The Magic Words Part 2: Time, Touch and Talk

'T'
Originally uploaded by doozzle

Last week I talked about the importance of clearing the slate, of throwing out the words "friendship" and "romance" and thinking of every connection with another person as a relationship. This gets pretty tricky. It's difficult to lump the stuff that we're used to thinking of as romance with the stuff that we're used to thinking of as friendship, because the two look, act and feel so fundamentally different. In order to describe where relationships are and where we want them to be we'll need a way to describe them that does not rely on the old binary. If we're trashing the binary, we need to design a new system for talking about relationships from scratch.

So if we're designing a new language system, what are our criteria? Well:

• It should be versatile enough to talk about the most superficial friendship, the closest lifelong partnership and everything in between. 
• Because many of us desire (but can't describe) relationships in the "gray area" between friendship and romance it should be able to navigate that gray area with ease. 
• It should be simple: easy to learn and easy to apply to the real world.  
• Finally, it should also be easy to communicate with. We should be able to speak this language to the general public without stopping to illustrate new concepts or define new terms.

This is no easy task. In one way or another, this is a problem that I've been grappling with ever since I started AVEN. After a lot of trial and error I've found a solution that seems to do the job fairly well, I've been using it for the past several years to think about and describe my relationships and have seen some pretty incredible transformations as a result. The old barriers around friendship have begun to melt away, as my (former) friends and I have grow considerably more open and affectionate and begun to talk about where our relationships are going in the long term. The numbers problem is almost completely gone- if anything I've got too many possibilities for meaningful intimacy (a happy problem I'll discuss next post.)  This system is something I like to call the 3 Ts.

The 3 Ts are Time, Touch and Talk. Think of them as a set of vital signs for a relationship, a way to quickly and easily understand the what is going on in a relationship and communicate it to others. They are also incredibly versatile, allowing you to accurately describe friendships, romantic relationships and relationships that fall far outside of either norm. To think about any relationship you really only need to understand 3 things:

Time

How much time do you spend in the relationship?

What happens during time?

Time fleshes out a relationship, how much time you spend with someone and what you spend that time doing. Relationships are built by spending time with people doing things that have personal relevance. The people that you have spent a lot of time with and done a lot of meaningful things with are probably the people that you trust the most and feel closest to. By looking at how much time you spend with someone and what you do with that time you can paint a rough sketch of the role that that relationship plays in your life. 

Time also tells you a great deal about your priorities. When you spend a lot of time with someone it's usually because you choose (consciously or otherwise) to prioritize your relationship with them over other things that you could be doing. You may go out of your way to spend time with someone that you are close to because it lets you relaxed or because it lets you feel challenged. You may spend lots of time with a coworker that you don't like because doing so allows you to earn money, and money is important to you. 

It can also tell you about the priorities of others. If someone goes out of their way to make time for you or keeps large sections of their schedule open for you it means that they consider their relationship with you a priority. It doesn't tell you WHY you're a priority, it could be because they care about you deeply or it could be because they want to steal all of your money, but it gives you a hint at how likely they will be to spend time with you if you ask.

Stop reading for a second and ask yourself:

What five people do you spend the  most time with on a weekly basis? What do you do with those people? Why are those five relationships with ones that you spend the most time on?

Touch

How does the relationship make you feel?

How do you and the other person express what you feel about the relationship?

Touch is about all of the "touchy feely" parts of a relationship, not just physical touch but the whole host of verbal and nonverbal ways that people communicate their feelings. Saying "I love you" is touch, so is flirting, so is saying "thanks for inviting me to the concert, it was awesome", so is sex. All of those things express feelings that you have about the relationship. When done right, touch is almost always fun. Expressing a genuine, positive emotion gives you a chance to experience that emotion more fully. It makes you feel good and it helps you to understand the emotion better. 

Touch is a little bit like a language that you build every time you form a new relationship. Over time, you and the other person will develop ways to communicate how you feel about the world in general and about the relationship in particular. Maybe you constantly give each other shit as a way to show affection. Maybe you hug when you say hello and goodbye and always take time in the conversation to ask the other person how they are feeling. 

If built effectively, touch operates as a sort of feedback system for relationships, it helps you quickly identify what works in the relationship and what doesn't. When good systems to exist to communicate emotion you can constantly tweak the relationship to fix things that are hurtful and explore things that are exciting. Without a good system of touch people tend to step on one another's toes without realizing it, and relationships quickly become frustrating. 

