Explaining Terminology, Part Two

TW: discussion of sex and romance

In my post explaining the difference between sex, gender, assigned sex, and gender expression, I also promised that I would talk about sexuality. Today I'm going to fulfill that promise.

In this post, we'll be covering libido, sexual attraction, romantic attraction, how it's possible to date and/or have sex (and enjoy those things) as an asexual or aromantic, and different sexual and romantic identities.

Libido and sexual attraction both have to do with hormones. The difference is that libido is simply one's body desiring sexual stimulation, whether through masturbating or partnered sex. Libido can be triggered by erotica, visual porn, fetishes, kinks...or actual people. When actual people trigger one's libido, inciting a desire to have partnered or group sex with said actual people, sexual attraction occurs.

In short, libido is your body going "Now!" whereas sexual attraction is your body going "This person!"

This doesn't mean that asexuals can't have and enjoy sex, however (though no one, asexual or otherwise, should ever be pressured into having sex). Asexuals have body parts that can be sexually stimulated, and many of us have libidos and enjoy masturbating...which doesn't give you permission to ask if we do, of course. That's none of your business.

Asexuals can love sex. Asexuals can get turned on, though not all of us do. Asexuals can be promiscuous. There are even asexual kinksters, and an entire sub-community of asexual fetishists (they're called AceFets). Some of these people are gray-ace, others aren't. They are often referred to as "sex positive", but a better term that's begun to crop up in the ace community is "sex favorable".

 I, personally, prefer this term - I don't consider myself sex favorable, but I am involved in the sex positive feminist movement. I don't have to want sex for myself in order to respect other people's bodily autonomy and join in the fight for their sexual liberation.

Moving on to romance.

I don't really understand romance as well as most people, for obvious reasons. But I've seen friends interact with their romantic partners, and I've asked questions.

When you get a crush, it's...you get giddy, and think about them all the time, and just the thought of them makes you smile or laugh. You want to be around them all the time, you might want to kiss them or cuddle them and go on dates with them. There's apparently also dizziness and butterflies in your stomach, and you occasionally blurt out ridiculous things. Weird, right?

A squish, or platonic crush, to me, is just...you also feel giddy...but it's more like pure happiness and warmth about being in the company of a friend. They make you feel happy and good about yourself, and you want to do the same for them. You just want to be emotionally intimate with them and get closer to them, in a non-romantic way (called a QP relationship). But that's just my experience with my own squishes, and feel free to talk about yours in the comments below.

An aro (or someone on the aromantic spectrum) who doesn't experience squishes is called aplatonic, or "apl" (pronounced like apple). A lot of people argue that aplatonic people are actually just straight cis people who want to invade queer spaces. This isn't true - aplatonic identity is exclusive to the aromantic community (though not all aros are aplatonic), which is already queer by virtue of not being heteroromantic. One can not be aplatonic if they are not also aro. Therefore, all apl people are queer (if they wish to label themselves as such).

Aros can date, though not all of us do. For example, truly romantic dating makes me uncomfortable, though I do get occasional crushes. For aros who do date, though, dating is about their partner's romantic attraction to them, their platonic attraction to their partner, and the sexual attraction between them both.

Sexual and romantic orientation don't always match up.

 The most accurate term for me, strictly speaking, would probably be gray-biromantic and gray-pansexual...I don't particularly care what gender the people I find physically attractive are, but I have never, as far as I know, gotten a crush on a boy (only on girls and nonbinary people, and even those crushes don't exactly happen frequently). I assume that I could get a crush on a boy, but I don't really know and therefore can't truly say that gender doesn't matter to me in romance, the way it doesn't in my sexuality. I often identify as either gray-a (a term I use for both my sexual and romantic orientation) or bi, depending on the situation, but gray-pansexual and gray-biromantic is more accurate in some ways.

And there's a name for people like me, whose sexual and romantic orientations don't match up: varioriented.

It's possible to be homoromantic and asexual. It's possible to be heteroromantic and bisexual. It's possible to be aromantic and heterosexual, panromantic and bisexual, biromantic and homosexual, polyromantic and demisexual, aromantic and gray-asexual, akoiromantic and pansexual, etc. All of those are varioriented identities.

