"I decided since then to trust myself as the arbiter of what’s 'enough' and have turned down plenty of offers since, and because I have yet to feel any sexual attraction to anyone..."

"... I have never allowed anyone else to talk me into anything I know I don’t desire. I think I’d recognize it if it happened to me. Most other people find it unmistakable. If a food smells delicious to everyone else but bland or bad to me, I don’t owe anyone the demonstration of actually eating it before I’m 'allowed' to say I don’t want to eat the dish."

From "You’re about as sexually attractive to me as a turtle: Coming out as asexual in a hypersexual culture," by Tracy Clark-Flory. I appreciated the analogy, because I have another "a-" — anosmia. And I've long observed the difficulty of achieving awareness of the separation between what you actually want and what everyone else seems to act like they agree that everyone wants.

And I've also been thinking a lot lately about the one-sidedness of much of the propaganda that we're exposed to. The pro-sex propaganda in our culture — like the pro-travel propaganda and the pro-education propaganda — is pervasive, and the anti- arguments are scarcely seen. That doesn't mean there aren't cogent things to say on the other side, just that people are not finding it in their interest to put effort into exposing that side. So I like when someone is inspired to correct the balance. It can help all of us think more clearly about what we really want.

Also: Clark-Flory explains — intelligently — how masturbation is not necessarily inconsistent with asexuality. Asexuality is defined as a lack of sexual desire directed at anyone. Think about it. You might try to say that if the purported asexual masturbates, she's experiencing sexual desire directed at herself, but that doesn't make sense, because we don't normally talk that way about masturbation, otherwise we would think of all masturbation as homosexual.