This is my guide to asexuality and will always be linked to on my main page. I want this to be a living document which is constantly being improved until it reaches a point that I can use it to explain asexuality to others.



Asexuality explained

It seems no matter how often I answer questions people have about asexuals in threads, new ones always seem to come up again after a while. There's a loooooot of misinformation about this orientation out there, and disturbingly, many prejudices as well. I'm tired of explaining over and over, and I'm tired of being told by people who have no idea what they are talking about I must just have something wrong with me. My goal is to make this the end all-be all page I use to put everything on the table about asexuality in a manner which is near impossible to misinterpret.

What is asexuality?

Asexuality is a sexual orientation identified as an inherent absence of a direct sexual attraction to either male or female individuals. Asexuality cannot be caused by hormone problems, injuries, or diseases. While those things can cause conditions with similar effects, those are caused by outside factors and are not something one is necessarily born with outside of unfortunate diseases or deformities passed on in extremely rare cases.

How do you know you're an asexual?

For me, being asexual isn't something that was noticed as a sudden manifestation. In fact, if anything being asexual was something that made itself apparent simply by way of its lack of appearance. At a time when everyone else my age was starting to shift interests less towards the games we all used to play and more towards people of the opposite sex, I was finding myself in complete disunderstanding of what was going on with them because I was not experiencing such mental changes in the slightest.

I went through puberty physically pretty much like any adolescent, but I didn't feel anything towards others that could be called attraction. I simply had friends and acquaintances and that was it. I was even scared of and subtly rebuffed advances by the few females who actually took the initiative to express interest in me. It was during this period in middle school it really began to sink in that there was something different about me, and that my thoughts in late elementary school that I would simply catch up with the others my age later were not going to happen.

It was a very long time after that that I continued to live with the knowledge that I was different. In a world where you were supposed to be attracted to girls and get a girlfriend, I lived thinking something was wrong with me. When I thought that you could only be either attracted to girls, or guys, or both, and knew that I definitely wanted nothing to do with females, but was less uncomfortable around guys simply because I just happened to be a guy myself, I began to fear that it must surely mean I was gay, even if I honestly felt no attraction towards guys either. Lack of attraction or not, I was still more comfortable around them than girls, and at the time my mind translated that to mean I might be gay.

That terrified me. It wasn't that the idea of being gay in and of itself was terrifying to me; it was the idea that I might be attracted towards other guys in such a way. I never was of course, but at that age I wasn't capable of the level of psychological evaluation that I am now. A long, long time went by. Years spent in confusion, fear, and shame because I didn't know exactly what I was inside. I couldn't talk about girls. I had no idea which girl was hotter. My parents were really starting to push me to get a girlfriend and have them some grandchildren. I felt like I was failing them.

It wasn't until I was 18 and had the powers of the internet at my fingertips that I finally learned what I was inside. I read a word that burned itself deeply into my mind. A word that burned into the very center of the empty void inside me that needed an answer to a question it did not comprehend. The word was asexuality, and it filled that void and created a sense of self and direction I had not known since the blissful days of early childhood. I knew who I was now. I had a full identity without any missing pieces. I wasn't into guys and there were going to be no grandchildren. With relief filling my very being and lifting away the weight of a tension that only years of fear could burden me with I knew that there was a fourth orientation, and that it described exactly what I had been experiencing all those years.

What do you mean by prejudices and misunderstandings?

The human mind is an amazing thing. You can discover so much about yourself if you only take a look at your own mind and learn the secrets of your own mental processes. I think perhaps I could have had a career in psychology of some sort and maybe even enjoyed it. My learning experience has taught me however that the mind attempts to insert the most plausible answer to a logical question that it can think of. This answer will always be based on one's own personal experiences in life however. It's not often someone will say they don't know an answer, or suggest the answer is yet to be found when their own answer, however unlikely, appears to possibly fit the question.

This is the primary obstacle when it comes to making people understand what being asexual is. Just as I didn't have any idea how to understand myself when I thought the only possible sexualities were heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual, most people have no idea how to understand how someone can be asexual when every moment of most of their life has been consumed by constant sexual urges and desires. Just like I needed someone to give me the answer I had been unable to reach on my own, it is necessary to make these people experience the paradigm shift necessary to facilitate the beginnings of understanding.

There's so many things people mistake for being a part of sexuality. The mind is able to take an idea, an emotion, a thought or thing, and link it to an emotion. We are able to enjoy the taste of food, savor the sound of music, or be thrilled by the rush of wind and horizon twisting weightlessness of a roller coaster. So many stimuli that different people translate different ways. What's mundane to one person could very well be a fetish for another! I find this amazing and think it allows me to explain things to a non asexual metaphorically.

I think the most infuriating thing I ever come across is when someone says you can't be an asexual and masturbate. The reason it infuriates me is simply because there's so many logical failings and assumptions in such a statement that my mind simply screams incoherently at the travesty of logic that such a statement is merely by being spoken and the web of further assumptions and misinformation it creates merely by existing. Righting such a very wrong statement is a complex beast and requires me to start with the basics as if with a child and work up from there and hope the reader has not lost track of the point as it progresses from infancy to unassailable counterstatement.

Asexuals come in two basic subgroups. Group A is asexuals who don't masturbate. Group B is asexuals who do masturbate. I've seen it suggested that group B isn't asexual. Frankly, I don't need a sexual individual trying to say I'm not asexual. Within these two groups, some of these asexuals even do have sex. There's a very explainable reason for this I can see even if I'm not one of the ones that does it, but basic points must be covered before the more complex ones.

