Thank you to everyone who came to this blog, wrote emails and comments to tell me what you thought of it, and made me feel that I was doing something useful here. I am glad to be finally doing it again.

See you there

EDIT (November 28, 2010): The new Petri Dish is now gone, but an archive of the posts is available here.

I have been dealing with some issues these past months (more specifically, my – hopefully – final year in graduate school and clinical depression – yes, the two are related) and asexuality was often very far from my mind. For a long time, I felt that I was not myself anymore; if I had remembered this blog, I would have been unable to relate to anything I had written here, or to any of the unfinished drafts awaiting completion and publication.

The asexual community was, in several direct and indirect ways, a great support. Some people on AVEN have been really kind to me when I felt low, even though they did not even know me. The four meetups I attended were some of the few bright points in otherwise dark months. My asexy friends have been great. And my main support and comfort during those months was my friendship with an asexy person I met through this very blog.

The past months were very painful, and I do not want to imagine ever having to go through them again. But some good things happened as well. I have opened myself to new ideas. I have tried to see things differently and to learn more about various things. I have grown. And this has led me to a better understanding of myself. The process is not over, there are still things I need to figure out, but now it seems to me that self-discovery is perhaps never over, that it is not supposed to end – that, as I keep learning about the world, I will also keep learning about myself. It is quite an exciting idea.

Now that I am well again, and that I am back to being myself (and, in fact, an improved version of myself), it is time to come back to this blog. And, since I have grown, it seems appropriate to give myself a larger Petri dish.

I wanted to wait a bit more to announce this, but I am getting rather excited about it, and I can see no reason why things should not happen according to plan – so I will not wait much longer.

In two weeks exactly, on June 4, 2010 – the fourth anniversary of the event that led me to question my assumed orientation and eventually come to identity as asexual – a new Petri dish will appear, in a different location, and all new blog posts will be published there. This present blog will not disappear, but it will no longer be updated, and comments will be closed.

Until then, you can follow updates about the setting up of my new Petri dish on my Twitter account.

It is because spending time with other asexual people is the closest to our home planet as we can get.

I have written before that I feel that I must be from another planet, and it appears that some other asexual people feel the same. In fact, I have felt that way all my life, not only because of my orientations – since I was not always aware of them – but because I could feel I was different from other people I knew (especially people my age) in various ways: I did not have the same interests, use the same slang, care about the same things. Because of that, I found it very difficult to relate to my classmates; it seemed to me that we could not be from the same world at all. Now, of course, it is because I am asexual and aromantic (and aware of those orientations) that I often find it difficult to relate to others – and in a way, it is maybe worse than when I was growing up, because back then I still could relate to my family and feel that they, at least, were from the same planet as I. But it is not the case anymore; my parents are very understanding of my asexuality and my aromanticism, but still, they are not asexual or aromantic, and even though they try very hard to see things from my point of view, and succeed most of the time, that does not make them asexual or aromantic. They try to understand how I feel about things, but of course they do not feel the same. When I am with them, I feel I am in a safe place, among friendly natives – but they are not from my home planet.

Until very recently, I did not think I actually needed to be among my own kind. I have never really minded being alone (this is actually my natural state of being; I am always glad to spend time with my friends, but I do not need other people around to be happy), so feeling I was from another planet did not mean that I felt isolated on this one. I daydream sometimes about what my metaphorical home planet would be like, but I do not long for it. Or so I thought.

When I attended the Asexy Dirty Weekend in Bath, I did not really feel there was anything special about being among asexual people. We did not really talk all that much about asexuality; we talked about AVEN, about other meetups, about visibility projects, but not really about asexuality itself, about how it is like for us to be asexual. As I wrote later, “it does seem that meetups are really about meeting other people, and asexuality does not really matter – the people attending happen to be asexual or related to asexuality in some way simply because the meetups are organized via AVEN, but asexuality is not the focus of meetups”. I did not think this was disappointing, in fact I liked it better this way, as talking nearly exclusively about asexuality would certainly have been rather boring; but this also meant that spending time with other asexuals did not seem different from spending time with other people, no matter what their orientation is.

When the second Asexy Dirty Weekend was announced, I was very eager to attend it – and I wondered about that. True, I had had fun in Bath, and I had met nice people that I wanted to see again and who (well, some of them, anyway) would be attending the new event – but it did not seem to be enough to justify my spending half a month’s food budget on a Eurostar round-trip ticket to England for only a weekend. There was something special about these people that made me really want to spend more time with them – something more than how nice they had been to me or how much fun I had had with them.

