Asexual Questioning and Sapphic Reverence
Nicky Barnes #37.1
Art by Toby
I do not (yet) identify as asexual. However, the more I learn about the experiences of people who do, the more I wonder if there is a place on that spectrum where I might feel more seen and understood than among confidently allosexual people.
Throughout my teen years, I attributed my lack of interest in boys, in conventionally attractive celebrities, in porn, and in sex to my adherence to a strictly puritanical religion and a history of adverse experiences with physical touch. I later discovered I was not a very pious straight girl; I was in fact a very horny lesbian who didn’t know any other gay girls to be horny for. “But wait!” You say. “What was stopping you from being horny for the straight girls?” That, my friends, is truly the question.
I’ve been told I think too much about attraction to be allo. Apparently, most people don’t read and dissect a person’s Hinge profile before deciding if the photos are hot. Apparently, most people don’t decide if people are hot at all. They simply are or are not. Spare maybe once, I’ve never felt sexually attracted to a person who I know wouldn’t be attracted to me or wouldn’t be a good idea to have sex with: men, straight women, people in relationships, butch4butch or T4T lesbians, etc. I never want, in that way, people who wouldn’t want me: stone tops, deeply religious people, people obsessed with hiking or bread (I’m allergic), etc.
There is one very minor celebrity figure I’d put on a hall-pass list, but I’ve never fantasized about her. Really, I don’t fantasize about anyone. It’s situations, faceless archetypes, dialogues and premises, pretenses and sensations. Most of the time, my head and my body take a while to get on the same page. I can orgasm and never feel turned on. I can be desperately aroused and never get wet.
I generally see sex as nothing more than an activity. I’ve messed around with people I knew I was not attracted to and enjoyed the physical sensations, the emotional closeness, the positive attention, feeling wanted and attractive. But I’ve never really experienced what a person might call “blue balls.” If my orgasm is ruined, or I have to stop abruptly, I’d be annoyed, and it may take a minute for the blood flow to correct itself. If it happened often, I’d be frustrated in an emotional sense and perhaps a little tense; beyond that, there’s really no further inconvenience. But I dissociate a lot, especially from physical feelings. So maybe my brain has learned to put these feelings in a box somewhere, too? Within the experience of one’s sexuality it can be hard to say what is orientation, what is experience, what is confidence, what is medical or psychological, and if it even matters.
What I do know for certain is that once I get really comfortable with someone, once I trust them with my physical safely, trust them to consider my feelings genuinely, to be thoughtful and good natured, gradually they start to seem more and more physically and aesthetically attractive to me. I want to touch them. I want to be touched by them. Not always in a sexual way, but sometimes.
I’ve never understood what people mean when they talk about “needing someone carnally.” I love sex. I have an active sex drive, perhaps even over-active, but it’s not often about achieving the orgasm, and it’s never really about achieving it with a specific person either. Being in a sexual relationship with someone who is often immediately available to me, I find myself wanting her sexually, looking at her sexually, but it’s never truly about the sex. I find myself aching to take care of her, to make her feel good, to see her relaxed and comfortable. She’ll walk around the apartment dressed for work or going out and I just want to look at her. There’s a magnetism that I can’t quite describe. She is absolutely beautiful, so perfectly queer in her masculinity. She is soft and steady, strong and pliant. Not to mention her body… my god. And I have the front row seat, the only backstage pass, exclusive VIP access to the most vulnerable parts of her. In these moments, all I really want is to look at her the way a person might stare for ages at a photo of a long-distance loved one, touch her reverently like a person might run fingertips across the textures and shapes of blown glass. I wouldn’t call this a sexual attraction, but this is what drives me to touch her in the quiet moments, the electric moments, the stolen ones, and the created-to-be-given ones. There is teasing done to tease, and displays put on just to rile her up, but the wandering hands, the lingering eyes, this is where they come from.
When she’s laid out and disheveled underneath me; when she looks up at me through her lashes, head on my chest; when she finally remembers who’s taller and uses this to instill a true gay panic in my chest; she is masterfully blown glass; violently forged metalwork; delicately set with gems and polished to shine; she is intricately carved stone; vines, moss, towering trees, and damp earth that smell like home and feel like haven; she is texture and color and expert design. And she has the capacity to feel so intensely every expression of my awe she receives. Sex is sex, but with her, in the way I feel attracted to her, what would otherwise be called foreplay feels separate from the sex.
I’m sure there is a word for this, the foundation of this queer platonic relationship we’ve built. I’m sure there are people out there who can relate to this kind of conditioned, gradually developed, largely aesthetic but very sentimental kind of attraction, not at all romantic or possessive and not exactly sexual, truly platonic, or purely aesthetic either. I’m sure there are people who will read this and assume I simply have a fetish for glass and separately have fallen in love with my best friend. For now, I feel seen enough in the intersection between the lesbian sense of reverence, the base desire to worship a sapphic body, and aspec perspectives on deconstructing amatonormativity. I don’t currently feel a need to define myself further, but I am endlessly curious about the experiences of unquestioningly allosexual queer people, the other kind of something they seem to feel that I don’t, and why so many people look at this beautifully queer, intensely human, and deeply intimate home we have found in each other and say it’s not enough.
Art by Rye