(This essay has not been previously uploaded anywhere.)
For the sake of this analysis we must accept that "modernity" as herein defined is, of course, relative. Some will argue that we have transitioned from modernity to postmodernity, while others of a more annoying variety argue that we have crossed from postmodernity to metamodernity. I argue, however, that in much the same way the people of early modernity would have considered their world modern even though by our standards it would not be modern at all, we must slide the label of "modern" up to wherever we find ourselves, in the same way we apply the term "the present". People my age (Gen Z) are saying that we live in unprecedented times, but of course all times are unprecdented since they are unique results of cause and effect which depend upon and are contextualized by the events preceding them. But enough semantics.
Asexuals have, like all other aberrative sexual orientations, existed for as long as the human species has existed. We always have existed and will always exist. This is because humanity is not a consistent monolith, we are a species of infinite variation. We are also pattern-recognizing creatures, to the extent that most of our percieved world is composed of various patterns. Patterns comfort us because there is order in them. We fear new ideas and we fear aberrations. This is why humanity is mentally predisposed to imagine a God who resembles us and whose consciousness facilitates our existence- because we are self-centered and the notion of a Godless universe is difficult for the weaker-minded among us to confront. Our less adventurous members would, naturally, be opposed to Homosexuality, Atheism, Philosophy generally, Communism, or anything else which dares to question the arbitrary order of things and attempt something new and legitimately interesting.
The noticeable trend towards cultural stagnation and homogeneity seen in the late 2020s is in many ways both an effect and cause of the human tendency away from experimentation and into recognizable pattern. Those who fear trying something new go to the 4th of July to watch the fireworks being set off- while I buck tradition and sit inside writing this on Microsoft Notepad, because I do not feel there is much of any reason this year to celebrate America, either as a region or as a concept. But next year, or the year after that, if conditions change to my satisfaction, I might. I prefer to celebrate the 4th of July by buying a nice bag of sparklers and smoke bombs and setting them off in a parkiing lot- but Denver is currently swamped in a heat wave and fireworks have been made illegal, so if celebration is made impossible by the supposedly infinite growth of fossil fuel extraction, then I simply will not celebrate.
At any rate, the question has always been put forward as to whether sexual orientations are something you are born with or something you choose. This is somewhat of a misleading dichotomy which ignores the nuance and complexity of a full, enriched human existence, it tends to break people down into schematics and charts and components, which should not be the goal of any humanist in our endeavors. Any pursuit of a so-called "gay gene" cannot fully capture the myriad of ways in which homosexual culture responds to and is confined by the overarching heterosexual culture around it. This constant give-and-take, push-and-shove is more intricate than empirical methods can account for.
I hope to make the case here that Asexuality- and all sexual orientations, for that matter- is not merely a label, but a way of being. We Asexuals may very well exist within a given context, and Asexuality as we currently know it may be dependent upon that context- but this does not make our lived experiences any less valid. In fact, we are interesting case studies for the accelerating modern world of heightened simulacra in which we find ourselves. To ask the question of whether sexual orientations can be scientifically justified is to afford supreme authority over human rights to science, which is not as good an idea as it sounds.
The truth is, I am proud of being Asexual and it gives me immense satisfaction because I don't know how to be anything else, in much the same way a Homosexual of the 1970s would not merely say that they were going on a date with a cute guy in the same way a Homosexual of the 2010s might. The conditions under which the 1970s Homosexual existed- of repression and potential retribution and violence- are a far cry from the conditions of the 2010s Homosexual who is the beneficiary of illusory progress and neoliberal excess. So the 1970s Homosexual will, as a response, be more flamboyant and reactionary than the 2010s Homosexual. This does not make either of their lived experiences invalid, it merely proves that there are many expressions and manifestations of Homosexuality.
