Here are the other submissions.

Ace Amoeba writes about “dropping the A Bomb” on people and what is helpful to let them know that one is not simply The Asexual.

Elizabeth writes about stereotypes of asexuals and how they ought to be dealt with for a proper representation of asexuality in the media.

Heorrenda (that being me) writes about the fear of showing any weakness when presenting oneself as an asexual, and what to do about it.

Pip writes about the nebulousness of the asexual community and the implications of this concerning any shared objectives.

Sciatrix writes about why it can be much easier to talk on a panel about asexuality than it can be to talk to friends about it.

Thanks to everyone who submitted!  If you’re a bit late and would  still like to send something then go right ahead.  You can just post it as a comment below or email it to me, and I’ll include it in the list above.

As for next month’s carnival, I’m afraid all I can do right now is refer you to the masterpost, where you can see that we still need someone to volunteer to host the next one!

EDIT: Elizabeth will now be hosting the carnival for next month, on the topic of sexual exploration.

Along the way I’ve met what Sciatrix calls the unassailable asexual, one whose asexuality cannot be doubted by anyone for any reason.  Particularly in the case of the radio show, which involved a late-night interview with a sex therapist, I felt a tremendous pressure to be the unassailable asexual.  I don’t mean, of course, that anyone ever told me to be that person.  It just sort of happened that way, where by “sort of” I mean “inevitably”.  Why would that be?  Perhaps it has something to do with watching bits of interviews which people like David Jay have given on TV, where they’re often asked any number of shocking questions with the assumption that their identification as asexual cannot possibly be valid and so the hidden Truth of their sexuality must be discovered and made known.  Perhaps it has to do with the frequency at which these exact same sorts of questions are being asked when asexuals come out in more ordinary situations.  There’s also the matter that as ‘the asexual’ on the show I knew I wouldn’t only be speaking for myself: many people would be listening who’d never have heard anyone say that they’re asexual before, and so many of them probably couldn’t help but to see my own situation as somehow representative of all asexuals, and so any personal weakness I might show could be generalized and applied to all asexuals.  At least that’s what I was worried about, as invalid as the generalization would be.  Whatever the reason though, I assumed the worst and so armoured myself as though preparing to be the direct target of some kind of nuclear inquisition.  It’s not that I planned any sort of deceit.  I didn’t say to myself anything like, “I don’t have absolutely no libido, but I’ll present myself as though it were the case so that they can’t try to undermine me”.  Rather, under the pressure I felt and my own insecurity in confronting it I managed to tell myself who I was and would be as I felt was necessary.

(As it would happen, the host turned out to be reasonably well informed on asexuality.  She knew what sorts of questions would be considered rude and didn’t ask them, and more importantly it was clear that I hadn’t been invited simply as part of a demonstration on the absurdity of identifying as asexual.  The main difficulty I had turned out to be in covering all my talking points, since I’d prepared each of them as a defence against a particular attack.  I’d come prepared for all-out war and found myself unready for peace!  But I think we managed to have a nice discussion in the end, one of the callers aside maybe.)

True, this might be a common way of dealing with things like this, and more generally, to some extent I hear that we all build a number of personae for social interaction.  But I feel like I may as well have been wearing a mask for parts of the discussion.  While I talked about how much diversity there is in what is termed ‘asexual’ and the many ‘shades of grey’ that there are, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that I was thus described.  For ‘me’ there was no ambiguity, no trace of a loose thread from which my asexuality might be unravelled.

I don’t mean to say that I’m really so doubtful of my being asexual, far from it in fact.  But asexuality isn’t normative.  Most people haven’t heard of it.  When they do, many respond by saying that there’s no such thing.  A few people are accepting, and I doubt I’m the only one to whom it means a lot that they are.  It remains though that I can’t look to the world outside, the world from which I come and am a part, and find much acceptance of an important part of myself in it.  Some insecurity, at least a lingering doubt, is almost inevitable.  Add to that the fact that what I’m describing now is just the way things are all the time: presenting this aspect of oneself to others brings with it the added concern of how they’ll respond, and from this follows the reluctance to show anything which they could interpret as weakness.