It's also possible to be aromantic and asexual, homoromantic and homosexual, biromantic and bisexual, panromantic and pansexual, heteroromantic and heterosexual, demiromantic and demisexual, etc. These are all perioriented identities.

So in a world where identity can be so diverse, how do we explain the difference between sexual and romantic attraction?

The best way I've found to explain that is that romantic attraction is whom you would be willing to date without sex. Sexual attraction is whom you want to bang. Are we clear on this? Good.

If your identity is heteroromantic and heterosexual, if you are allosexual and alloromantic (meaning you're not on the ace/aro spectrum), and especially if you are cisgender, you benefit from what's called straight privilege. That means, basically, that because of your straightness, you are seen as a more important, more natural and special, and more morally sound person than if you had not been straight. You are able to get married in every country, you will never face violence or abuse for your sexuality, your autonomy and right to seek sexual and romantic fulfillment on your own terms are never questioned, you will never face housing or employment discrimination for being straight, and the people who matter most to you have probably been correctly assuming your sexuality for your entire life.

Straight people, you have a ton of unearned benefits just because you experience attraction in the ways that strangers have arbitrarily decided you should, and you benefit from that at the expense of LGBQA people. That doesn't make you a bad person, erase the ways in which you are oppressed, or mean your life is perfect, but recognizing your privilege and taking steps to dismantle it is something that you probably need to work on - especially if you are also cis.

Here are some ways in which straight people are privileged (yes, I got lazy while looking for privilege lists, dammit).

Okay, let's move on to identity prefixes for sexual and romantic orientations.

Homo- Attraction to one's own gender, and only (or predominantly, in the case of homoflexible people) their same gender. Commonly called gay or lesbian. A woman who is exclusively attracted to people she reads as women is a lesbian. A man who is exclusively attracted to people he reads as men is gay.

Bi- Attraction to at least two genders; attraction to genders similar and different from one's own.

Pan- Attraction to all genders, or attraction regardless of gender.

Poly- Attraction to at least three genders.

Demi- Attraction only after an intense emotional bond, whether platonic or romantic, has occurred

A- lack of attraction.

Hetero- Attraction to the "opposite gender" only or predominantly (in the case of heteroflexible people). A heterosexual man is only attracted to people he reads as women, and a heterosexual woman is only attracted to people she reads as men.

Woma/gyne- Attraction to women.

Ma/andro- Attraction to men.

Gray- Attraction that is in the "gray area" between  allosexual and asexual, or alloromantic and aromantic; attraction that occurs very rarely.

Akoi/Lith- Attraction, but without any intrinsic and instinctive desire to form a relationship; attraction that fades once it is reciprocated

Femme- Attraction based on feminine gender expression. Not the same as attraction to women, because not all women are feminine and not every feminine person is a woman.

Masc- Attraction based on masculine gender expression. Not the same as attraction to men, because not all men are masculine and not everyone who is masculine is a man.

Allo- Attraction that is not on the asexual and/or aromantic spectrums

Apothi- Repulsion (I.e. sex repulsion, romance repulsion)

Mono - Attraction to only one gender.

Fray- Attraction that fades once an intimate emotional bond is formed (also called 'reverse demi')

Queer- Not a prefix, but an umbrella term for all LGBTQIA identities; a slur that some LGBTQIA people have chosen to reclaim

Things that should not be said to Asexuals.

"Why do you make (insert genital name) jokes if you don't like sex?"

I am asexual, that does not mean I have no sense of humor, sometimes these jokes are funny.

"Don't you care about your partners needs?"

Of course I do! I just think that they should care about my needs as well.

"So you're asexual, like you just don't like dating?"

Really dear? I said aSEXUAL not aROMANTIC, I am still quite happy with romance

"I bet I could fix that ;)"

I don't need fixing

"You just haven't met The One"

Life's not a rom-com, there is no 'One'

"You're being selfish!"

No I'm not, you are

Some Thoughts On Heteronormativity

For whatever reason, a lot of cishet people seem to think that everyone who is  attracted to men and everyone who is masculine is attracted to women. I'm not sure what this says about androgynous people, not to mention aromantics, asexuals, and multisexuals, but it's so painfully untrue that I decided to confront it.

1. Straight tomboys exist and nobody says a word about them, but if a tomboy is a lesbian or multisexual, her androgyny is assumed to be BECAUSE of her identity. How is that fair?