And then I realized what it was: with them, I felt – safe. Not because being with non-asexual people is dangerous or makes me feel worried about my physical safety or psychological well-being, no, but because with asexy people, I knew that my orientations were not in danger of being questioned and doubted. Everyone knew (or at least assumed) that I was asexual, and even if they might not know I was also aromantic, at least there was a good chance that they were aware of the possibility. No-one would think me weird for not having a boyfriend or try to comfort me for being single. There was no need to actually talk about asexuality, or about my orientations, for me to know I was safe, to know that if we did talk about it everyone would be open and understanding – and not as people who see asexuality from the outside, but as people who know what it feels like to be asexual, who are asexual themselves.

When I am among asexy people, I can be certain that no-one is assuming me to be heterosexual – something I strongly dislike and never know how to react to when it is made indirectly clear by something someone says. For a few hours, I am among my own kind – among people who do not assume that I must be interested in sex and dating, among people who may never think about sex or dating unless the outside world reminds them that such things exist and matter to some people. For a few hours, it is as if I were back on my long-lost home planet – that place where asexuality is the natural state and where no-one has ever heard of or thought about sex, and where friendships are the closest, strongest, most meaningful relationships people can build (all right, so maybe not all asexual people are from that specific aromantic planet, but they’re from a planet very close by). There is no need to talk about asexuality, because it is everywhere – while we are together, we can forget that asexuality is not the mainstream sexual orientation in the wider world, because it is the mainstream orientation in our little group, at least.

This, in turn, led me to finally understand why people who belong to “minorities” tend to want to meet other people like themselves and get together. It is not at all because they feel they can only relate to people who are like them, or because they distrust people who are not like them, or because they hope that this common point will make it easier to become friends with people who are like them. No, it is because it is exhausting to live in a society which does not always recognize us, in which we are always assumed to be something we are not, and where, very often, we cannot correct those mistaken assumptions – and from time to time, we need to be among our own kind, among people who understand what we are and who see the world the way we do. We cannot go back to our home planet – but we can build a safe haven with our own kind, and for a while, we can forget how far from home we are.

Now I only wish I did not have to go so far from my Earth home to find this, and could meet with asexy people nearer the place where I live, without months going by between two meetings. But AVENfr is not an option for me, and I have not yet found another way.

Just like sexual attraction, sexual desire is a concept I cannot relate to and which I cannot easily define. I assume that experiencing sexual desire for someone means to want to have sex with them; while sexual attraction, to me, would more something like “hmm, this is someone I could imagine having sex with”, sexual desire would be something much stronger, like “I need to have sex with that person, there is nothing else in the world I want more” or something along those lines. I understand sexual attraction to be the awareness of a possiblity (that someone is the kind of person one might want to have sex with) and sexual desire to be much more specific and intense; obviously, since I have experienced neither, I may be totally wrong.

I do understand desire – not sexual desire, obviously, but the other kinds. I know how it feels like to desperately want something, so much that this wanting becomes physical and being denied is nearly unbearable. I have even felt that way about people – although I never quite understood what it was I wanted them for; I just knew that thinking about them hurt because I wanted something more with them, “more” remaining something undefined (and yes, I did consider the possibility that what I wanted was sex, and it was not – it was not romance either, by the way). So I can imagine what it feels like to “want” someone – just not what it feels like to want them in a sexual way; sex being something repulsive rather than desirable for me, I cannot imagine wanting to engage in it, and especially not wanting it with the intensity of desire that I have experienced for other things.

Still, in a way it is an emotion I can understand – I may not understand this specific kind of desire, but I still do know how it feels like to want something so very much. It would scare me to find out that someone desires me sexually (even more than if they were merely sexually attracted to me) – not because I would be afraid that the person might try to get by force what I could never give them willingly, but because I am always a bit afraid when someone wants something from me that I know I cannot give them, as if I felt they have no right to want such things from me – even though wanting them does not actually take anything from me, and my fear does not have anything to do with being worried that they will try to take what they want not matter what I want. In the past it also scared me to find out that someone was “in love” (his words, not mine – it seemed to me that he did not know me well enough to be truly “in love” with me and that he merely had a crush on me, but what do I know?) with me; I did not identify as aromantic or celibate then, but I did feel that I was not made for romance, and that I could never return his feelings, and I was afraid to be “in his debt” in such a way. With sexual desire, I would probably be even more uncomfortable, not only because sexual desire is an emotion that I understand to be much more intense than whatever feelings this guy really had for me, but also because of the fact that it is difficult for me, as I explained in my previous post, to see sexual attraction (and sexual desire) as something positive, as a compliment. I can make myself see it as something that is not negative, but I do not think I will ever be flattered or happy if someone experiences sexual attraction or sexual desire for me.

