"[Those] seeking bigential anatomy—or, both a penis and a vagina—call themselves 'Salmacians'..."

"... [a term] derived from the Greek myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, wherein the nymph Salmacis begs the gods to unite her with her male object of desire, Hermaphroditus, and the gods merge the two into a single androgynous being.... [One Salmacian] said they’ve received messages telling them they’re 'making a mockery' of the community by 'only going halfway.' They described a torrent of derogatory comments from self-proclaimed 'trans-medicalists'—those who believe transness is contingent upon a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and a full medical transition. 'That was the hardest hate mail to take—other trans people saying, "No, you're doing it wrong"'..."

From "Trans People Are Seeking Nonbinary Bottom Surgeries/Across the gender spectrum, some patients are looking for mixed sets of genitals, or none at all. Actually receiving this affirming care isn't easy" (Vice).

"I’m asexual (yes, you can be asexual and have a boyfriend), and what that means for me is my penis was just for me."

"So what was even the point of having a lot of it? Was I greedy? Crazy? Weeks before my procedure, I got a block of clay and sat meditating and molding by feel, letting my body answer. The resulting phallus was the exact size I’d been requesting. For days, I lay on the floor on and off in the sunlight coming into my living room, asking my ancestors and transcestors for guidance. Some people might kill for this kind of access and choice. Certainly many, many, many, many people have died in the fight for it. One night, I woke up from a dead sleep, and all I heard was: Take the big dick. So I did. And it was perfect.... One of my surgeons asked me at some point if I’d want to follow up later with surgical girth reduction in case this here wondrous member we had conjured from fucking nothing into warm, space-displacing reality wasn’t yet the fit that would stop the deafening five-alarm bereavement scream that had ricocheted around my insides incessantly since birth. But the screaming had stopped...."

From "My Penis, Myself/I didn’t need a penis to be a man. But I needed one to be me" by Gabriel Mac (New York Magazine).

"These days, we understand Thoreau to have been a nonpracticing gay man, whose retreat to his weatherized cabana at Walden was... an anti-heteronormative broadside."

I'm trying to read "Thoreau in Love/The writer had a deep bond with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he also had a profound connection with Emerson’s wife" by James Marcus (The New Yorker). 

I've taken an ongoing interest in Thoreau ever since I encountered him when I was a high school student in the 1960s, and I've noticed and blogged things about him throughout the 17 years of this blog, and I'm even also interested in the subject of historical figures who might have been gay. How did I miss the development of this understanding that Thoreau was "a nonpracticing gay man"? 

If he's nonpracticing, and he didn't talk about it, whence the idea that he was gay? Doesn't that erase asexuality?

Anyway. Let's read:

"Why do people feel the need to label their sexuality with such specificity? As if a 'demi-sexual' is a thing you are and always have been and always will be."

"So short-sighted. Why pressure people into fitting into a sexual 'tribe'? Once we label, we sort ourselves, and then we're in a tribe, and then we reinforce tribal culture within that tribe. So if you join the 'asexual' tribe, then your asexuality will be reinforced and you'll stop going through the normal changes that most of us experience over our lives. Once you classify yourself, you ossify yourself."

Asks PatHMV, emailing me about yesterday's post about "Platonic" — sex-free — marriages. 

I myself was critical of what I called "picky terms" — like "asexual, aromantic, pansexual, demisexual" — but PatHMV elaborates some of the problem with this pickiness, this specificity. How do you know that's what you are — as a type of entity — as opposed to it's just your effort to express what you feel now? And I really wonder — when we are talking about life partners who don't have any sex at all — is this really who they are or is this a way to arrive at mental peace when you've found yourself in a relationship that has some but not all of what you want? 

In one of the updates at yesterday's post, a reader named Peter spoke of his long marriage that has turned into a sexless marriage in recent years. This is something that happens — a lot, I presume — and I don't think it would be accurate to think that Peter or his wife discovered that he/she is asexual.... or would it?

PatHMV said — pithily — "Once you classify yourself, you ossify yourself." But in cases like Peter's, it seems that both had classified themselves as heterosexual, but at least one of them morphed into asexuality. But — no! — we don't talk about it like that. It's conventional to think that both are heterosexual, but they just got older or more jaded and sex became unimportant. They're still heterosexual. If so, then these picky specifications aren't really sexual orientations.

And yet, if people like thinking of these various concepts as their sexual orientation, well, that's an intellectual orientation. If it makes your circumstances in life more pleasurable or more tolerable or more exciting or more rational to you, then go ahead — What's the harm? To classify is to ossify? But you can reclassify. 

