Roundup of Submissions | August 2023 Carnival of Aces | Asexuality and Orientation

Carnival Roundup 19 Minutes

I received several incredibly insightful submissions for the August 2023 Carnival of Aces. Apologies for the delay in posting the roundup. I’ve been tied up adjusting to my move across the country for a new position. And the submissions were too good to post them without including my usual discussion.

List of Submissions (chronological)

Discussions of the Prompts

This may have been the first carnival I hosted where every prompt I suggested got tackled. I will discuss each submission in relation to the prompts, starting with a broad overview of asexuality and orientation that will help us get “oriented” to the topic, if you will.

First, it’s worth noting that sexual orientation, as a concept, has always been shifting. The model of 4 exclusive identities of heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual has it’s origins as psychological diagnoses. These identities, even before asexuality was widely known, were meant to capture the entirety of logical space with regards to what gender someone could be attracted to. Asexuality was the last of these gender-focused labels, basically an afterthought we had to invent because the previous model (again, due to originating from psychology) assumed everyone was sexual (or, alternatively, asexuality was previously theorized as a lack of sexual orientation).

But because asexuality is a null answer to the “what gender?” question, it quickly lead us to develop other terms to describe our internal experiences that didn’t revolve around sexual attraction to gender – after all, we didn’t want people to think that because we’re asexual we have no feelings at all! There were a couple ways to do this: 1) develop other types of attraction (romantic attraction, aesthetic attraction, etc.), and 2) develop models of sexual orientation that aren’t based on gender (i.e., demisexual, sapiosexual, some types of kink, etc.).

CaptainHeartless

Do you tend to think of asexuality more as an orientation or more as an identity? Or both?

This prompt question was inspired by Isaac’s post (“Beyond attraction, identity”) from the 2022 carnival (“Beyond attraction”), which I had also hosted:

So, beyond attraction, only identity. The former is descriptive, while the latter is facultative. I can’t compare the situation of asexuality with gender, because in gender what matters is identity. In gender, the defining feature is identity, while in asexuality it is attraction. This is why asexuality is an orientation and gender an identity.

Isaac (February 2022)

keygoose provides some background about this in his submission:

There once was a distinction between asexual orientation and asexual identity that was made by some, with the latter being about how others identify and the former about a lack of sexual attraction.

keygoose

It was interesting to see Mia’s and Sara’s (and Artemis’ and keygoose’s) takes on the prompt, which leaned towards asexuality as an identity.

While calling myself ace of course stems from the term as an accurate description of my sexual orientation … it’s more than that (for me) – it’s a marker of the community I’m part of & who I get along with, an indicator of sorts for the perspective & thoughts I have on my society’s attitudes & expectations about sex, and a special interest.

Mia

I think of my asexuality as the part of my identity. I am asexual the same way that I am a fanfiction writer, blogger, programmer, cognitive scientist, economist, Slovenian, European, woman, aromantic, public speaker, and many, many, many more.

I adopted the asexuality as part of my identity, because it helps me label some of my thinking and actions, that otherwise I might feel uncomfortable about.

Sara

(In fact, the common thread of the 2022 Carnival was that most of us relate to asexuality as a feeling of not being able to connect with, understand, or relate to the general populace; and [a] feeling of being able to relate to those people who call themselves ace.)

Regarding orientation vs. identity, while Mia does think of asexuality as an orientation (therefore, Mia’s answer to the prompt would be “both”), Sara doesn’t.

Should attraction be the basis of describing orientation?

Again, keygoose provides some background about this:

People often justify defining asexuality solely with attraction in part because that’s how other orientations were defined (apparently). 

keygoose

Artemis’ take on the defining feature of orientation being attraction is a resounding no. Artemis is not saying attraction shouldn’t feature into orientation, but that it shouldn’t be the sole determinant.

I think desires, what you want out of life, what you prioritize and how you conceptualize it and how you want to pursue it or reject it, ought to be embraced as a fundamental part of an orientation.  Even just purely semantically, an orientation defines what you’re oriented towards; even if we narrow that to romantically, sexually, and socially, it seems like an attraction you feel but have no desire to act on or incorporate into your plans for the future doesn’t have to be part of your orientation.  If an attraction isn’t orienting you – helping guide the path you want to follow – are you obligated to incorporate it into your orientation?  Your identity?  Conversely, if something that’s not attraction is helping to orient you in your life of pursuing or not pursuing certain romantic, sexual, or social connections, why shouldn’t that be allowed to be part of your orientation?

