Ablow, Tyra Banks, Daily Telegraph All At The Same Time

Minor Site Downtime- Sketchy in Restrospect?

Montel Filming Goes Great

-Power Asexuals Get Bagels, Conquer Planet, Kick Butt on Camera

-Montel Williams Allright but Kind of Mysogonistic

-Joy Davidson Defends All That is Pure from the Asexual Hordes

-Attacked us on lack of academic cred. Accused us of recruiting, etc.

-Counter: Asexual health

My Computer is Fixed, yay!!

Start updating AVEN, go to make cookies and… Nov 10, 6PM site goes down

- Why this happened: ignorance about asexuality

o NOT explicit sexual discussion going on AVEN

- Takes a week to get a new server and get back up. I’m really stressed out the whole time, about doubled my computer knowledge through trial and error and redangel.

Next up: Montel, finishing the book proposal, code updates and PT elections. If anyone needs me drop me a line, but those three things are what I’m focusing on.

Check out the lecture!

#10- The Masturbation Paradox

Good times with the NCSF, a lecture update, visibility blitzing, and some more on community based intimacy. Hold on ‘cause this is Episode 10: The Masturbation Paradox.

Recently the asexual community has been receiving a lot of press. From 20/20 to the View to the New York Times, a lot of people seem fascinated by the previously boring topic of not having sex. As a community, we’ve had to put together a sort of public relationships strategy. Generally speaking we try to steer the interviews towards more emotional topics- relationships, coming out, fulfillment and other life experiences. Talking about arousal and masturbation makes the discussion clinical, about our bodies rather than our lives, while talking about emotional topics highlights our humanity. It invites audiences to empathize with us rather than clinically dissecting us. But inevitably questions keep on coming. Do asexual people experience arousal? Do they masturbate? Do you? How can someone masturbate and call themselves asexual?

It’s high time we gave them a good answer.

Asexual masturbation is something of a paradox. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll tell you that it’s a sexual act. It involves sexual arousal, sexual pleasure, often times it even involves orgasm. It makes up a significant chunk of the sexual activity that happens in the world, and is a vital part of the sexuality of most sexual people. If sexual desire is just the desire for sexual pleasure, then masturbation is by far the easiest way to act on it. No long courtships, no emotionally complicated relationships, no fancy clothes and pick-up lines and alcohol, just a little free time and (usually) a private place.

In a sense, the desire to masturbate is the purest form of sexual desire out there. If you genuinely, truly, JUST want to get off then there’s no reason to involve all of the complexities of other people. Pure economic logic tells us that if you put in all of those long, grueling hours for sex with a partner you’re looking for something more than an orgasm that’s just a broom closet away. Partnered sexuality is adulterated with all sorts of nonsexual egos, expectations and emotional needs which take turns either enhancing or detracting from the Good Stuff. Unpartnered sexuality is easy, direct, to-the-point and pure. If sexuality is just the desire for sex, then people who only masturbate should feel like the most purely sexual people on the planet.

They don’t.

Rather inconveniently, people who masturbate and don’t have sex with other people tend to call themselves asexual. We can’t say this universally, but currently the asexual community is the only place where these kids of people have gathered together to talk about it in any number. These people don’t identify with sexuality at all. Unlike most people, who consider masturbation sexuality and sexual desire to be central motivating factors in their lives, people who only masturbate tend to think of their sexuality as nonexistent. They spend their time hanging out and sharing an identity with people who experience no sexual arousal at all, or who experience sexual arousal and are never motivated to act on it. These people relate to one another’s experiences, use the same terms to describe themselves, struggle with the same problems and swap the same strategies to tackle them, and they do it all in a community founded by someone who masturbates and calls himself asexual. What’s going on here?