And maybe staying put once you marry is an important commitment to your mate. If you present yourself as heterosexual, your mate is counting on that — counting on your being ossified! If you say, you've come to the realization that your true self is asexual, that's going to be a disappointment. But if you find yourself to have become asexual, must you — should you — continue to play the role of a heterosexual? Put yourself in your spouse's position: If you knew your partner wanted no sex at all, would you want him/her to provide sex for you anyway? If yes, would you prefer that with the truth hidden or revealed?

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"[Yasmin] Benoit is determined to ensure other asexual (or 'ace') people don’t feel broken or alone in a world in which lust and desire pulsate through our entire culture...."

 “And while many aces, such as Benoit, are also aromantic, meaning they have no interest in romantic relationships, others feel differently. [Angela] Chen, for example, is biromantic (attracted romantically to both genders) and has a long-term boyfriend with whom she has sex. She says she has sex with her partner for emotional reasons only – to feel close to him – but adds: 'I could go the rest of my life being celibate and I would be perfectly happy.'... If you remove sexual desire, what’s the difference between romance and an intense platonic friendship? Research suggests key differences, says Chen, with romantic attraction leaving individuals wanting to change their life for their partner, being infatuated with them and becoming possessive.... When many people envisage an 'asexual' they picture a nerdy, androgynous white male – think Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory – but as a black female model, Benoit is taking on these stereotypes...."

From "‘I don’t want sex with anyone’: the growing asexuality movement" (The Guardian).

"Graysexuality is fascinating because we get to watch the process of a new orientation being constructed in real time."

Writes Ozymandias at Thing of Things:

Graysexuality is fascinating because we get to watch the process of a new orientation being constructed in real time.

The Asexual Visibility and Education Network defines graysexuality as the following:

Sexuality is not black and white; some people identify in the gray (spelled “grey” in some countries) area between asexual and sexual. People who identify as gray-A can include, but are not limited to those who:

• do not normally experience sexual attraction, but do experience it sometimes
• experience sexual attraction, but a low sex drive
• experience sexual attraction and drive, but not strongly enough to want to act on them
• people who can enjoy and desire sex, but only under very limited and specific circumstances

Graysexuality can be a very broad term, and it’s easy to misinterpret what people mean about it from a definition. Here are some examples of graysexual experiences people I’ve talked to have had:

"Mr. Gorey himself never really acknowledged his own sexuality. To Mr. Schiff, he described himself as 'reasonably undersexed.'"

"To another interview’s probing question about his sexual orientation, he said, 'I’m neither one thing nor the other particularly.' Later in the interview he added: 'What I am trying to say is that I am a person before I am anything else.' While today’s L.G.B.T.Q. community may read that as a closeted gay man from an earlier generation refusing to come out, 'it’s far more complicated than that,' Mr. Dery said. The few romantic feelings Mr. Gorey confessed to in letters to friends, most of them for other men and best described as infatuations, show him as someone for whom the messiness of human relationships was much too much. Perhaps for that or other reasons he kept himself buttoned up. Mr. Dery honored that. 'I wanted to allow Gorey his self-definition, and his self-definition is essentially not to define himself,' he said. 'I wanted to allow Gorey his mystery.'"

From "Edward Gorey Was Eerily Prescient/A new biography celebrates his mysterious life and art."

The book, by Mark Dery, has a fantastic title, "Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey."

On the subject of vague sexuality, I love this Gorey drawing:



The caption is: "When they tried to make love, their strenuous and prolonged efforts came to nothing" (from Gorey's book "The Loathsome Couple").

80s Dusty.

I love Dusty Springfield, but have absolutely no memory of this...



... and I watched a lot of MTV in the 80s. I remember the Pet Shop Boys, chiefly this, but never knew they got together with Dusty Springfield.

Why am I looking at Dusty Springfield this morning? It was a strange journey! Routine checking of Instapundit took me to a Campus Reform piece titled "Student gov to pursue mandatory LGBT 'ally training' for faculty." It says LGBT in the headline, but the text refers to "LGBTQIA+." I figured the A was "asexual" — correctly, I see — and I wondered why do people who want nothing need anything? Recognition? Hey, what about me? I need nothing.

And you know me, I like to say Better than nothing is a high standard. I think there's too much bad sex going on and recommend valuing nothing as pretty high on the list of things you might want.

I played my favorite nothing song, "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'" by The Velvet Underground, and thought about other great nothing songs. "All or Nothing at All," "Nothing Was Delivered," "I Who Have Nothing," "Nothing Compares to U." Here's a whole big list, so you don't have to tell me I "forgot" any nothing songs, and you can find your own favorites. Maybe you like "Money For Nothing" or "King Nothing."

