The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality by Julie Sondra Decker

Author:Julie Sondra Decker [Decker, Julie Sondra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carrel Books
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

When something matters to a person, they invest time and energy into pursuing it. It makes no sense to suggest that, in the case of asexual people, they must have just put a cap on what their lives can contain and left out the part that involves sex or relationships. If someone feels a desire for it, that person can, of course, choose to ignore it if a career or a project is determined to be more important, but ignoring urges or crushes is not what asexuality is. If people are asexual, it’s not because they ran out of time to have sexual relationships.

Funnily enough, asexual people are also sometimes “accused” of having too much free time—and asked why they haven’t won a Nobel Prize or cured cancer since they surely must be doing something immensely constructive with all that time not spent on pursuing sex. The “but what do you do all day??” response is not uncommon, but this is more insulting to non-asexual people than to asexual people, considering it implies that non-asexual orientations prevent one from being productive or dominate one’s attention entirely. Most of the vastly productive people in the world are not asexual. And being asexual does not guarantee that one will have abundant free time.

Since most people do perceive sexual and/or romantic relationships as central to life, it’s not surprising that they see those who don’t desire those relationships as having “extra” free time. Yes, someone may have more free time if they’re not engaging in a time-consuming activity that nearly everyone else feels compelled to pursue. But that’s like suggesting a person who pursued basketball as a career did so “instead of” pursuing a career in baseball. Most non-partner-seeking people don’t feel their activities are “instead of” partner seeking.

Viewing partnered and/or sexually active life as the default, and all other arrangements as deviations, is not an accurate, useful, or supportive perspective for an asexual ally to maintain.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.