It’s tempting, though ultimately pointless, to try and correct this situation. You could crash into the asexual community wielding badges of scientific, medical or imagined authority and demand that all of the masturbating asexuals pack their bags and truck off to a conceptually consistent set of terms. Not only would this be wrong (because it would deny masturbating asexuals their right to self-identity) and pointless (because there’s no way to create a division in the community if masturbating and non-masturbating asexuals don’t see one), it’s a textbook case of changing the facts to fit the theory. To make sense of this paradox, let’s take a step back to our ideas about sexuality and sexual desire.

In the asexual community, asexuality is about more than how you feel about sex. There is no litmus test, no way to examine your own internal wiring (or lack of wiring) around sexuality and scientifically state whether or not you are asexual. Asexual identity is viewed less as a label and more as a sort of toolbox. If the word “asexual” works, if it helps you understand yourself and describe yourself to other people, then you pick it up and you use it. In the asexual community you meet people with all sorts of tips and tricks in their toolboxes on everything from coming out to nonsexual flirting, and you swap and experiment until your asexual identity has evolved to perfectly fit your lifestyle. In the asexual community identity is constantly evolving and changing as people pick up new terms and ideas and send old ones off to be recycled.

Why do most people in our culture identify more strongly around their race and their gender than around their eye color and their blood type? Is it because race and gender are more biologically relevant? Of course not. Most people are made to think about their gender and their race on a daily basis, and about their blood type a maximum of a few times a year. Most of us are forced to think about our race and our gender- and about the problems which arise around them- almost constantly. As we grapple with the problems put in front of us we create tools to address them. How we use these tools begins to shape our lives, we being to feel a common bond with those sharing our struggle and before long we find ourselves embroiled in a full-fledged identity. More than mere labels, identities that matter come equipped with a full set of ideas, terms, and collective wisdom that can let us take on even the most daunting of challenges.

What if sexuality is about more than just liking sex? What if sexuality, like asexuality, is a sort of identity? Any sexual 8^th grader can tell you that sexuality is fraught with emotional hazards. Starting young, most people devote an intense amount of time and energy to figuring out how to happily fit sexuality into their lives. They swap ideas and tricks, experiment, and fill up a personal sexual toolbox chock-full of the skills and knowhow required to gracefully deal with a wide range of sexual situations. If our examination holds it’s people’s identities, their “toolboxes” and not the contents of their underwear which serve as the locus of their sexuality. When someone kisses their boyfriend they think about it with ideas and terms from the sexual toolbox, and the experience feels “sexual.” Swap kissing a boyfriend for kissing a mother and, oedipal complexes aside, people think about the situation with tools and concepts from another, nonsexual toolbox.

In this scenario it’s easy to see why masturbation is so sexual for so many people. Arousal and orgasm by yourself feels a lot like arousal and orgasm with another person, and it’s no surprise that people use very similar concepts and terms to describe the two. Once you’ve spent those hard adolescent years feeling out a place for sexuality in your life, it’s no surprise that for most people masturbation fits nicely into the picture.

But think back- was masturbation really the cause of all that frantic, awkward adolescent identity-building? It is, after all, just a matter of some spare time and secluded corner. Masturbation is easy, far too easy to spark the development of a full-fledged sexual identity. At the end of the day sex is simple, it’s the relationships where it happens that are complicated. From High School cafeterias to Sex and the City people are struggling with the complicated things that happen when you mix sex with other people, not the fairly straightforward things that happen when you have it by yourself. If relationships are the name of the game, kids who only masturbate will feel out of place in conversations about sexual intimacy and right at home with people exploring complicated emotions and relationships without sex. Without a sexual identity to contextualize it, masturbation would become nothing more than an amusing pastime, a momentary distraction unrelated to the complicated and daunting task of living in as an asexual person in a highly sexual world.

The important lesson here isn’t about masturbation or asexuality, it’s about the nature of sexuality itself. Is sexuality as simple as a raw biological desire? When (and if ) we feel it, are we feeling what all other people feel and have felt through human history? Or is sexuality more complicated? Is it an identity: a frenzy of ideas, problems, strategies and (often contradicting) desires unique to each person at each time in their lives? Either definition is valid, just make sure to choose the one that’s most useful.