2. Most crossdressers are women or straight men, so why are queer men stereotyped as feminine? And why are queer men so hated, mocked, and discriminated against when they ARE feminine? Why is femininity a bad thing?

Think about that for a second. Now unpack your misogyny, homophobia, and femmephobia.

Femininity is not a bad thing.

3. From personal experience, queer cis people conform to gender roles at roughly the same rate as straight cis people, aside from the fact that queer sexuality and romance in themselves defy heteronormative gender roles.

I mentioned in the My Journey post that most of my close friends are queer girls, but there's also several others at my school. And from experience, queer women are no more or less feminine than straight women. The only difference is that while all straight women are into men, only some queer women are.

As for queer men versus straight men, I can't really compare as much because I don't know many out queer men. Let's see...there's three cis gay men (two adults and a teenager), two bi cis boys (I edited this post after a friend came out to me), and one cis boy who is some variety of not-straight but I've never asked exactly what and he's never told me. One of  these men is androgynous, but the other four are masculine. Especially if you factor in #3, queer men are no more or less masculine than straight men.

As for trans people, whether queer or straight...well, by virtue of being trans we're automatically gender variant. And many of us in the trans community have this delightful fondness of rejecting the concept of gender norms altogether. While I'm a big fan of the practice in theory, I'm too indoctrinated into heteronormativity to fully adopt it in practice. I try, though. And what I've observed is that this makes much more sense than the sexist, racist system we have in place now. I can't understand why cis people don't just adopt it already, but then cis people also think WE'RE the strange ones. I'm not sure why.



Decent cishet Christian men, don't freak if your toddler son likes playing with his sister's Disney Princess stuff. It doesn't necessarily mean he'll be gay, or that your son is actually your daughter. And if he is? So what? What are you so afraid of? Don't bring fire and brimstone into it, either. Unless you can actually give me proof of Satan that DOESN'T come in the form of Bible verses, I refuse to take any proselytizing you may have to offer seriously.

Cishet moms, just go with it if your nine-year-old daughter starts refusing to wear all things pink and frilly. She might just be a tomboy. She might be queer. She might actually be your son. She might have some internalized misogyny - and if you feel like that might be the case, you need to have a heart to heart with her. But that's a whole 'nother rant.

Honestly, I think Timmy Turner's dad had it right when he said, "Where is it written in this one sided society that a man can't be beautiful?!"

Why Does a School Project Need to be Gendered?

 I get that from the perspective of many - not all, but many - of the more privileged people in the world, they don't need to learn about sexual and gender diversity, or any other kind of diversity for that matter. After all, much of it doesn't apply to them personally, right? But when someone like that does or says something ignorant or forgets to check their privilege - and I'll admit I've been guilty of this on occasion, but I'm trying to stop that - it's really annoying.

Here's an example. In my economics class, we're working on group projects in which we have to create an imaginary product, make a logo for it, and write a one-page paper about how and why it works. My group is making a scent patch for athletes to cover up their B.O. after games and practices (it works like a nicotine patch; you put it on your skin and it puts something in your body to make your sweat smell good. We're calling it the Buddy Body Patch). 

With everything else done, we needed to work on the logo. Our design was on a big piece of poster paper, with five circles showing the different patch 'flavors': lavender, berry, bonfire, after-game, and the ocean. Lavender and berry were on one side, bonfire and after-game on the other, ocean in the middle. The lavender and berry side was labeled 'her scents' and the bonfire and after-game were 'his scents.' (Until the side-labeling started, I had merely watched the drawing of the poster. I'd already done my part as group secretary, and I'm not exactly the world's greatest artist.)

I didn't really take this personally or get angry about it, the way I did when a guy in science class was ignorant about asexuality, but it did bother me.

"Some guys like wearing lavender and berry," I protested mildly, simply not seeing the point in gendering sides of a poster. Even with the ocean in the middle and labeled as 'his and hers,' it just seemed a bit  much. Since getting into LGBTQ+ activism, I'd noticed more and more about how society was geared toward those considered 'normal,' and it irritated me every time I saw an example of that.

"Yeah, guys who like guys," the girl doing the labeling chuckled with a derisive snort.

"Not always," I tried to explain, but the conversation had already moved on.

I want to hear your thoughts on this. Ideas, anyone?