Stop reading for a second and ask yourself:

What four relationships in your life do you feel strongest about? How do the other person in the relationship and you express those feelings? Are there types of emotions or types of emotional expression that you would like to have in your relationships that you don't have currently?

Talk

What expectations do you have about the relationship?

How do you decide what to expect in the relationship?

Talk is the conversations and other things that you do to know what to expect from a relationship. It's the times when people say "honey, we need to talk," it's the endless hours that people spend processing relationships with their partners and friends. Talk is deciding whether to raise kids together, it's agreeing never to go to that pizza place again, it's popping the question and it's asking someone to go to the movies.  All of these things set some expectation about what the relationship will be like in the future. 

Like it or not, expectations matter. Expectations give structure to a relationship, they tell you that the relationship is a safe place to invest time and a safe place to express your emotions. If you build up good talk in the relationship you'll have a clear sense of the role that the relationship plays in your life that's based on good, ongoing conversations with the other person. If you want to change anything about the relationship you'll feel comfortable having an open conversation about it, and you'll know that the other person feels the same way. 

Like touch, talk works differently in every relationship. Some people are comfortable diving right into the guts of a relationship's expectations, while others need to spend hours meditating or processing with their friends before they can speak with the person they're in a relationship with. Talk is also the way that time is negotiated. If I call you and invite you to a concert on Saturday, I'm setting an expectation (talk) about doing something together (time). Looking at talk is a good way to know which relationships matter, since relationships have to be important to involve big commitments. Looking at how those commitments and expectations are decided on can divulge information about the way that power works in the relationship.

Stop reading for a second and ask yourself:

Think of four random relationships in your life. What do you expect from those relationships? How did you decide to expect those things? How do you and the other person communicate about the expectations that you have for one another?

Ok, this blog post is running a little longer than expected. I'll have another update, possibly mid-week, where I talk about how to use these three concepts to build, understand, and communicate about relationships. 

The Magic Words Part 1: Focus on Relationships

Last week I talked about how the relationship problems facing asexual people aren't all that bad, because we can use language to solve them. By finding new ways to talk about relationships we can greatly increase our options for forming them. I'm going to spend the next three posts talking about some of the language that I use, I hope that you all will respond by posting some of yours!

Drop the words "friend" and "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" from your vocabulary, use "relationship" instead.

The first and most important task in rephrasing relationships is getting rid of the binary. Describe a relationship as a "friendship" and people will make a set of assumptions about how important that relationship is in your life, how you feel about the person and what sort of commitments you've made to one another, describe it as "romantic" and you'll get another set of assumptions. Personally, I've found that most of the time neither set of assumptions is very accurate. I'll form a new relationship that's exciting like a romantic crush, nonphysical like a friendship and structured like neither. When talking about the relationship, either to the person it's with or to other people, I want to jump out of these boxes. I want people to get a puzzled look on their face and ask me what I mean so that I can have a chance to tell them.

Just using the word "relationship" does this beautifully. I use relationship in the broadest possible way, the dictionary definition of "a connection, association, or involvement." I have a relationship with my computer, the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in my glass of water have a relationship, so does a nine year old and her multiplication tables."Relationship" describes the full spectrum from friendship to romance and then some, it gives people almost no room to project false assumptions about what kind of relationship you're talking about, which is what you want.

You can think about this sort of language like a coloring book. When you say "friend" you get one page with a bunch of lines that you can shade and color in. If you don't have all the right colors or you want to draw a different picture then you're out of luck. When you say "romance" you get another page. When you just say "relationship" you get a blank page. You have to go to the trouble drawing your own lines, but you can draw them however you want, with whatever colors you and the other person have around and like the best. 

That blank page can be a little intimidating. Stop right now and think about some of the most important friendships and romantic relationships in your life. Now, imagine describing those relationships without using the words "friend" or "romantic". What would be the most important information to convey about each relationship? How would you distinguish the relationships from one another? Are there common themes in how you would describe them? Getting rid of the binary forces you to generate a new language to replace it. (I'll talk about the words I use next post.) This is good because the new language will much more accurately reflect how things work for you than the binary does. It's also challenging, because you wind up thinking about relationships in a language that no one else speaks. Sometimes people will be happy to sit around while you go into long discussions of what makes your relationships unique, but most of the time you'll only have room for a few words of information. For your most important relationships it's important to figure out what these words are. 

Relationships are not people.

