My little cousins recently came for a visit, and I find it kind of interesting to watch how they’re developing. One of them is a seven-year-old little girl, who is a little bit precocious for her age. She’s already reading books at least three or four grade levels above her own. One of her habits that I found interesting is that she is already starting to hint at things rather than saying them outright, which is a habit I think that women have that tends to confuse men quite a bit. I remember once I was walking around late at night with three guys and another girl. She had mentioned to me earlier that she was wearing shoes that were very painful to walk in, and my feet were starting to really hurt as well. So I leaned against a fence to try to take some of the pressure off my feet and said, “Hey, can we like, figure out where we’re going and what we’re doing instead of wandering around aimlessly?” The guys completely missed the point. One of them even berated me for not being spontaneous enough. So I find it interesting to see that this little girl is already beginning to exhibit that behavior (even though she hasn’t quite got the subtlety down yet), and it kind of makes me wonder whether it’s more due to her nature, or whether she’s internalizing feminine socialization. Probably a combination of both.
My other cousin is a boy who’s two months shy of his thirteenth birthday. His voice has changed since I last saw him, which was kind of hard to get used to, but I don’t know how far along in developing a sexuality he is. He still seems very childlike, and very much uninterested in girls. His mother mentioned that he’d gone to a new year’s eve party at a girl’s house, and that he turned out to be the only boy there, which of course led to the adults going “OOOoooOOOh,” and asking questions like, “Did you play spin the bottle?” He didn’t know what that was, and didn’t seem to understand why they were making a big deal of it. My sister thinks he’ll turn out to be gay, but I don’t know. I think it’s still too early to tell.
Still, it got me thinking about how I was at that age, and how my sexual identity developed as I got older.
I see a lot of asexuals go through a phase of agonizing confusion when their identity suddenly shifts from whatever-it-was-before to asexual. There seems to be quite a bit of anxiety around that change, a lot of questions about whether or not the label really fits, and a lot of difficulty integrating this new understanding of oneself into one’s picture of oneself as a whole.
I can certainly understand that. But me? I just didn’t feel it.
When I was a kid, I never thought about sexuality. Most kids don’t, right? (Right?) I did discover how to masturbate at a very early age, but I didn’t connect that with anything sexual, because I didn’t have any concept of what sexuality was. And frankly, even though I have a better understanding of it now, I still don’t connect masturbation with sexuality. It’s purely physical, in my experience, and has absolutely nothing to do with other people. I never thought about other people and their naughty bits when I did it as a kid. Why should I have? For a long time, I only had the faintest idea of what sex actually was, and even when I had it basically figured out, I didn’t know why anyone would want to do that, nor did I care. I mostly just never thought about it.
Moreover, I didn’t even think about romance, when I was a kid. I was certainly told to, over and over again, through all the fairy tale socialization that targets little girls, and in some respect I did, but I just never applied that to myself. I never imagined my own wedding, I never imagined some prince on a white horse come to rescue me. I imagined being a princess, sure, but mostly I just imagined wearing pretty dresses and jewelry. There was no element of either romance or sexuality in any of my childhood play. I told stories about other people getting married, I made up characters and pretended to be them, but I never thought of any of that as my own possible future. I kind of supposed I would eventually get married, I guess, but in a very distant way. It was just never a focus for my attention, as I now realize that it may have been for a lot of other girls.
As I got older, of course, I was educated about sex, and told that it was a bad idea, that I should wait until I got married. I just shrugged and said, “Okay.” I wasn’t thinking about trying it anyway, so why wouldn’t I wait? Eventually as I began to question the church, I also began to question whether sex before marriage was such a bad thing, but I still thought it would be a good idea to wait until I was at least in my twenties to have sex. I knew I wasn’t ready for it. Obviously not, since I wasn’t even interested. I assumed I would be by then, and in a way I was right. But I still had no concept of sexuality as a separate motivator from romance. I thought I would probably be in a relationship by then, and I would just eventually have sex as part of maintaining that relationship. I didn’t think I would want to have sex just to have sex; I thought of it as an expression of love rather than a desirable act in and of itself.