Hopefully it’s just the jitters of a sort: with more experience I might become more comfortable speaking about this kind of thing.  However, the underlying problems I’ve described are systemic and won’t just go away on their own.  At the heart of it is probably the fact that our identities as asexuals are for the most part either invisible or erased.  The only way to deal with this is by gaining visibility, and so it seems that the solutions to the problem at both the individual and the societal level may really be one and the same.  Each of us being as we are, it’s important to talk about who we are.  We need to be bold.  Let’s.

I recall now a line from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  It didn’t take me too long to realize that I was mistaken, although it took a few years to understand how I’d been mistaken and to be able to better articulate my understanding.  For instance, like many asexuals I eventually learnt what asexuality is from Wikipedia, where it has for a few years now been listed together with other sexual orientations, and in an important way that is what led me to begin identifying as asexual.  However, before this I had nonetheless perceived that, as I could later say, the whole heteronormativity thing wasn’t working out for me: that is what I had been able to recognize and admit to myself then.  It was frightening.  After all, the most basic assumptions I’d had about what I’d do as an adult involved getting married and starting a ‘traditional’ family and that sort of thing.  It didn’t seem that this would be an option after all.  More generally, there was a sense of what I was expected to do and be which was greatly at odds with my very nature.  That is in fact unchanged, or rather it has grown more pronounced as my adult life has indeed begun to diverge visibly from such expectations.

I’m not complaining about that.  As regards myself, the only thing I wish is that I’d more clearly known sooner, for it would probably have saved me a fair bit of trouble, or at least spared me certain especially useless troubles in place of other ones from which I might have gained something more beneficial.  Things being what they are, I hope now to be able to deal with those troubles.

I haven’t posted anything new here in two months.  It’s not because I don’t have anything which I’d like to say though.  Instead, it has to do with a reluctance brought about by a funny thing that happened to me recently.  Simply put, last month I was outed to my family as asexual.  (It was a simple matter of an indiscretion of mine being caught by a relation online.  The details aren’t important here.)  That’s not really such a funny thing of course.  Outing people, in this case finding that they have a secret which they’re keeping for some unknown reason and then deciding that whatever the reason might be it cannot possibly be important enough not to make their secret common knowledge, is hardly proper.  I would have thought that such a thing should go without saying, but apparently in so thinking I was neglecting to think about reality.

Of course, I did realize that such a thing could happen to me.  After all, I’ve been giving workshops and interviews on asexuality recently, using my legal name to boot.  I haven’t really been hiding it so much as simply not talking about it when I go back home to visit, that is, if there’s really such a difference.  Nonetheless, knowing that anything I say here might effectively be said to everyone back home, I decided not to say anything for the time being, until I’d have a chance to talk about it all when I’d be over for the holiday.

However, for the entire three weeks of my stay, neither I nor my parents raised the matter.  Perhaps they’re no more keen to talk about it than I am.  Perhaps they simply respect my choice not to talk about it and won’t bring it up themselves.  I obviously don’t really know the reason, seeing as how we haven’t spoken about it.  However, it was kind of awkward because I know not only that they know but also that they know that I know they know.  It’s sort of like I’m in the ‘glass closet’, but only that here other people don’t just see me in the closet but they can also see me looking out at them and carrying on as though I weren’t in a closet at all while clearly knowing otherwise.  Fun.

It’s really quite silly.  I’ll probably raise the issue sooner rather than later, but for the same basic reasons which held me back from talking about it earlier.  “In case of emergency, break glass”, as they say, and so δοίη τις ἀνδροκμῆτα πέλεκυν ὡς τάχος.  Meanwhile, I’ll continue to carry on here as usual.

This blog carnival is an effort to encourage a variety of different voices to speak about asexuality from their own perspectives. Anyone can participate, but the responses should deal with asexuality or the asexual spectrum (grey-As, demisexuals) in some way. They should also relate in some way to the theme of each round of the carnival, which will change from month to month and will be chosen by the person hosting the carnival for that month.

The scope of this project is general–any post dealing with both asexuality and the theme of the carnival is welcome. Alternate forms of media are also welcome as long as they deal with the prompt! If you’re not sure whether your piece is okay, submit it anyway and we’ll figure it out.