The other reason I love the word "relationship" has to do with grammar. Friends, boyfriends and girlfriends are all types of people, relationships aren't. If I have a girlfriend then conceptually all that's going on is me and her. If I have a relationship with Bernice then there are conceptually two things going on: Bernice and the relationship. For me, separating these two makes things a lot clearer. I can feel respect and love for Bernice while at the same time feeling fear and excitement about our relationship. Bernice can stay more or less the same while our relationship changes radically, or vice versa. 

Because I think about Bernice as "Bernice" and not "my girlfriend" it's easier to separate who she is and what she wants from the expectations I've placed on her. It's easy for me to see that there are important parts of her that have nothing to do with her relationship with me, I can see that she is a complicated entity that I only understand one facet of, and I can appreciate that she's deserving of unconditional love and respect (though not unconditional time and energy.) 

Because I think about my relationship as a distinct entity I can appreciate all of the ways that it behaves like a relationship and not like a person. It exists to the extent that both people are actively invested in it. It can be hurtful without either of the people involved in it being hurtful, it can go from extremely energetic to fairly mellow without the people involved changing in any fundamental way. Usually it's easier to try to change a relationship than to try to change a person. It's one thing to say that I want Bernice to call me every day, it's another to say that I want to build the sort of relationship where we call each other every day.  It's one thing to say that a person is hurting me and needs to stop, it's another to say that I am being hurt by my relationship with them and try to envision ways that I can change that relationship. 

I find it useful to separate people from relationships because it helps me draw general guidelines. People aren't fundamentally more important than one another, but relationships can and should be prioritized. I can't control people (and generally shouldn't try), but I always have some control of my relationship with them. All people are deserving of fundamental respect, even if relationships with those people have serious problems. 

Next post I'll get into some of the language that I use to describe these relationships, ways to quickly and accurately give them meaning without relying on the binary. 

The Asexual Problem Part 2: Language

Last post I left you hanging. I went through what probably seemed like an incredibly depressing  breakdown of all of the reasons why asexuals have a polar bear's chance in climate change of forming a committed romantic relationship with another asexual. Those odds are getting better all the time, and the more people chip in with local community building the faster they'll improve. Still, on daily basis almost all of the people that we interact with, get crushes on and begin to develop feelings for are into the whole sex thing. Why CAN'T we form relationships with them?

The traditional story is that there is a fundamental compatibility problem. In order to be happy in a romantic relationship sexual people need to have sex, so sexual people can only get romantically involved with people that they can boink. There is a widespread assumption that without sexual compatibility relationships are doomed to fail, because people only fall in love with people that they are sexually attracted to. So a straight woman can fall in love with a gay man, but she'll only get her heart broken because his attentions will be elsewhere. No matter how much she pines the two of them will never be more than friends. Friendship is the kid brother to romance, it's what happens when two people who aren't sexually attracted to one another (or who don't act on it) love one another. Friendship love is to romantic love what a snack is to a balanced meal- satisfying, but not that important and not enough to live on. Friendship comes with a set of emotional and sexual limitations, which get  invoked with the phrase "just friends." If you believe in this relationship binary, asexual people (romantic ones, anyway) can't be "more than friends" with sexual people because we're sexually incompatible. We have to form relationships with other asexual people because they are the only ones that will have us, and the depressing numbers problem results.

Hold up a minute. People only fall in love with people that they are sexually attracted to? Relationships which involve sex are fundamentally more powerful, fulfilling and important than relationships which don't? The logic of the relationship binary is fraught with assumptions that asexual people disprove by our very existence. If we can form emotionally powerful, fulfilling and important romantic relationships with one another, then it's possible to form them without sexual attraction and without sex. Read that again, and think about how monumental the implications are. Nonsexual relationships can be just as powerful, just as passionate, and just as deep as sexual ones. Look around the asexual community and there is plenty of evidence that the wall of "just" constructed around friendship is fundamentally a lie. This means that straight women and gay men can fall in love, a lesbian can steal a straight girl's boyfriend, and there are no limits to how deep a sexual and an asexual person can go.

