Ask Ellie: Am I asexual?

Dear Ellie,

Help! My sexuality is dead in the water and I don’t know how to bring it back to life, or even if I care.

Before Covid I was single by choice for a few years, after a bunch of bad relationships. Then when I finally DID start looking… bang, pandemic. Upshot… it’s almost three years since I had sex or even, actually, kissed someone. What a freak!

Anyway, now everything is fucked and doesn’t seem to be getting better and I’m thinking… Will I ever have sex again?

The worst part is… I don’t know if I even WANT to have sex. I don’t miss it. I don’t know if I’d really care that much if it never happens again. But I’m only 39. What if I REALLY never have sex again? Is that a full life? Or will I look back when I’m old and wish I tried harder to find my spark…

Help me please! From,

Am I Asexual?

Dear AIA,

You mean to say that hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, the constant threat of illness and death hanging over you and everyone you love, enforced isolation, economic collapse, rising fascism, and the near death of American democracy don’t turn you on? Wow, what a prude.

I know there’s more at play here, and we’ll get to that, I promise. But first please give yourself a break. I mean, jeez. 2020 was not exactly an erotic year, and 2021 isn’t shaping up to be much better. Sex and sensuality are expressions of vitality, and most of us find it hard to feel full of life force when we’re struggling just to survive the day. It’s OK and in fact perfectly normal if your loins aren’t primed for action at all times, or indeed ever, right now.

OK. With that “the world is a shitshow” disclaimer out of the way: I hear that this is about more than current affairs. Most of all, I hear you struggling with a lot of self-judgment: “What a freak!” you say, as if there’s a “normal” way to be around sex. Well, let me put your mind at ease there. Every single one of us is a fucking weirdo about sex. How could we not be? Sure, attitudes to sex vary from community to community, but the overarching message about it at this stage of Western civilization remains: sex is secret, private, shameful, and but also, in varying ways depending mostly on your gender, your value as a human being depends on your sex appeal. And by the way, there is a correct type and amount of sex to be having, and whatever you’re doing, it’s not that.

I mean, Jesus Christ, fuck off? These impositions are absolutely symptoms of a culture that has no idea, any longer, what a human is, or how to value one (and that’s a benign interpretation). In fact, one wise person I know likes to call it an “anti-culture. “Culture,” after all, means an environment that cultivates growth. What we live in is an environment that tries very hard to kill organic growth in the name of sterile uniformity.

That anti-culture can very easily colonize our minds, but it’s harder (though not impossible) for it to colonize our bodies. So what if you trusted your body? What if your body is actually trying to tell you something about you, about who you are and your place in the world, but your poor frazzled mind is in attack mode, drowning out the body’s message because it’s been tuned to K-Fucked Radio for so long?

What if, actually, we happen to live in a moment of history that absolutely requires all of us to stop listening to the hectoring of the social order, and tune in to our own bodies’ and souls’ deeper wisdom? Because make no mistake, the voice that’s calling you a freak for having followed your own body’s perfectly reasonable needs for solitude, and that’s making you fear living a “wrong” or “incomplete” life if you don’t force yourself to do something you don’t currently want to do — that voice is doing the bidding of a social order that’s now collapsing. A social order that has long demanded that we live according to some external ideal, rather than what our bodies tell us they need. We’re only going to weather this storm and come out with something better if we retune our radios and start getting our information from elsewhere.

Where? Well, one of your sources is already talking to you, loud and clear. Your body. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the central truth of your life is that you won’t ever want sex or, to answer your question, that you’re asexual. Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Who knows?

It sounds to me like the real message your body is giving you is an assertion of sovereignty. It’s not interested in sex right now. So maybe the next question is not “why are you such a freak?” but rather: what are you interested in?

The way our culture treats sex — as an achievement, a goal, or something you can do right or wrong — turns it into a commodity, an acquisition, something we must go out and seek in order to prove ourselves. It fits in all too easily with the broken Hero’s Journey motif, a macho model of conquest that can easily have us riding roughshod over our inner wisdom. If we go out looking for our lives in a world that prioritizes material success; glossy, commercialized sexuality; power, etc, then it’s very likely we’ll mistake those for our own priorities.

There’s another model for living that might be more helpful to you right now: the Ancient Greek idea of the daimon, which appears in a bunch of texts, but maybe most clearly at the end of Plato’s Republic. (If you want to dive into a real mythologist explaining the daimon, try listening to this Russell Brand interview with the mythologist Michael Meade, or reading this article by Sharon Blackie.)

Before we’re born, this model tells us, each of us selects our life and its purpose. In other words, all of us chose to come here now, and to live the lives we’re each living, because there’s a curriculum in it specifically for us, and a role for us to play in this moment of the world’s unfolding. After choosing our lives, we pass beneath the throne of the Goddess Necessity and the Fates, who help cement our assignments. Then, before we’re born, we drink from the River of Forgetfulness, so that we don’t remember our assignment or this process when we wake up into our new life.

But our purpose isn’t a total mystery. We each bring with us a “daimon” — in Sharon Blackie’s words, “a spiritual companion who acts as a ‘carrier of our destiny’, and helps to remind us to fulfil it.” Part of a life’s work, then, is tuning into your own wisdom enough to hear your daimon and become yourself.

But why am I banging on about Plato when you asked about asexuality? Because your core concern here seems to be about living a “full life.” You’re scared that your body’s failure to comply with some arbitrary standard of sexual desire will stand in the way of that life. Might I suggest that the only way to miss out on your own full life is to keep listening to the voice that tells you you’re a freak, you’re doing it wrong? To keep trying to override your own body because the radio’s telling you it should be different?

After all, there will never be another you. And it’s not long, this life. We don’t get long to live in these bodies and learn what they’re for, what they want, and what they can offer. It’s so easy to forget what a gift and an honour it is, to get to find out.

The funny thing is that if you start respecting your body’s sovereignty, you might find that life starts to feel good again; that a frisson returns. The world around you might acquire a certain radiance when you actually experience it, instead of contracting around the ways you’re doing it all wrong or should want more. And from there, who knows what kind of sensual enjoyment might follow. That’s the joy of the unhectored body.

So, in short: I don’t know whether you’re asexual. I’m sorry. But I do know that you’re in your body for a reason, and that finding what that reason is and enjoying your brief spell in your own skin will begin with listening to your body’s messages, without judgment or the fear that you’re doing life wrong.

Love,

Ellie