This month, our theme is going to be re/presentation.

Feel free to interpret this theme as broadly as you’d like.  Here are a just a few ideas.

• How do you think that those of us who are asexual should present ourselves to others as a group, if we should do so at all, and why?  Do you think that current asexual visibility efforts are working?
• Are you ‘out’ as an asexual, and if so, how do you present your asexual identity to others?  How do they respond?
• Have you ever presented asexuality and/or represented asexuals to others?  How did it go?  This needn’t only involve such deliberate things as giving presentations, being interviewed, and the like.  For instance, perhaps you are the only asexual known to your family or friends.  Do such people ever view you as though a representative of all asexuals, even if you intend nothing of the sort?

The deadline for submissions will be January 31st and I should have the roundup posted within a few days after the deadline.  You can leave a link to your submission in a comment here, or by emailing it to me.  (I have a gmail account with the handle heorrenda.)  If you don’t have a blog and would like to make a guest post here, then you can also contact me by either of those methods for us to work that out.

Have fun!

Under timely circumstances, some of my friends went to a workshop on campus the other day on the topic of love and “why we all crave it”.  By the sounds of it, I’m glad I didn’t go.  Much of the discussion seems to have been about romantic relationships, how we all (by this account) desire unconditional and everlasting ‘true love’, and how without it we are nothing no matter how much else we might happen to accomplish in our lives.  My aim here isn’t to talk about the workshop: the people who organized it had their own reasons for saying the things they did, and I wasn’t actually there to hear them.  Instead, I want to talk about these ideas of romance, and in particular how they relate to the realities of those of us who, for whatever reason, don’t experience love in such ways.

To make it clear where I’m coming from, when pressed for a one-word description of how I understand myself in terms of romantic orientation, I tend to say that I’m aromantic.  It is perhaps a bit more complicated than that.  I find the whole concept of romance somewhat confusing if not incoherent, particularly once sex has been removed from the equation (since sex can be used to arbitrarily differentiate between romantic relationships and other kinds of close friendships, although even for non-asexuals this doesn’t really work all of the time).  It is entirely possible that I actually do experience what other people might term romantic attraction and so am not aromantic, but the fact is that I don’t find the romantic paradigm useful for describing my own experience or understanding the dynamics of my relationships, seeing as how I find it so confusing.  How can I tell whether I experience romantic attraction if I don’t understand what is meant by ‘romantic’?  I prefer simply to think in terms of ‘closeness’ or whatnot: I feel closer to some people than to others.  It is true that I feel the desire to be closer to some people than to others as well.  This could perhaps be understood as indicating some kind of attraction, but I’m not sure what else to say about it.  Attraction is not by necessity romantic any more so than it is necessarily sexual, and without clearly understanding the romantic I’d be hard-pressed to call such attraction romantic or not.  In any case, none of this is important to my identity: I’d rather just call myself an ‘asexual’ than an ‘aromantic asexual’ or (with the alternative assumption that I do experience romantic attraction) a ‘panromantic asexual’, but I don’t care too deeply about it one way or the other.  Fair enough?

So, let’s return to the ideas about romance which I mentioned at the start.  I won’t say anything much about the idea that it must be unconditional: I think the problems with this are obvious enough to (well, almost) anyone who stops to think about it for about for a moment.  What about ‘true love’?  At the risk of sounding terribly unromantic, I’m going to say that this term is poorly defined and can be unceremoniously discarded for the purposes of our discussion.  (And don’t say anything about ‘the one’ either!  That’s an unabashedly supernatural notion I’ll have no truck with.)  That leaves one thing, the idea that we’re nothing, or at least incomplete, without romantic love.  Before even speaking about the idea itself, it’s obvious enough that this can be an annoying if not hurtful claim to aromantic asexuals.  If we don’t experience romantic attraction, but need romance in order to be ‘complete’, then we’d find ourselves in a situation where we’d be at a great disadvantage in living meaningful lives, were we not to simply be declared ‘broken’ by our own nature from the start.  The more basic problem with it though is probably one that is familiar to many asexuals: substitute the word ‘romantic’ with the word ‘sexual’ and it should be clear why.  (“You must experience sexual love to be complete as a human being.  Your relationships aren’t the real thing otherwise.”)  It is a clear privileging of certain forms of affection over others.  (I’m not saying that this is a problem at the personal level: of course we value certain things above others.  The problem though is saying that other people must follow suit when the values in question are simply our personal preferences.  This holds true even of preferences that are generally shared among one’s peers or by society at large, which may indeed be socially conditioned.)  Anyhow, another problem might by now be obvious.  The idea that we need to experience romance in order to be complete is a form of the idea of true love, which has in fact crept back sneakily into this discussion.  “You must desire this kind of love.  You must experience this kind of love.  This is true love!  Without this you are altogether lacking.”