Asexuals are interesting in that, while it is very easy to find a Homosexual who does Homosexual things (i.e. has sex with members of the same gender) it is very difficult to find an Asexual who does Asexual things (I.e. never has sex with anyone). I have met many self-proclaimed Asexuals or Aromantics who claim to be on the "ace spectrum" but do not consider that there even is such a thing as a complete asexual, and cannot really describe the traits of one if called upon to do so, even if Asexuality has a well-defined meaning. All the self-proclaimed Asexuals I have known, save one (at the time of writing this) have had sex or say it is easy for them to have sex. They might claim that sex disgusts them but that they will have sex if they love someone.
They do not consider that if the other person loved them, their boundaries would be respected. Asexuals and even Aromantics tend to celebrate successful romantic relationships and even successful marriages with a frightening amount of glee- the erasure of the individual in favor of the successfully rehabilitated abomination to be subsumed by heterosexuality. It is as if Homosexuals celebrated conversion therapy (which, as a more codified bloc, they generally don't). Nobody is encouraged to be proud of who they legitimately are anymore, and Asexuals arrived so late to the game in terms of larger cultural awareness or recognition that we lack a cohesive foundation upon which to base our beliefs and standards.
Of course, it could be that Asexuality arrived so late because it is only culturally useful in the context of the current day. We may be in the same place now that the Homosexuals were in when they had their moment to shine. Of course, both groups have always existed- it is just that certain cultural conditions facilitate visibility for some groups and not for others. Is Asexuality a voluntary choice one can make, or an intrinsic truth to which one is bound?
I for one am proud to be a neutered, sterile, non-reproductive, tautological affront to the will of God- which, as in keeping with the will of a human-created fictional character such as God, aligns perfectly with the interests of humanity generally- in this case, to "be fruitful and multiply." I have already mentioned that human beings are pattern-seeking creatures, but we are also animals who legitimately enjoy exploration and the boundaries of the unknown, and I legitimately believe that in this day and age, c. 2026, nothing is more boundary-pushing than the wholesale rejection of sex as an activity.
People often ask me, as they might in bad faith to a Homosexual, how I can be proud of my state of being if it is how I was born and I am therefore not responsible for it in any way. The answer is that, even if Asexuality is something thrust upon me rather than a voluntary choice on my part (and, for the record, I do not readily entertain either option completely, as that would constitute a sweeping generalization), while I may not have chosen to be Asexual, what I can choose to do with such a state of being is truly remarkable.
For the legitimately sexless individual, sex is a fictive construct, a perpetually inaccessible hypothetical idea which can never be engaged with seriously. To an Asexual, sex is a joke, and this means that we are able to readily cross social norms which would otherwise be considered off-limits, and be happy and comfortable doing so. We can mock sex as a barbaric, archaic practice and dismiss any sexual advance without a second thought, we can flaunt our sterility in a culture which prioritizes reproduction above all else. Following the mainstream acceptance of Homosexuality in the 2010s, sexuality in general has become uncontroversial. The next frontier is the outright removal of all sex, and it is proving to be a compelling frontier indeed.
It is a shame that an insitution so supposedly cherished and necessary to the human experience as sex must be abandoned by the wayside, but the more mainstream culture attempts to force sexual behavior down our throats (no pun intended) the response will be to recognize it as a tool of overwhelming control and power used to justify the hierarchy of the ruling class rather than as any sort of beautiful or legitimately consensual act between two adults. The context under which sex existed has changed, sex itself has gone from being a standard biological process to a political statement. By having sex, you are implicitly saying certain things about what you value or do not value. Actions speak, as the saying goes.
The generation of postwar children who destroy the nation in an impotent fit of rage do not generally consider, as they pass on and die out, how their existence happened under a certain context and how the younger generations likewise exist under a certain context. To them, with idle time and lots of resources at their disposal, the possibilities seemed infinite and the sex came fast. For us, who are overworked and cannot afford basic necessities and live on screens, we have been confined to boxes and we do not know what it is to genuinely love. The supposed world of infinite resources and information which the Internet initially claimed to be has been exposed as a facade which sterilizes and homogenizes, and we do not have options with sex because all dating seems like a tiresome, performative chore.
