Asexuality: A Brief Introduction

How do I tell if someone is asexual?

You ask them.

There are no physical indicators of asexuality. You can’t tell that someone is asexual just by looking, even if you’re looking at them with their clothes off. You can’t tell by how tall we are, by the rhythm to our step, by the way we talk, by the color of our eyes or by the size of our hair.

You can’t look at the way someone behaves, either. Asexuals act the same as everyone else. You can’t say “That person doesn’t have sex, so they must be asexual”, because being asexual doesn’t necessarily mean that someone doesn’t have sex, and not having sex doesn’t necessarily mean that someone is asexual.

The only way to know for sure if someone is actually asexual is to talk to them about it.

Is there a cure for asexuality?

Asexuality is not a disease, so, no. There isn’t a cure because there’s nothing to be cured.

Is “asexual” another way to say “celibate”?

Celibacy and asexuality are not the same thing.

Celibacy is a behavior, it describes one’s actions. A celibate person does not have sex.

Asexuality is an orientation, it describes one’s attractions. An asexual person does not experience sexual attraction.

It’s possible for a celibate person to experience sexual attraction and simply not act on it. It’s possible for an asexual person to have sex, even though they don’t feel any sexual attraction toward their partner. And it’s possible for a person to be both celibate and asexual, where they don’t have sex, nor do they experience sexual attraction.

How old does someone have to be before they can know they’re asexual?

Old enough to say “I’m asexual”.

There’s no minimum age for asexuality, just like there’s no minimum age for any other sexual orientation. You never hear anyone say “Well, you’re only 15, so just to be safe, you might want to give it a few more years to see before you rule out bisexuality. You never know when some hot guy might catch your eye!” That would be ridiculous.

Presumably, by the time someone is at the point where they’re comfortable with identifying as asexual, they’ve spent some time thinking about it. They’ve gone through the process of realizing that they’re different from their friends and wondering why they’re not as interested in sex as everyone else around them. They’ve spent long hard hours questioning themselves, trying to figure out who they are.

Possible Signs of Asexuality

A lack of experiencing sexual attraction is the only thing that all asexuals have in common. That’s what the definition of asexuality is. But that definition doesn’t help people who are trying to figure out if they’re asexual. It’s a definition through negation, which isn’t useful if you’re not sure what’s being negated. It’s like saying “You’re unxonoxian if you’ve never seen a xonox.” How are you supposed to know if you’ve never seen a xonox, when you have absolutely no idea what a xonox is? Maybe you’ve seen one, but just didn’t know that’s what it was called. So you ask someone how to know if you’ve seen a xonox, and the best answer they can give is “Well, if you’d ever seen a xonox, you’d know.”[4]

Because of this, figuring out if you’re asexual can be a challenge. How do you know if you’ve never felt sexual attraction when you’re not sure what sexual attraction even is, and no one can satisfactorily explain it to you? What I’ve found is that most asexuals don’t come to the realization that they’re ace from reading the definition of the word. Instead, they read what someone else wrote on a blog or in forum posts, or they see a news article or YouTube video on asexuality and think, “That person is talking about me.”

Even though a lack of sexual attraction is the only thing all asexuals have in common, there are clusters of shared experiences, similar things that some asexuals have felt. It’s these shared experiences which often make people come to realize that they’re asexual. In this section, I’m going to explore some of them.

(Please note: These aren’t universal ace traits, so don’t worry if you don’t fit into them all. I haven’t even experienced all of these myself. This shouldn’t be looked at like a checklist or “Am I Asexual?” test or anything like that. You can still be asexual even if you’ve experienced none of the things on this list and you may not be asexual even if you’ve experienced most of them. There’s no diagnostic test to confirm if you’re asexual, there’s no twenty-seven point checklist, and you don’t have to pass an initiation or be referred by someone who’s already in the club. The only person who can truly determine your sexual orientation is you.

Also, I want to note that these thoughts or experiences should not be taken as some sort of manifesto of the unquestioned and unified belief system of all asexuals. They’re not necessarily the right experiences or the wrong experiences, and certainly, some of them may be misguided or born out of ignorance. I am writing about them here because some asexuals have passed through these thoughts on their way to discovering their identity, and I felt it was important to mention them for those people still making the journey and who may currently be thinking the same thoughts.)

Personality and Identity

In this first installment, I’m going to talk mostly about personal thoughts, thoughts about yourself and your identity.

You don’t think about sex.

When thinking about activities you’d like to do with a romantic interest, sex rarely makes the list. You might not catch the punchline to a dirty joke, because you’re not operating in that frame of reference. When other people start talking about sex, you have to take a second to remember that other people think about that sort of thing. When you hear that old statistic that people think about sex every seven seconds, you only think about how wrong that statistic is.

You realize that everyone else thinks about sex in a completely different manner than you do.

One day, I was talking with a friend about some sex scene on a TV show I’d seen the day before. I was trying to figure out the positioning and mechanics of what was supposedly going on because it didn’t make sense to me. As the conversation went on, it became apparent that I was focused on the wrong thing, that it wasn’t meant to be about the impossible and/or uncomfortable contortions required to make the scene believable, it was meant to be about the sex.

This, in itself, wasn’t weird. I’ll often find things odd about scenes in movies or TV shows and try to sort out the problems afterward. What was weird is that at no point in the conversation did I ever think anything like “Oh hey, sex! Yay!” I realized that I never really did think that way. Ever.

So I started rewinding my life, going over various sexual situations from my past. What struck me was how, in almost every single one of them, there was something that made me feel different. Left out. One or two things over the years might have just been a fluke. A handful of things bunched together during one summer might have just been a phase. But here, in event after encounter after situation, consistently,