#9- Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Asexual?

This week’s episode has a computer update, a roundup of the response from the rebroadcasting of 20/20, a shout-out to the new AVEN Wiki and a good old-fashioned discussion about identity.

#8- Relationships with sexual people

Today’s show includes some updates about the action on campuses, a couple of major press hits, and the sad, sad state of my computer. All that, of course, and a little topic I like to call:

Relationships with sexual people

Most of my close relationships are with sexual people. Because I do the whole community based intimacy things none of these are really Relationships with a capitol R, but it’s still worth noting. I have been able to do a lot in my relationships without sexuality ever entering the picture (or at least without it ever becoming unmanageable.)

The key for me has been to get comfortable blurring that line between friendship and romance. It’s a catch 22- for sexual people, a romance without sex is extremely limiting. Romantic relationships are, after all, where they are supposed to play out their sexuality, and asking them to engage in one without sexuality is asking them to mute an important part of themselves. The alternative, as many of us are all too aware, is asking us to mute a part of ourselves and go through the motions of sexuality for the sake of our partner. The relationship is forced to morph itself around a fundamental incompatibility, our ability to tolerate sexuality and our partner’s ability to tolerate going without it must be stretched painfully until they can find some happy meeting place. It works, if a Montague and a Capulet can build a relationship then surely so can a sexual and an asexual, but it ain’t necessarily pretty.

For the record, this is NOT how I do things. Maybe it’s the AVEN-lavender blood coursing through my vanes, but the thought of an arrangement so centered around sexuality makes me shudder. If my years of asexual escapades have taught me one thing, it’s that every time it’s about sex it’s never REALLY about sex. Let’s dig a little deeper.

What do sexual people mean when they say that they “need sexuality?” Science has yet to find a negative thing which happens to people when they don’t have sex, aside from the general theory that wanting anything too much and forcing a denial of it is a problematic behavior. When sexual people don’t have sex in their lives they in theory (though not always in practice) get cranky, and cranky people are no fun to be in relationships with. It may be useful to stop thinking about sexuality as a biological drive, and start thinking about it as a sort of identity. For most of you listening, asexuality is an important part of who you are. It’s a sort of toolbox of ideas and definitions that you use to think about yourself and your relationships, describe yourself to people and just go about your day without getting hopelessly lost and confused. (Which is not to say that most of us haven’t been there.) I’m saying, what if sexuality is the same way? What if sex and the desires that they feel around it are so integral to the way that sexual people think about themselves and their lives that asking one of them to suddenly live in a world without sex would be like asking one of us to live in a world without AVEN.

(Not to compare AVEN to sex, y’all already know which is better.)

So sexual people need sex for more than endorphins, they need it to understand and explore themselves. The important thing to realize is that we don’t need to be the arena of their exploration in order to be close to them. We don’t even have to help, all we have to do is avoid standing in the way. Sexual people are just as capable of nonsexual intimacy as we are, they’re just not as used to exploring it.

So how do you avoid standing in the way? Point out the facts. Unless your partner is gung-ho about exploring sexuality with someone who’s inexperienced, disinterested and bored, their relationship with you probably is not the arena for their sexual exploration. If you’ve never had sex play down the virgin card. Virgins swoon over the world of erotic possibility that their first time has unlocked, you would look at your watch and ask if there was anything good on TV. And not to bean-count, but does your partner REALLY have anything lose from a relationship with you? If they go from looking for sex, intimacy, and companionship to just looking for sex, then aren’t they better off?