I make no claim to be a complete and perfect human being and am willing to accept that I am quite deficient in certain respects, but in certain other respects I think I actually have much to be proud of.  I think it’s fair to say that I amount to more than nothing.  Yet for the reasons explained, I have not experienced the kinds of love described here.  Someone then must be wrong, and I don’t think it’s me…

But there’s more to it.  When I say that “I’m glad I didn’t go” to the workshop I don’t mean that this is because I think the people presenting the workshop were simply mistaken, and if I thought that the ideas about the importance of romance which I’ve mentioned here were merely incorrect then I wouldn’t have anything much else to say about them.  The fact is though that these ideas have a way of playing to one’s insecurities.  Consider that one of the positive things about an asexual identity is that it can help replace the idea that one is defective for not experiencing sexual attraction: this seems to describe the experience of more than a few of us.  Now what of romance and those of us who are aromantic and don’t experience romantic attraction or (aromantic or not) simply don’t seem able to make sense of romance or connect with people in that way?  To say that it’s just how we are and it’s fine and we can still live fulfilling lives is reassuring.  It also flies in the face of almost everything our society says about love.  After all, a quick look at popular culture shows us that romance (and sex too) is held in very high esteem, and more than that, is thought to be a considerable part of what makes us who we are.  It’s something we should have, or at very least want (and be inconsolably miserable without).  To simply say that this isn’t so for us is perhaps to say that it needn’t be so for others.  It’s a challenge of sorts, and it is not made against one found to be resourceless.  After all, how can I even write this without feeling just a little bit like some sort of loveless orc?  How can I even try to dodge the charge that I must just be a bitter person who’s chosen to denounce (what is held to be the only meaningful kind of) love for want of its experience?  But no one has told me these things: I am rather giving voice to my own doubts, which exist in light of social expectations of the universality of romance and sex.  In truth, I don’t even think I’m saying anything that radical.  “I still desire love and affection, just not of those sorts.”  In this respect I see little substantial difference between myself and anyone else who desires love, who feels any sort of attraction to others.  But I’ve set a distance between myself and the forms of affection commonly designated as especially important.  Some sort of difficulty is to be expected.  So be it.

There is a remedy for this, but whether it is an easy one I can’t altogether say.  We have to consider where our expectations come from and try to evaluate them on their own merits.  “Does it really make sense to say that I am flawed if I do not desire love in such-and-such a way and broken if I do not even desire it?”  When we’re talking about sex and even romance, I don’t think that it does: to me it would not seem reasonable to say otherwise.  Have I reasoned correctly?  Then all I have to do is actually believe what my reason tells me is true.

To explain, I was raised in a fairly devote Catholic family.  While the doctrines concerning Hell were never emphasized in the way that is stereotypical of Catholicism, they were there.  At Mass they did sometimes teach the concept of mortal sin, but I relied on books to follow its course of logic to the end and learn among other things of the damnation on account of such sin of those who understand that they scorn the faith.  (These books, some admittedly rather dated, “taught” me many things besides this, but that’s perhaps a subject for another time.)  I came to believe that “the damned” were all around me, in my community, my school, my church, and that I might even be one of them should I fail to behave in accordance with God’s will.  Unbelievers seemed to be a particularly bad sort in light of the nature of their rejection, but as far as I could tell, most of the people I knew were unbelievers.  I was very reserved though, so I never tried to evangelize to them or anything like that.  I merely became used to having ‘civil and polite discussions with nice, fairly intelligent people whom I sincerely believed were (probably) going to be in eternal agony after their deaths.’  So I’ve been that person who thinks this way.  I know well that such people exist.  Their experience is too familiar to be strange to me.

