Definition & Distinction in Sexual Description
21/06/18 15:25
I'm going to offer an idea here, I'm not sure how people will take the idea but I will also offer an immediate defense of this idea based on what I THINK the problems with it might be. Others may have arguments against this idea that I have not foreseen and my characterization of these arguments is not meant to be a complete description of anyone else's point of view. All I can offer is what I expect are the opposing views.
*****. Please understand that I am talking about the creation of specific language here. I do not in any way want to diminish any person's lived experience. Every person has the right to love who they love and have whatever sexual desires they have. This is not meant to in any way reduce the validity of who a person is or to say their experience is inconsequential. This is about how the larger social order uses language to create perception and structures of social order and power. How a person feels or self identifies is absolutely up to them but how we create words and labels is a social process. I am trying to explore the idea that something innately personal, interior to ones self, may be at odds with the systems of socialized naming and control ****
The idea is this. In this day and age of sexual spectrums and definitions for sexuality, romantic attraction, and the associated (though not the same) ideas about gender we may be trying too hard to make these definitions happen. PERHAPS SEXUAL IDENTIFICATION IS TOO PERSONAL FOR SPECIFIC LABELING. I'm going to take a relatively simple example for the sake of argument here but one I feel does an excellent job of describing the difficulty of describing sexuality.
Take for example what seems to be a very baseline term Sexuality. We have now made this into a divided term between Asexuality and Sexuality. In 2008 a term in the middle of those two surfaced for Demisexual. But that term was later subsumed into a middle term called "Gray Asexuality" of course all of these terms are pretty tough for people to really understand. Let's look at the basic wikipedia definitions for each. I use wikipedia here because it is designed to be non academic, accessible but still fact based when possible.
"Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. It may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the variations thereof, alongside heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality. It may also be an umbrella term used to categorize a broader spectrum of various asexual sub-identities."
"Gray asexuality or gray-sexuality (spelled "grey" outside the U.S.) is the spectrum between asexuality and sexuality. Individuals who identify with gray asexuality are referred to as being gray-A, a grace or a gray ace, and make up what is referred to as the "ace umbrella". Within this spectrum are terms such as demisexual, semisexual, asexual-ish and sexual-ish."
So what we seem to describe there is a whole spectrum of space between two extreme polls, someone who has sexual feelings and someone who does not have them. In some ways this opens a whole discussion about things like severity of those feelings or desires, maybe the frequency of those desires, etc. That seems okay at first blush until we realize that most people have very little idea what to do with that wide spectrum. You can find forums all over about people asking for advice on where they fall here. What any human being feels here is a complex of emotional, cultural and physical elements. And yet these are so personal we often see people get very mad about others now labeling someone else.
If this is a complex issue, and if the only acceptable label is a self label… is there a value in labeling? I mean what do we use to understand sexualish, demisexual, semi sexual, asexual-ish and asexual? In that alone we have 5 different terms that essentially mean "Sexually Non-conforming" how is a normal person supposed to understand the minute and subtle variations there?
Let's actually back up a step and look at the definition of "human sexuality"
"Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, erotic, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied over time, it lacks a precise definition. The biological and physical aspects of sexuality largely concern the human reproductive functions, including the human sexual response cycle. Someone's sexual orientation can influence that person's sexual interest and attraction for another person. Physical and emotional aspects of sexuality include bonds between individuals that are expressed through profound feelings or physical manifestations of love, trust, and care. Social aspects deal with the effects of human society on one's sexuality, while spirituality concerns an individual's spiritual connection with others. Sexuality also affects and is affected by cultural, political, legal, philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious aspects of life.
Interest in sexual activity typically increases when an individual reaches puberty. Opinions differ on the origins of an individual's sexual orientation and sexual behavior. Some argue that sexuality is determined by genetics, while others believe it is molded by the environment, or that both of these factors interact to form the individual's sexual orientation. This pertains to the nature versus nurture debate. In the former, one assumes that the features of a person innately correspond to their natural inheritance, exemplified by drives and instincts; the latter refers to the assumption that the features of a person continue to change throughout their development and nurturing, exemplified by ego ideals and formative identifications."