Artemis

After all, going back to the February 2022 carnival, so many of us were able to conceptualize asexuality beyond attraction. So why would attraction be the sole basis of determining orientation?

keygoose also shares how he arrived at the asexual identity that had nothing to do with attraction:

I feel like my alienation from romantic and sexual relationships first stemmed from my disinterest in having kids.

keygoose

Here, I will also note that microlabels (which some adopt as their orientation) seem to have not been rigid about attraction-based definitions. Lithosexual is such an example.

How do you think about orientation?

I wrote this prompt with the hope someone would discuss a conceptualization of orientation that is not usually discussed, in the same way the February 2022 carnival invited folks to conceptualize asexuality beyond attraction. To this end, I received three submissions.

Orientation as a compatibility gate

First, Coyote discusses how orientation works as a shorthand for a compatibility gate:

By “compatibility gate” I mean a threshold or filter for preemptively ruling people out. For example, if a person is only willing to consider potential sex partners who share a common language with them, who live nearby, and who share their interest in long-term partnership, those are all compatibility gates. They don’t guarantee that someone will be compatible with that person; they just preemptively rule out a lot of people who aren’t. The same could be said about preemptively ruling out a given gender — or, conversely, indicating which genders aren’t ruled out. It doesn’t tell you everything, but it can provide a rough starting point before you get into the nitty-gritty details.

Coyote

This conceptualization struck a chord for many of us, and it was referenced in several of the subsequent submissions.

Orientation as patterns

Next, Perfect number highlights how orientation is determined by a pattern and that exceptions and outliers don’t necessarily have to disrupt that pattern.

I want to talk about how orientation labels are about describing the overall patterns of your feelings/experiences. It doesn’t mean every single feeling you’ve ever felt fits the definition for that orientation label. It’s about the pattern. … And, since it’s about finding patterns, there could be 2 people with the same experiences, but one of them thinks those experiences show a pattern, and the other thinks those experiences are just exceptions that can be ignored, and so they use different identity labels … but also… maybe there’s some truth to the argument that your own internal biases can have an effect on whether you identify something in your life as a “pattern” or an “exception.” … But my point is, don’t worry about “oh maybe I have had sexual attraction at some point in my life but I just didn’t realize it” and think you’re not allowed to ID as asexual. If it hasn’t happened enough times that you can find a pattern to it, then you don’t have to base your identity on it.

Perfect Number

This is a very relevant post for anyone who is questioning their identity and stressing about which identity label they are “allowed” to use. As CaptainHeartless also discusses, people tend to fall under the impression that orientations are “diagnostic categories” and they try to look at all of their experiences as “symptoms” in order to “diagnose” their orientation. But Perfect Number reminds us that this process needs to be neither so rigid, nor so stressful.

In fact, Artemis also points out that tying the definition of asexuality so rigidly to attraction can lead to the tendency of treating orientation as categories that can be diagnosed based on the attractions one feels, leading to a hyper-fixation on diagnosing every possible kind of attractions someone feels. (Totally happened to me.)

Orientation as a framework

Finally, nebula galaxy explains how asexuality is a framework through which we can understand the world. I am extrapolating this to apply to orientation itself being a framework which we can use to understand the world, but we shouldn’t think of it as an immutable characteristic.

nebula explains why they are cautious about identifying as ace,

Was identifying as asexual useful to me? … Or would it just make people make assumptions about me, like assuming I was uncomfortable hearing about or talking about sex, or I never wanted to have sex, or I wasn’t interested in a relationship, or worse, I wasn’t relationship material, or I was naive and immature …

nebula galaxy

but

You know that feeling toward the end of the semester when you think you haven’t learned anything in class, and then you talk to someone outside of school and realize your entire worldview shifted without you noticing? … Being asexual, and especially growing up asexual, has changed my worldview in ways I don’t always realize.

nebula galaxy

nebula, in their post, describes many of the ways in which being asexual influenced their thinking and their view of the world through an asexual lens.

Do you think of orientation as TO WHOM you are attracted (e.g. hetero-, bi-, homo-, pan-, etc.) or HOW you are attracted (e.g. demi-, gray-, fray-, etc.)? Or both?