I was able to persist in such belief for several years, longer than I think should have been possible.  There were two main reasons for this.  The first is probably applicable to many: the belief that being good requires a certain degree of orthodoxy means that challenging the orthodox doctrines of Hell was out of the question, since believing such doctrines and not challenging them was one of the things necessary to being good and thereby being saved.  (Duh!)  The other reason is probably common as well, but by nature not something easy for others to notice: as I said, I seldom talked about these beliefs.  In fact, I didn’t talk much about my beliefs at all.  The result is that they received little direct challenge.  How could they?  But I was sensitive to those devilish sentiments which made their way in my general direction by less direct routes, and the basic dissonance inherent in believing in the probable eternal damnation of seemingly-decent people around me gradually became too much to remain acceptable.  Something had to give, and in the end it was my belief in Hell (and its God).  I have to thank everyone who ever said that it is a foul doctrine, and so I don’t hesitate to join them now.

What I really want to talk about though is the basic social dynamic involved in situations like these, where (let’s say) two people can sit around having a friendly discussion while each quietly believing that the other is fundamentally wrong on some important matter.  After all, believing that one’s interlocutor surely faces eternal damnation while not saying much of it to them is just one of the more excessive forms of this pragmatic civility.  I’m sure that it’s something we all do in other forms.  Here are just a few examples that come to mind from my own experience.

1) In a certain community organization I find myself working with people with whom I share rather different political views, and by that I mean I often find their views quite repugnant.  But we have things to do together and fighting each other for political reasons wouldn’t seem to be productive, so I simply do what I can to avoid political discussion.  (I admit that I could be mistaken on that last point about avoiding conflict, especially because it leaves open the risk that the inaction of people like me will passively allow the group to move in a distasteful direction.  Case in point: ‘doing what I can to avoid political discussion’ has increasingly meant simply being less involved in the group.)

2) For mainly ethical reasons, I’m a vegetarian.  Most people aren’t, including the majority of my friends.  We tend to avoid the topic.

3) Someone is wrong on the internet, but I don’t hit ‘reply’ because I have things to do.

What should I do in these situations?  They’re not entirely comparable, but what they have in common is that they all involve silent inaction for practical reasons in the face of a situation which might seem to call for something more from anyone with a conviction that they’re in the right.  More generally, what is the proper response to such situations?  This is a difficult question and I won’t pretend to have the answer, even if I assume that the context underlying the situation is always one in which it is safe to speak.  (It’s also problematic for me because I tend to be somewhat shy.  This means that the fundamental reason for my saying nothing in such situations is sometimes only that I find myself too unassertive to say anything when the occasion surely calls for speech.  I can then rationalize my failure by saying that it was a sound tactical decision on my part when it was merely a thoughtless reaction.  Separating good reasons for inaction from such rationalizations adds another level of difficulty to this situation, and I’m sure that many people face the same difficulty.  Shyness is after all something that may vary with context.)  I suppose it’s something to think about.

“You are a male, and so I’m asking you…”

This was the voice of a caller asking me about something to do with asexuality when I was on the radio.  I don’t quite recall now what his question actually was though, because I didn’t entirely understand it then.  The way he introduced it disoriented me.  Yes, I am a male.  But what was he getting at by that?  What seemed like it would be a simple question was being carefully framed in terms of my sex, and I wasn’t sure what were the implications of this.

Presumably though it had something to do with gender.  There are broader questions that are often asked about asexuality and masculinity, questions like, “How can you be a guy and be asexual?  Isn’t that some kind of contradiction?  Don’t all men want sex?”  It probably doesn’t come as news to anyone actually reading this that these are common sentiments.  Some people ask them and are legitimately willing to hear the answer that no, asexual men do in fact exist.  (Tada!)  Others though are suggesting one of two possibilities: either the ‘asexual man’ in question isn’t really an asexual, or he isn’t really a man: he’s really just a fraud, whether to others or to himself.