This is, admittedly, where it gets tricky again. As I’ve noted in earlier podcasts I’m a ho, most of my friends are hoes and none of us has THAT much trouble separating intimacy from doing the nasty. Not all of us are so fortunate. For some people sex, intimacy and companionship can not be so easily separated. This is NOT because once intimacy and companionship enter the picture immutable sexual desire gets dragged in with it. (See Exhibit A, in which sexual people have been forming intense nonsexual relationships with each other throughout all of history.) It’s because when intimacy and companionship are served up with cake and AVENfries, sex is left a la cart. Your partner can’t get close to you because they’re saving themselves for a sexual relationship which rides in on a unicorn that shits rainbows.

In times like these that it’s useful to point out the flawed logic of “saving oneself.” The whole really fantastic thing about love is that you never run out. Love is a verb, not a commodity- when you love more you get better at loving. And unless looking for that all-encompassing sexual relationship is a 40-hour-a-week endeavor (in which case PLEASE stop them), there’s no reason that they can’t make that relationship better and richer by seeing just how far they can take their relationship with you. And who knows? Once they’ve had themselves a nice, big slice of AVENcake that unicorn may seem like more and more of a fairy tale.

#7- Intimacy Basics

Media Machine:

Doctor Doctor

Further developments with one of the UK documentary companies

Interview with SF state

News: Web Week!

Asexual Underground Myspace

http://www.myspace.com/asexualunderground

Viva los AVENistas on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2205159398

In this episode I’m going to talk about some ideas I’ve been kicking around about intimacy. I’ve been thinking a lot about the distinction between “romantic” and “nonromantic” people that we tend to draw here. You’ll have to listen to get the full scoop….

#6 - The Trendy Asexual's Guide to Experimenting with Sexuality

Check out the new AVEN chatroom!

Media Machine:

Reporter from SF State

Spanish news website elmundo.es

Potential documentary on the science of asexuality!

Mailbag:

Marie

Ghosts (sparking a cool discussion discussion!)

Carsponspire

DJ Presents:

The Trendy Asexual’s Guide To Experimenting with Sexuality

A little under a year ago I gave a talk at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. The room full of grad students and professors didn’t quite know what to make of me at first, but by the end of the talk they were blown away by the work that we in the asexual community are doing. One woman was so impressed that she invited me to play on her Ultimate Frisbee team, and we got into a habit of hanging out after practice to talk shop.

During one of these discussions she said something that got me thinking. She said that condom use in teenagers was directly proportional to amount that teenagers expected to have sex. When they knew sex was coming they had the foresight to plan ahead and be safe, when they couldn’t envision themselves having sex but somehow got caught up in the moment, high-risk behavior got a whole lot more likely.

That got me thinking about the community on AVEN. Though only some of us are actually having sex, most asexual people experiment with some form of sexuality in some way. That I’ve seen we don’t really talk about that experimentation much, but it seems like the more openly we can address the topic of asexual people experimenting with sexuality the more we’ll be able to do it on our terms. We don’t find sexuality addictive or intoxicating the way that sexual people do, and that makes it slightly less ugly a prospect, but there are still a lot of very real emotional, relational and medical risks involved in experimenting with sexual dynamics. With forethought and we can minimize those risks. And whether you foresee yourself dealing with sexuality in the future or just want to be prepared, knowing how to safely and purposefully approach sexuality is something that even the most sexually averse of us should know how to do.

**Disclaimer: A small percentage of experimentation with sexuality involves gooey fluids. This type of experimentation, though it can be worthwhile under certain circumstances, it will not be the focus of our discussion today. If you think that there is a chance that the experiment you are planning may involve Gooey Stuff, it is extremely important to familiarize yourself with its safe handling. After reviewing several sites, I recommend Wikipedia for a comprehensive, asexual-friendly view on this topic. (I’ll include a link with the show notes on asexualunderground.blogspot.com) **

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_sex#Safe_sex_precautions

What do I mean by “experimenting with sexuality?”