The more you look for it, the more that this kind of nonsexual intimacy is all around us sticking it's nose in the face of the relationship binary. Longterm couples say that it's the little (nonsexual) things, not necessarily tons of sex, which keep relationships going in the long run. Check on facebook, where the "Relationship Status" box is used to "marry" and "date" nonsexual friends almost as much as it's used to communicate socially valid sexual relationships. Turn on the TV and you'll notice an interesting trend. Popular shows that focus on human relationships almost never focus on sexual ones. Shows like,  "Will and Grace", "Friends" and (ironically) "Sex and the City" topped the charts by focusing on nonsexually intimate relationships, not the supposedly more powerful and interesting sexual ones. ("Friends" went sexual only when it began to lose steam and ratings.) What's going on here?

I propose that there is a significant gap between the way that most of our society talks about relationships and they way that we actually experience them. Sex is exciting for some people, but it's not really that much more exciting than the other things that people are truly passionate about. Relationships that are "just" friendships can get incredibly deep and complicated, and they easily take on the ups and downs of their romantic counterparts. But how often do friends sit down and talk about where their relationship is going? How common is it for groups of friends to gossip as excitedly about new nonsexual relationships as they do about new sexual ones? Sexual and asexual, we all want to find relationships where we can explore our passions, challenge one another, build trust and feel loved. In all of the things that really matter in relationships, sexual and asexual people are fundamentally compatible. The only problem is that the words we have, "friendship" and "romance," don't adequately describe the powerful nonsexual relationships that we want to form. In short, asexual and sexual people don't have an compatibility problem, we have a language problem. 

The nice thing about language problems is that they're easier to solve. If we see this as a numbers problem we have to solve it with numbers- diligently building up the asexual community until the odds of finding a mate become reasonable (this still isn't such a bad idea.) If see it as a compatibility problem we have to solve it with compatibility- compromising to make ourselves more sexual and asking our partners to compromise to make themselves less sexual, which works but not that well. But what if it's a language problem, and we can solve it with language? What if having unfettered access to deep, fulfilling relationships is simply a matter of saying the magic words?

For the past four years or so, I've turned my life into an experiment which tests that hypothesis, and the results flip conventional wisdom on its head. Talk about asexuality the right way and it turns people on, not off. As much as they sometimes fixate on sex, sexual people are mostly driven be the same nonsexual desires as us and are just as eager to build relationships around fulfilling them. All we need is the language to show them how.

Next post I'll get into some of the language that I use to do just that. I haven't found the answers, if anything I've just barely scratched the surface, but it will hopefully get you thinking about language that works for you in your community. 

The Asexual Problem Part 1: Numbers

Thanks for all of the great comments on my last post! I definitely agree that we need more asexual literature, and gathering narratives are a great place to start. I'd be up for making room on the AVEN homepage for this kind of stuff if anyone wants to help me collect it. Maybe we should even feed in posts from the emerging and fabulous asexual blogosphere? (And thanks Ily for subtly shaking your fist and getting me to post more.)

Last post I talked a little about "The Asexual Problem," the idea that as a community we face barriers to forming some types of intimate relationships. I wanted to expand on this idea a bit and flesh out my hippyshit solution a little better:

A few weeks ago, we got dropped from the Tyra Banks show. It was gonna be great: I was all ready to head to New York for filming and we were going to get the concept of asexuality out to hundreds of thousands of people who had never heard of us. Then, at the last minute, the producer called and said that he wanted a couple: two young, photogenic asexual people interested in coming to be on the program. And I was stuck, because as far as I know that couple doesn't exist in the US. We had one (1) couple that fit the bill, but they moved to England. As I scrambled to try to meet the request, I could feel Tyra's people backing off. If our community couldn't produce a happy couple for the show, then were asexual people really as happy as we claim to be? It's a sobering question. In a poll on AVEN 60% of asexual respondants identified as romantic, we have over 15,000 registered members, yet I can count all of asexual/asexual couples that I know about on a single hand (and the most asexual/sexual couples I know aren't exactly ready for Tyra either.) What gives? Why are ase having such a hard time hooking up?

At first glance, it looks like a numbers problem. Even 15,000 asexual people spread across the (English speaking) world is a pretty thin distribution, the best case scenarios are in major metro areas where a little over a dozen people get together for meetups. Subtract the 40% of those that are aromantic, another 50% if you're not bi, and the luckiest gay and hetero asexuals in the world have a dating pool of about 4. That's 4 people who run the full gamut of age and personality type, making the likelihood of compatibility pretty slim. A local a-a relationship has happened only once, to my knowledge, and it's not hard to see why. 