This was not necessarily the topic I had initially envisioned to launch this new series of posts, but very recently a few comments about sexual attraction on one of my older posts reminded me that this is quite certainly one of the things that make the less sense to me about the non-asexual world – and since becoming aware of this is what led me to first consider the possibility that I might be asexual, maybe it is, actually, the most fitting start for this new series.

I realized that I had no idea what “sexual attraction” meant about three years ago, when I became aware that my feelings for a woman I knew were much stronger than mere admiration and that maybe I was not heterosexual at all. I looked up resources about bisexuality on the Web to find more information about this orientation and see if it fitted me or not, but the definitions I found confused me, because they all more or less summed everything up to “you are bisexual if you are sexually attracted to both men and women” and I did not understand what “sexually attracted” meant. It was not a concept I had ever thought about. I identified as heterosexual more by default than certainty (I was a girl, so by default I had to like guys, unless I had good reasons to think otherwise – and until that moment I had never thought I had any reasons to question my orientation); I had crushes on guys and not on girls (or so I thought, anyway) so clearly I had to be heterosexual. When I realized I could also have crushes on women, I supposed it meant I was bisexual – but suddenly these definitions reminded me that these were sexual orientations I was thinking about, and that they were not just about crushes, but about sex – and sex was not something I had ever seriously thought about.

I decided to interpret “sexual attraction” as “wanting to have sex with the person one feel attracted to” and while this was a concept I could understand, it was not one I could relate to; understanding this eventually led me to identify as asexual.

As a sex-repulsed asexual, I find it very difficult to imagine people wanting to have sex in the first place. I am not sex-negative and I do not think sex is wrong, I just find it ludicrous at best and disgusting at worst. How one can desire to engage in something like that is beyond me – the best I can do is to remember that people do want to engage in that activity and often enjoy it very much, but it definitely seems very strange to me.

Looking at someone and thinking “I’d like to have sex with him/her” (this is how I imagine sexual attraction to be like) seems even stranger, especially as this is supposed to be something positive, like a compliment. A few times, I have tried to think about people I find attractive in those terms – to picture myself having sex, or wanting to have sex, with them. But it always killed the attraction rather than enhanced it – it made me feel very uncomfortable and I could not endure thinking about that very long, because it felt wrong to think about these people in such a way. I do not mean that it felt wrong in a moral sense, but rather that it did not seem to be a natural way for me to think about them. I could not keep feeling attracted to them after thinking about them in a sexual way (or whatever I imagine to be a sexual way, obviously).

Back when I was still trying to figure out whether I was asexual, I remember the final test that convinced me I was definitely asexual. I thought about my celebrity crush – a movie star I had had a crush on for several years – and asked myself to imagine what I would like to happen if he could suddenly appear in my room and if everything was possible (meaning that if I wanted something to happen, for instance if I wanted him to kiss me, he would really want to do it and not just submit to my every wish like a puppet). Basically, what I thought was that if there was one person in the world I should be sexually attracted to, it should be him, since I had been totally crazy about him for years. But I could not imagine doing anything sexual with him. I even thought that I really did not want him to suddenly appear on my bed naked or anything like that – I could think of so many outfits he had worn in movies that I would rather see him wear! I think that back then I thought that if he kissed me and if we cuddled it would be nice, but nothing more. Thinking about seeing him naked, touching his naked body (not even thinking about touching him there), or even worse, being naked and touched by him, were all very unpleasant images that I hurriedly kicked out of my mind before they could kill my attraction to him. Whatever I wanted to do with my celebrity crush, sex was absolutely not on the list.