So someone who is "sexual" already has this complex web of elements that shape and determine their sexuality and sexual drives. Does it really benefit us to continue to discuss and further try to sub divide this down into some arbitrary set of labels for people who simply experience sexual desire differently? Maybe this topic is simply too infinitely complex to really offer us a clear definition? Maybe instead of trying to gather enough people to form a coalition of people which we can then apply a group label to we need to accept that everyone experiences this as a unique individual. That all people are sexual, even if they do not have any sexual desire.
Asexual people talk a lot about erasure. The fact that they are not depicted in media. By their own estimates perhaps 1% of people fall into this spectrum. Now I have no idea how we would calculate that, the sample size for a self reporting study would be enormous. But when people self report how do they do so accurately? In fact I would think that either someone would have a desire for sex of some kind with some type of person to some degree…. Or they would have no desire for it whatsoever. That distinction makes sense, though even then we need to open up "sexual desire" a bit more to understand what we are dealing with. But a dichotomy here seems at least workable.
Everything else however feels… inappropriate.
For example. My parents told me I would know when I met "the one" I've been in a few long term relationships (3+ years) and I have no idea if I have ever met "the one" because I don't know what that feeling is. In fact that's why humans continue to write songs and make movies and poems and everything else about those kinds of relationships. From the pornographic to the victorian romance we have a hugely hard time really outwardly expressing love, sex and romance.
COUNTER ARGUMENT 1:
When we talk about erasure we have a group of people who feel wronged. The reason then that we continue to define people into groups is because when people are united as a group around an idea they have a combined voice and can empower one another. So the drive to define groups is to enable those groups to seek empowerment in society.
MY RESPONSE 1:
Let's continue with the example group. They may take up as much as 1% of the population. If you divide that down into the 5 different sub groups from the wikipedia article you are now at about 0.2% of the population for any one of those groups. That is a large number of people assuming the math is as clean as all that (which it likely isn't, I suspect it's far more complex) but 0.2% of the population is still a HUGE number of people. Assuming the world population is 7.5 Billion then 0.2% of that is 15,000,000. So if we take all the people who fall under any condition of "Non-Sexual" we would have about 75 million people worldwide. That's about the same number of people who play Minecraft. Breaking this down into smaller and smaller groups diminishes the voice fo the group. Trying to create artificial sections among Asexuals seems to actually run counter to offering them a unified voice.
However by further dividing it and making more specific groups it magnifies the strength of the individual's connection to the group and amplifies the sense of victimization at the hands of society. I think in many ways the goal of this continued specificity is to amplify that sense of victimhood and to allow an emotional release for people who feel they have not been heard or listened to about their sexuality (or in this case their lack of sexuality)
COUNTER ARGUMENT 2:
By attempting to limit the description of marginalized people you are enacting a sort of linguistic violence against them, limiting their personal expression. They need to have a label that works for them and makes them feel at ease with their sexuality.
MY RESPONSE 2:
That counter argument is one I hear a lot in discussions like this about sexual orientation and gender. The issue is that if people want to be something like Gray Asexual or Genderfluid they have a unique personal experience. One that no label will ever properly encapsulate. This means that they will absolutely be continually mislabeled or misunderstood because their particular feelings or desires are different enough from any mainstream definition that they need to deal with this not as a label but as a relational issue. While I can absolutely sit down with a person and learn about hem and then come to some (maybe limited) understanding of who they are and how they feel, with labels I simply have a set of preconceptions that have to be large enough to cover a useful percentage of people I meet. This is why people often have a hard time with bisexuality or gender fluidity. The rules they have come to know don't apply here. Bisexuals come in a myriad of flavors, I have a couple of friends who are married…. Both of them are bisexual but they area married hetero couple. That doesn't make them "bad bisexuals" it also doesn't make them heterosexual, but it will confuse the hell out of a LOT of people because they don't know my friends personally. They see a man and woman who are married and assume they are heterosexual.
Erasure and repression in these instances are kinda impossible because showing people the total possible outcomes of all human sexuality is equally impossible. For instance I just watched a show called "Lip Service" from the BBC and most of the main characters are LGBTQIA+ but they are a myriad of different specific people and they all do something in that spectrum differently. They all want who they want and want them how much they want them but they are all different. The show does on occasion talk about bisexuality but they certainly don't come up with 5 different sub categories, because then the whole show would feel very much like checking off boxes for what sub class of what marginalized sexuality each character is. Media, and by extension society, would become this endless morass of mental paperwork to understand the categories and sub categories of human sexuality.