Online dating is another logical option, and a few asexual dating sites are working their way into the picture. Falling in love over the internet is less than ideal for many people, and until these dating sites can build up an active base of users they won't provide compelling option. Most of the a/a couples I know about have gotten together on AVEN itself, but even that presents challenges. Most AVEN members are either there to get community support or to pointlessly mess around- neither of which are particularely romantic. Sitting on top of it all are a few dozen people who volunteer to keep the community going: admods and power users that are invested in keeping the community humming, and this seems like the only place where people are engaged enough for real relationships to form. All of the AVEN couples that I know about emerged from this tight little group of powerusers. 

Just to recap: all you romantic asexuals out there have two options. Either you can move to a major metro area, pour your heart and soul into building a meetup scene and with a littleluck find one other romantic asexual in your approximate age bracket. Or you can get on AVEN, spend a huge part of your life working on building up the community, get elected to the admod team and somewhere between fights over warning policies find true love. Them's the bones. Take 'em or don't.

Love always finds a way, but even It can get tangled in those odds. If all of those romantic asexual people stake their happiness on falling in love with someone like them then our community will be waiting and unhappy for a long, long time. If we want to solve the numbers problem then we have to learn to fall in love with sexual people, and we have to learn to make it work. This is actually a lot easier than you might think. After all, sexual people form intimate relationships with one another all the time, research indicates that it's not uncommon for them to have stable, happy romantic relationships that don't involve sex. If sexual people can get down and nonsexually intimate with one another, why not with us? The more you ask it, the more perplexing this question becomes. Shows like Will and Grace to Sex and the City thrive on nonsexual intimacy, yet there's no market for it. Carrie Bradshaw has mutliple sectors of the economy devoted to helping her find Mr. Big, but no clear way to go looking for a Samantha. 

I've got much more to say on this topic, but I'm trying to keep these posts a digestible length. Expect a follow up soon where I get into some ways to fix this. 

What Asexual People Want

Wow, has it really been a month since my last post?

I just had a cool discussion with a researcher from down the bay, and we go into an interesting discussion about what asexual people, as a community, are out to accomplish. I broke it down into four categories, though I'd love people's thoughts on the issue.

Support
Probably the biggest thing asexual people are looking for is a place to figure ourselves out and be supported in our identity. This is why most people bother to show up to the community, and is probably one of the things that we do best. It means offering an open, accepting environment that makes people feel safe and encourages them to explore themselves in whatever terms fit best. Even the way we that we talk about asexuality (it's just a word that you use to describe yourself) is geared to create a supportive atmosphere.

How we do it: AVEN discussion forums, other online communities, admod team, advisory team, meetup groups.

Visibility
Most asexual people are peeved at how little asexuality gets talked about in our culture. More visibility is the first step to broader social acceptance, and many of us are tired of giving a 20 minute lecture every time we come out. Most importantly, visibility let's us make the great support systems that we've built available to people who might need them. All of us have knows how much it sucks to not have a community, and we know that there are tons of people out there going through the same struggle. Visibility lets us reach out to them.

How we do it: Media trainings, AVEN Media Guidebook, assisting reporters in finding interviewees for their stories, lectures, informational pamphlets.

Institutionalization
The next step after visibility is getting other organizations to recognize us and incorporate us into what they do. To me that's meant getting LGBT and sex ed groups to start including asexuality in their materials, getting scientists to include us in discussions of sexuality and getting doctors to stop pathologizing us half the time. There are two powerful social institutions that we're courting (or at least I'm courting).

The first is the LGBT/sex positive movement (the two movements are pretty integrated at this point.) They make up a huge grassroots network that does education around sexuality and gender and advocates for legal rights. Making friends with them means that that huge grassroots network talking will add asexuality to the list of things that they talk about, which is huge. They tend to be interested in us as a social movement like they are. We gain their respect by talking about our personal stories, our political views, they way that we have emerged as a movement and the amount of people/resources that we are capable of mobilizing. We also have a little hiccup in dealing with this community. Because their politics are all about celebrating sexuality, it sometimes takes them a second to get how they share the same agenda with asexual people. I've been trying to smooth the transition by getting leaders in the sex positive movement, like Carol Queen, to go on record as saying that asexual people are cool.

How we do it: Show up/give talks at conferences, network with educators and organizers, participate in LGBT and sex positive communities, publicly affiliate with LGBT/sex positive leaders.

