Wow it’s been… some
time… between posts, hasn’t it. The thing I’m apparently most interesting when
I talk about, or at least slightly less boring than usual. So:
One of the most apparently obvious
stereotypes about asexuals is that we must have a load of free time, since we
don’t spend so much time thinking about sex. I can see why you’d think that,
actually. No offence, but sexual people* do come of as the teeniest bit obsessed with the whole squicky business. That’s why
asexuality – and LGBTAQA+** issues are even issues in the first place. So,
logically, since we don’t spend all our time thinking about spending time far
too close to a load of mostly-hairless apes with an annoying tendency to ooze
various liquids, and since we don’t spend massive amounts of time and energy
trying to bring about such a situation about, we must have masses of spare time
and energy. So just think of all the stuff we must be able to get done!
Etcetera.
Unfortunately, that idea is…
somewhat inaccurate. Personally, if my productivity was any lower, I’d probably
progress backwards. I’d walk into a room, and things that were finished would
become slowly undone. Actually, that might be a fairly awesome superpower. If
nothing else, I could make cookies back into cookie dough… Anyway, because of
this, there’s a fairly popular thing for asexual bloggers and so on to do,
which is to write about something called ‘asexual porn’. Now, there is actually
an asexual porn video on the internet somewhere. It involves cake. Delicious,
delicious cake, and someone eating it. It’s funny enough that I’d like to link
to it, but unfortunately I can’t find the bloody thing, and I don’t really want
to delay this post much longer. The normal definition of the term, though, is
the stuff that we do instead of porn. So, being me, I decided to a top-ten
list, based on how much I do it, and how close it is to filling the same kind
of role. So porn is pretty much exactly the same as porn, but I don’t look at
it, so that doesn’t make it onto the list. Taking pills to mitigate the effects
of my medical condition**** is something I do a lot, but it doesn’t really
compare that closely to pornography*****, so that doesn’t make it onto the list
either. So, list:
10: Learning random trivia
This might not seem so close to
porn. The comparison between Steven Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’ and Trixie does Texas (I think that’s right.
I really don’t want to Google it) is not exactly a close one. And yeah, it’s
not the closest comparison. It’s less a substitute for porn, more ‘what I do
instead of it’ – when I’m bored of actually concentrating on things, and don’t
want to actually think. And when I say ‘random trivia’, random is probably
operative as a word – game theory, liberal philosophy, tvtropes, the Discworld
Companion, Wikipedia. As a result, I have a rather vast bit of ‘random trivia
that will never be useful in a million years’. And yet it’s still by far the
thing I replace porn with that’s the most helpful to me. It’s on the list
because the mental state is probably similar, and because I do it quite a bit.
9: Eating/Sleeping
Yeah, these are basic necessities.
Porn, no matter how straight people might talk about it sometimes… isn’t. I’m
one person who should know that. I’m less talking about knocking myself out
every night for six hours, and fuelling myself on a thousand or so kcal a day
(yeah, both of those figures are about accurate for me quite often). It’s more using
them as luxury – the mindless sensual pleasure of that kind of thing, of eating
fresh brownie mix rather than putting all of it in the oven. Would probably be
higher up, but I don’t do it that often, to be honest.
8: Fantasising
There is no life I know to compare
with that of pure imagination. I like that quote. Yeah, just indulging by
wandering through completely internal stuff is pretty much an exact substitute
for porn. Straight people use it too, from what I understand. The difference
is, large parts of the purely self-indulgent parts of the imagination of a
straight person might resemble a porn film. Mine doesn’t.
7: Being actually sociable
This is really, really low on the
list, compared to where it might be, simply because of how far it is from the
rest of the list. The mental state involved in being social is completely
different from the mental state I imagine people have when they’re looking at
porn. If it’s not, I may have to seriously reconsider how I think about
straight people. And I’m not actually that sociable a person – not because I
don’t like people, more because you lot are bloody scary. So why’s it on here? Basically
because of one of the things I use to model sexual attraction – one of the
things I sometimes say is that where most people have a sex drive, I have a
romance drive. So even though there are obvious differences between sex and
romance, I use romance to model people’s attitudes to sex to some extent. I was
going to say that it was like using three to approximate pi, but, honestly, it’s
closer to using two. But even despite the differences, and even despite the
fact that I tend to actively try to avoid any kind of romanticy part of
conversations, there’s still a pretty close connection between friendship and
romance (though they’re certainly not the same thing, as I think I may have
mentioned. Repeatedly), so it to some extent fulfils some of the same need. So
I thought it deserved a place on the list, if not a high one.
6: Half listening to
cartoony-things.
Cartoony things are awesome.
Things like the Nostalgia critic. I’m pretty good at multitasking, and it’s a
good way to release mental pressure and unwind. Cartoony things refers to the
level and style of things, not their actual animatedness. So the Zero
Punctuation counts. Death Note… really doesn’t. So yeah, similar reason to why I might watch porn, just
not involving naked people.
