I haven't been writing here in over a year and I know why: it's because I'm pretty sure nobody wants to hear what I have to say.
Taiwan was fun. Taiwan was an adventure. Taiwan was not the stress-fest that my daily...weekly...monthly... life often is here in Japan. And the number one thing nobody wants to hear about is someone else's problems. So, you know. I keep that shit to myself.
I do want to talk, though, and probably about something nobody wants to hear about: sexualities that aren't their own.
I'm ace. (Asexual.)
A little over a year ago, I was four nights away from moving to Japan, and I finally got around to googling "asexuality" beyond its dictionary definition, which is "a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction." The problem with that dictionary definition is that nobody ever explicitly describes to you what sexual attraction feels like. The entire world assumes that everyone feels it, so when you begin to realize that (as far as you know) you are the only person you know who doesn't want to express her affection for someone by fucking them, you do your best to mistake your own feelings for sexual attraction in the hopes that maybe that desire to fuck people will kick in.
If this sounds sarcastic and a bit angry, there's a reason. I had to google my sexuality at the age of 27, and it took me ten fucking minutes on the FAQ page of AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network) to figure out I'm ace. A lifetime of media and information and education at my fingertips, and not one bit of it ever answered the question I'd always asked myself: What's wrong with me?
The answer turned out to be: nothing.
The reason I want you to know how difficult this was for me is because there are a lot of people around me with babies, toddlers, and small children in general. When I was growing up, there was no information around me about my sexuality. There were no people in my life (as far as I knew) who felt the way I did, who could identify with me and reassure me that there was nothing wrong with me. Nobody in my life knew to explain to me that there are different ways to be attracted to people, or to not be attracted to people in any way at all, and that it was all okay. Nobody in my life (including me, and I was on the internet all the time) knew the words aesthetic attraction, sensual attraction, romantic attraction, or asexual, gray-asexual, demisexual, aromantic.
I don't blame anyone around me for being ignorant, because there was no information there for anyone to learn from.
Here's the thing, though: you know an asexual. You know me. You can't claim that ignorance of this. Heck, you can't tell me that you're 100% sure your kid is cis-gender and heterosexual. Because, see, everyone (including me) was 100% sure I was cis-gender and heterosexual my whole life, until I found out otherwise. (And these days I take issue with the secondary sex characteristics of my female gender because they're basically useless to me, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.)
I don't plan to have kids, ever, because I don't want them. I'd rather get a dog. And hey, your kids are your kids, I'm not going to tell you how to raise them. But do me a favor, and make sure you're educated on this stuff. Make sure you have the vocabulary to describe different kinds of relationships, different kinds of feelings, different ways to be comfortable in your body, different nouns to use in reference to one's self. Make sure your kids know that you're open to new interpretations of what it means to be themselves. Make sure you know, and that you let your kids know, because knowledge is power, and by God do I this information had trickled down to me a decade sooner.
Don't assume this is going to come up in health class. Don't assume your kids will tell you if they feel this way. I felt this way for nearly two decades. I read books voraciously, I wrote in excess, I aced pretty much every spelling test every put in front of me without trying for years because I knew so many words by heart, and it wasn't until I was twenty-fucking-seven that I had a word to describe myself besides "broken."
Don't assume your kids will know how to describe their feelings to you. Don't assume your kids will even tell you. This information is available to you now. I'm right here, telling you that this is something real. So now you know.
Please make sure your kids know, too. Give your kids words to use to describe themselves (and those around them) besides "broken."
Resources:
AVEN (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network): Asexuality Overview
What is it Like to be Asexual? BBC News
Am I Asexual? 10 Things You Don’t (But Should) Know About Asexuality, Because It's Not All About Sex
A Parent's Guide to Asexuality
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