Explaining The Gay - Tumblr Posts
I’ve just thought of a half-decent analogy to describe asexuality to allosexuals, perhaps even for aromanticism as well. It works best for sex-indifference, but I think it applies either way, so. Bear with me.
Have you ever seen a pair of mittens and immediately, instinctively, unprompted, thought about what it would feel like to wear them? What their fabric feels like? How your hands would feel inside them, what they look like on the inside? Precisely how warm they’d be? To the point where even if you’d never seen those mittens before and never see them again, you might even think about them after? No? Yea, me neither.
Imagine you’re out shopping with a group of friends and you see a lineup of mittens. Everyone’s jumping over eachother to point out, “oh, I’ve gotta wear this one,” “guys, look at this one,” “I need these” “this is totally my style” “I bet these are so comfy” and then someone looks at you, just standing there because…wtf. And they go “What about you? Which mittens do you wanna wear? C’mon, I know you want at least one!” Would you pick a pair of mittens? It seems like a relatively low stakes social interaction, they all seem to be having fun, nothing about this will truly affect the mittens at this time, you don’t have to buy anything, and there’s plenty of aesthetic criteria to base the choice on if you want. Would you pick one? I would. Many of us did.
Imagine right now, you learned a new fact that has always been true about the world and that everyone else sees as normal: 99% of people see some pair of mittens, maybe 1 in every 20, and immediately and instinctively think about wearing them, like I described earlier. They want to, they feel what’s described as a biological urge to wear those mittens. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they check out the mittens first, sometimes they just wear a pair of mittens they found on the sidewalk without knowing anything about them. Feeling this was is considered normal, and everyone has assumed you feel this way too, because this is the default. That inclination is normal, and you’re weird.
What would you think? Perhaps some level of what the fuck? But there’s no problem with wearing mittens, you guess, you just didn’t realize people actually felt that way, you thought they were exaggerating or joking around, but no. Would you struggle to believe it? Would you pretend to feel the same? What would you say the next time someone asked you about what kind of mittens you want to wear, knowing that’s what they really mean, knowing you’ve never felt that way about a pair of mittens?
People judge you now for not feeling as inclined to wear specific mittens as they do. Even some friends stick their hands in their pockets when you walk up, and stop talking about mittens at all because they don’t want to make you uncomfortable. Perhaps they act as if you don’t have hands, or insist you just haven’t found the right pair of mittens yet. For all you know, you could still find that “perfect pair” but time just keeps going and you’re clearly missing something. People accuse you of lying, laugh at you, maybe even try to shove mittens onto your hands just to show you how it feels, to “fix” you. Will you wear mittens just to appease the masses? Will you pretend to want mittens you don’t really care about? None of this makes any sense to you!
I think the analogy is pretty clear at this point, but I really want to emphasize that I’m not exaggerating here. The analogy isn’t perfect, but as far as I’ve taken it, it emotionally follows. The idea that someone could look at someone else, especially someone they don’t know, and immediately imagine them naked or want to touch them or whatever sounds just as ridiculous as someone achieving climax from wearing a pair of mittens. When people asked me who my “crush” was as a kid, like many aces and aros, I just picked a random person because I didn’t understand.
I have nothing against sex, I feel quite neutral about it and if you’re having it and enjoying it, I’m happy for you… but I just don’t care to try it. I shouldn’t have to. Just accept that I don’t care that much about the mittens.