How I Discovered I Am Asexual

This is how I discovered that I’m asexual.

This.  This one second of a TV-14 sex scene.

It wasn’t that I was repulsed or disgusted or bored or didn’t think the actors were “hot”.  It wasn’t anything like that.

It’s a standard TV sex scene:  Two characters fall into bed, exhausted from their simultaneous orgasm or whatever, but still with enough presence of mind to make sure their naughty bits are covered.

But watch it again.  See if you pick up what bothered me.

The guy falls straight back, to the lower right of the frame.  The woman falls straight back, to the upper right of the frame.

I was utterly baffled by the physical orientation of the two characters.

If they’re both falling straight back and they had just finished immediately prior to the cut to the scene (which is what’s strongly implied), then they should be falling straight back, in parallel, with her directly back on top of him.  Or maybe side by side, with one of them rolling or sliding off.

But they’re not parallel.  They’re at a roughly 45 degree angle to each other, with an intersection point around the center of her chest.  That would mean their genitals are not even remotely close to one another, it’s clear that there was no mouth contact, and from a position like that, even hand contact would be awkward. I suppose they could have been masturbating together, but why would they do that in a position where neither one could see anything?

So just what in the hell were they supposed to be doing there?

I have drawn this diagram to illustrate my confusion:

bonesorientation

As you can plainly see, there’s something strange here.

No, not with the clip from the TV show.  There’s something strange in that I launched a Zapruder Film style analysis of the clip from the TV show.  I didn’t once, in all of this, think “Look at those hot people having hot sex, that’s so hot”.

And then it clicked.  That’s pretty much the way I’d always looked at sex.  A puzzle to be solved.  A curiosity.  Not a desire.  Not a need.  Not a good time.  I looked at sex differently than everyone I’d ever heard talk about the subject.  There had to be a reason for that.  That’s what led to the investigation where I discovered asexuality.

This is how that one second of TV sex scene changed my life.

Forward Advances

I was watching a TV show today when a familiar scene came on. There was a woman who was interested in a male character, and in order to make her intentions clear, she physically forces herself on him as he sits in a chair. Usually, this scene leads to one of the following outcomes:

  • Sex
  • Someone walks in on them (And they typically end up having sex later anyway)
  • Outright refusal (And they typically end up having sex later anyway)

Today, it got me thinking: What would I do in this situation?
Then I remembered… I’ve actually been in this situation, so I know exactly what I’d do.

I just sat there.

It was almost ten years ago now. I was meeting an Internet friend for the first time. She had made her feelings for me quite clear, but I didn’t feel the same for her. I expected some sort of physical display of affection, a hug, maybe a kiss. I knew it would probably be awkward and I almost didn’t want to meet her because of it.
We’d been together for a couple of hours when she told me that she wanted to sit for a bit.  We were on the fourth floor of a university building and there was a small study lounge at the end of the hall.  We sat and chatted a bit while looking out the window.

Then she pounced.

She flew over into my seat and pressed herself against me.  With one hand, she rubbed my chest, the other hand ran through my hair.  She pressed her lips against my neck.

I just sat there.  I watched the people in the courtyard below.

I couldn’t push her away because that would kill her.
I couldn’t actively take part because that would be a lie.

She pressed closer.

I felt like I wasn’t there.  If I were there, I’d react.  I’d want to kiss her, to touch her.  But I didn’t feel anything.
Why didn’t I feel anything?
Here was a friendly, attractive woman who obviously wanted me.  No one had ever expressed an interest in me like this before.  She wanted to do this for months.  I wanted nothing.

And I just sat there.

This isn’t right.
Why didn’t I want her?
Why didn’t I feel anything?
Why couldn’t I feel anything?
What is wrong with me?

I watched the people in the courtyard below.

I replayed that moment in my mind over and over in the days that followed.  The weeks, the months, the years that followed.  I searched for clues, for hints, for anything that would help to unlock the mystery of my heart.  There was nothing there to find.