Even if we can somehow access a romantic relationship, we will be haunted throughout it by the question of whether it can possibly hope to match the potency and intensity of the types of romantic relationships our parents experienced in the back seat of a sweaty Chrysler. If they could meet and have sex and get married by 25 and we can't get married until we're 50, what are our lives and why do we fail to meet the standards set by our predecessors? Are we merely pale imitations of what they were? We do not consider the real material conditions under which they existed and the ones under which we exist- we declare that we are personal failures who for whatever reason cannot meet the expectations and demands imposed on us by a society of old people who believe that the world is static, and the conditions they knew in 1950 still exist today.
My grandma, for instance, tells me that I could start working at a corporation and within a few years I would be "running the place". She notices that I am intelligent, which in her day might have been a quality which would help one ascend the corporate ladder. I have no doubt that, in her time, one really could make a substantial difference by joining a company and commuting to work every day and sitting in boardrooms. One could feel a sense of fulfillment in that, one could get married at 25 and retire at 60, and make a fantastic income and buy all sorts of fantastic products to occupy one's time with.
My sister is 40, she's a millennial and in her adolescence she had friends at 17 and they considered smoking cigarettes behind school to be "risky behavior," she began selling marijuana when it was legalized in 2013 and had a child and today is reckoning with a world where she cannot succeed or be popular and no matter how much she tries in completely good faith to reconcile the myth of hard work and success with the self-evident truth of the materialism-decimated shithole the world has devolved into, she cannot. She envies the fact that I have never been employed and I have never had a relationship. When I told her I was Asexual, she told me I "just hadn't met the right person yet". She has never met the right person either, her life is nothing more than a haphazard, impractical series of one sad, unfulfilling relationship after another.
I, on the other hand, accept that true freedom comes from not trying or caring. My adult life will be spent going from one deeply unfulfilling, haphazard platonic friendship with a girl to another, and most of these friendships will last less than a year. But because I accept this as the reality of my existence, I can never be disappointed. It is an adaptation which prevents me from killing myself. I have been rejected, mocked, humiliated and belittled by so many people who are jealous of my ability to live with myself by now that it all becomes background noise.
In certain ways, it could be said that I have altogether conquered life. This is a bit sad, since it means there are no challenges remaining at my disposal, no pleasant surprises or meaningful paths forward in terms of personal development. I have to work hard to ensure that life does not become stagnant for me, and I seek out increasingly novel experiences. The one novel experience I doubt I will ever have is where I am naked with someone and we touch each other.
My generation is derided as being unable to take risks. To older generations, "risks" meant asking out the cute person in class, going on a sock-hop date, necking at Lover's Lane, and quaint things like that. I take much bigger risks which have nothing to do with sex. Just a few months ago, I called my landlord a "doughy troglodyte fuck" directly to him over the phone. This was a huge risk because I could have been evicted. Thankfully, my landlord is too much of a pasty landowning shithead to take decisive action. If more people took risks like that and less risks like asking a girl out to the malt shop, I think the world would improve a lot.
Perhaps I had this outburst because on some subconscious level, I do crave emotional intimacy, and berating my landlord, who I consider above anyone else my absolute nemesis, does in some way emotionally connect me to him through our rivalry. It was much more intense and riveting than sex, I think. The instant after I called him a doughy troglodyte fuck, there were rockets of ecstasy going off behind my eyes.
There is not actually that much it would take for me to want to have sex with someone, surprisingly. The conditions are relatively simple: I would have to know someone for a year, I'd have to be convinced that I could trust them and that they were legitimately concerned with the improvement of my life, we'd need to see each other about once a week, and then they would need to initiate the sex at an opportune time when we were both sober and in a good mood and the question would need to be literal and direct, free of any innuendo:
"Do you want to have sexual intercourse?"
"OK".
But I know this will never happen, and this is because girls cannot devote time or energy to me because they are convinced that their time and energy would be wasted on me. I cannot necessarily prove that they are wrong, because they would need to spend a year on me and most girls cannot take things slow like that or actually care about my particular circumstances. Perhaps I am a waste of time, the signs would never line up just right and we'd never have that perfect kiss and the sparks would never fly, and to this I respond with a confident:
So the fuck what?