Gooey fluids aside, sexuality is a social thing. It’s about a certain way of thinking, acting, and feeling which comes very naturally to most people and seems alien to us. Experimenting with sexuality is a little like dressing in drag. It’s about taking on, playing with and complicating a social performance that most people take for granted. It can be fun, exciting, educational, and can cause the sexual people around you to question their assumptions. Experimenting with sexuality does not necessarily mean having sex, it means doing things which most people consider “sexual” even though you aren’t. This could include flirting, telling dirty jokes, or allowing sexual tension to develop in a relationship.

In my experience experiments with sexuality always follow a set pattern. Knowing the pattern can help you plan ahead, decide when it’s worth bothering to experiment with sexuality and approach sexual experimentation with a sense of purpose.

Here’s how to turn sex into something useful in six easy steps:

Step 1: Imperative –Why experiment with sexuality? Because we live in a sexual world, where a whole range of thoughts, activities and feelings are arranged in a hierarchy around sex and sexual relationships. Take kissing. Unless you’re kissing your grandma, touching your lips to someone else’s is generally considered a sexual act. Now, touching your lips to someone else doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to have sex with them, but do it for long enough and everyone will look at you funny and wonder why “more” isn’t happening. In the sexual world things like kissing, flirting, dating, talking to people at parties, and dancing are all considered part of this sexual hierarchy: even though they look and feel nothing like sex, each one is inexplicably chained the desire to boink someone.

When we experiment with sexuality we’re slapping on camouflage facepaint, sneaking into sexual territory and cutting those chains. If you try out kissing, like it, and figure out a way to work it into your life without porking anyone, you’ve taken a step towards a more asexual-friendly world. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Step 2: Dismissal- What’s the first thing I do when something in the sexual hierarchy catches our eye? Generally speaking I ignore it. Experimenting with sexuality can be a lot of work and a huge headache, and I’ll only go through the trouble of venturing into sexual territory if it seems worth the effort. Nine times out of ten it’s not- there’s nothing wrong with experimenting with sexuality, but there’s also no reason to if it doesn’t seem worthwhile.

Step 3: Confusion- I want to be clear: experimenting with sexuality does NOT make you any less asexual unless you want it to. There are a lot of things to be confused about when you’re skirting the sexual/asexual boundary- your identity isn’t one of them. Experimenting with sexuality could bring up parts of yourself that you didn’t know existed, but it won’t change who you are.

Identity aside confusion is a natural part of any venture into unexplored territory. Remember: the asexual community has only been around for a couple of years, experiments which mix out-n-proud asexual people and traditional sexual activity are pretty new territory, and there’s no telling what could come out of the reaction. Accept that not everything makes sense- that’s why you’re doing the experiment in the first place.

Step 4: Experimentation- With all that confusion it’s hard to have a clear plan, but the clearer you can have the better. I like to try and think of it in terms of green, yellow and red- things I’m interested in, things I’m willing to let happen and things that I’m not down for. (e.g. I’m INTERESTED in hitting on people at this party, I’m WILLING to let people think I’m sexually interested in them if that’s how they interpret it, but I’m NOT DOWN for letting anyone take me off into a corner.) Once you’ve set you’re boundaries, go ahead and jump in. Don’t expect things to feel natural- sexuality is a performance, and it may take you a while to learn how to play the role (maybe longer than most sexual people, since you won’t have your own sexual desire to act as a compass.) Be curious, try different things, see what works, what seems interesting and what doesn’t. Remember this is like drag- by a little campy and have fun. Once you’ve gotten your bearings, don’t be afraid to break out of the usual sexual script.

Whether you’re at a party or alone with someone, whatever experiment you’re doing will probably involve other people. Sometimes it’s impossible to keep everyone fully informed at all times, prefacing a flirting session with a disclaimer about how you’re asexual and this is just a test might kill the mood. You won’t be able to engage in clear, open dialogue all the time, but you should communicate as openly as possible the second other people start getting seriously invested in things.

Step 5: Reflection – Now it’s time to let all of that confusion sort itself out. Every time I’ve experimented in any way with sexuality I’ve enjoyed at least some part of it, but usually not the “sexual” part and usually not in quite the same way as sexual people seem to. As I turn the experience over in my head I’ll find a way to separate all of the parts I’m not interested in from the parts I am.

