/u/askwomenthrowaway23 on I have no idea how to react

I think some people don’t have a good radar for clearly-made-up vs. realistic. Some people can’t imagine certain experiences, and so they decide it must be fake just because they don’t share it. Nevermind they’ve felt the exact same way in a different circumstance. “How can you not like pizza? You must be faking to seem special.” Okay, you have a food you don’t like too, just apply that feeling to pizza! But because the dislike is specifically directed at the popular pizza it can’t be real. I think that’s very weird. I also can’t imagine a lot of experiences whatsoever, like being blind. When I close my eyes, I just see black. I have no frame of reference for being unable to see whatsoever, only being unable to perceive specific objects because they’re too far away or blocked by other things. And yet I believe that people are blind, even though I can’t fathom what it’s like. People experience sexual desire, and even though I don’t know what that feels like I’m pretty darn sure it’s real!

“I’m only attracted to people who eat grapes at 6:00PM, this is called sextostreptosexuality” is made up. The absence of attraction is not. Come on. It’s not oddly specific, it’s just extending the concept of “I, a lesbian, am not sexually attracted to men” to everyone. “The absence of” or “none” is also such a simple and common concept in life. Coldness is just the absence of heat. “Null,” “empty set,” “zero”… why wouldn’t there be a sexuality that’s basically “sexual attractions: zero”? If you’re looking to be super special and unique, you don’t go for an identity that can be explained that easily.

Some people don’t feel anything and other people fight about whether you call that psychopathy or sociopathy instead of saying “it’s impossible to feel nothing, sociopathy and psychopathy are fake and made up and describe nobody, they’re just looking for attention.” Even though a ridiculous amount of people pretend to be sociopaths or psychopaths for attention, when they’re clearly not that. But nah, asexuality is the fake one. Even though when people are looking for attention with sexualities, if they’re not claiming something oddly specific and stick to established ones they switch it every week instead of claiming one thing and fighting for its rights and also act consistent with their claim of who they’re (not) attracted to…

Also, it’s probably because a huge deal is made of sex in real life. Complaints about media being prudish and conservative and not acknowledging reality, complaints about media being oversexualized and corrupting and making people have unrealistic desires, they’re interested in changing the portrayal of sex and how it may affect sexual beings. They’re not really thinking of or mentioning those who don’t have any desires to be twisted or suppressed. Sexuality is full of cultural boundaries and hangups and issues that get discussed 24/7, naturally people make tons of art and literature and music about this subject, it permeates our culture because it really is super common and so people say stuff like “universality of sexual experience” or “that makes us human” because they think everyone really does like that and it’s some big deep statement because it’s sex so how can it not be deep and spiritual and a big revelation that connects us all. Allosexuals are a giant giant majority.

So when somebody shows up and says “nah, not really” it can sometimes look like being contrarian on purpose or stuff like claiming you’re a dog and not a human person in order to be ~special~ when really, you’re a human person. The thing is, special snowflakes making things up for attention do not set up things like AVEN and have other online communities consistently reporting the same experiences. Special snowflakes make their own website at best, and don’t have several communities reporting the same experience. But you could also argue multiple separate groups are dedicated to believing in a flat earth and report the same arguments, and they’re not valid. My defense here is that asexuality is something about our personal experience and unfortunately you can’t climb in our heads to experience the same thing to validate that it’s real. The best you can do is writing and talking about it and making analogies, you can’t actually give someone the experience. Earth’s roundness is an observable phenomenon about the physical world which is firmly not different for different people. Speaking of the term “special snowflake,” there’s also pushback against “wokeness” but few people will push back against the existence of gay and lesbian people. They’ve been facts for forever. Asexuality hasn’t always been visible. I think it started getting talked about more often at the same time “wokeness” had its surge so it’s associated with that, and a lot of people think “wokeness” is mostly just people saying made-up stuff. So since asexuality is “woke” therefore it’s made-up.

The absence of something is also harder to notice than the presence of it. If I say “there is a teapot in this storage room,” just find the teapot and you know I’m telling the truth. If I say “there isn’t a teapot in this storage room,” you have to check everywhere the teapot could possibly be before knowing it’s not here. You basically have to fail every check for the presence of it to confirm its absence. Sexual desire is also a feeling, so proving its presence or absence is not as easy as proving something you can see or hear, further worsening the teapot problem I proposed. You often just have to take people at their word in regards to feelings, thoughts, etc. because we can’t read minds yet. And people won’t always do that. A lot of people only enjoy or bother to have sex because they feel attraction to someone, so when an asexual chooses to have sex with a partner and enjoys it they might feel “I’m still asexual, I didn’t desire them” is a copout because they can’t imagine enjoying or bothering with sex without also desiring their partner. Which is weird because we have the very mainstream jokes about hating your spouse and not finding them attractive anymore but still bothering to have sex with them, and the concept of gold diggers who have sex and romance with people they’re not attracted to in order to get money, so obviously you can have consensual sex without attraction. Anyways, this goes hand in hand with the false idea that “if you had sex and climaxed/you experienced arousal you obviously liked it” that likely exists because both are often a symptom of desire even though both aren’t always caused by desire. So obviously if an asexual ever has sex or arousal it must be because they really wanted it. Thanks, rape culture. Allosexuals sometimes don’t want to have sex because of medical problems or side effects, and it’s a real problem for them, so our natural state is their legitimate “this isn’t normal, I don’t like this, fix me.” So some end up thinking it’s also a problem for everyone and they just don’t recognize it. A lot of people don’t experience split attraction where they want someone romantically but not sexually or vice versa, so they assume one always comes with the other.

Also, people who claim to be celibate often get a bad rap and are thought to be liars because of priests who were supposed to be celibate but actually didn’t bother controlling their desires and violated children, so therefore everyone who claims celibacy is obviously just faking and using it as a cover so nobody suspects them when they rape children. Even choosing to not have sex is associated with being a bad person, and so the stigma against these “no sex” people (even if theirs is a choice instead of simple lack of desire) spreads to us too. Also, so many people were shamed for their sexuality, especially by religious institutions, and are jaded by it and can’t see how anyone would ever choose not to have sex aside from repression because that’s all they ever saw. After growing up in such an environment and being shaped by it it’s hard to fathom someone who wants to live a life free of sex, without any repression behind it, which is the total opposite of what you desperately wanted but couldn’t have and were shamed for.

Waiting on brain scans and studies and biological science and stuff that can identify sexual attraction so that we can prove that we really aren’t lying, it actually is truly like this. Till then, we have to ask people to just take it on faith that our self-reports are true. Anyways that’s all my thoughts on why aphobia exists. Figured I’d post this because a lot of people are like “how can they believe that!?” as an expression of outrage so why not give what I believe to be the actual answer

June 11, 2021 at 11:49PM