What can I say in reply to that?  This is, after all, the question at the root of many others which may be asked of me: I ought to have an answer readied.  I’m going to focus on those who say that asexual men aren’t really men, since I think the other claim tends to boil down into the claim that (cis)males who aren’t interested in sex cannot exist, which is easy enough to refute.  So, I guess we have to start by specifying exactly what masculinity is.  Unfortunately, that’s a bit hard to do simply.  Different men give different answers which may or may not be carefully considered, and even matters of general consensus may change over time and place.  For instance, here’s what Xenophon (or more accurately his Simonides in the dialogue Hiero), from late Classical Athens, has to say (Xen. Hiero 7.3):

καὶ γάρ μοι δοκεῖ, ὦ Ἱέρων, τούτῳ διαφέρειν ἀνὴρ τῶν ἄλλων ζῴων, τῷ τιμῆς ὀρέγεσθαι. ἐπεὶ σιτίοις γε καὶ ποτοῖς καὶ ὕπνοις καὶ ἀφροδισίοις πάντα ὁμοίως ἥδεσθαι ἔοικε τὰ ζῷα: ἡ δὲ φιλοτιμία οὔτ᾽ ἐν τοῖς ἀλόγοις ζῴοις ἐμφύεται οὔτ᾽ ἐν ἅπασιν ἀνθρώποις: οἷς δ᾽ ἂν ἐμφύῃ τιμῆς τε καὶ ἐπαίνου ἔρως, οὗτοί εἰσιν ἤδη οἱ πλεῖστον μὲν τῶν βοσκημάτων διαφέροντες, ἄνδρες δὲ καὶ οὐκέτι ἄνθρωποι μόνον νομιζόμενοι.
“For indeed it seems to me, Hiero, that in this man differs from other animals—I mean, in this craving for honour. In meat and drink and sleep and sex all creatures alike seem to take pleasure; but love of honour is rooted neither in the brute beasts nor in every human being. But they in whom is implanted a passion for honour and praise, these are they who differ most from the beasts of the field, these are accounted men and not mere human beings.”

Notice anything?  I don’t simply mean that wanting sex doesn’t seem all that important to this definition of manliness, although that is interesting.  What I want to draw attention to is the distinction he makes between “men” (andres) and “humans” (anthropoi).  The distinction Xenophon is making here is not simply that some humans are men but others are women, but rather that not everyone, even among those born male, is necessarily a man.  (For those interested, you might want to look up the term “cinaedus” or rather κίναιδος: this was their idea of the deviant unmanly male.  John Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire would be a good place to start.)  This was probably a basic aspect of the definition of masculinity in Xenophon’s society, and it does perhaps accord with the sentiments motivating the questions above as well.  The underlying idea is that masculinity, whatever exactly it is, is an achieved state, and something to be asserted.  This helps to explain the thoughts of those willing to accept the existence of asexuals but not of asexual men: an asexual (cis)male fails to achieve their idea of masculinity, or in other words, he does not fulfil the expectations of the gender role assigned by them to him.

What can I say to them?  Now I’m back to where I was earlier, but hopefully we know more now about where that is.  Assuming that I actually want to try to answer the question, there are a few basic strategies of response which I can take.  These are as follows, rather simplified and ranked in a sort of ascending scale:

1. “Frankly, you’re right.  I don’t measure up.”
2. “You’re mistaken, because your idea of masculinity is misguided.  Mine is better.”
3. “Your words mean little to me, because the basic idea of masculinity itself is misguided.  It should be discarded.”
4. “You suck.”  (Or in other words, I can call him a κίναιδος.  This happens to have been a basic strategy of legal debate in Xenophon’s time, making it a literal classic of manly discourse.)

#4 is perhaps the easiest.  Fight fire with fire, as they say.  However, it is not terribly persuasive, and so I think it is best to resort to such strategies only when there is little hope of fruitful conversation and a quick exit is desired.  Admittedly, I have never taken this route.  I tend to be less confrontational than that.