This prompt gets to the who-not-how debate, which, as far I’m aware, is still an open question. At any rate, the who-not-how debate has several layers, which was well summarized by keygoose:

And part of that rhetoric […] was that sexual orientation could only be about the gender(s) you were into, the “who”, and not the “how”, which excluded polyamory (how many people you can be into), pansexuality and omnisexuality (how gender factors in your attraction), kink (how… you practice sexual activities?), and yes, asexuality and its adjacent identities like gray-asexuality and demisexuality (how much sexual attraction you experience if at all).

keygoose

Below, I will discuss the other posts as they relate to each layer, although note that I am numbering the layers arbitrarily.

The first layer

The first layer is about the fact that the “-sexual” in homosexual, heterosexual, etc. doesn’t refer to sexual attraction, but the sex of the person to whom one is attracted. These terms were coined before the distinction between sex and gender were well established.

Blue Ice-Tea challenges this take:

I can understand the idea of being sexually oriented towards someone.  I can understand that there are some people we feel sexual attraction to and others we don’t.  But the idea that we can experience other kinds of affectional bonds with people based on their sex or gender identity?  That’s a hard one for me to grasp.

Blue Ice-Tea

Both Ice and Coyote both discuss the idea that the “attractions” they find most relevant in their lives, aren’t “oriented”:

Basically, anything you might think of as attraction or love that isn’t sexual is, for me, just part of friendship.  And friendship, for me, is not “oriented”.  I’ve felt the same non-sexual desires for men and women; it’s an equal opportunity kind of thing.  And the fact that the feelings were non-sexual didn’t make them less important or the relationships less meaningful.  On the contrary, romantic relationships have played an almost non-existent role in my life.  The most important relationships, for me, have always been friendships.

Blue Ice-Tea

The assorted forms of attraction I experience do not orient me. My actual preferences and priorities have more to do with seeking people who share or mesh with my personal interests, my communication style, my outlook on the world, my baseline moral principles — things which are not only ill-suited to an orientation label, but which are already recognized as their own categories, independent from the role that “orientation” is generally expected to serve.

Coyote

Here, I wish I had heard from folks who identify as “oriented aro ace”. The name of this label implies that they don’t feel either sexual or romantic attraction, but they are oriented by something towards their choice of … friends? (Queerplatonic) life partners? To that end, it would have been interesting to hear from those who identify with a “platonic orientation” too.

The second layer

The second layer is regarding how one acts on their attractions, whether it is through sex or through fetishes. Saikat’s contribution brings up kinky aces, who may be “oriented” by their fetishes:

Although by the traditional definition, fetishes are inherently sexual in nature, kinky aces report fetishes can be completely platonic in nature. This is especially true for fetishes that are related to specific activities. One may get no sexual pleasure out of it, but rather an emotional pleasure from the accompanying relationship dynamics.

Saikat

(I am not clear whether by “platonic” Saikat means non-sexual or neither-sexual-nor-romantic.)

The third layer

The third layer is about how one develops or experiences the attraction, e.g., demi-, gray-, fray-, cupio-, aego-, lith-, etc.

These are often referred to as “microlabels” although, people often use some of these microlabels as their orientation. This was the topic of discussion for the August 2022 Carnival of Aces.

Mia addresses the semantics issue that is at play here:

I think of being ace as “who” for me, because I’m a sex-repulsed ace, so since I’m sexually attracted to absolutely no one and never want to be sexually active, “how” doesn’t feel relevant to me since there are no viable “who’s” with which to explore the “how.”  But if you’re greyace, demi-, sex-favorable, etc., then “how” may be a much more relevant framing.  And then there’s the fact that it could come down to semantics a bit – if you’re only attracted to people you’ve established an emotional bond with, is that a “how you experience attraction,” or do you categorize “people you have an emotional bond with” as a “who”?  Either would work.

Mia

I will also note here that two of the submissions linked to two different pieces by Jillian Keenan (an article about kink, a video about fetishes) that seem to disagree with each other. In the video Keenan claims fetishes are a sexual orientation because it is about “how one loves”. In the article she claims kink (which I presume is synonymous with fetish) is a sexual orientation, but there is a lot more to it than “how one loves”. For instance, reducing kink down to “how” one acts on their sexual attraction is the same as reducing homosexuality down to the mechanics of the way sex is practiced.