Of course, they'd need to be the one to initiate the process of sex, and this is because I have no firsthand experience with sex and so I need to be shown directly how it works and I need someone to tell me that it's worth having and that having it would somehow improve my existence from how it currently is. That she matters and that I matter and that making each other feel good is a good thing. But I have never had a positive sexual experience and never will, and because I accept this I am remarkably happy and content with the state of my own existence. And it is this unbreakable happiness that people envy, and this very happiness that would be broken if I were to have sex. I would be fundamentally changed and my mind would be irrevocably altered. And I would accept this, of course- because it would be objectively real- but at the same time something beautiful would die. The world would have broken me, and God would win. My happiness is only derived from the fact that I am an affront to God (alias the will of weak-minded human beings).
Girls today do not or cannot initiate the process of sex because they ascribe to old-fashioned values, as much as us GenZers like to pretend as if the sex we have is some kind of rebellious new push forward, the Conservatives have in so many ways already won against the Homosexual agenda and traditional gender norms have been reasserted. So many Lesbians have decided that having heterosexual sex with men who resemble Joe Dirt is acceptable. So much so in fact that I have yet to meet a single Lesbian who is in a happy Lesbian relationship, they all insist they are gay but all they do is ride the sausage. I am tired of existing within a generation who claim that being straight is some kind of act of legitimate rebellion, whose actions do not match their supposed preferences. Being in a world of people who claim to be queer but are actually straight is positively surreal and infinitely annoying. All I see is a reassertion of heteronormative values playing out in real time.
So of course it is expected that I, as a man operating within traditional gender norms, will initiate the process of sex, but I never will because I have no experience with sex. And this process will repeat ad infinitum. No girl will ever ask me to have sex with her, I will never have sex. I will remain a virgin until I am dead because to ask for sex requires willpower and strength. In many ways, the people of the 1960s were more forward-thinking than Gen Z. In those days, you could just wander into a new-age flower compound and some girl would come out and give you sex then and there, and you'd never question it. But, as I have already established, those were different circumstances.
I have asked for sex twice. The first time was as a test of friendship with someone I thought I loved platonically, if she had said "yes" I probably would have declined because I valued our friendship more than any potential romantic or sexual bond. I thought I could actually trust her. I thought that her saying "no" was because she also legitimately valued and respected our friendship as something meaningful and special and important. However, she moved away shortly after and started having sex with a southern hick who looks like a thin meth-addicted Ron Jeremy, despite claiming to be an aromantic lesbian for the duration of the time I knew her. The actual reason she said "no" wasn't because she recognized that I legitimately valued her friendship more than sex or romance, and respected me as a human being, it was because I wasn't her type, and I also wasn't stupid enough to manipulate to her own ends.
The second time I asked for sex it was with a different friend I hadn't seen for 6 months. She respected me even less, the last time I had seen her she had tried to have sex with me while there was a dangerous level of alcohol in her system- a life threatening amount- and I had stayed at her apartment to help her vomit it out. She pawed at me and groped me and fondled me in a way that made me extremely uncomfortable, but I stayed with her and probably saved her life through the ordeal because I legitimately cared about and respected her, and didn't want her to die. And for this effort she ignored me for 6 months and when I saw her again, I said, "Look, I would be WILLING to have sex with you as long as we were both sober," but she slammed the door in my face because she apparently thought I actually wanted sex or cared about it when I was merely offering it. It was not me who wanted the sex, I just wanted to be friends with her. She very much did want sex out of me but then got rid of me when she realized she might have to legitimately care about or love me to attain it.
If she had never groped me, we could still be friends today. But that experience, of being fondled and then ignored for 6 months and then immediately rejected and told that I was "not normal" even though she identified as "queer," was so monumentally lousy it has convinced me that I will absolutely never ask anyone ever again. I am done putting in the effort. If some girl wants to try, by all means they can, but I am not easy and I will never actively pursue an activity as sad and miserable as sexual intercourse. At least, I think it's sad and miserable. I've never had it so I can never know.