I also find it hard to understand sexual attraction as a positive feeling, because I cannot help feeling it is quite demeaning to the person who is desired in that way. Now, this is just my gut feeling – I try very hard not to think of it that way because it seems too sex-negative. But I find it very hard to imagine an emotional component of sex – it seems merely physical (and unpleasantly so) to me. So, from that point of view, being sexually attracted to someone means being attracted to their body and their body only, and this offends me – it seems disrespectful to the person to want to use their body in that way.

I like to think (and I am aware that this is probably totally unrealistic wishful thinking) of myself as impervious to sexual attraction – and I do not mean that I think of myself as unable to experience it (quite obviously, it is the case – if I could experience it, I would certainly not have such a negative idea of it; I tend not to reject things I experience, but to try to understand and eventually accept them), but that I think of myself as someone that no-one could feel sexually attracted to. I know it is quite certainly not the case, as there is nothing about my face or my body that should repulse the average person and therefore no reason why, for statistical reasons alone, there cannot be at least one person who saw me once and thought me sexually attractive – but thinking of someone being attracted to me in that way is nearly unbearable. I prefer to live in a fantasy world, in which my innocent and youthful looks are enough to prevent anyone from having impure thoughts about me (just kidding here – I do not believe in purity or think that sex is evil or whatever).

I am aware that I have a very negative view of sexual attraction. On the other hand, I live in a culture that highly values it and among people who are shocked when I tell them how I understand it, because they never saw it as the ugly thing it is for me, so I try to remember the way they understand it (since it is a concept that they relate to, not I, it seems that I should try to see it from their point of view and not mine), even though I will probably never be able to see things that way myself. I do not do this in order to pretend to understand things the way most other people do, but simply in order not to be intolerant and reject what they experience simply because it does not make sense or appears unpleasant to me. I wish others would see things from my point of view sometimes and understand that there are things (like sexual attraction) that I do not experience and that I cannot relate to the way they do; the least I can do is to know how they see things and accept that we perceive them differently.

This led me, among other things, to question the belief that the concept of romantic love is universal and that romantic relationships are essential components of happiness, and to discover my own aromanticism and come to identify as celibate, something which matters a great deal to me now. It has also led me to realize that there are things that everyone takes for granted but that I often find it difficult to fully understand or that make no sense at all to me – like sex, romantic relationships and the whole concept of “cheating”, for instance.

In my previous post, I wrote that I did not want to keep thinking like the heteronormative person I am not, and that I had decided to stop pretending I understood and believed in the norms and assumptions of the heteronormative society I live in and to ask questions to make my ignorance known and maybe gain a better understanding – but an outsider’s understanding – of these matters. I think that this blog is also a good place for me to try to make sense of them – or at least to state that they make no sense to me at the moment.

In my next posts, I intend to explore these various concepts, norms, ideas and beliefs from an outsider’s point of view – a little, I suppose, like a visitor from another planet entirely populated with asexual beings (“asexual” taking here also its biological sense of “which reproduces asexually”) would try to make sense of them. After all, the more I think about all this, the more I feel I am coming from another planet.

Of course, the problem – if we can call it that – with passing is not so much that people’s orientations are not conspicuous enough, but rather that people in general tend to assume that everyone is heterosexual until told otherwise (and may even be reluctant to accept that someone is not heterosexual when they are told about it). The problem is not that people do not behave in ways that make it clear which gender they are attracted to (if any) and which kinds of attractions they experience; sexual and romantic orientations are only components of who a person is, and there is no reason why they should advertise those components more than others like, say, their favorite food or music genre. Still, while the possibility that someone might be a vegetarian or be totally insensitive to music is quite probably not the one that comes first into people’s minds, I do not believe that everyone is assumed to love, for instance, hamburgers and pop music, so why should we all be assumed to be romantically and sexually interested in people of the opposite gender?

Whether we want it or not, though, this is what happens, and most of the time, it probably does not seem worth it to correct inaccurate assumptions, especially when asexuality can be so difficult to explain in a way that make it acceptable for others. The mistake is not really a harmful one, either; by passing as heterosexual, we are playing it pretty safe. People are (unfortunately) sometimes hurt because they are not heterosexual, but the opposite is much rarer.