Going back to the semantics issue that Mia brings up, it seems like every “who” could have a “how” and every “how” can have a “who”! (That sounded like Dr. Seuss, lol.)

Other layers

While not discussed in detail in the posts, a few other layers bear mentioning. (CW for anti-ace or anti-aro sentiments in the links)

  • Polyamory as a sexual orientation because there is something innate about the desire to have multiple partners among the folks of polyamorous communities (keygoose links to this discussion)
  • With the “-sexual” referring to the sex one is attracted to, there are different views about where that leave asexuality, aromanticism, and other related terms:
  • 1. Asexuality is not an orientation, just a modifier (Ice referenced Coyote’s 2021 post documenting this view).
  • 2. Hetero-, homo-, bi-, and asexuality respectively refer to attracted to opposite sex, same sex, both sexes, and neither sex; and since attraction is “all encompassing”, other orientations like romantic orientation or sensual orientation are irrelevant or at the very least a completely different classification (discussion in this 2015 post and this 2016 post).

All of these different layers of the “who-not-how” debate don’t necessarily line up with each other, because these arguments were developed independently and did not build on each other. So they fail to address any inconsistencies that arise when you try to put them together.

I discuss this more in my commentary on the asexuality and fetish submission, where I bring up Dalychia Saah’s argument that epitomizing sex only as penetrative sex creates a sexual hierarchy that puts penetrative sex as the destination for all sexual relationships. Whereas I guess Keenan would rather put penetrative sex in a category all on its own, and put every other sexual activity in a “kink” or “fetish” category. But those don’t necessarily all belong together as I discuss below.

This idea is also discussed in CaptainHearthless’ submission:

In my younger years I still had a desire for totalizing systems, for a complete model to explain everything. It was also based on a desire to be seen and understood. But this was doomed to failure for two reasons. First, it’s impossible to ever have a complete model. We’ve seen this demonstrated in the split attraction model.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, even coming up with a model to explain myself personally was always doomed to failure because I’ve come to realize we are all enigmas. We all have elaborate histories and are constantly carving and recarving that uncarved block of raw experience to create and define ourselves. But no set of concepts or identities will ever capture all of the nuance and complexity in those histories.

CaptainHeartless

If you like the TO WHOM you are attracted, do you think we should keep it limited it to TO WHAT GENDER you are attracted? Are there other categories that we can include?

I want to be clear that I wasn’t advocating for including other categories. Here is how I described this prompt:

If we decided to adopt labels about to which race/ethnicity we are attracted, or to which socioeconomic class we are attracted … that would feel uncomfortable to say the least. So why do we adopt labels with respect to gender and feel no discomfort whatsoever?

To that end, I appreciated that Blue Ice-Tea did remind us adopting labels with respect to gender can be uncomfortable:

I don’t like the idea that love can be “oriented” in this way.  I don’t like the idea that we’re wired to form bonds with certain kinds of bodies or gender identities but not others.

Blue Ice-Tea

And while writing my commentary on Saikat’s “Asexuality Vs. Fetish” submission, I realized:

“I have totally heard of people having like an Asian-fetish or a Black-fetish and things like that. People do get fetishized based on their race, or probably other characteristics like skin color, hair color, hair type, or eye color, and so on. But then, isn’t this fetish all about TO WHOM you’re attracted? In the call for submissions, I had asked, why is “to whom” limited only to gender? But now I can see, when it comes to fetishes, it is not limited only to gender … So, when it comes to gender preference, we call that an orientation, but when it comes to any other identity-based preferences, we call that a fetish?

Yeah, maybe fetish isn’t just about “HOW” (activity- or body part-based fetishes might be), but fetishes can also be about “TO WHOM” — and usually identity-based fetishes are a sensitive topic because they are uncomfortable.

But based on this discussion, it does seem fair to say that sexual orientation is a gender identity-based fetish! 😂

Is orientation the sole determinant of what kinds of relationships you want?

My post was inspired by many of the other submissions because putting the concepts together helped me think more about whether I, personally, am straight or not.

The main questions the post comes down to are these:

Is orientation referring to feelings that are out of my control (like sexual attraction or limerence)?
Or is orientation about my intentionality with regard to whom I might want to spend my life with?

I get the feeling that the former is the norm, and that’s why I determined that, for me, orientation doesn’t matter.