The second is the academic/medical world. They control not only classroom sex ed, but also the medical institutions which treat asexual people when we have problems. Getting them to see us as legitimate and healthy will mean inclusion in a bunch of classrooms and will make it much much easier for asexual people to go to the therapist (and for people who do might identify as asexual but don't to go to the therapist.) This community is a tougher nut to crack than the LGBT world, they care primarily about academic research and very little has been done on us. Current medical definitions of things like Hyposexual Desire Disorder and Sexual Aversion Disorder kind of graze the question of asexual pathology. An out-and-proud asexual probably wouldn't be considered pathological, but someone struggling to come to terms with their asexual identity probably would. The strategy here has been to encourage academic discourse. Get academics talkign about asexuality, make it known that we want them to research us and help them in any way that we can if they decide to do research. The more research gets done, the easier it will be for us to change the way that the academic and medcial world talks about us.

How we do it: Show up at conferences (we usually don't have the credentials to give talks), give talks on college campuses, assist anyone doing research on asexuality, network researchers together so that they can assist one another and begin to buil a professional community, AVEN DSM Task Force.

Relationships
Once people get past the need for support, one of the biggest looming questions is around forming intimate relationships. We face some a pretty serious challenge here as a community one that I've spent so much time thinking about that I referr to it as just "The Asexual Problem":

Many asexual people want to form intimate relationships, and in our culture sex is what separates primary intimate relationships (dating and marriage) from secondary ones (friendships). That means that no matter how close I get to someone, that relationship is considered "just a friendship" in the eyes of our culture unless it involves sex. This creates big problems for us, since many of us want to be more than just friends with someone at some point in our lives. There isn't really a perfect solution to this problem, a lot of asexual people that I know are still struggling with it, but there are a few imperfect ones:

1) Just form friendships- This tends to be a matter of personal preference, but a lot of asexual people, mostly those who identify as aromantic are happy this way.

2) Date other asexual people- This can work really well. It's easy for two asexual people to get together, decide to form a primary intimate relationship and announce it to the world. A couple of happily married couples have already come out of AVEN this way. The problem is number. Even major metro area have, at best, a few dozen people actively identifying as asexual, which means that the likelihood of finding a good match is pretty low. For this reason most asexual-asexual couples meet online and eventually move long distances to be together. Since many people aren't interested in long distance online dating, this will probably only become a solution once local meetup groups have grown significantly.

3) Date sexual people- Though there are several examples out there of healthy sexual/asexual relationships, this remains a problematic option. Sexual and asexual people are fundamentally incompatible in something that our culture claims to be vital to an intimate relationship's emotional health. Making a sexual/asexual relationship work requires extensive communication. To make matters more complicated, most people see sexual compatibility as a precurser to an intimate relationship. That means that in order to start dating a sexual person an asexual person usually has to stay closeted, making the extensive communication that needs to take place evren trickier.

4) Create new models for intimate relationships- This is my personal favorite. If friendships don't work and traditional dating doesn't work, why not invent new words to describe the relationships that we want? I've had a lot of success with this method. It lets me form relationships with sexual people that are intimate, emotionally expressive and committed but that don't require sexual exclusivity. That means that I avoid the emotional ceiling of just forming friendships, the numbers problem of only dating asexual people and the incompatability problem of being monogomous with sexual people. I get to form close relationships with anyone I want, and there's no limit to how close those relationships can get. The only problems are around communication and jealousy. I have to be cool with my partner forming sexually and emotionally intimate relationships with others (which has never been an issue for me personally). I also have to communicate whatever hairbrained relationship model I've thought up to the other person clearly enough that they understand it, accept it, and get emotionally turned on by it. This is a lot easier in places that have are already accepting of sexual diversity, and could pose a real challenge in places where traditional dating is all that anyone has ever thought about.

How we do it: Discussions on AVEN, meetups, asexual dating sites, blogs discussing relationship issues.

Blurring the Desire Line

So I got an email from someone today who had some awesome comments about this blog and podcast. She was talking about the episode on having a crush and raised an interesting point:

"because the word crush is so sexualized I prefer using 'to be enthusiastic' about someone."

This is a completely legit way to approach things. For a lot of people keeping the line between sexuality and nonsexuality nice and clear is an important part of being A, and I can think of a lot of reasons why it would be a good idea.

I'd like to make a case for the opposite. I love my sexualized language. When I have connect with someone nonsexually, even if we don't touch, I'll sometimes talk about "hooking up" with them. I'll say that I need to get laid (want to cuddle with someone) I'll flirt and tease and can get downright raunchy on the dancefloor.