5: Retail therapy
Is one of the easiest ways I have
to cheer myself up is spending money. So I only really do it when I’m feeling
incredibly depressed. Looking for new things, getting the best prices – something
I do for pure and absolute pleasure, and no other reason. So nothing else to
say, really, it’s getting pretty close to the reasons for which I think people
look at porn – pure pleasure – but I only do it when I’m depressed, the quality
of it is a lot different from pornography, and there’s something later on I
think is a better explanation.
4: Reading romance novels.
Now we get onto the more
traditional things for a list like this. This could quite easily be a top five
list, actually, but I decided that it would be a top ten list, and I’m damned
if I’m going to let a little thing like complete and utter impracticality
change my mind. That is not my way! I tend not to read romance novels when I have
a severe cold, which has led to me describing them as ‘chicken soup’ novels.
Obviously, there are some pretty good exceptions to that – the most famous
being Jane Austen, but the thing about romance is that it’s really, really hard to actually write well. So
yeah, most romance novels are pretty meaningless fluff. And like I said, the
similarities between my attitude to love and most people’s attitudes to sex
means that reading romance novels is probably in some ways the closest I can
get to porn. But like I said, there are some incredibly clear distinctions
between ‘sex’ and ‘love’, and I don’t read romance novels that often, so this goes down to number four on the list.
3: Admiring pretty stuff
My interest in aesthetics is
probably something I’ve mentioned at least a few times, but it bears repeating,
I like looking at beautiful objects. Which is basically in a way what porn is.
You look at things you find beautiful – naked people of your preferred gender
or genders. I look at things I find beautiful – forests, buildings, clothing,
poetry, paintings, and other stuff. I sometimes spend hours looking through
sites like desktop nexus, and finding pictures like this:
Which is one of the bet things I’ve
ever seen. Ever. But when it comes to looking at pictures of pretty things,
there’s a better one that comes in next with:
2: Window Shopping
This is really close to the ‘retail
therapy’ thing above, except without any actual monetary expenditure. It’s also
really, really common – that’ why window shopping is a common term, after all.
So yeah, I’ll spend ages looking through things I wish I could buy, finding the
best prices, etc., and not actually buying it. A particular thing I tend to
look at is clothing and fashion – which is still common, which is why ‘cloting
porn’ is a famous term. One of my favourite ‘you know you’re asexual when…’
stories is that when looking through various pages of clothing, coming across a
woman in a corset, a presumably attractive woman, since she was a model (I’m
pretty sure it was the corset she was meant to be modelling, actually), I had
one single immediate and overwhelming response. ‘I want that hat.’
To be fair, it was a really nice
hat. Typically, the site wasn’t actually selling it, but that was probably a
really good thing anyway, since I might’ve accidentally bought it. But yeah,
spending hours looking through things like Amazon, Clockwork Couture, etc. just
to look at the pictures, with no immediate intention of buying anything, is
pretty much as close as an asexual can get to actual pornography. Except, of
course, I put it at number 2.
1: Going ‘awww’ over cute stuff.
Because number one is awesome cute
things. There’s an asexual teddy-bear who wears a t-shirt marked ‘the only one
I sleep with’. Personally, I’m less into teddy bears, and tiny little awesome
creatures – cats, hamsters, snails, rabbits, rats and awwwww. Not dogs though. For some reason, they’re just about the
only animal I don’t like, for some reason. The truth is, for all that I gush
about aesthetics, a cute little fluffy thing can just about produce a stronger
emotional reaction in me more consistently than most refined beauty. I don’t
honestly know which is more sexual, my attraction to a butterfly, or my
attraction to a kitten, but I’m pretty sure that they’re quite a way from a
sexual’s experience of sexual attraction. I really hope so anyway. But cute
stuff is more primal, generally stronger, and less intellectual in its nature
(though my appreciation of aesthetics can be pretty non-intellectual in
places). And so cuteness just about beats out beauty for my top spot.
That was long. But I have to write
another forty six words to reach two thousand, so I’m just going to ramble a
little. Ummm… sorry I was away for so long, I’m nearly certain I won’t have such
a huge gap next time.
*As a note, I have a bad habit of
accidentally replacing ‘sexual’ with ‘straight’. I try to avoid doing it as
much as possible, or at least to correct myself when I do it. I’m guessing you
can probably work out why it’s something I do.
**69 points in Scrabble. Not quite
as good as good as my favourite word, zqyjxyk, which means ‘I just won this
game of scrabble’***.
***Ébópúmá means the same thing in
Irish, and may actually be even harder to pronounce.
****Which reminds me that I should
in fact do so around now, actually.
*****There’s an except joke there
somewhere. Not a clue where, but I’m pretty sure it’s there.