I think it is very likely that for most people the intentionality with regard to whom they want to spend their lives with is inextricably linked with people towards whom they feel sexual attraction and/or limerence. And maybe for other people, these are not as much out of control as they seem to me. And I would be very interested in understanding how this inextricable link works.

However, for me there is a clear distinction for these questions and hence I stand by what I said about my orientation being divergent. And given that it is so divergent, orientation may not be a useful concept for me.

keygoose’s also focuses on the choice aspect in his submission:

I focused a lot on the “choice” aspect because the alternative was to endlessly dismiss my own feelings on the possibility that I was a late-bloomer who hadn’t experienced attraction yet. I focused on that aspect because my choices kept being minimized by biological explanations, by insisting that things were out of my control. I was scared of losing that control, so for me, framing my experiences partly as a choice I was making was far more empowering than not.

keygoose

A Few Additional Thoughts

Discussions of about asexuality, and indeed maybe all orientations, have been fraught with debates about how to define, classify, and categorize. (For further readings, see these posts by Coyote: “History of Asexual Definitions (A Summary)” and “A Condensed History of Asexuals Arguing with Asexuals Over What Asexuality Is” .)

In the ace community, I’ve often seen the concept of orientation weaponized by some to argue for specific definitions (or shutting down discussions around them) and putting weird standards on what an orientation ought to be (which excludes some people who do have these “legitimate orientations”).

keygoose

Nature is messy and never clean-cut. That’s why it is so difficult to classify and categorize. Society may want to think there are two definitive categories for gender, but as we have been seeing, the question of gender is not to clear cut. In the scientific field, taxonomies of how species are classified are still changing because new advancements illuminate new ways species can be classified. CaptainHeartless’ post also discusses this idea:

We all have elaborate histories and are constantly carving and recarving that uncarved block of raw experience to create and define ourselves. But no set of concepts or identities will ever capture all of the nuance and complexity in those histories. As soon as we moved away from a simple (and generally useless) gender based diagnostic model of sexuality towards trying to use identity as a form of expression, we were doomed to failure.

CaptainHeartless

Being very rigid about definitions (whether you based them on attraction or desire or something else entirely) will give rise to scenarios where there will be a lot of bickering regarding who “counts” as ace and who doesn’t. And then people can start splitting hairs and looking for loopholes and start acting like lawyers to get someone to fit the definition.

For example,

  • Suppose someone feels very strong sexual attraction, but that does not translate into sexual desire, hence they feel no interest in sex. Can we think of this person as asexual? They are effectively asexual (no interest in sex), maybe they even feel alienated from the rest of the world in the same way aces do, but there is that definitional technicality, if we tie the definition of asexuality solely to attraction. One could argue that if the attraction doesn’t translate into desire, then it isn’t sexual attraction at all, it is some other form of attraction, thus still technically managing to fit the attraction-based definition. (Or one could come up with a new label for this. Lithosexual could be a microlabel that comes close to describing this scenario.)
  • Now suppose, someone feels very strong sexual desire, but zero sexual attraction. This person might engage in sexual activity with a lot of people as a way to relieve their intense sex drive, but they don’t feel any sexual attraction whatsoever. I think most of us would think of this person as allosexual, but technically, on the basis of the attraction-based definition, this person can be classified as an asexual.

I’m not saying we should stop trying to create these definitions and classifications of orientation. But I do hope we won’t be too rigid about it. These classifications are means to be tools that we can use to understand ourselves, if we find them useful. But not everyone will find every tool useful. And we shouldn’t force them to use tools that they don’t find useful.

But there is an insistence of rigid classifications for the sake of “legitimacy”:

It is weird how much legitimacy “orientation” has been given as a concept, […] Shouldn’t we broaden and revise what can be considered as “legitimate”, “innate” or “important” when it comes to sexuality and relationship inclinations, rather than broaden what “orientation” encompasses?

keygoose

The caveat here is that, if definitions of orientation need to be present in the legal realm, which they would if queer orientations are to be a protected class, then unfortunately, it is necessary to apply rigid definitions, splitting hairs, and looking for loopholes (discussion in comments section of another post).

To end on a positive note though, I recently came upon the collective identity model of asexuality, which pushes back against creating rigid classifications that end up gatekeeping who gets to or doesn’t get to call themselves asexual. I also discovered Spaghetti Cat’s Introduction to Asexuality, which includes several possible definitions of asexuality, rather than enforcing just the one.

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