Uh oh!
This article has “sex” in the title! Everybody, start panicking! Scream! Run for cover!
Because lo and behold anyone even attempts to have an honest conversation about their identity these days, right?!
See, we just ended pride month, meaning the wide variety of Fortune 500 companies that pretended to give two shits about the LGBTQ+ community (to try and sell them shit,) are hanging up their rainbow flags and actively suppressing the identities, sexualities, and beliefs of those that actually work for them again.
Full disclosure, I have a horde in this race.
I do indeed mean “horde” and not “horse.”
Myself?
I’m that annoying little “plus” at the end of the LGBTQ+ acronym.
Hell, there are DOZENS of us Demisexuals and other gray-spectrum ace (asexual) folks out there. We’re just chilling, hanging out in the shade of nearby trees as everybody flails in rainbow bliss for the entirety of June, throughout pride. It’s also a large part of my decision to take a back-seat regarding my sexuality and the greater queer community.
Reasons of privilege, mostly.
I’m a 6’3, 240lb bald, white man with a beard. At first glance, I’m a macho man who drives a truck, wears plaid and flannel, and whom used to work as a logger. I very much do not fit the tropes or stereotypes of the queer community, outside of the bear stereotype I’ve been painted with on and off over the years. (Go read my poem “Tar Pits” from The Butterfly King and Other Poems for Self-Reflection if you haven’t yet, for some context!)
See, for the uninitiated, this dumb ex-lumberjack has taken a few Sociology, Biology, Philosophy, and Anthropology courses, wouldn’t you know!
The long and short of those courses were that being cisgender equates itself with varying hierarchies of power. Cisgender identity is where you look like the thing you are and identify as, in a nutshell! On the surface, I’m one big fat dad bod of a dude, and while I do use dude as a purely agender term, simply walking around in this westernized world – people will usually stop and listen when I have something to say.
Being the biggest person in a room with a history of a good scrap or two helps.
But how does having a beard, or simply being a big bald guy with one or two muscles relate to power outside of physical power?
I’m glad you asked, hypothetical reader wearing a top hat!
I’ll have to whip out my history degree for this one.
I live in North America, and the colonial history of this continent has resulted in a whole swack of hierarchies around who has power, influence, and a voice in our society. Here in Canada, first nations peoples had their land stolen, as Canada used the RCMP as a big stick to murder, imprison, and forcibly segregate them onto reserves. Children were stolen under the guise of education, and immigrants who arrived after the first wave of these atrocities were slotted into service roles to work the menial labor and retail jobs European colonists didn’t want to work.
That’s the short version. Doesn’t really do it justice.
Never could.
The long version has a lot of tears, enormous anger, death, grief, and terrible injustices throughout.
It means that aside from being demisexual, disabled, and poor, in the grand scheme of privilege and power within our society?
I’m still close to the top.
So what the fuck does that have to do with sexuality?
Well, it comes with a responsibility to stand up for the underdog, firstly.
That’s because even having an LGBTQ+ identity out in the open affects where you end up on that hierarchy of power and privilege. We’re much better these days about inclusivity and education at younger ages – because when I was growing up, my only true familiarity with the LGBTQ+ community were my mentors, who came in two varieties – exclusively the tropes of gay white men and butch lesbians from the countercultures and subcultures of the 1980s and 1990s.
Thank god I at least had those folks as role models, mind you!
But role models or not, I learned a long time ago that no matter what I do – insofar as my gender identity was male, my skin was white-passing, and my eccentricity was thoroughly tempered as a weird, disabled, demi dude…
I’d still be mostly fine out in society.
Sort of the opposite of what you’d expect, right?
That’s because when you have power and privilege, it’s hard to see how others might live without those same levels of power and privilege. The absence of something in our everyday lives is much more noticeable in said life than the constant presence of something – even things you might see as small – like respect, or the mere “benefit of the doubt.”
Which is why I’m perfectly content to chill in the shade of the tree while the other folks frolic in the sunshine.
I’ve had more than enough people listen to me flap my gums over the years, regardless of whether it’s speaking at events, monologuing on a stage, or in reading the thousands of poems I’ve written.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not ready to stand up from where I sit, to throw an elbow or two if people fuck with the frolickers – especially after the LGBTQ+ community has fought so hard and for so fucking long simply for that small pleasure in life. I kind of operate like the bouncer in my own mind – lurking in the background until somebody needs to be told to shut the fuck up or who needs to be kicked out of the party for being shitty.
But being at the outskirts also means I’m often misunderstood.
Just because I’m not waving a rainbow flag in your face doesn’t mean I don’t exist in the world a tad differently from you. There are even folks out there doing PhD level research on the correlations between neurodiversity, gender and sexuality! (As according to smarter people than me.)
I’m eager to read those results one day. God knows I’ve read enough Judith Butler at this point to have an aneurysm or two in the way that academics from the 1980s frame their narratives and research. But maybe that’s just the frustrated storyteller in me!
Enough waffling with expository pre-reading.
What the fuck is Demisexuality?
Well, I definitely don’t speak for all Ace and Gray-Spectrum folks, nor do I speak for all Demisexuals, even. I only speak from my own heart, soul, and brain. As fair warning.
But what I can say is that being on the Demisexual spectrum means those pesky notions that most heteronormative people deal with on a day to day basis simply don’t exist. Sex and Sexual attraction just isn’t a common thing outside of long-term romantic relationships. I rarely even remember it’s a normal functioning part of many heteronormative human relationships, let alone find myself wracked with it like some of you thirsty motherfuckers.
See, the Ace gray-spectrum is a wide one, and again, I’m not an expert by any means outside of my own privileged life experience. But it’s often split into two contexts – the romantic and the sexual sides of relationships. You’ll often see some ace folks use the term “allosexual” for everybody wracked by the primal biological needs to go bang it out.
