Last week there was an article posted about gray asexuality which quoted my blog and an older interview I did with the writer. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I’ve been taking a blogging break over the past few months, so I’ve been ignoring my blog-related email. As such, I missed her request for a new interview, and the result was that the information is somewhat outdated. It reflects where I was perfectly fine, but not so much where I am now. I’ve been meaning to make a post about this for a while now, and it also fits nicely with this month’s blog carnival theme (attraction), so I may as well do it now even though I’m a little late for the carnival.

I do not identify as gray asexual anymore. At the time when I started my blog, I did, and there were no other blogs or forums out there focusing on gray asexuality, so I decided to start a blog where I could sort of think out loud about it. But after thinking about it for a while, and feeling like my identity was sort of in flux between sexual and asexual, I’ve started realizing some things which have led me to identify as just asexual. I’ve thought about changing the name of the blog, but I don’t know what I’d change it to and the idea of not thinking in black and white is still important to me, plus that would involve a lot of broken links at this point, so I’m leaving it like this for now.

When I started this blog, it was during a time of immense turmoil and stress, in which I had just been subject to a very heavy load of anti-asexualism and some very nasty gaslighting. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it comes from a play called Gas Light in which a man attempts to make his wife think she is going insane by subtly dimming the gas lights and then denying that anything has changed. It’s an attempt to make someone believe that their perception of reality is wrong. Or, in other words: “There are four lights!”

When I started this blog, I didn’t recognize that this was what had been going on. I didn’t know there was a word for it until someone else used it to describe my experiences (this happened more than once, and in several cases I would argue that it wasn’t whatever someone said it was, though now I think their perceptions were accurate while mine were skewed by the gaslighting). I don’t necessarily think it was entirely intentional, and it really doesn’t matter whether it was or not, but throughout the time I knew him, M was manipulating my perceptions of reality. I was already off-kilter at the time because I was in a foreign country, and just from that I was having bouts of derealization (another example of a word I didn’t know until later), but M played the game of doing things behind closed doors and then never acknowledging that anything was going on in public, with the additional standard Pick-Up Artist technique of ignoring/avoiding me and the other girls he must have been treating the same way (several other people told me about them). More importantly for the purposes of this discussion, he led a sustained campaign for nearly a year to convince me that I’m not really asexual, only ever dropping it for long enough that I would let my guard down thinking he had changed his mind.

Which brings me to discussing attraction.

I was attracted to M in various ways. I found him somewhat aesthetically attractive on a visual level (sort of a push-pull sort of thing; if I just saw him in a picture without meeting him I would have thought he was pretty average-looking, though a lot of people seemed to disagree) and considerably more so on a sonic level (he is a musician). I found him intellectually attractive in a way that I know that he understands well because he described similar feelings toward House at one point, albeit in a much more sexualized way than I would have put it. When he wasn’t being a hugely self-absorbed asshole, I enjoyed his company enough that I was willing to overlook his transgressions. I wanted to cuddle with him and kiss him, but I never wanted it to go farther than that. Later on I did sort of want to, but only in a “can I get myself to be okay with this?” sort of way and not in a genuine desire sort of way. I had a genuine desire to be able to be okay with doing sexual things with him, but in reality that wasn’t happening. That got really confusing.

There was another thing, too: I really fucking wanted to scratch him. I’ve always had kind of a thing for scratching, though it’s not something that turns me on, just something I like doing. I’m decidedly more sadistic than I am masochistic. I never asked him if that would be okay because he didn’t foster the kind of relationship where that kind of thing would be acceptable—he never made any effort to gain explicit consent himself, and consequentially he was abysmally bad at sex even when I did unambiguously consent. He made it out like he was so open and accepting of talking about things like that, but he wasn’t. He was blunt and open about talking about sex in public to the point of being considered quite rude, but as far as anything serious or important goes, any time I would try to bring up an issue I was having with him it was always “your problem, not mine.” So something like that was so far off the table I didn’t even consider it.

I had all of these different sorts of attractions to him at varying levels of intensity, and I was being constantly told that I was not really asexual to the point that I began to question whether all of those things added up to what people call sexual attraction after all. The kinky attraction was particularly confusing to me because of how intense (and intensely physical) it was. But the thing is, I still did not want to have sex with M. In an ideal situation, yes, I think I would have wanted to eventually, and had he been the kind of person who would ask me what I wanted and listen to me instead of telling me I was wrong, I probably would have found it enjoyable. But had he been that kind of person, he would have accepted that I’m asexual, if not from the beginning then at least after a certain point. Not having such intense pressure to think I’m “not asexual enough” would have made me considerably less likely to identify as gray in the first place.

At the time when I first started this blog, there had been a lot of arguing around AVEN about who counts as asexual and who doesn’t, with I think some members accusing moderators of not being “real” asexuals. Maybe it’s just that I stopped going to the AVEN forums, but in the three and a half years since I started this blog, I’ve seen a lot less of that kind of elitism. I’ve also, through blogging and also from conversations with my partner (who still needs to make a guest post here about it), come to the realization that desire and attraction are quite separate things, and wanting to have sex does not make you not asexual. I did sort of recognize that before, because obviously you can have sex with people you’re not attracted to, but I didn’t live it until after I met C. Since I saw so many more comments judging other asexuals for being sexually active and (gasp!) enjoying/desiring it back then, and since I was already inclined to doubt my own perspective due to the gaslighting, I internalized those stereotypes too much and thought I was further in the gray area than I actually was.

There’s still room for me to change my mind, of course. The nice thing about the asexual community is that we don’t deny that phases of sexuality exist, and we don’t consider it less valid to identify a certain way for a period of time and another way later. But for the past… mm, roughly two years, the “gray” part of my identity has become less important and fallen away. I’ve stopped hedging and doubting myself.

Now, I’m just asexual. And there really are four lights.