*****. Please understand that I am talking about the creation of specific language here. I do not in any way want to diminish any person's lived experience. Every person has the right to love who they love and have whatever sexual desires they have. This is not meant to in any way reduce the validity of who a person is or to say their experience is inconsequential. This is about how the larger social order uses language to create perception and structures of social order and power. How a person feels or self identifies is absolutely up to them but how we create words and labels is a social process. I am trying to explore the idea that something innately personal, interior to ones self, may be at odds with the systems of socialized naming and control ****
The idea is this. In this day and age of sexual spectrums and definitions for sexuality, romantic attraction, and the associated (though not the same) ideas about gender we may be trying too hard to make these definitions happen. PERHAPS SEXUAL IDENTIFICATION IS TOO PERSONAL FOR SPECIFIC LABELING. I'm going to take a relatively simple example for the sake of argument here but one I feel does an excellent job of describing the difficulty of describing sexuality.
Take for example what seems to be a very baseline term Sexuality. We have now made this into a divided term between Asexuality and Sexuality. In 2008 a term in the middle of those two surfaced for Demisexual. But that term was later subsumed into a middle term called "Gray Asexuality" of course all of these terms are pretty tough for people to really understand. Let's look at the basic wikipedia definitions for each. I use wikipedia here because it is designed to be non academic, accessible but still fact based when possible.
"Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity. It may be considered the lack of a sexual orientation, or one of the variations thereof, alongside heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality. It may also be an umbrella term used to categorize a broader spectrum of various asexual sub-identities."
"Gray asexuality or gray-sexuality (spelled "grey" outside the U.S.) is the spectrum between asexuality and sexuality. Individuals who identify with gray asexuality are referred to as being gray-A, a grace or a gray ace, and make up what is referred to as the "ace umbrella". Within this spectrum are terms such as demisexual, semisexual, asexual-ish and sexual-ish."
So what we seem to describe there is a whole spectrum of space between two extreme polls, someone who has sexual feelings and someone who does not have them. In some ways this opens a whole discussion about things like severity of those feelings or desires, maybe the frequency of those desires, etc. That seems okay at first blush until we realize that most people have very little idea what to do with that wide spectrum. You can find forums all over about people asking for advice on where they fall here. What any human being feels here is a complex of emotional, cultural and physical elements. And yet these are so personal we often see people get very mad about others now labeling someone else.
If this is a complex issue, and if the only acceptable label is a self label… is there a value in labeling? I mean what do we use to understand sexualish, demisexual, semi sexual, asexual-ish and asexual? In that alone we have 5 different terms that essentially mean "Sexually Non-conforming" how is a normal person supposed to understand the minute and subtle variations there?
Let's actually back up a step and look at the definition of "human sexuality"
"Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, erotic, physical, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied over time, it lacks a precise definition. The biological and physical aspects of sexuality largely concern the human reproductive functions, including the human sexual response cycle. Someone's sexual orientation can influence that person's sexual interest and attraction for another person. Physical and emotional aspects of sexuality include bonds between individuals that are expressed through profound feelings or physical manifestations of love, trust, and care. Social aspects deal with the effects of human society on one's sexuality, while spirituality concerns an individual's spiritual connection with others. Sexuality also affects and is affected by cultural, political, legal, philosophical, moral, ethical, and religious aspects of life.
Interest in sexual activity typically increases when an individual reaches puberty. Opinions differ on the origins of an individual's sexual orientation and sexual behavior. Some argue that sexuality is determined by genetics, while others believe it is molded by the environment, or that both of these factors interact to form the individual's sexual orientation. This pertains to the nature versus nurture debate. In the former, one assumes that the features of a person innately correspond to their natural inheritance, exemplified by drives and instincts; the latter refers to the assumption that the features of a person continue to change throughout their development and nurturing, exemplified by ego ideals and formative identifications."
So someone who is "sexual" already has this complex web of elements that shape and determine their sexuality and sexual drives. Does it really benefit us to continue to discuss and further try to sub divide this down into some arbitrary set of labels for people who simply experience sexual desire differently? Maybe this topic is simply too infinitely complex to really offer us a clear definition? Maybe instead of trying to gather enough people to form a coalition of people which we can then apply a group label to we need to accept that everyone experiences this as a unique individual. That all people are sexual, even if they do not have any sexual desire.