Still. I have realized that I am tired of passing – of allowing people to believe inaccurate things about me, simply because I do nothing to correct them when I could. It seems to me, at times, that I have something like a duty to reveal the truth, to come out as asexual and aromantic whenever I have the opportunity to do that (that is, when the context of the conversation leads rather easily to such a revelation, such as when people ask questions about my romantic life) because I may very well be the only asexual and aromantic person that most of my acquaintances know, so they may have no other opportunity of learning about these orientations. If I do not come out from time to time for visibility’s sake, it is rather unfair of me to complain that most people around me have a rather narrow, heteronormative view of the world – after all, it is likely that only I can change that.

I am tired, also, of still thinking according to norms and expectations that, although they are the mainstream norms and expectations of the society I grew up in, are not the ones I fit or believe in. Maybe I believed, until I was 21, that I wanted to fall in love and have wonderful sex with the man of my dreams; maybe I believed, until maybe a year ago, that even though I did not want sex, a romantic partner would make me happy, but now I have finally managed to dissociate what I really want from what cultural myths and social conditioning once convinced me I should and did want, so why should I keep thinking in ways that do not fit what I actually feel and want?

Let me give you an example. Two months ago, I started an internship in a big company. I work in a large office with four women and four men, all much older than I am; three of the women are married and have teenage children. Most conversations are about these women’s husbands and children (the men generally do not talk much, or when they take part in conversations it is always about more general things, but they do not talk about such aspects of their personal lives; the more personal details they give are usually where they spent their last vacation or where they are planning on spending the next one).

The only person who is about my age is another intern, who worked in that office for the first couple of weeks I was there, then was moved to another floor so he could be closer to his manager. As soon as I had been introduced to him, I wanted to get to know him better, simply because I was longing for someone my age I could talk to (and especially a guy, since there were only girls in my major last academic year, and I have grown tired of talks about boyfriends, clothes, and how cute the teaching assistant is but how sad it is that he is not a bit taller). But I was afraid to go and talk to him. Contrary to That American Kid, I do not find it easier to talk to guys because I am asexual. Obviously, I do not feel shy or embarrassed to talk to them because I want to appear cool and potentially attractive to them, but I feel shy and embarrassed because I am afraid they (or other people) will assume that if I talk to a guy, it is because I am romantically (or sexually – not that anyone would actually say it, but maybe they think it?) attracted to him – and I am uncomfortable with such an assumption.

This is, of course, the consequence of the same social conditioning that once made be believe that I might be happier if I had a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or that the best way to be close to someone would be to be their girlfriend. Just like I have discovered that romance does not necessarily make everyone happy, and that in my case it is quite the opposite, and that it is possible to be very close to someone without being their romantic partner, I am now aware that there are other reasons for talking to someone of the opposite gender (or even someone of the same gender) than romantic or sexual attraction (well, of course I always knew that – for years I had only male friends, after all; but apart from them, the only guys I then felt like talking to were guys I found attractive). So why do I keep thinking as if I did not know better? Why do I keep fearing that people might interpret my behavior in a specific way, when this specific interpretation is not the one that would come to my mind first?

In short, why am I still thinking like a heteronormative person?

I have decided to do my best to put an end to that. Since I know that I am not interested in getting to know that other intern for romantic or sexual motives, I will stop assuming that others will think that these are my motives. I will, in fact, ignore that possible interepretation, because it is not coherent with the way I think, with my asexual-, aromantic- and celibate-oriented view of the world, a view of the world which does not include romantic or sexual motivations. I will talk to him because I want to, and get out of my mind the possibility that I might be assumed to have different reasons for doing that – because these other reasons do not matter to me.

But wait, you will tell me. You have to remember that other people – most of the people you know, in fact – follow different rules, that if, say, someone asks you to have a drink with them after work, it may (it does not have to, but it may) mean that they are interested in getting to know you better so they can decide if they want to try to date you or not. You live in a mostly non-asexual, non-aromantic and non-celibate world, and you need to play by its rules.

Well, no, I do not think so. We need to play by the established rules when those rules are here to guarantee our safety – like driving on a given side of the road, waiting until the light is green to cross the street, and so on; if each person followed their own rules in such matters, many people would be hurt or killed in car accidents. We also need to follow some basic social rules of courtesy and good behavior so that it is easier for people to live together. But I do not think that, if I think as an asexual instead of trying to see things from the point of view of who I am not, it is going to cause such terrible misunderstandings that it will become difficult for me to keep interacting with others.

