fuzzy post-it

probably not

idealized cartoon animal junk is neat and all but irl animal junk is kinda gross

e.g., dog dicks look like fragile balloons that will burst on contact and spray blood everywhere and that’s all i can think about and it’s super creepy

horses are such paragons of cleanliness that part of maintaining a stallion is sticking a finger up its urethra on a regular basis to extract a hardened lump of dirt and gunk called the “bean”

also i have had to deal with way too many cat disasters to ever want to be in close proximity to a female quadruped’s butthole

hmm maybe a dolphin, dolphins are cool and pretty chill and live in a giant bathtub.  too bad about that part where they can supposedly blow a hole in your intestines or drag you out to sea or other innocent playful shenanigans

oh i’m not bothered

yeah my initial reaction to asexuality many years ago was “oh how tragic” but i thought about it a bit and it pretty much turned into “oh, huh” once i realized how irritating it is to get the “you don’t like football?!” lecture

if you’re deaf then you’re probably constantly surrounded by people who assume you can hear and have to shift into unfamiliar forms of communication just to be able to talk to you at all, which is both a constant reminder and a huge barrier to interaction

but if you’re asexual then, well, it’s not like everyone you meet is immediately trying to get into your pants (i hope) so why does it matter

now if you were interested in a long-term relationship but couldn’t find compatible partners who were also asexual, that might pose a more immediate practical problem.  but even then it’s you and one single other person trying to work it out, not you versus virtually everyone else.  so that would probably call for compromise long before it called for “fixing” anything.

all part of the murky swamp of trying to get along with the people around us

well homosexuality is something different from the common human experience whereas asexuality is something missing, as is deafness

but then, we don’t focus very strongly on people who are lacking (say) a sense of smell.  we care about that so little that we don’t even have a common word for it.  we take for granted that most humans can smell things, but we don’t rely on it as a primary form of interaction.  as a result we aren’t spending a lot of effort trying to fix it, but we also don’t have any real culture built around it either.

so i suspect asexuality occupies this weird middle ground where it gets a lot of attention from people who think sex is awesome and thus it’s a huge shame if anyone else doesn’t also enjoy it.  it’s not strictly a necessity, so we don’t have any real reason to get all fidgety about it, but our culture thinks it is.  but, you know, i think plenty of things are awesome that other people have no patience for whatsoever, and that’s just how it goes.

thought experiment: would deafness be an impediment if a group of deaf people lived on their own, isolated?  no hearing people would be awkwardly trying to communicate with them, there would be no warning systems that relied exclusively on sound, etc.  hearing would no longer be necessary, so would being deaf be a problem?  i suppose not.

and something else i wonder but don’t actually know: as i understand it, trauma can turn a sexual person off of sex entirely.  is that something that ought to be “fixed”?  if such a person genuinely wants nothing to do with sex any more, how is that different from “natural” asexuality, aside from the cause?

well.  health may be subjective, but it’s usually based on something, and that something tends to be “how well you can go about your life”.  clearly if you have the flu you are less able to do things like breathe, so you are less healthy.  which is how stuff gets in the DSM: autism throws up barriers to social interaction that most people don’t have to struggle with.

which makes things like a low sex drive kind of fuzzy.  it could go either way: a low sex drive may or may not bother a person.  a high sex drive may or may not bother a person.  depends entirely on how it gets expressed and whether it’s causing problems.

i do have some problems i wouldn’t mind resolving but i don’t think low sex drive is the underlying cause

i have this deep-rooted fear of being That One Person Who Won’t Shut Up About It and i very heavily over-compensate by just not saying anything

which is probably kind of ridiculous when my partner is making a living off of cartoon animal porn

i am full of extremely specific anxieties