The night she'd gotten drunk, she had dismissed fentanyl addicts we had passed as "people caught in patterns they cannot break." And I believe this was some kind of subtle insult towards me considering how, from her perspective, I was trapped in a sad and miserable cycle of virginity. She failed to consider that, from my perspective, the sex she had was a sad and miserable cycle. To me, people like her are little more than animals because they seem incapable of legitimate choice. She could not make the decision to permanently forfeit sex because she was a slave to her body, her carnal instincts ruled her. On the other hand, I probably could break my pattern, provided we were both sober. I am capable of changing my behavior if I believe it would be in my best interests to do so. I would probably rather die than be reduced to her sorry state, though. The fact she tried to present her condiiton as desirable to mine is laughable. She was a sad wreck whose constant lust meant that she could never be satiated. I view sex addicts in much the same way I view fentanyl addicts. Actually, I like fentanyl addicts more since they never flirt with me.
Such is the continuous state of the asexual- I am told by so many people that it is I who cannot make legitimate decisions, that choosing to have sex is somehow the ultimate and best decision, while they insist that they "must pay rent" or "must have a well-paying job" or "must suck penis" even while the society which demands such standards crumbles around them. If more women told more men to castrate themselves, that would constitute a profound act of autonomy, but I don't see much of that. So it is rather rich to hear from the well-paid sex-havers whose every action must benefit the system which provides them with nonstop sex and resources that it is I who cannot make decisions and do not have agency.
As long as I refrain from having sex, I retain the high ground and a profound moral clarity. The most liberating feeling possible is the realization that sex does not matter, and the subsequent rejection of sexual hierarchy. The complete devaluation of sex is an act which enables one to see the beauty of the world beyond humanity and the relative unimportance of reproduction. For us, sex is tyranny.
I described Asexuality as "tautological" above, in that we must justify our own existence. We do not have to do this entirely, of course- for instance, I know for a fact that my writing and art resonates with many people. It captures some unspoken essence of the human psyche and this is why people choose to engage with my ideas. As long as I am provably more successful and happy than all the boyfriends around me, I will assume that I am doing something right, and my being will justify itself again and again, procedurally. I will revel in the aspect of merely existing, and will not define myself by something as trivial as a "body count".
What sex enthusiasts tend to deny is that their arguments are equally tautological. They insist, for instance, that having new children and making new people is objectively good, despite the many arguments which could be made to prove that this isn't the case. They insist that sex produces the most serotonin possible in the brain and therefore maximizes happiness without considering the equivalent amount of misery which is produced as the immediate byproduct of sex. These sorts of arguments are short-sighted and naive.
It is true that we Asexuals on average have large egos and are exceptionally confident. But I say, also- let my ego die when it is my time to die, for in accepting that sex is meaningless and trivial I also openly confront death, and in confronting death I celebrate the beauty and inherent finity of life. Let me live as a grand spectacle, a blazing orb of happiness in a world of relative misery, and then allow me to be subsumed by the earth and rolled back into the particulate matter of the universe, and let me end rather than having my genetic material drag on and on and on. Sex may be approved by God, but death is approved by the actual legitimate universe, because unlike God, death is real.
I have yet to meet someone who is capable of confronting and appreciating the base nature of life and death as I do, they all in some way make some concession to the notion that there is a grand purpose or higher calling, and even I in some way must make some slight admission which is a denial of my true material status as a collection of atoms, and I am cursed with this thing called consciousness, but I accept it as wonderful and meaningful and in so doing I actualize myself, and though this actualization I attain power, and this power will not eat me because I can make decisions and have free will, and there is no God I must answer to.
Is Asexuality a choice or is it a curse? Is it beneficial or detrimental? Such questions will undoubtedly vary from person to person, but speaking for myself personally I cannot deny that asexuality exists and as long as I exist, it exists, and its presence is every bit as vivid and real and potent as the wildest orgasm.
I suppose I cannot say that with complete certainty, since I have never had one.