In fact, I probably misunderstand many things when I try to  think like a heteronormative person – since, after all, I am not heterosexual and do not really understand or know these rules very well. Most of the time, in a given situation, I sort of know what a heteronormative person is supposed to think, but it is not because I think that way – it is because I have heard other people talking about these things and I know what they think. I suppose, though, that at times my interpretations are wrong.

It is like trying to play a game I do not know the rules of and trying to figure the rule out by watching what the other players do. Because that game is of the kind that everyone is supposed to have learned to play as a child and to have played many times while growing up, none of the other players can imagine that anyone might not know the rules, and I am embarrassed to tell them that I do not know them and that in fact I have never played that game before, because I know that they will not believe me and it will take a long time and a lot of explanations to convince them that it is possible to grow up without playing that game. Until now, I did not say anything – I watched what the other players did and I tried to imitate them as well as I could. The game, however, was not very enjoyable for me, because I was imitating what I saw other people doing, but it made no sense to me; I was unable to think of a strategy, and therefore I had no chance of winning the game. If I asked someone to explain the rules to me, though, I might have more fun playing…

This is what I have decided to do. When I find myself involved in a conversation about sex or romantic relationships, instead of taking mostly everything for granted, like the non-asexual and non-aromantic people I am talking to, I now ask questions, and explain why I am asking them: “I’m sorry, but I have no experience with such things. What do you mean exactly by this?” or “I’m not sure I understand why this conclusion seems obvious to you – it’s not obvious to me, but that’s probably because I have never been in a situation like that. Could you explain to me why this is the only explanation?”

People are often surprised that I ask questions about things that seem obvious to them (like “being in a romantic relationship with that guy seems a lot of work and trouble – what is is exactly that makes it worth it for you?” or “you say that your romantic partner must always take your side if you are in a disagreement with one of your friends. Why is that?”) but they also answer, and it does not take too much to make them give a more detailed answer than “but it’s obvious” or “that’s just the way it is”. By asking questions, I am gaining a slightly better understanding of the world of sex and romance – but this time, it is an outsider’s understanding, not an insider’s. I am learning to see this strange world from the point of view of the extra-terrestrial being that I often feel I am in such situations, instead of trying to see it like a native, which makes no sense since I lack the personal experience and the interest required to really understand this world from the inside.

And, of course, by asking questions, I am making it clear to others that I am different from them when it comes to sex and romance – that I have not had the experiences they may assume a girl my age should have had and that none of this is obvious to me. It may not necessarily lead to my coming out to them as asexual and aromantic, but at least they usually notice that I approach sex and romance from an outsider’s point of view, something they probably never thought was possible before (how could someone feel that sex and romance are not things that concern them?). By asking questions about things that are supposed to be obvious to everyone (meaning: obvious to every non-asexual and non-aromantic person), I am not only gaining a better understanding of the non-asexual and non-aromantic world, but I am also making it more difficult for myself to “pass”.

I was aware, when I decided to attend it, that the Asexy Dirty Weekend was not a typical meetup, since it spread over a weekend instead of being a one-day event. In a way, it bothered me a little that this would be my first meetup, since whatever happened there would probably not be representative of what goes on at meetups in general:if I enjoyed it, I might be disappointed when attending one-day meetups in the future; if I did not, I might be put off attending meetups of any kind, even though whatever I disliked about the Asexy Dirty Weekend might be due to the fact that it was a weekend event. But I also wanted to be part of such a unique event – in fact, I think it was its uniqueness that made me want to attend it, while I had never really been tempted to attend a meetup before (I had thought about it, thought it would be nice, but never really tried to do it; I thought about meetups in general, but never actually considered attending a specific one). I happened to have planned to be in London around that date, so traveilling to Bath was not really much trouble; I might not have done it just for one day, though, but for a weekend, it certainly seemed worth it – and it seemed I simply could not miss such an occasion.

In the end, it turned out that a weekend event was probably the best kind of meetup I could choose to attend. I met some people on Saturday and some on Sunday, so the first good thing is that I did not meet everyone at once. The other good thing is that I had more time to get to know the other people (well, those who had arrived on Saturday like me, anyway) so by Sunday afternoon I felt rather comfortable with most of the people I had met on Saturday. A one-day event would have been too short for that, I think. Another thing that helped is that I helped cooking dinner on Saturday night, so by working in the kitchen with some other people I got to talk to them and get to know them a little, more easily than I got to know the other people the next day while just walking with them in Bath or sitting on the boat.