Talk things out in a place where you feel safe doing so. What did you like? What didn’t you like? What seemed easy to fit into the rest of your life and what seemed tricky? Maybe the experiment brought out parts of yourself you weren’t aware of, maybe it didn’t. If it did, take the time to figure out how they fit in with the rest of your life.

Step 6: Reinterpretation – Finally, the fun part. Now that you’re figured things out, you’re got a new tool in your asexual repertoire. Once you’ve separated the stuff you like from that big, ugly hierarchy of sexuality you are free to do it on your own terms. Once you’ve sorted things out in your head you can come up with clear, concise language to communicate with any sexual people (or asexual people) who might be left scratching their heads. Once everything works and makes sense, make sure you post about it on AVEN. Asexuality is still new territory, and we need people like you to blaze the trails.

A little homework in lieu of a question of the week: when I was researching safer sex sites for the disclaimer I came across the site for Planned Parenthood. Now I usually have a lot of respect for Planned Parenthood, but the wording on their site is unfortunate:

http://www.plannedparenthood.org/pp2/portal/files/portal/medicalinfo/sexualhealth/pub-safe-sex.xml

Their section on safer sex opens with the unfortunate phrase “We are all sexual — from birth to death.”

Waddaya say we see if we can get them to change it? Drop them an e-mail at actioncenter@ppfa.org. Be respectful and polite- we’ll get a lot more accomplished that way.

Peace in the middle east.

-DJ Danjerous

#5-History Lesson

I’ve got another long show for you this week- 22 minutes of edge of your seat asexual action. The latest and greatest news as always, discussion of some of the great reader mail an overview of AVEN history, starting with some of the pre-AVEN organizing of the asexual communities on the internet. Definitely check it out.

(Sorry for the short show notes- I need to get to bed!)

As always you can e-mail me, asexualunderground@gmail.com. The question of the week: What does the asexual community mean to you? And if you feel up for it: Where do you see the asexual community going in the future?

#4 -Confessions of an Asexual Slut Part 2

I’ve got a great show for you this week, I go over Chinese asexual marriages, asexuality and abstinence, and of course the second chapter of Confessions of an Asexual Slut.

Got a great e-mail this week, here’s an excerpt:

I find it interesting that people find defining asexual relationships, more difficult to define than sexual (or potentially sexual) ones. Although I no longer believe that it is important to wait until marriage to have sex, I was raised with that belief, and stuck with it for a long time. Because of that, I never saw sex as the defining element in a relationship, because, if you're going to abstain until marriage, like asexuals, you need to find something other than sex to separate your romantic relationship, from all the rest. But maybe it's not that simple. Before AVEN, I assumed that I didn't want to have sex, because I was waiting. It didn't exactly occur to me that the ease of abstinence, might be caused by lack of sexuality. Do you think that for those abstaining, the desire for sex with their partner, replaces actually having sex, as a way to separate friendships from romantic relationships?

I’m REALLY GLAD someone brought this up!

There are lots of parallels beween asexuality and abstinence, haven’t been able to find many people into abstinence to talk about them with. I’ll start by getting the incompatibilities out of the way- abstinence is a moral code, asexuality is about doing what makes you happy. In abstinence you HAVE TO have sex in marriage, even if you’re miserable. The overlap is, I think, more interesting. Both abstinent people and asexual people, at least when they’re young, are out to enjoy life without sex.

There are two ways that abstinent people can go about this. They can make their life about building up to sex, OR they can party with the asexual kids and then worry about enjoying sex when the time comes. Both asexual and abstinent kids are facing at least some social pressure to use sexuality to validate themselves.