Both groups can also have fetishes. I've also seen sexual individuals trying to say you can't be asexual and have a fetish. It's time to explain how all these seemingly sexual things can be experienced by an asexual. The most basic and obvious thing that really shouldn't have to be said but shall is that asexuals have perfectly functional and working genitalia. Due to this fact, asexuals are quite capable of feeling sexual pleasure. There is this strange idea that being asexual somehow means you must be incapable of having an erection despite the fact your hormones are working normally and your genitals are capable of sensing pleasure.

That's another point there; people seem to think an asexual must not be able to feel anything good down there. I don't really know how people can possibly think this, but I'm not to experienced with being ignorant either. Some asexuals don't seem to experience much or any pleasure from their genitals, but at this time I am unsure if this is from asexuality or merely a side effect of circumcision. It's a very, very sensitive topic and not the sort of thing I can comfortably talk about with others.

Now, as I said earlier, the mind is able to link unlike things together. A fetish is what happens when for inexplicable reasons the mind links something to an arousal trigger. In a normal sexual individual a fetish is also going to likely be linked to the 'sex' trigger. That is, exposure to a fetish is also going to be considered a suitable substitute for sex in the case of masturbation, and it's also going to be capable of making the individual crave actual sexual activity with another, or want to involve them in it as well. This is where asexuals and sexuals trip up on one another. An asexual mentally links a fetish only to arousal. A fetish will never be able to make an asexual crave sex or serve as a substitution for sex to them. A sexual individual isn't able to immediately comprehend this concept because they've never experienced such a thing before.

The most complex topic is asexuals having sex. Part of this stems from the misconception that all asexuals are supposed to be averse to sex. The defining thing is that an asexual is unlikely to initiate a sexual encounter themselves. When asexuals have sex it tends to be because they know it will please their partner. They may find it awkward or prefer to avoid it sometimes, but they care enough for their partner that they're willing to move out of their comfort zone for their partner's sake. Society places a heavy pressure on having sex as a sign of a healthy relationship, and many asexuals, having already been pressured into a relationship or having grown very attached to someone end up engaging in sexual encounters. Generally an asexual views sex as a somewhat messy act that's far too much effort when they can just masturbate on their own.

Asexuals can form a relationship with someone else. That relationship can even advance so far as to be called love. An asexual doesn't feel the urge to have sex with someone, but that doesn't mean they don't love them and want to be close to them. It's so sad to know lots of people think an asexual can't love someone too. Asexuals tend to form very strong emotional bonds with the right person, often far more real than anything you see in most relationships between people today. They engage in sex because they don't want to deny their partner happiness.

On the topic of a fetish, I've seen it tossed around way too much that asexuals can't have them. Never mind that a fetish is as unnatural for a sexual individual as an asexual. I can't talk for everyone, but my fetishes for vore and navels were definitely a part of me way before puberty, and I think it's that way for a lot of other people too. I've picked up more fetishes over the years, but none will ever be as strong as those two for me. I honestly have no idea why I like them, but I know that they arouse me and that they are my only means for achieving it. I can't arouse myself with men or women. It takes my fetishes. The fact my fetishes have to involve entities with genders is irrelevant.

How exactly is one supposed to have a fetish where nothing ever has a gender exactly? That's certainly not very realistic and would ruin everything. I prefer males in my fantasy fetishes because i'm a male and have been comfortable with being a male all my life. Females are like an alien species to me and I want them nowhere in my fetishes if I can help it. I sure as hell have no intentions of imagining myself as a female! I'm not getting off with feelings directed at the individuals in my fantasies however. I'm getting off on the idea of the vore itself, or the idea of looking like one of them, or the theme of domination and submission, or any number of other things that have nothing to do with wanting sex with whatever creatures my mind has conjured up. This is the important difference that distinguishes an asexual's fetishes from a sexual's fetishes.

I've seen people say an asexual would just like sex if they tried it. I'm sure I could tell one of my asexual friends he's like masturbation if he just tried it, but that would be horribly rude and inconsiderate and completely ignore that fact he probably has his own perfectly reasonable circumstances to make him avoid such activity. There's so much wrong in saying an asexual would like sex if they just tried it. It may as well say 'You would like rape if you just tried it'. I can't think of many things that cause more revulsion than the thought of sexual intercourse with a man or woman in any position whatsoever. It would be rape no matter how you spun it. The fact such crude actions cause pleasure being a justification makes as much sense as saying rape victims who had an orgasm actually liked it. If I were to suddenly find an interest in sticking my bits in asses and vaginas, why even stop there? As long as it's warm and wet right? Why not a dog? A fresh corpse maybe? A burrito? Hell how about we go exotic and try a tree or a shark. It's like saying you the reader would like sex with whatever gender you aren't attracted to, or with one of the things I just listed. All you have to do is try it and you'll see! It's a completely absurd suggestion and anyone saying such a thing has not done any original thinking on the subject.

So that's my take on asexuality. I highly doubt that I've remembered to explain everything I wanted to, but doing such is a very difficult task given the size and complexity of the subject at hand. I encourage others to ask me questions, offer their own experiences and ideas, and test my logic. It's the only way I can further improve my explanation of asexuality and what it really is.