3 minute read
CONFESSIONS OF A SMUT-LOVING ASEXUAL GIRL
by On Dit
Forgive me allosexuals (non-asexual people), for I have sinned: I, an ace girl, read smut, and I liked it. Moreover, I devoured it like the poor starving, sexdeprived prude I am. Confused? Let me be frank: I love sex (in theory).
In political discourse about sex education, I often hear the argument that all children are asexual; they are clueless about arousal and don’t fantasise about sex. Therefore, they don’t need to be informed about their bodies because it’s developmentally ‘inappropriate,’ but those conservatives are so fucking wrong. Case in point: me.
At age 5, my sexual awakening was Ursula from Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989) (Damn, she was thicc). In the showstopping Poor Unfortunate Souls number, I wanted to be Ariel so bad and have the Sea Witch wrap her black, tantalising tentacles around me and have her wicked way with me in her den of iniquity. However, I soon discovered I wasn’t opposed to the male silhouette either, as I found myself strangely aroused by Jafar in Aladdin (1992). Retrospectively, I realised that both characters are queer-coded. In the book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), author Jenn Shapland posits that a queer person’s “becoming” is the result of conflating “desiring to have [a queer sexual relationship/experience] with wanting to be [queer].” As evident from childhood, I believe that queer-coded villains being my ‘type’ indicated “a lust for what [I was] or could be.”
My point here is this: I’m attracted to/ turned on by, or the activities of, fictional characters, but I’ve never felt this way about any person (male, female, or enby) in real-life. As for having sex in the flesh? Meh.
It’s well known that sexuality exists on a spectrum. After all, no two straight, gay, bi, pan, etc. people are the same, being subject to a diverse set of experiences and preferences. The same goes for the ace community, where the micro-label aegosexual (translating to sexuality without the self) lies under the asexual umbrella. Originally coined as autochorissexual (a now outdated, acephobic term) by Dr. Anthony Bogaert in 2012, aegosexuals experience sexual arousal but are emotionally disconnected from the subject of their arousal. Enter my habit of reading smut and fantasising about fictional characters.
For me, smut serves as both a source and model of sexual energy. Reading about fictional characters getting down and dirty is incredibly erotic in ways that the real thing could never live up to. It seems more magical somehow. In my fantasies, I adopt the role of a voyeur, wherein I derive pleasure from the actions they’re doing, rather than getting off to the characters’ physical appearances. On the rare occasion that I’m a participant, I’m a disembodied figure that is partly me, but also isn’t me. There is a disconnection. Capeesh?
“Asexual? Oh yeah, that means they just don’t like sex, right?” a schoolmate once asked me. Survey says … BZZZ! ‘Wait, wait, I got this, uh …’ thought the Year 8s, in charge of disseminating information
about queer identities for Pride Month, “[it] means being involved in a romantic relationship, but not really wanting to give birth” *Facepalm* (I kid you not, this was circulated to the entire school. Where’s
Zuckerberg and his factcheckers when you need them?). Seriously? Why is it so hard for straight and queer people alike to provide a basic, accurate definition of my sexual orientation?
It’s because of these misconceptions, together with my decidedly ‘queer’ childhood fantasies, that I questioned whether I was bi for a long time before coming out to myself as ace. Purely because I was operating under the assumption that ace people don’t have a libido or fantasise about sex and that if they do, then they’re clearly in denial and just haven’t met the right person yet. The erroneous mathematical equation my 14-year-old brain had calculated, read like this:
0 attraction to men + 0 attraction to women = 0, thus I was equally attracted to both sexes (bisexual).
Indeed, this logic was a gross misunderstanding of bisexuality. On that note, I’d like to present another equation for allos to understand asexuality:
sexual attraction =/= sex drive.