As I expected, there was little talk about asexuality – someone said at one point “I have never been in a room with so many asexuals!” and another person replied that they never really thought about that – about the fact that the other people were asexual too. So it does seem that meetups are really about meeting other people, and asexuality does not really matter – the people attending happen to be asexual or related to asexuality in some way simply because the meetups are organized via AVEN, but asexuality is not the focus of meetups. I expected that, and I think it makes sense; our sexual orientation is important to us (or at least, it is to me), but it is not the main focus of our lives. Still, even though asexuality was rarely discussed, there were several moments when it was mentioned or when what someone said clearly indicated they were asexual, and that certainly fulfilled my expectations about reassurance.

I definitely had a great time, met very nice and interesting people (some I had never really noticed on the AVEN boards – how could I, since I nearly never go there? – and others I had noticed in the thread dedicated to the Asexy Dirty Weekend and was looking forward to meeting) and felt sad to leave them. I hope I will be able to go back to the UK and attend another meetup – maybe one of the London ones, since I enjoyed my stay in London and want to go back there.

I am aware that this is a very strange question to ask, a few hours before attending a meetup for the first time… But I have been wondering, lately, why exactly I was going to that “Asexy Dirty Weekend”, why I was so excited and nervous about it, and what the point of meetups is in the first place.

Now, I am aware that meetups are a huge thing in the asexual community – there is a whole section of the AVEN boards dedicated to them, after all. People dedicate a lot of energy to organizing them – finding a place and something to do, trying to decide on a date, advertising the event, trying to solve issues and dealing with last-minute problems or complicated people – and I admire and respect them for all that work.

But at the same time, I cannot help wondering why they do it – why they think it is so important that meetups take place at all.

Is it about visibility? Organizing meetups to coordinate visibility events is something I can understand. I agree that visibility is important – I often wonder what a mess my life would be now if I had not found out I was asexual three years ago, and I am grateful to all the people who did visibility work and made it possible for me to read about asexuality and eventually realize that I was asexual myself. Yes, asexual people gathering together to raise awareness of asexuality – whether it is by taking part in a parade, setting up a booth at some LGBTQ event, or… well, I have very little knowledge of such things so I have no idea what a group of asexual people might do to raise awareness of asexuality – makes sense to me and I understand their purpose.

Many meetups, though – including the one I am about to attend – seem to be mostly about asexual people getting together, and this is where I am a bit confused.

Maybe it is because I am a fairly solitary person. I do have friends, including friends that I love so much that I cannot imagine living without them in my life, but most of the time I prefer being on my own. That means that I am not really trying to meet new people and make new friends; I am more than happy with the friends I already have (sometimes I meet someone new by chance and like that person and hope we can be friends, but I do not really know what to do to make that happen, so it often fails). So, if the point of meetups is to meet new people and hopefully make new friends, while I can imagine that this would be important to other people, it is not important to me – especially since I cannot see how a common sexual orientation could be a guarantee that we will become friends anyway. I have only met one other asexual in person (I have corresponded via email with several and I have become close friends with one whom I have not yet met in person) and it did not work out at all; our personalities were too different and I felt very uncomfortable with her. This has not prejudiced me against other asexual people – my close online friend is the proof that there are indeed asexual people I can feel very comfortable with – or made me wary of meeting other asexual people in person, but it has made me aware – and this is something so obvious that I should have understood it from the start – that it is not because someone is asexual that we will necessarily have compatible interests or personalities.

Maybe meetups are about having fun in a “safe” environment? I do not mean here, of course, that non-asexual people are a threat to asexual people, that we are in danger of being forced to have sex or whatever every time we are in the presence of a non-asexual person; I just mean that I, at least, often feel that I am living in a confusing world, where asexuality is not known and not recognized, which means that this world, in a way, is not made for people like me. I also very much dislike people having mistaken assumptions about me, and knowing that nearly everyone I know assumes – without even thinking about it, since this is supposed to be the way everyone is – that I am interested in sex (and in romance, romantic relationships, and so on) bothers me a lot. I do not feel that I am physically or mentally at risk in my daily life, but I can imagine that in the company of other asexual people (as I have been able to experience it via my online friendship with another asexual) I would at least feel safe in the sense that I would be certain that they do not expect or assume me to be someone that I am not, and that they totally understand what my orientation is. It is certainly appealing, but on the other hand, my asexuality is only a part of me, an important one to be sure, but not necessarily the most important – I have lived so far surrounded by people who do not know about it and it is not that hard; most of the time, I do not really think about it (I am only reminded of it when conversations turn to specific topics on which my sexual and romantic orientations influence me to have a totally different opinion from the other people around me). So, can this really be the one reason why I am going to spend a whole weekend with people I have never met (something I am terribly nervous about – positively excited, too, but mostly very, very scared) in a town where I have no other reason to go at that specific time?