With that list, I stumbled into 80s Dusty. The 80s look and feel so anaesthetized. That hair, that makeup, the shoulder pads — such deadness. I don't think nothing has to be like that. The antidote is this 70s nothing:



IN THE COMMENTS: Left Bank of the Charles helps out with 2 great nothing songs where the nothing isn't in the title: Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" ("Nothing really matters") and The Talking Heads's "Heaven" ("Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens").

"I could say I wasn’t that mad about it once she’d said she could take or leave it..."

"... and we had sex off and on then for about six weeks till she got pregnant with our son. That’s more than 20 years ago and we’ve not had sex since, though we’ve talked about it a couple of times. We had one tricky spell about five years ago when Alison started to worry we weren’t normal and thought we should go for counselling. I didn’t care about normal – my worry was that she really did want sex and might have an affair, but she promised me that wasn’t the case. None of our friends or family would believe that we have a sexless marriage. We’ll have a spat occasionally, like everyone else, but we’re very cuddly and close to each other and still as interested in each other and do as much together as we ever did.... She’s beautiful and I love her and I don’t think we’ll ever have sex again."

From "'I don’t think we’ll ever have sex again': our happy, cuddly, celibate marriage/Brian and Alison have been together for 25 years and haven’t had sex for the past 20. Here, they explain why" in The Guardian.

"I identify as grey-asexual (can't bring myself to call it greysexual) and for me it's a useful term."

"I experience sexual attraction vanishingly rarely and when I do it's often not strong enough to even act on, more of an intellectual curiosity. Some folks in the asexual community can be absolutists about the identity, so that a person with my history, for instance, wouldn't be considered asexual, even though my lived experience is more in line with asexuality than not. Grey-asexual identifies those who fall between asexual and non-asexual and can help those of us who fall on that part of the spectrum understand ourselves. It's not a term with an exact definition and people who identify with it often have their own interpretations, but it's functioning in an area where the language is evolving rapidly as people work to more accurately express their feelings, hence the host of identities in the article."

From the Metafilter comments on a post about a HuffPo article collecting a bunch of words that purportedly identify various sexual conditions. The HuffPo article is not good. It seems like it could be a joke, but if so it would be: 1. not particularly funny, and 2. disrespectful toward some people you'd expect HuffPo to swath in dignity. The HuffPo article can be experienced as funny, as Metafilter commenters point out, if you concentrate on why the various stock photos were chosen to illustrate the particular sexual conditions. Why is the "graysexual" a man in a hat walking down the middle of a country road?

The serious question — the one that made me choose the quote above — is whether having more specific words for feelings helps people understand who they are and what they are doing with their lives? Off hand, I say it depends on what you do with that word once you learn it.

"I assume the Caitlyn Jenner explosion was a glut of PR companies pushing insanely because I don’t know anyone who felt that interested."

"I believe in humasexuality... we are all human and we are all attracted to humans. To chip it down to tags and tote-bags simply creates division. I could only be concerned by a person’s sexuality if it directly affected me, which it never does. I do not feel asexual, but technically it appears as if I am because I don’t feel any raging affiliation with anything."

Said Morrissey.

"All those crazy labels — bi, gay, lesbian, straight, pansexual, asexual, etc. — are there to help us communicate who we are and what we want."

"Once upon a time, NNFS, you wanted heterosexual sex, you had heterosexual sex, and you identified as heterosexual. That label was correct for you then. If the asexual label is a better fit for you now, if it more accurately communicates who you are (now) and what you want (now), you have none other than David Jay’s permission to use it."

That's sex-advice columnist Dan Savage answering a question from a lady who's trying to figure out if she's asexual. David Jay is the founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.

Jay's comment was: "If you’re not drawn to be sexual with anyone, then you have a lot in common with a lot of people in the asexual community. That being said, there’s no such thing as a ‘true’ asexual. If the word seems useful, use it. At the end of the day, what matters is how well we understand ourselves, not how well we match some Platonic ideal of our sexual orientation, and words like ‘asexual’ are just tools to help us understand ourselves."

"After that sweet birthday fling, I was to have no sex for the next 35 years."

Writes Oliver Sacks in his new memoir "On the Move," reviewed in the NYT by Andrew Solomon, who complains that Sacks's "transition into celibacy is presented without explication." Sacks has known that he is gay since at least when he was 18 (in 1951), when he told his father the news. His father told his mother, and his mother "came down with a face of thunder, a face I had never seen before. 'You are an abomination,' she said. 'I wish you had never been born.'"

