Wednesday 31 July 2013

Convolvus minor

Still July!

I need to start getting this stuff done faster...


Anyway, my foratting has gotten all screwed up, and I can't be bothered to replace most of it...


I don't think I have anything else to say this...

Oh! The topic of the post!

OK, doubt. I'm big on doubt. I'm agnostic, for a start, and I heartily dislike glib oversimplifications. Things are more complicated than that. Things are always more complicated than that*. Always**. So doubt is a kinda 'me' thing.

In the case of asexuality, it's rather easy to be less than entirely sure of where you stand, especially if you've got fairly used to identifying as straight before you even hear  that you might be something called an 'asexual'. Straight is... kinda the default, it's what you assume. You need some reason to start doubting it, and being a heteroromantic asexual doesn't really lend itself to you getting that kind of push. You don't start getting attracted to people of the same gender as you (which I've always thought must be a definite hint that one is not entirely straight), you just... aren't attracted to anyone. Except you are. You're attracted to those of the opposite sex***, and in a way that you are not attracted to those of the same sex****.­ So that must make you straight, right? Sure, the attraction isn't exactly what you'd imagine sexual attraction to be, since, y'know, it doesn't actually come with any desire whatsoever to actually have sex with anyone, but, well, even if you do ask someone else what sexual attraction feels like, they generally don't have a particularly satisfactory answer for you. Even if (as I did) you have a suspicion that what you feel isn't sexual attraction, it's rather hard to figure out what other options there might be. The distinction between romantic and sexual orientation is really something almost unique to the ace community, and knowing about it can be a huge part of trying to figure out if you're ace or not. Which means that you have to be part of the asexual community in order to figure out that one should be part of the asexual community. It's pretty easy to get stuck in a state of existential doubt, where you really doesn't know what on earth you are. You must be straight... and yet you're kinda not.

If you are lucky, and find out that 'heteroromantic asexual' is a thing (or any other flavour of romantic asexual), then there's still the problem of being sure that you are one. It's easy to determine, for example, polysexuality. At least somewhat. One simply has to be attracted  to people of a variety of genders. Determining for certain the complete absence of something? That's a lot harder, especially if it's something you've never experienced, and which noone can describe to you properly. It's always hard to be sure that something isn't there somewhere, let alone when you don't, technically, actually know what you're looking for. Just ask Nessie. The best you can do is, eventually, to decide that if there was someone you were going to be attracted by, you would have seen them by now. You would have found at least one person you had at least a little attraction to. And you decide that, if there is such a person, and you haven't found them yet, you might as well be functionally asexual. The kind of people you're attracted to are clearly so rare you're unlikely to ever come across them, anyway, and they'd have to be a long way from what is commonly thought of as attractive, or you would have known what your friends were talking about when they said that they found people attractive.

And then you find out about grey-aces and demisexuals. And as far as I know, there is no way of determining that you aren't one of those. Maybe I only get attracted to people I feel a certain way about. Maybe I've never really felt that way about anyone, or maybe the people who I have felt that way about aren't the kind of people I'd find attractive anyway. I mean, people of other orientations aren't attracted to absolutely everyone with whom their orientation is compatible (I don't think). So it would seem rash of me to assume that demisexuals must be*****. I still don't know if I might be, for example, demisexual. I have no idea how I'd go about finding out, really.

And then there's the final piece of doubt. Or the final piece that I'm going to talk about right now, anyway. Which is when you come out, and you are doubted. Generally, this doubt is really not helpful. You get told that you just haven't found the right person yet†. You get told a whole load of things about how you just haven't tried it††, or about how if you're a repulsed asexual, rather than a merely indifferent one, then that means you must be ill†††. None of this is helpful, if you're still not entirely confident in your conclusions. A sexual might not be trying to be at all hurtful when they say something like this. They might genuinely be trying to help. To any sexuals reading? You're really not. The person you're talking to has probably thought of all this. They've probably heard all this from someone else. If they've been out for a while, they definitely have. If you're a close friend, and you know what you're talking about, and you have some specific reason to think they're not asexual, you might go ahead (though remember that if it's something obvious, all their other close friends have probably mentioned it too, and try to be polite about it. For example, it's probably better to assume it's your mistake, and to ask for clarification, than to accidentally come off as a 'Ha! Gotcha!' kinda accusation (and remember that they really do have no obligation to explain this to you - if they do, it's out of politeness).

Obviously, if they're a close friend and they're not coming out, but just telling you, specifically, because they're not sure, you obviously have a lot more leeway to ask questions. And because you're a close friend who they trust enough to tell, you probably won't screw it up. You do still want to be pretty careful, yeah, and think about how they're likely to be feeling right now, but if they came to you, I would hope that you'd be able to deal with it.

Anyway, that's it for now. I have another post I've been working on that should go up in early August, hopefully (I have no idea how these things take so long to write). Seeya!

*To be clear, it's not the fact that something's been simplified that I dislike - I do that all the time myself, after all. It's the denial that this is, in fact, being done. Reducing something complicated into something simple is helpful. Pretending that something complicated is something simple is really downright unhelpful.
**Mathematics often claims to be the exception here, saying that mathematical truths are absolute truth, and thus (at least some of them) are entirely straightforward and simple. I would like to point out to these people that in Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and Russell (two rather intelligent philosophers) spent several hundred pages attempting to prove that two plus two equals four. An attempt in which they were only partially successful. And even this partial success depends on the validity of deductive logic - which, it must be pointed out, is seen to be reliable only on the basis of deductive logic,a level of circular reasoning roughly equivalent to the claim that one knows that astrology is accurate because the stars predict that it will be.
***Whether or not they are the opposite gender is not necessarily something our hypothetical heteroromantic asexual, who is totally not me knows, or has even considered, as yet.
****OK, in my case, I am sometimes attracted to men - cisgendered men - in that way. But it's a lot rarer, and I'm just going to skip over it right now.
*****That is... not actually an entirely uncontroversial statement. Yes, I know about the thing about primary vs. secondary sexual attraction. I'm saying that I don't find the idea of a demisexual who is attracted to some people to whom they have a close enough emotional connection, but not to others, to be a self-contradictory one. In the simplest case, imagine demisexual A is biromantic, but actually only, as it turned out, demi-heterosexual. The primary vs. secondary model does not seem to, in the form I have encountered it, be able to account for it, but it seems to me not to be too absurd, and whilst I'm happy to be shown to be wrong, I'd need to have some fairly compelling evidence that it just doesn't happen at all to discard it as a possibility.
†Any sexual readers: how old were you when you first found someone you were attracted to? I mean at all. Not the first person you fell in love with, the first person you found at all desirable
†† With straight people, of course, it's easy to go with the old 'have you tried gay sex?' thing. And it's not much harder to do the opposite to gay people, if they come out with that. Bisexuals, polysexuals and pansexuals might be harder, but I've never actually come across one who didn't believe me, strangely enough, so I've never had to deal with it. Possibly you should ask them if they've ever tried auto-amputation.
††† Though, curiously enough, the people I've tried this on have been less than receptive to the idea that they must be mentally ill if they're disgusted by having to watch two people of their less preferred gender having sex. I don't know if one has tried this on Dan Savage, but I think most people accept that there are number of people who would actively dislike, and even feel some sense of disgust at sex between two people of their less preferred gender, or even between two people of different genders, at least one of which they are unattracted to, no matter how homo/hetero-phobic they may or may not be. You could argue that the level of disgust is different, but once the general principle is conceded, the rest is really just haggling over the price.