I know I’m Demisexual because for myself, romance or at the very least close platonic connection has to precede sexual attraction. Some folks refer to the emotional bond between them and others as the magic circumstance that flips the “OFF” switch over to “ON.”
It literally means that unless I’m with someone I care pretty deeply about, nobody is getting laid.
I’ve played this line for my own benefit before, of course.
I once bet somebody I was dating that I would buy them ice cream if we slept together before three months had elapsed into the timeline of us dating. I waited until the day before the three months had elapsed, lost the bet on purpose, and promptly bought them ice cream – in some foolish young attempt at romance.
See, gender identity is a little easier to grasp for a lot of straight folks. Fitting into a binary of absolutes often helps people feel more comfortable. But that also means you’re potentially watering down who you are in order to fit the needs of the mainstream society and those immediately around you. Often to avoid conflict, persecution, ensure your safety, etc.
Now, aesthetic appeal is still a thing. As much as I want to shed this meat sack, demisexuals aren’t robots that paw at your face to test the tightness of your skin. I can still look at another human and tell you my opinion on their quote-unquote “attractiveness.”
But the distinction is I’m not making that assessment with any biological bias or drive, mind you. I’m purely making quantitative and qualitative comparisons between what society has brainwashed me to think are attractive qualities. This usually is in reference to health markers. Is that person taking care of themselves? Do they look happy, healthy, do they focus on holistic wellness, and seem to be ensuring they achieve some form of basic self-care?
Obviously there’s some bias here, both from an artistic perspective and from a demisexual perspective. Every famous painter or sculptor from the past several thousand years tends to elevate very specific features of the human body.
Attractive men are usually played as the adonis, having less than 2% body fat, well-toned olympic wrestler level muscles, and sharp jawlines and facial features. Inversely, attractive women are defined by how well they fit according to the current beauty standards of the era. Just flip through a Maxim or Sports Illustrated magazine to see what the mainstream media wants you to use as a benchmark.
I find that aesthetic beauty and biological attraction are often completely conflated with each other, which sucks.
As an example – anybody I date would have to fit these criteria:
- Can make me laugh consistently.
- Is clever, educated, or intellectually stimulating in some way.
- They practice active self-care to ensure they’re happy and healthy.
- They can keep up with me when I’m moving at “lightspeed.”
- We have at least one or two shared hobbies/activities or can grow one together.
Note how aside from a misinterpretation of the self-care piece, none of those variables have anything to do with actual physicality or gender representation.
I know I tend to drift more towards women, as it fits in line with that cisgender privilege piece – making my life much easier in the day to day. (Something I know Bisexual people also reckon with.) It’s also because the list of men I would willingly date is less than five, as heteronormative conditioning for men is usually super fucking toxic. Although, to be fair to men, the list of women I’d date off-hand is ALSO under ten. And I’m still exploring, questioning, and figuring some shit out like polyamorous or nonbinary identities of course. You never stop growing and learning, hopefully!
Even stopping to think about this stuff requires some patience, basic wisdom or an iota of intelligence. Not to mention a load of self-awareness! When you consider I didn’t even know what demisexuality was, let alone realize that I was demisexual myself until like twenty-two or twenty-three years old…
God damn!
So… As I despise the academic tendency to problematize everything under the sun without offering a single concrete solution… Now that you know what the hell Demisexuality is, and how my own privilege sorta works… How can we be more inclusive? How can you help people on the asexual spectrum like me fit into our society better?
Well, I have a super easy starting tip:
Stop plastering all media with sex to sell it. The male gaze sucks. Every time I have to watch a sex scene in a movie, I wrinkle my nose and think about all the plot that could be occurring instead of sloppy makeouts. (Cue dumb dude joke about watching movies for the “plot.”)
(I also know “plot” is not why all those middle-aged women watched Brokeback Mountain or Magic Mike on a loop like five years ago.)
There are smarter people who have thrown this idea out there with dozens of better reasons than me just thinking that it’s stupid and icky. Actual fair representation of all sexualities comes to mind. Even small things like fucking Archie comics labelling Jughead as Ace can be huge victories for smaller communities. (Because honestly, I would almost always choose a good hamburger over sex myself, good buddy.)
A secondary quality of life improvement would be more emphasis on building healthy relationships as a whole in our society. One of the demisexual curses is that as you tend to need an emotional or romantic bond first, prior to sexual attraction, we tend to fall in love with our friends. Which is a fucking hassle I tell you! I can’t count the number of times in my life it has fucked me over against my will. And the rate at which it continues to fuck me over.
We need to be better about building self-aware, emotionally healthy relationships in our day to day lives. Things like open communication, boundaries, and being honest about our feelings are all healthy markers.
Dammit!
This article ended up being way longer than I’d like it to have been, so now that I’ve hopefully educated a few allosexuals out there… I’m going to wrap things up with a message for the dozens of other demisexuals out there, my “horde” as it were:
“There is nothing wrong with you. Your libido isn’t broken. Stop forcing yourself into the check-boxes of mainstream society. Take the time to know yourself and know who you are by building your own critical thinking and self-awareness skills before conforming to the expectations of others.”
Pride can be a tough time for many folks, not just for reflecting on the rough history of LGBTQ+ rights and representation as far back as Stonewall, but for feeling like you’ll ever fit in somewhere. In feeling that you have a community or group that you can belong to. It’s a symptom of the tribalism inherent to us humans as pack animals.
Hell, if it helps… At least you know I’ll accept you! Because I just want people to grow, evolve, adapt, and become their best selves at the end of the day.
That’s all any of us are trying to do, right?
Become our best selves.
Even us demisexuals and ace-spectrum folks!
Now…
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