Asexual people talk a lot about erasure. The fact that they are not depicted in media. By their own estimates perhaps 1% of people fall into this spectrum. Now I have no idea how we would calculate that, the sample size for a self reporting study would be enormous. But when people self report how do they do so accurately? In fact I would think that either someone would have a desire for sex of some kind with some type of person to some degree…. Or they would have no desire for it whatsoever. That distinction makes sense, though even then we need to open up "sexual desire" a bit more to understand what we are dealing with. But a dichotomy here seems at least workable.
Everything else however feels… inappropriate.
For example. My parents told me I would know when I met "the one" I've been in a few long term relationships (3+ years) and I have no idea if I have ever met "the one" because I don't know what that feeling is. In fact that's why humans continue to write songs and make movies and poems and everything else about those kinds of relationships. From the pornographic to the victorian romance we have a hugely hard time really outwardly expressing love, sex and romance.
COUNTER ARGUMENT 1:
When we talk about erasure we have a group of people who feel wronged. The reason then that we continue to define people into groups is because when people are united as a group around an idea they have a combined voice and can empower one another. So the drive to define groups is to enable those groups to seek empowerment in society.
MY RESPONSE 1:
Let's continue with the example group. They may take up as much as 1% of the population. If you divide that down into the 5 different sub groups from the wikipedia article you are now at about 0.2% of the population for any one of those groups. That is a large number of people assuming the math is as clean as all that (which it likely isn't, I suspect it's far more complex) but 0.2% of the population is still a HUGE number of people. Assuming the world population is 7.5 Billion then 0.2% of that is 15,000,000. So if we take all the people who fall under any condition of "Non-Sexual" we would have about 75 million people worldwide. That's about the same number of people who play Minecraft. Breaking this down into smaller and smaller groups diminishes the voice fo the group. Trying to create artificial sections among Asexuals seems to actually run counter to offering them a unified voice.
However by further dividing it and making more specific groups it magnifies the strength of the individual's connection to the group and amplifies the sense of victimization at the hands of society. I think in many ways the goal of this continued specificity is to amplify that sense of victimhood and to allow an emotional release for people who feel they have not been heard or listened to about their sexuality (or in this case their lack of sexuality)
COUNTER ARGUMENT 2:
By attempting to limit the description of marginalized people you are enacting a sort of linguistic violence against them, limiting their personal expression. They need to have a label that works for them and makes them feel at ease with their sexuality.
MY RESPONSE 2:
That counter argument is one I hear a lot in discussions like this about sexual orientation and gender. The issue is that if people want to be something like Gray Asexual or Genderfluid they have a unique personal experience. One that no label will ever properly encapsulate. This means that they will absolutely be continually mislabeled or misunderstood because their particular feelings or desires are different enough from any mainstream definition that they need to deal with this not as a label but as a relational issue. While I can absolutely sit down with a person and learn about hem and then come to some (maybe limited) understanding of who they are and how they feel, with labels I simply have a set of preconceptions that have to be large enough to cover a useful percentage of people I meet. This is why people often have a hard time with bisexuality or gender fluidity. The rules they have come to know don't apply here. Bisexuals come in a myriad of flavors, I have a couple of friends who are married…. Both of them are bisexual but they area married hetero couple. That doesn't make them "bad bisexuals" it also doesn't make them heterosexual, but it will confuse the hell out of a LOT of people because they don't know my friends personally. They see a man and woman who are married and assume they are heterosexual.
Erasure and repression in these instances are kinda impossible because showing people the total possible outcomes of all human sexuality is equally impossible. For instance I just watched a show called "Lip Service" from the BBC and most of the main characters are LGBTQIA+ but they are a myriad of different specific people and they all do something in that spectrum differently. They all want who they want and want them how much they want them but they are all different. The show does on occasion talk about bisexuality but they certainly don't come up with 5 different sub categories, because then the whole show would feel very much like checking off boxes for what sub class of what marginalized sexuality each character is. Media, and by extension society, would become this endless morass of mental paperwork to understand the categories and sub categories of human sexuality.