#2 is probably more common.  The idea here is basically that rigid conceptions of masculinity (and genders more generally) aren’t to be desired and ought to be replaced with more flexible ones.  People can define themselves as they like, to the extent that this is possible.  Perhaps then men needn’t want sex, or at least those men who don’t want sex can still be fully masculine.  (In case it isn’t obvious, the distinction there is between removing the desire for sex as something necessary to masculinity as broadly understood on the one hand and allowing for men to do so acceptably at the individual level on the other.)  I think there’s something to be said for this strategy.

#3 is more radical.  The idea here is roughly that the gender binary itself is deeply problematic to the point that it ought perhaps to be nuked from orbit (just to be sure, as they say).  I think of #2 as reform and #3 as revolution.  It goes without saying that there is something of a grey area between the two.  Both strategies respond to the challenge to one’s own masculinity by turning the challenge against masculinity itself.

#1 is I suspect something more commonly thought than spoken.  In a sense, this one is also easy: it does not turn the challenge made against it against masculinity itself but rather, in the terms of the challenge, concedes defeat.  I can imagine this being done in distress or apathy.  If it could be done in high spirits, then in effect it would probably be quite hard to distinguish from #2.  In any case, a lot of asexual men probably confront this one, given that it is I think the answer most readily provided for us by the gender norms of our society.  Many probably move from there to #2, whether or not they can leave #1 altogether behind.  That said, from my own experience I think the difficulty this one poses for men is quite apparent when looking at asexual communities: there don’t seem to be a lot of guys around.  (For instance, the Asexual Awareness Week census data just released indicate that a full 14% of respondents were guys!  While this probably says something more about the people who found and took the survey than it does the asexual population, it remains quite striking.)  They’re probably out there, doing what they can to keep their (a)sexuality to themselves.  Moreover, I suspect there are also many who would identify as asexual but don’t precisely because of the challenge they find it poses to their own understanding of masculinity.  While they mightn’t be thinking of it in these terms, they may in effect be trying to change their own sexual orientation.  I think that’s a problem.

So, what can we do about this?  I suppose it’s obvious that we should keep working on visibility efforts so that asexuality will become more acceptable for everyone, guys included, and that the feminist cause is a good one for us, since its purpose is largely to overhaul the old gender norms which happen to be the cause of this problem in the first place.  As for how an individual might deal with things on a more day-to-day level, I may have something more to say about that later.

“But the sheer condescending dickery on the post above isn’t a lack of polish. It’s indicative of one of the worst tendencies of the atheist community – to be smugly superior. Think Dennett’s attempt to create a “Bright’s” movement. It thankfully never took off, but there is a tendency in certain quarters to assume being an atheist automatically makes you cleverer than anyone else. I can see where this might crop up, especially in the States, if the only religious people you ever encounter are Tea Party-esque evangelicals, or Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. But for the most part, atheists are not smarter than anyone else, just (in my view) right about a single thing.”

I’ve noticed this.  There is certainly a tendency among some in the atheist community to think that we’re smarter than everyone else.  But, I don’t think this problem of feeling smugly superior is at all unique to us.  Let’s review.  People can be atheists for all sorts of reasons: the only significant generalization that can be made about us is that we don’t believe in any god.  However, there is more that can be said about people involved in the atheist movement than can be said of atheists generally.  This is a community which defines itself largely in terms of a shared epistemology: we value reason, critical thinking, freethought, scepticism, and that sort of thing.  We value these things because we think they are useful for ascertaining the truth of matters of a certain sort and for recognizing claims which are false.  As a community we distinguish ourselves from others on the basis of these things.  It’s no wonder then that there are many within the community who think that we’re smarter than everyone else, since we define our community –a process of setting ourselves apart from others– in these intellectual terms.  This is therefore not simply a matter of atheists in our view being “right about a single thing,” since we are speaking about the atheist community and not merely everyone who happens to be an atheist.  As a community we define ourselves as a group who are right about a number of things on account of our superior epistemology…

Of course, that last bit isn’t quite true.  For it to be true we would have to assume that humans are internally consistent in their thoughts, entirely rational, etc, and these things are demonstrably false.  It is by recognizing our limitations that we can realize an expressed commitment to a certain method of ascertaining the truth does not inevitably mean being right about anything at all, and in this, perhaps somewhat regrettably, lies the escape from a misguided feeling of smug superiority.