To me, the line between sexual stuff and nonsexual stuff is ultimately a line that holds us aces back. If my friends all get to "hook up" with people and all I get to do is hold stimulating conversations, then the things I have to gossip about will never seem quite as interesting as the things that they have to gossip about. That's a big deal. The phrase "hook up," while being fabulously ambiguous, bears a lot of social weight. It's an exclamation point. It says "pay attention to what's going on here, because what's happening here matters" and as asexual people one of our big challenges is to demonstrate that our relationships matter.

I like to think of it as sexual drag. Drag is all about blurring lines, messing with preconceived notions of what's male and what's female, which is why it's so fun. Sexual drag works the same way. Once someone knows I'm asexual, they expect me to exist purely in the social space that they have set aside for nonsexuality. I form only friendships, I experience no fiery passions, I have little or no relationship with my own body, yada yada. By breaking that expectation I can force people to reassess their expectations of me (which is handy) and also reassess what they think about sex. Is there a nonsexual reason to make flirty eye contact from across the room? Sure- if I know how to turn that flirtyness into a compelling nonsexual relationship (which ain't that hard.)

In a society where the word "desire" has a sexual connotation, it's tough to get people to realize that we have any. I know from experience that a huge part of forming close, healthy relationships is clearly articulating the things I want, which is tricky when the language for a lot of my nonsexual desires doesn't really exist. Talking about the things that I want in sexual terms makes those desires matter. It makes people say "wait, you're asexual, what do you mean 'hook up?'" and that gives me the opportunity that I need.

#22- Interview With Carol Queen Part 2

Listen here.

As promised, here is the second installment of the interview with Carol Queen. Enjoy!

#21- Interview with Carol Queen

Listen.

I got to interview Carol Queen, an icon in the sex positive world. She had some very interesting, very positive things to say about the overlap between sex positivism and asexuality!

Directive

Asexualest. Robot. Ever.

Even though Wall-E's hopelessly romantic and I'm hopelessly not, I was way way into the relationships in this movie. So cute! And falling for the girl with the laser cannon and tireless directive to save the world? Story of my life.

On the HSDD front, some promising news. It looks like there's a timeline of "a couple of months" (how many I'm finding out), and I've tracked down the recently-released list of working group members. A cool AVENite also updated the definition of HSDD on Wikipedia.

How to hit on people

I just listened to an excellent episode of Polyamory Weekly about hitting on people. The show gives some good philosophy and methodology for flirting, and it's flexible enough to get easily used for nonsexual flirting by romantics and aromantics alike.

Sexicon

At my housemate's insistance I rolled out to Sexicon, which was this kink art show at a leather store in SOMA (South of Market, an SF neighborhood.) There was all manner of sexually themed art on the walls, people in their cute little dominatrix clothes spanking one another and cages and erotica readings and whatever.

I was all set to have a ball, when I realized that ALL of my friends were event staff working the bar or the door or the coat check in their little corsets and wrestling outfits and the whatnot. Generally when I have no one to talk to I'm pretty adept at making friends, but here I felt a bit too disconnected.

This used to happen to me all the time. I'd show up somewhere that was drenched in sexuality and feel completely out of place. Sexuality is scary when everyone else is fixated on it and you don't have an internal reference point to understand what the frak is going on. What's a boy to do?

After pacing around the room for a minute my head started to hurt. Trying to make sense of all of this sexuality felt like high-order calculus, so I grabbed a pen and a cocktail napkin, found a corner and got to work.

Once both sides of the napkin had been filled with nerdy little notes a snap went off in my brain and I could get up and enjoy the party. The piont wasn't that this was an erotic party, the point was that it was a celebration. For the most part people weren't actively getting off, the event wasn't about sexual pleasure it was about sexual empowerment. It was a room full of people who had all had significant struggles in their lives to become sexually empowered getting together to celebrate and reinact that empowerment, it's the sexual equivalent of cake. And I may not be into the eroticism thing, but I can definitely relate to a good celebration.

At the table

Oh man.

So I roll up to 1325 Mass Ave, which happens to house not only the National Center for Transgender Equality but also the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and a shit-ton of other GLBT and sexuality related lobbying groups. (Mighty, mighty convenient.) I bumble my way past the building directory and into the elevator, and some compassionate guy there asks me where I'm going.

"The National Center for Transgender Equality." I proudly beam.

"Oh..." he says "are you David Jay?"

Holy shit. I am.

