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Obviously every individual is unique in a way that defies the ability of language to describe in a single word or phrase. But it's not clear what, if anything, this has to do with gender, or why, having staked out this position, suddenly it's necessary to invent a whole load of new terms to express the things that apparently can't be expressed. The 'demigirl' might feel less feminine (whatever that means), but does that actually justify the word rather than just describing her as an unconventional woman? Cut an arm off an octopus, you just get a wounded octopus, not a septapus.
I feel this goes doubly for sexuality, too. Defining someone by who they prefer to have sex with feels reductive in the extreme. Yes, it is an aspect of their personality as an individual. No, they (probably) shouldn't be discriminated against for it. They also shouldn't require public recognition of it in order to feel fully validated and functional.
And it gets really absurd when they start naming concepts of sexuality that have been accepted for nigh-centuries as if they've discovered and elevated them for the first time. "Demisexual" meaning someone who doesn't form attraction from mere physical observation but from getting to know someone deeply? My friend that used to just be called 'not being shallow.' It is very, very unclear why this needs to be recognized as a unique sexuality that defines you as a person. Don't even get me started on "Sapiosexuality."
I happen to like ample-sized breasts on my possible sexual partners. I don't go around calling myself a 'mammosexual' who only feels attraction to persons with big breasts.
I call myself a 'boob man' and leave it at that. And I wouldn't bring it up in any conversation where it wasn't obviously relevant and appropriate. And it doesn't even go very far in describing my preferences anyway!
Are you saying they shouldn't be allowed to marry someone they're capable of finding sexually attractive, or that the recognition shouldn't go beyond marriage?
I'm saying that the only people who need to know about one's sexual preferences are their actual sexual partners.
It needn't be a flag that one proudly displays on publicly-facing social media profiles.
Well... if a gay man wants the same chance to score dates from the publicly facing social media profiles that straight man have, then he does need to make his preferences known, no?
Also... isn't marriage intrinsically public, and doesn't that reveal one's sexual preferences, at least in the sense of which sex one prefers?
Maybe? A blurb that says "I'm single and will entertain offers of dates from eligible men" sends this message too, with less ambiguity.
Or some variation on the theme.
What I'm getting at is that one doesn't need to make their sexuality an overriding part of their identity such that it supercedes other information about you.
The first thing I need or want to know about a person upon first meeting them is almost never "What is their gender identity? What types of people are they willing to have sex with?"
And YET, that's the primary information that is conveyed by these symbols. If it were a dating profile it would be relevant info. But its used everywhere, including in 'professional' setting!
And I ask... why?
I don't know what you mean, you get married and people know you're married. That's the sum total of it. Usually this means you're 'off the market' for dating purposes, which is a useful signal to send.
They can make inferences about you from that signal, but that's different, for instance, from an actual flag/symbol that you display that says "I'm deeply heterosexual and love to have vaginal intercourse in the missionary position!"
Got it, that's all fair I think. And I agree that people who make their sexuality or gender identity the core of their personality are tiresome and frivolous. I guess I'm just sensitive to the idea that gay people should "keep it to themselves" as was a common talking point in the years before same-sex marriage became legal nationwide. For my part, I don't want the fact that I'm gay to be foremost in people's minds when they're talking to me, I just want to assimilate into society like everyone else and have a normal life insofar as it's possible. But assimilating and having a normal life entails, at some point, having a monogamous relationship that is public, initially as dating and then ultimately as marriage and a family. And the "keep it to themselves" logic doesn't really account for that. It works while people are having flings and dating serially -- no one in a professional setting or in everyday life needs to know about your fuckbuddies or your one-night stands -- but marriage and family are naturally public, and need to be public to function as such, and I think the "keep it to yourselves" logic has a corollary (whether intended or not) of demanding that gay people stay on the margins of society in that sense. Not suggesting you intended it that way.
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"I'm gay" is shorter. From everything you've said, I don't understand your issue with it?
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The government can make you marriage legal, but no one can make other people actually respect you.
That's totally fine, I'm not interested in coercing anyone's respect. But the parent poster suggested that public recognition shouldn't be given. Isn't same-sex marriage the public recognition of a gay relationship? The notion that sexuality should be kept to oneself seems to require that one have only secret relationships, and not get married.
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Really? I mean, maybe I'm just shallow, but I've always assumed that most people have the capacity to be attracted to someone within a short time of meeting them. I completely understand why some people would either want or need a longer acquaintance before actually having sex, but needing to know someone for years before you even understand that they could be attractive seems to me to be fairly unusual. Am I wrong? Perhaps I'm just falling prey to the fallacy of the typical mind.
I tend to agree, but I think you may be taking them too much at face value. If they feel that attraction quickly, they'll also just say -- "I felt a deep connection, like we'd already known each other!" Maybe I'm just too cynical though, or projecting my own take on it -- i.e. I wouldn't want to jump someone I just found attractive, but if I found them attractive and felt something of a connection, I wouldn't need to to know them a long time to get physical -- that would in fact be part of 'getting to know them'.