In a way, you could say I understood myself even back then. The thing is, I just didn’t understand other people. The boys, well, I knew because I had been told over and over again that they were going to want to have sex, but the girls? I assumed they all just wanted boyfriends out of romantic interest, and would just let themselves be pressured into having sex. I didn’t know any of them actually wanted to. It didn’t occur to me that other girls my age might actually be ready to start having sex for a long time–not until I was fifteen, and my best friend told me she’d lost her virginity.
But let’s back up a bit, shall we?
I was a bit of a nerd, in middle school. Okay, yeah, really I was an otaku. It’s not that anime completely dominated my life, because I don’t think I was ever THAT into it (not as much as kids these days are), but I thought it was pretty darn cool. At that time, of course, it was pretty unpopular. Only about a handful of kids in my entire school liked it, and most of us were made fun of regularly. I was seen as one of the loser kids, because I preferred to keep to myself and watch weird Japanese cartoons, and I didn’t show any interest in normal things like boys.
In sixth grade, I had no friends, but nobody really picked on me, either. In seventh grade, I made friends with a small group of sixth graders who liked anime, and hung out with them every day at lunch. My school had different lunch shifts for each grade, but due to having an advanced class that lasted three periods in the afternoon, my class had to eat lunch with the sixth graders. This was advantageous for me since almost all my friends were sixth graders, but of course my classmates hated it because it meant they couldn’t hang out with their friends. The girls in my class saw me as weird because I would hang out with the sixth graders instead of trying to fit in with them (which I didn’t want to do, because they were horrible). They had the typical popularity contest mentality, and it made no sense to them why I didn’t want to be a part of that. It made even less sense to them why I didn’t show any interest in boys. They tested me over and over again throughout the year, mean-spiritedly telling me that so-and-so liked me, just to see how I would react. I knew they were lying, and I didn’t care anyway, so I mostly just gave them blank stares. They tried to play matchmaker, harassing both me and the least popular male student in the class to get together. When all their attempts to goad me failed, they assumed I was a lesbian, and one of them asked me out (on a dare, I’m sure). I gave her a look like she was crazy, and then ignored her for the rest of the afternoon.
At that point, I wasn’t interested in anyone yet, male or female. I had never considered going on a date with anyone. By the time I got to high school, I still had never had a crush on anyone around me, but I had started considering (in a vague, distant way) whether I was straight or not. I wasn’t revolted by the idea of being with a woman, as my straight friends apparently were, and in fact I found myself more aesthetically attracted to women anyway, so I figured I could just as easily fall in love with a woman as I could a man, and began calling myself bisexual. As I became more aware of the fact that not everyone lives within the rigid male/female dichotomy, and making friends with transgendered people, I began to realize that I am equally able to fall in love with a transgendered person as I am with cisgendered people. So I changed my label to pansexual to reflect this, though I joked that I was really more like an asexual.
I already knew, by this point, that if I was a late bloomer, I was abnormally late. Even my own parents had started assuming I was a lesbian. But I still just got along with my life, figuring that I would have been interested in someone if there had been any interesting people around me. Finally, when I was seventeen, one of my friends told me he was asexual. My reaction was something along the lines of, “Oh… yeah, me too.” Then he was like, “Asexual pride, yay!!” and he linked me to AVEN. And from then on, I started seriously identifying as asexual.
It wasn’t so much a revelation to me, because I had already basically understood myself for years; I just didn’t have a label. And this label fit me, and it fit well. I had never really been able to identify with other people’s experiences when it came to sexuality, but reading what people had to say on AVEN sparked a sense of familiarity. It felt like coming home. It gave me a way to express how I am to other people, which opened the door for me to begin to form romantic attachments to other people. Before, I had never been capable of doing that because I had always been aware that I was different from them, but had no way to explain it so that they could understand me. Now that I understood myself in other-focused terms, I found I was ready to try negotiating a relationship.
Since I figured out the big picture, I have started regularly questioning myself on the little details of my asexuality, figuring out what I like and don’t like, and where my limits are. I’ve figured out that the asexual label doesn’t fit me 100%, that I lie somewhere within the gray area, but compared with sexuals I am still way too far in the white area, so to speak, to identify as sexual. I’m still in the process of fine-tuning my understanding of myself, as I suspect I will be all my life, but it’s a rewarding process. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I have developed my sexual identity, and how it continues to develop to this day.