"I wrote a paper on you! You're awesome! Come on in!"

I wound up in a good 20 minute meeting with Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality and all-around badass. I gave a quick overview of asexuality, and she raised some excellent points that I haven't seen talked about recently:

1) It's apparently not too uncommon for trans people, especially trans women, to use the term "asexual" to describe themselves during parts of transition. It seemed like this is considered a disempowering thing. While it's tough to say how much overlap there is with the ways that the term is getting used on AVEN, it seems like thinking about nonsexual empowerment coming out of our community could be useful in parts of the trans community where we're not currently doing active outreach. I know that there's already significant overlap between the asexual and trans communities, but crafting a specific "asexuality for trans people" education message could be interesting and very cool.

2) So I'm all listening attentively and Mara Keisling is all assertively putting her hand on the table and she's like:

"Are you all doing anything with the DSM?"

"I'd love to, but I don't think we have the capacity to target someone like the APA right now."

"You'd be surprised. There are several committees getting together now to discuss the DSM V. We've obviously been targeting the Gender Identity Panel, but there is another one which deals with fetishes and sexual disorders that would be in a position to amend the definition of Hyposexual Desire Disorder." (Not an exact quote, but you get the idea.)

Holy Shit!! Apparently the DSM panels HAVE to talk to outside advisers, including community advocates (thank you thank you thank you radical gay rights movement for paving the way here!). That means that if we put forward advisers who can discuss asexuality then it's their job, at least in theory, to listen. I'm getting more info from Mara, but we can send a fistful of grad school AVENites and friendly academics their way and pray for the best.

She also introduced me to folks from the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, who do sexual freedom lobbying and coalition building, and sold me about a group called the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States that does sex positive sex ed work and generally is connected in the Sex Ed world. All good people to keep in mind moving forward, we've got everything to gain from being on coalitions (if the votes are there on AVEN) and getting in with the sex ed infrastructure is Money.

To top it all off, I got introduced to policy and organizing staffpeople from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who do tons of grassroots organizing around gay rights around the country. They weren't really interested in us unless we could send people to their mobilizations, but if we can and it can get back up the chain it'll make us a serious player at the national gay rights table, which means that when we start having legislative things we want we'll be able to integrate them into the agendas of organizations with real money and muscle.

I am all a-twitter.

Hopefully AVEN chapters can get up and running and we'll get one in DC....

Lobbying

As I mentioned last episode the good folks at Google Reader and Asexy Beast (or should I say, Asexy Best!) have been inspiring to get more on the content generation. As a part of that noble effort I'm going to give up on the strictly-podcasting format and let loose my random thoughts about Community Based Intimacy and whatnot. Podcasts will still keep flowing, as they give me a perfect excuse to talk to awesome people like Carol "Sex Machine" Queen (which will be up as soon as I can get it audio edited!) For now:

Lobbying
My work just flew me out to DC for a conference, so I am just atwitter with potential networking. I'm gonna try to pry my way into the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. That's right, they got their grubby paws on TheTaskForce.org, which pretty much makes them the Special Get Shit Done Commando Squad of Operation Gay. H.O.T. It also means that the they probably won't have time for the likes of my pissant sexual orientation, but oh wells. Here's the gameplan:

Step 1) Hang out with the awesome sounding interns at NCTE and get them to think I'm cool.

Step 2) Get them to introduce me to their Task Force friends, who apparently work one floor down, over lunch.

Step 3) See about hooking local AVEN groups into Task Force campaigns, which will give AVEN people an excuse to make friends, give them organizer training and get them hooked up with their local gaybourhood.

Step 4) Throw organizing love to the NCTE as a way to demonstrate solidarity between the communities and so that we have allies there, who will come in all sorts of handy over time.

Fingers crossed.

Speaking of lobbying, Carol Queen thinks we're beyond awesome, which is a good thing. Carol is the founding director of the Center for Sex and Culture, and has the love, respect and admiration of the sex positive everybody near as I can tell. If someone were to be elected President of Sex there's a good chance she'd take the ticket, and during our interview she gave a long list of ways that the asexual and sex positive movement could have a constructive dialogue. HOPEFULLY this means that we can soon drop business cards on sex positive folks without getting the evil eye, which would be a nice change of pace. (To be fair, I only get it half the time now.) We just need to get an "endorsed by Carol Queen" seal for AVEN.

The above pic is a shot I took of the white house, which featured a mysterious woman in coral. Ooohhh.

#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.