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Jun. 25th, 2019 03:29 pmI made a post on tumblr earlier today where I said that I feel like my gender and my sexuality (not the orientation kind, the other kind, that it makes me break out in hives to admit to having) are very tangled together, and how weird that makes things. Book asked me to elaborate and at least here no-one's going to reblog me and take me out of context just because I'm daring to not only be ace but also be an "atypical" ace.
Sidenote: There is no typical ace, but part of the reason that the tumblr ace community and I aren't on speaking terms is that it's been simplified into 'being ace is about not having sex' and I'm sorry but that's not my style. So I feel atypically ace, in tumblr terms, although in reality there is no typical/atypical.
So, okay, here are the facts:
I'm ace and aro. I neither experience sexual nor romantic attraction.
I'm bi. I experience some kind of attraction and at this point in my life it's more trouble than it's worth to figure out the nuances of that because, I'm a happily engaged man and even though I'm polyam, theoretically, anyone I'm with is already going to have known me long enough to bypass any initial attractions, anyway, so it's an entirely academic issue.
The people I see in fiction that I relate to for gender reasons most strongly are often people who have a distinctly unsentimental approach to sex, but are also people who are attractive and desirable. I joke that I'm bigender between '1790s harlot' and 'queer 1890s gentleman'. Sorry, this is probably going to go really disjointed, but it makes sense in my head. There's a sexual component to my Ultimate Self in my head, a kind of confidence and flirtatiousness and tendency towards enjoying casual sex and sex-as-exchange or sex-as-currency (not just in the sex work sense).
There's a particular type of rakish gentleman you get, even into Christie, and something about that is magnetic to me - and I know it's a homophobic stereotype but it's there in the 1890s part of my gender too, for better or for worse.
It's not my sexual orientation. It's not. It's not about my experiencing of sexual attraction, it's about being the object of attraction, and being able to use it - I'm not a gay man, I'm not especially attracted to men even insofar as I'm attracted to anyone, but queer man who is desirable to queer men is a big chunk of my gender. Queer man who has sex with queer men is, also, a big chunk of my gender. The same is true of men who are into women, and occasionally women who are into women, but in a very specific kind of a way - in the way that C19 and earlier homosexuality is expressly not cis, so the being-into-women makes me not cis, even in that specific moment/context I'm not a man.
I think there's a difference, to me, even generally, between orientation and activity (there always is I know but a lot of people seem to chose who they have sex with on the basis of attraction and I know and understand this but like....I wouldn't have sex if I did that, and I like sex, so, you know)
I don't know, I don't know that this made sense and I don't know that it's even the whole story, but hopefully this is a start?
Sidenote: There is no typical ace, but part of the reason that the tumblr ace community and I aren't on speaking terms is that it's been simplified into 'being ace is about not having sex' and I'm sorry but that's not my style. So I feel atypically ace, in tumblr terms, although in reality there is no typical/atypical.
So, okay, here are the facts:
I'm ace and aro. I neither experience sexual nor romantic attraction.
I'm bi. I experience some kind of attraction and at this point in my life it's more trouble than it's worth to figure out the nuances of that because, I'm a happily engaged man and even though I'm polyam, theoretically, anyone I'm with is already going to have known me long enough to bypass any initial attractions, anyway, so it's an entirely academic issue.
The people I see in fiction that I relate to for gender reasons most strongly are often people who have a distinctly unsentimental approach to sex, but are also people who are attractive and desirable. I joke that I'm bigender between '1790s harlot' and 'queer 1890s gentleman'. Sorry, this is probably going to go really disjointed, but it makes sense in my head. There's a sexual component to my Ultimate Self in my head, a kind of confidence and flirtatiousness and tendency towards enjoying casual sex and sex-as-exchange or sex-as-currency (not just in the sex work sense).
There's a particular type of rakish gentleman you get, even into Christie, and something about that is magnetic to me - and I know it's a homophobic stereotype but it's there in the 1890s part of my gender too, for better or for worse.
It's not my sexual orientation. It's not. It's not about my experiencing of sexual attraction, it's about being the object of attraction, and being able to use it - I'm not a gay man, I'm not especially attracted to men even insofar as I'm attracted to anyone, but queer man who is desirable to queer men is a big chunk of my gender. Queer man who has sex with queer men is, also, a big chunk of my gender. The same is true of men who are into women, and occasionally women who are into women, but in a very specific kind of a way - in the way that C19 and earlier homosexuality is expressly not cis, so the being-into-women makes me not cis, even in that specific moment/context I'm not a man.
I think there's a difference, to me, even generally, between orientation and activity (there always is I know but a lot of people seem to chose who they have sex with on the basis of attraction and I know and understand this but like....I wouldn't have sex if I did that, and I like sex, so, you know)
I don't know, I don't know that this made sense and I don't know that it's even the whole story, but hopefully this is a start?
