I’m feeling a little feisty today about my orientation so : #asexuality is often readily understood as a “lack of sexual attraction”, which is a useful description, especially for people comfortable in an allonormative system of thinking. However, I don’t love “lack”. 1/

“Lack” seems to affirm a reductive and condescending notion of asexuality as something like “pre-sexual” or innocent to sexual attraction. It’s also obviously grounded in asexuality as negatively pathological — if you “lack” sexual attraction, you deviate from those who don’t. 2/

My fellow aces can attest to the range of reactions we get from people we cone out to. In my experience, these reactions often center “the lack”: “you just haven’t met the right person”, “oh so you’re celibate”, “medication can effect sex drive”, etc. 3/

All of these reactions point to an assumption that the normative good life requires sexual attraction. To “lack” that attraction is often pitiable and certainly undesirable. 4/

In my thinking about this topic, I’ve been trying to reframe the “lack” as, instead, fullness and liberation. Centering sexual attraction feels to me like a defensive and reductive lens for understanding attraction and sexuality. 5/

It depresses me when I see purity culture, for instance, emphasizing sexual intimacy as a prize to be won in marriage, assuming that sexual attraction is of course always present and, in this case, in need of overcoming. 6/

I see this in romantic relationships, where the sexual attraction assumption is allowed to take a central role over other forms of intimacy in dealing those romantic bonds. 7/

Culturally normative depictions of Valentine’s Day capture the erotic assumptions of romantic relationships perfectly: to decouple sex and romance is to commit cultural blasphemy. 8/

All this is to say that to understand asexuality as a “lack” of some kind of essential human experience is to fall into the traps of a “sexusociety”, one which centers, even fetishizes, the sexually erotic, even when it claims to do the opposite (see purity culture). 9/

I understand my asexuality as a fully developed state of being. I don’t “lack” sexual attraction any more than the allosexuals in my life “lack” asexuality. Learning I was asexual in my early 30s felt like *liberation from* something sexusociety told me was a requirement. 10/

I celebrate Valentine’s Day because it reminds me that I no longer have to perform romance or sexual attraction. These are not requirements for human existence. These performances are embedded into a sexual assumption and you’re allowed to opt out. 11/11