When I do think about it, it really makes no sense. I am uncomfortable in groups; there should be about 7 other people for dinner tonight and a few more on Sunday. I am terrified of being “trapped” with people I do not know, in a place I cannot easily leave on my own, and yet I have agreed to join the others for dinner at a cottage who is certainly too far out of town for me to hope being able to walk back to my hotel (not that I expect it will be necessary, I merely need to know it is possible). And yet, despite all this, I am genuinely looking forward to this weekend – but why?

I guess that one reason is that everyone seems to be so nice. There is no reason why, statistically or scientifically or otherwise, asexual people should necessarily be nice people, but it seems that the ones I am about to meet are – so it definitely eases my nervousness, enough at least to make me do these things that are so uncharacteristic for me. But this, of course, is not the reason why I decided to attend that meetup in the first place.

In the end, I suppose it is for a silly reason.

I am going to this meetup because I need reassurance – I need to see other asexual people and be reminded that this is true, this is real. There are other people like me – this is not just something I am telling people to convince them that I have not just made it all up. There are other people who feel like me, and soon I will have met some of them and when I come out to someone and tell them “I am not the only one feeling that way, there are others too” I will be able to remember those people, to think about their faces, and maybe this will also give more confidence and more weight to my words, and make them more convincing.

And… maybe the people I am about to meet only have asexuality in common with me, but after all I have nearly nothing in common with most of the people I see everyday, so this does make a difference in a way. Enough, in any case, to make me decide to do something totally unexpected and attend this meetup. Enough to convince me that it is worth putting myself in a situation I know I will not be comfortable in. And look forward to doing it, too.

Well, and of course, it is an opportunity to wear one of my asexy t-shirts

]]> http://rainbowamoeba.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/why-meetups/feed/ 6 Rainbow Amoeba http://rainbowamoeba.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/three-years-already/ http://rainbowamoeba.wordpress.com/2009/06/11/three-years-already/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:16:14 +0000 Rainbow Amoeba http://rainbowamoeba.wordpress.com/?p=294 ]]> Last year, I chose June 4 to celebrate the anniversary of my discovery of my asexuality – or, more accurately, the anniversary of the day I first realized I was not heterosexual, and started the process that led me to identify as (at the time) bi-asexual.

I could not write a celebratory post on June 4 this year, because I was too busy with other things – the same other things that have prevented me from updating every other week as I should have – but anyway June 11 is just as important a day in my personal history, since it was the day that first phase of self-discovery came to an end – the day I triumphantly wrote in my private self-analysis blog “I am bi-asexual” and felt that these label did fit me.

Many things have changed since then. I do not identify as bi-asexual anymore, but as asexual and aromantic. I now define myself as celibate as well – or at least, this is how I would describe myself to others if there was a word in French for it; since there is not, and since I am not comfortable with the word “single” (it is too often interpreted as “single for now” or “single and looking”, which is not my case), I try to avoid using labels (unless I am filling an official form of some kind) and to simply convey that I am living alone, travelling alone, doing most things alone, and quite enjoying it. I have gone through another questioning phase since that first one (I did not mention it here, for many reasons, but it happened a few months ago) and I have come out of it more confident than ever that I am indeed asexual, and that becoming aware of it is one of the best things that ever happened to me. I have finally found a black (well, hematite) ring to wear on my ring middle finger, and bought my first AVEN shirts. And in a little over a week, I will be attending my first ever asexual meet-up – the Asexy Dirty Weekend in Bath. I am a bit nervous about meeting so many new people at the same time, but also very excited.

Oh, and now that all these things that have kept me away for the past few weeks are over, I am going to be able to update more frequently. I have been considering changing my schedule to update every ten days (on the 5th, the 15th and the 25th of each month) and I am going to try to do that; I have my half-written drafts waiting to be picked up again, completed and polished, so it should not be very difficult.