If what I’m saying is at all true, then it would follow that other communities may also feel superior to others on the basis of those things by which they define themselves as a group.  Based on my own experience in some of these communities, I would say that this is indeed so.  A good example can be seen in the vegetarian/vegan/animal movement.  Once again, the only generalization that can be made of all vegetarians is that they don’t eat meat.  There are any number of reasons why people mightn’t eat meat, and so little else of any significance can be said of them.  But once again, there is more that can be said of people involved in the animal movement.  This time, we define ourselves largely in terms of a shared ethics, or rather that we largely share an ethics which grants more consideration of a certain kind to animals than is usually done.  The reasons for this are actually rather varied, probably much more so than the reasons for which people in the atheist movement value scepticism and whatnot, and so generalization is somewhat more difficult.  Whatever the reason, the community defines itself largely in ethical and moral terms, and so it is not surprising that there is a tendency among some to feel morally superior to everyone outside the movement.  (Of course, some of this is related to the religious reasons for which some people are part of the movement, since religion is itself another way in which communities are defined.  Even in the West, where most religious discourse has not encouraged vegetarianism for a very long time, there is still a powerful narrative of purity originating in part from certain strands of religion in Antiquity that did, ready to be tapped by anyone.)

This is why the stereotypical animal-rights activist has a marked holier-than-thou attitude, and it is for the same basic reason that the stereotypical atheist is a snob who thinks he (I think the stereotypical atheist is a guy) is smarter than everyone around him.  For the reasons described, there are people like that.  That said, there is also an extent to which these stereotypes emerge from people outside the communities involved.  For instance, if I tell someone who isn’t an atheist that I’m an atheist, then at least implicitly it is probably clear to that person that I think they’re wrong about something: I can’t help but have something of an oppositional stance when I do this.  My interlocutor may then make a similar mistake to the smug atheists and assume that, because I think I’m probably right about these matters for the reasons mentioned, then I must think that I’m smarter than everyone else.  In other words, to someone to whom I say that I’m an atheist, I could be thought to be deeply conceited either because they’ve encountered other atheists who are, or simply because they think it must follow inevitably from atheism.  Or both.  In any case, it wouldn’t follow: it would be a mistake to assume this of someone for such a reason as that.

So, while I agree that there is a problem with some people in the movement thinking they’re smarter than everyone else, I think this is simply the particular manifestation of a more widespread phenomenon common to (among others) self-selecting communities seeking social change, arising from the way in which these communities define themselves in relation to others.  This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t resist this tendency to have misguided feelings of communal superiority, nor that I think there is anything wrong with having activist movements like the ones I’ve mentioned, but merely that to be effective we have to keep in mind what sort of a deep-seated human tendency we are probably dealing with here.

The justification for calling both these sorts of people asexual lies I think in the concept of sexual orientation itself.  After all, what exactly do we mean by this?  I’d say that it is a concept referring to our sexual desires in relation to others.  For instance, when we talk about homosexuals we are talking about people who have sexual desires directed mainly towards members of the same sex/gender.  (This is another matter, but I don’t think the prevailing concepts of sexual orientation really distinguish between sex and gender, so I’m going to call it “sex/gender” for now.)  When we speak of asexuality as a sexual orientation we are therefore speaking about a term describing people who have no sexual desires directed towards anyone.  People who experience no sexual desire and those who experience only undirected sexual desire are both then meaningfully described as asexual, since neither experience desire directed towards anyone: their experiences of sexual desire in relation to others are both null, and so both are equally asexual by the standard logic of the terms of sexual orientation.  Of course, it could be objected that despite their shared lack of the experience of sexual attraction, we’re still describing a diverse group of people who differ in many ways as regards their experience of sexuality.  This is true.  However, this is also true of the people described by any other designation of sexual orientation.  For instance, we define as heterosexuals both men who are attracted to women and women who are attracted to men, despite the sex/gender difference in the objects of their desire and even the subjects themselves: the focus of the term is entirely on the relative sex/gender relation.  The language of sexual orientation is generalizing, and if we want to label people with anything beyond their own names then I think that we have to be willing to make such generalizations.