Confessions of an Asexual Slut, Part 2

(I’ve watered this one down a little bit)

No offense to all my sexual people listening in. Seriously, you all know I’ve got nothing but love and I know you know I know how to share it. See I’ve gotten to know the sexual human being intimately, I’ve gotten to see you all inside, backwards and upside down and I’ve drawn myself a little conclusion: sex kinda makes you a prude.

Now it’s one thing to lick the inside of each others' faces or play table tennis with bodily fluids, but when it comes to actual balls-to-bone unadulterated nonsexual intimacy half of you are afraid to so much as show a little ankle.

Let me be perfectly clear here: when I say "intimacy" I'm not talking about when you stare into each other's eyes by candlelight and then "just" cuddle. I'm talking about vulnerability, about seeking out the most sensitive areas of your being and seeing what you can do with them. Now in my experience if you can do that, if you can really do that it’ll more intense than any sex they've had in their life, because at the end of the day the sensitive bits in your pants are, at best, just a cushy metaphor for what's happening deeper down.

Now I wanna talk to all my asexuals out there, ‘cause I want to back up and take a look at the big picture. Now I love ‘em, but sexual folk come prepackaged with an annoying inclination to pretend that we asexual people don't exist. They start out denying the existence of our whole population, and when they get over that they like to deny our existence as potential partners. Some of the other theory dorks from the community and I like to chalk this up to what we call the "sexual/nonsexual binary," the idea that pleasures, desires and relationships which are "sexual" are somehow different than pleasures, desires and relationships which aren't.

You can do a quick experiment to see what I'm talking about. Start telling someone about a close relationship that you're in, and create genuine ambiguity about whether the relationship is "just a friendship" or "something more." They'll start getting fidgety, eventually they'll interrupt you mid-sentence and demand to know if you and the party in question are bumping fenders, the same way they would if you started talking about a newborn baby and failed to mention the specifics of its genitalia.

Why? Because most sexual people can't think about relationships in any serious way without thinking about sex. To them capitol-r "Relationships" are in one category, "friendships" are in another and sex is the line that separates the two. They take one look at my (not unattractive) asexual ass and lament the fact that we will never be able to cross that line, writing me off as safely unable to reciprocate whatever desires they might feel.

It's almost kind of cute.

We covered this back in part one, but I reciprocate more desire than the barmaid at the Lusty Sailor Tavern on Whore Island. See, sex is never just about sex. Anytime anyone feels a sexual desire for me there are plenty of dirty little nonsexual desires just below the surface, struggling to get out. Desires for things like validation, safety, intimacy, power and release. They can pretend that these desires don't exist, that their need for sex is pure and untarnished by nastines like vulnerability. But repressing a desire will only make it stronger, and strong desire is just what this little barmaid likes.

Here’s the dirty little secret: By itself, sex is always boring. I’ve never known a sexual person, not one, who enjoyed sex simply because they like it when the penis goes in the vagina. At bars, clubs and drunken college parties people cruising for one-night stands are simply bubbling with nonsexual energy- they want to show off to their friends, they want to prove themselves, they want release, they want to be close to someone without worrying about the inconvenience of keeping them that way. New couples are practically overflowing with the need to be affectionate, to make each other happy, to create intimacy and to avoid it, to assert and give up power over one another. Everyone who has sex has it for a reason. What’s interesting is when people STOP having a reason to have sex. When they’re not looking for anything, when everything in their relationship has been figured out and hums along of its own accord sex drops right out of the equation. It’s kind of like a bucket of water- the fluids are only gonna slosh around when something’s shaking the handle.

All my asexual slutlets out there, listen up and listen good. Next time someone starts hitting on you or starts complaining about how much they need to get laid look at them out of the corner of your eye and squint. See past the sex, past the anxious horniness and the stress about bodies and the pent up tension, and get a good look at what’s shaking that bucket. Call it out. See what happens.

Thanks for checking us out! As always send questions or comments to asexualunderground@gmail.com. If you like the show, please subscribe.

Question of the week- how do you hit on people? Interpret that however you like.