Has anyone ever successfully explained demisexuality to a group of sexual people? I'm beginning to think it's like the Kobayashi Maru of asexuality 101. It's particularly frustrating to invest time in trying to explain all the reasons a person might "want" sex separate from feeling sexually attracted to their partner, and then to have demisexuality erased on the grounds that "normal people don't want to have sex with everyone," by people who are conflating wanting to have sex with feeling sexual attraction. I'm sorry, demisexual-identified members of the ace spectrum, I too have failed you.
On a completely different note, I've been trawling through the brilliant Ace Secrets (which has gotten a lot more submissions in the short period of time since its launch than I would have expected). I think it was here, in the notes to one of the secrets, that someone mentioned they found all the mentions of cake triggering for ED. I had never thought about that before, and now I feel kind of bad. No more gratuitous mentions of cake for me. (I was thinking of replacing them with mentions of staring contentedly at various pretty people, but decided that could be upsetting, too. However, that reminded me of this Tumblr post re: Sherlock and asexuality, which entertained me to no end.)
ETA: So the joke in the Sherlock fandom is that it's the purple shirt of sex, because I guess people think Sherlock looks particularly attractive in it, or something.
1 comment:
I... haven't. However, I've pondered the issue and have some ideas that I want to try out the next time I run into this sort of discussion and see if they work:
Focussing on the fact that demisexuality is an ace identity and is considered as part of the asexual spectrum. It isn't "I'm sexual, except that I'm not attracted to people I don't love", it's "I'm asexual, except with exceptions based on deep emotional connection." People often go 'oh, by *that* criterion I'm demisexual!' when they hear the definition but they're missing that the fact that demisexuals are identifying as demisexual instead of sexual means that they probably aren't comfortable in a hetero/homo/bi/pan/etc.sexual identity and don't feel this is a good fit - *in particular*, they feel that their experience is enough like an asexual person's experience that they identify as part of the ace spectrum. The slut-shaming argument is based on seeing demisexual people as "sexual except for X", not "asexual except for X".
Of course this may crash and burn just as badly, but it's worth a try. :/ Otherwise there's things like "look, there are poly demisexuals, are you honestly trying to tell me they're slut-shaming?"
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