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I don't know if such a person in fact exists, but I can certainly imagine a hypothetical person who literally does not experience sexual arousal until they have formed an emotional bond with a prospective sexual partner.
Are some people calling themselves "demisexual" when they do, in fact, experience sexual arousal towards people they have no emotional bond with, but nonetheless prefer to hold off on actually having sex with them until they have formed an emotional bond?* Probably.
Are demisexuals "oppressed" in a manner comparable to the treatment of Alan Turing, or gay men in Saudi Arabia? Obviously not.
Were they ever so oppressed? Obviously not.
*i.e. are they using "demisexual" as a description of their preferred sexual behaviour, as opposed to their inner sexual life?
Do you think that asexuals exist? That is, people who do not feel sexual attraction at all? If so, I think the existence of genuine demisexuals, in the sense of "almost never feels sexual attraction," isn't really so hard to believe. I see no good reason to think that most of the people who describe themselves in this way are lying.
With that said, the misapprehension that demisexuals merely do not desire to have sex in the absense of an emotional bond is common enough that it is also very plausible that some of the people who call themselves "demisexual" are themselves misunderstanding the term.
Over what timeframe? If we take the definition at face value, 100% of the population either is or used to be asexual as children. There are also various things that can cause a low or nonexistent sex drive, such as hormone levels, particularly in women who usually start with a lower sex drive to begin with. Wikipedia claims that 10% of all pre-menopausal women in the United States are affected by Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, though the source is just an executive at AMAG Pharmaceuticals in an article about the FDA approving their libido-boosting drug, so I don't know what research this is based on. (For instance, I don't know if that's 10% being affected at any one time or if it's 10% who are substantially affected at least once in their lives.)
But of course "asexual" has implications beyond that: it is formulated in analogy to sexual orientation to imply an inborn, permanent, and immutable state. (Originally "asexual" was used in psychiatry to indicate women who have difficulty orgasming during sex, with recommended treatments ranging from psychoanalysis to having the woman be on top, but this has been displaced by the lay meaning which uses it in analogy to "homosexual".) But that's not actually a good model of how libido works, as seen by the tendency for people who identify as asexual to either stop identifying as asexual or to adopt some "grey-asexual" identity that allows them to continue identifying as asexual while having sex. To venture beyond anecdotal evidence, the only study I've found on the subject is The Temporal Stability of Lack of Sexual Attraction across Young Adulthood. Of the 25 people aged 18-26 in Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health who selected "No sexual attraction", only 3 of them selected that option again in Wave IV 6 years later.
So if people with low or no sexual desire are put in an ideological environment where they are encouraged to identify this as "being asexual", the vast majority of those are going to end up happening to have more sexual desire at some later point, whether due to changing hormone levels over time, the right circumstance to get in the mood, etc. (An even greater majority if we count children, and I've seen a noticeable number of 13-15 year olds identify as asexual on Tumblr or have their supposed asexuality uncritically mentioned in news articles, despite a large fraction of the population being enough of a late-bloomer to not be interested in sex at that point.) Even if they don't do so on their own, the ideological framework discourages treating it as a medical issue (even though it is a symptom which can reflect deeper medical problems needing investigation) or taking something like the aforementioned libido-boosting drug to help you have a romantic relationship or enjoy a sex life (which I'm assuming would be termed "conversion therapy"). Nothing about the framework is designed to better understand the world, but to fit people into categories extrapolated from popular identity-politics categories.
So then that brings us to "demisexuality". As many people will attest, especially women, romantic interest and emotional involvement often enhance sexual interest. A lot of men will say "my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world" and mean it. Established relationships also have more opportunities for romantic situations to get in the mood, casual physical contact to arouse interest, or actual sexual interactions that one partner becomes interested in before the end (the aforementioned HSDD Wikipedia article terms the last one "responsive desire"). Even with porn women are more interested in mediums like writing that tend to build up more of an emotional context for sex. It is thus unsurprising that if someone has a libido low enough to not feel noticeable sexual desire, something that boosts sexual desire like an emotional relationship could make the sexual desire noticeable. But, like asexuality, there is no reason to think the implications of calling this "demisexuality" in analogy to sexual orientation are accurate.
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It isn't a hypothesis which is hard to believe. I just haven't conducted any research into it, so I'm not in a position to comment on whether people meeting that description do, in fact, exist. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they exist.
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I think there may be some slipperiness in the term "attraction," here? Because the word can mean things from "ooh, pretty" to "I am quite emotionally invested in [whatever]."
Yeah. Most of the demisexuals whom I have seen describing their sexual orientation have been at pains to explain that the simple "ooh, pretty" does not kick in for them under ordinary circumstances, except in the disinterested aesthetic sense.
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