Then she left and did not speak to me for several days. When she did speak, there was no reference to what she had said (nor did she ever refer to the matter again), but something had come between us. My mother, so open and supportive in most ways, was harsh and inflexible in this area. A Bible reader like my father, she loved the Psalms and the Song of Solomon but was haunted by the terrible verses in Leviticus: "Thou shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

That's from the book. Solomon wonders why Sacks was celibate for 35 years:

He explains only that he had trouble with “bonding, belonging and believing.” Sacks has cared for many people — especially his patients — but the kind of love on which marriages are based seems to have been not merely elusive, but bewildering to him (though he has been seeing the same psychoanalyst for nearly 50 years). Sacks did not so much avoid convention as fail to notice it; he understands difficult facets of the human experience with singular clarity, but emotional rules that are legible to most people seem to bewilder him.

By the way, the word "celibacy" (or "celibate") does not appear in the book. Nor is there "sexless." And "no sex" only appears that once (quoted in the post title). Is Sacks really as bewildered as Solomon seems to think? I'm looking at the book — which I just bought — and I see that Sacks says that he "regarded [his] sexuality as nobody’s business but [his] own, not a secret, but not to be talked about" and that one closest friends when he was a young man told him he thought Sacks was "asexual."

We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times. And I have needed to remind myself, repeatedly, that my mother was born in the 1890s and had an Orthodox [Jewish] upbringing and that in England in the 1950s homosexual behavior was treated not only as a perversion but as a criminal offense. I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas— like religion and politics— where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings. My mother did not mean to be cruel, to wish me dead. She was suddenly overwhelmed, I now realize, and she probably regretted her words or perhaps partitioned them off in a closeted part of her mind.

But her words haunted me for much of my life and played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality.

I think that's some explication of what Solomon calls the "transition into celibacy." But many readers — including me — would like to see the subject of celibacy examined by someone with such a fine mind and such long experience with the condition. There must have been some good in it, to stay with it for 35 years.

"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.

"I used to think I was asexual, but the primary reason why I thought that was because my BMI was 14..."

"I castrated myself when I was 15 to rebel against society... a degenerate capitalistic system results in a commodification of sexuality...."

"I feel like a complete oddity, but I am a male who hates sex."

"I feel dirty and gross during and after the process. When I’m with a partner I do my best to help satisfy their needs and desires, but I almost always have to rush to the shower afterward. Some times I simply can't even be touched without jerking away and having a panic attack. But I do love going on dates, making dinner together, snuggling while watching movies."

A question for Emily Yoffe.

In a similar vein: "The married couples who NEVER have sex but insist they're happy: Are they deluded - or just honest?"

"It's hard to imagine what would push me to having sex. I'm not afraid of sex, it's just not something I want to do."

"That's probably why I delve into the world of science fiction and Transformers, where sex isn't an issue at all."

"The male staff who Hillary attracts are slick, geeky weasels or rancid, asexual cream puffs."

Yikes! It's Camille Paglia!

(Via Instapundit.)

ADDED: So I'm mentally sorting through the Hillary men and trying to decide which ones are slick, geeky weasels or and which ones are rancid, asexual cream puffs.

ADDED: Rush Limbaugh read the whole passage and said: "It is an interesting question, and it is interesting to note that all of these guys in Hillary's orb, you know, would be in Revenge of the Nerds 10 — and that's even being charitable towards them, in terms of being men."

"The asexual, unmaternal, left-leaning eyes of a poorly groomed woman."

Don't miss the hilarious Joe Queenan review of Edward Klein's book "The Truth About Hillary." I'll just list my favorite phrases:

"Waterworld'' stinks, but it does not reek

short-haired women from the sapphic charnel house Wellesley College

Geraldo Rivera's sublimely vile autobiography, ''Exposing Myself"

only about the 16th sleaziest book I have ever read

referred to by classmates as ''Sister Frigidaire"

the asexual, unmaternal, left-leaning eyes of a poorly groomed woman

manipulative pinkos who were playing for the other team

commie gangsters associated with mobbed-up trade unions

Out asexuals.

Here an interesting piece in the NYT about the newly found pride of persons who are not sexually attracted to anyone:

They describe themselves as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire. They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives happily without ever having sex.

"People think they need to convert you," said Cijay Morgan, 42, a telephone saleswoman in Edmonton, Alberta, and a self-professed asexual. "They can understand if you don't like country music or onion rings or if you aren't interested in learning how to whistle, but they can't accept someone not wanting sex. What they don't understand is that a lot of asexuals don't wish to be quote-unquote fixed."

"People think they need to convert you" -- that reminds me of the scene on the yacht in "Some Like It Hot," where Marilyn Monroe is trying to help Tony Curtis (who's just pretending).

Go to the link to see a picture of a young man wearing a shirt proclaiming his asexuality. I wonder what sorts of things people say to him when he's parading around in that? I'm sure most people think he's kidding and trying to get attention. But he's quite serious.