When I discovered asexuality last year, this memory was one of the first that jumped to mind.  Everything finally snapped into place and became perfectly clear to me.  Nothing was wrong with me at all.  That’s just not the way I’m wired.

this.Initialize();

Okay, let’s get this thing started…

Hello.  I’m asexual.

(I’m also a nerd, but I’m not really here to talk about that.  I’ve already got a place to get my nerd on, a place I didn’t really want to fill up with all of this stuff.)

I discovered the word “asexuality” in April 2011, but I’d known that there was something a bit off for years.  I never had a girlfriend in high school or college.  When I finally did get a girlfriend after graduating, I didn’t exactly dive into the relationship and get swept away.  It took her months to get me agree to go out with her.  That relationship only lasted about nine months and I haven’t had another girlfriend since.

That was almost nine years ago.

I’ve never been interested in sex.  Actually, let me qualify that a bit…  I’ve always been interested in sex, in a subject of scientific curiosity kind of way.  But I’ve never been interested in having sex.  Sure, I wanted to experience it, because everyone said it was so great and amazing, but I never felt an urge to seek it out.

I have had sex.  Twice.  With that girlfriend I mentioned.  It was not great and amazing.  I mean, it wasn’t terrible.  It did feel good, but…  I honestly didn’t see what the big deal was.  It was an okay way to spend part of an evening, but so is watching reruns of ST:TNG.

That was almost nine years ago.  I haven’t had sex since.  I don’t miss it.

I used to think that I was “straight, but not good at it”.  I adopted that label because it seemed like the best option for me at the time.  I had a girlfriend, and there had been other women along the way that I’d had some level of interest in.  Men, however, had never caught my eye.  So I knew I wasn’t gay or bi, therefore I must be straight, because what else was there?  But I “wasn’t very good at it” because I didn’t feel the need to rack up conquests or anything like that.  I never thought, “She’s hot, I’d so hit that”.  (Not even with the girlfriend who was, by many accounts, rather “hot”.) Plus, I’d only had sex twice in the roughly 18 years since the onset of puberty, when it seemed like other guys were averaging sex twice a day over the same time period.

It didn’t really bother me until April of this year.  I was having a conversation about sex with a friend, and it suddenly struck me that I didn’t think about sex in the same way as ANYONE else I’d never known.  It always stuck me as a scientific topic, rather than an emotional one.  After seeing a sex scene in a TV show, I spent more time wondering about how the position the two characters were supposed to be in didn’t make any sense at all, rather than thinking about what they’d been doing just before the camera cut in.

I suddenly had the feeling that I was a puzzle that needed to be solved, and I like solving puzzles, so…

I decided to start by looking up “asexuality”.   Obviously, I thought, that can’t be me.  I’ve had sex.  I masturbate.  I might be something close to that, but I can’t be that.  But still, it’s a starting point.  I’d heard the word before, but didn’t know what it meant.

(Actually, I think I started by looking up “Low Testosterone”, which just gave me a bunch of ads for male enhancement pills.  I <3 INTERNET.)

And so I read descriptions and posts and watched videos and…  OMG THESE PEOPLE ARE ALL TALKING ABOUT MY LIFE.

My life completely rewrote itself in under a week.  It was like the twist at the end of a movie that changes everything you’ve just watched.  Moments in the past suddenly flipped over and started making sense.

I didn’t agonize over it.  I didn’t need a second opinion.  It was just so right.  It was me.

And so here we are now.

I’m mainly here out of a potentially misguided desire to raise visibility.  I mean, I went for all these years not even knowing that I was asexual, and I’ve been around the Internet and thought I was fairly well versed in the various sexual orientations, preferences, practices, variations and deviations, yet somehow, I never managed to catch on to what I was during that whole time.  I’m hoping that by writing a bit on the subject of asexuality, that maybe other people will discover themselves and it won’t take as long as it did for me.  Plus, I’m hoping to raise understanding and awareness among all the potential allies out there.

Aw, who am I kidding?  I’m only here for the cake.