What does “asexual” mean?

[BizzareBlue]

Someone who have a sexual attraction to a philia but not attracted by both genders is still not asexual.

That's not really the definition I've been using. To me asexual only means lacking any desire for sex and isn't really connected to fetishes or other sources of arousal. Then again, that might just be because I don't really have a ny other term to describe finding vore (or other stuff) arousing but not sex.

[Cowrie]

People confuse the meaning, asexual only applies if you have no sexual attraction at all, you can still have a fetish but not as aroused or sexually attractive but in a comfortable way or in a non-sexual fascination towards it.

For example, some people here were attracted by the concept of vote way before their puberty and liked it the same way they liked eating chocolate or playing a great game.

Someone who have a sexual attraction to a philia but not attracted by both genders is still not asexual.

This is wrong. And, if you're not asexual yourself, making this statement and saying actual ace people aren't ace because you make the category artificially narrow is extremely offensive. Like, on the level of those creeps who try and tell me the right term is "nonsexual" (a number of ace folks, myself included, consider being called nonsexual instead of asexual or ace a mild slur) and then make mean-spirited asexual reproduction "jokes".

[Artemis]

This is at least half misleading and partially outright wrong. First of all, you group asexuality with low sex drives, as if being ace means you have no sex drive. Being ace means you experience no sexual attraction. Speaking as an ace person, we can have any level of libido

Apologies, but I consider you calling yourself asexual misleading. Unfortunately, it's fairly common for people to latch onto terms that don't actually 100% describe them due to not knowing a more fitting term. For a while, I incorrectly identified as asexual too due to my aversion to sex. To be more accurate, I now identify as a genophobic lesbian. It's not a matter of invalidating your identity, but rather finding the right words to accurately describe its nuances when language can so easily fail us.

having a strong preference towards one sex when dating has nothing to do with whether or not you are asexual. ... For example, an asexual, heteroromantic woman would only be interested in dating men, and them without having sex in mind, but it would in no way mean she hates women.

Having a strong preference toward what's between someone's legs has a lot more to do with your sexual orientation than "nothing". But sure, whatever, I'm not interested in arguing this point, mostly because I'd rather not accuse anyone of having biases against a gender. That strikes me as a rather unpleasant direction to take this thread over what is more likely, in my opinion, merely a semantic disagreement.

ace people are perfectly capable of having one or more fetishes they consider arousing.

It's true that asexual people can enjoy vore, and that vore can be enjoyed non-sexually, but if you find it "arousing" that's sexual, the opposite of asexual. On the other hand, I suppose I wouldn't really know what to call it if you normally aren't attracted to people, but get aroused by vore. ...Complicated, perhaps? Jokes aside, I don't think an appropriate word for that even exists, so I suppose I couldn't blame someone for stretching the definition a bit to mean "Normally asexual, except when it comes to vore". I've got no better recommendations, so who am I to judge eh?

[Cowrie]

Those look to be from Google. I'd trust a web site for asexuals, by asexuals over something that was in all likelihood written by a straight man, i.e., the privileged sex and sexuality. (Also probably white and Christian, but those are less relevant in this case.)

So, I attached a couple of bits from https://www.asexuality.org/.

[RuffledFerret]

Think of genders as doors
Heterosexuals are doors that open on 1 side that is opposite to them, meaning they are only interested in the opposite sex
Homosexuals are doors that open on 1 side that is towards them, meaning they are interested in the same gender as them
Bisexuals are doors that open both ways, which means they are attracted to the same sex or opposite sex
Pansexuals are revolving doors, they open to anywhere, they can be open to anybody, regardless of their gender
In this case, Asexual is just a brick wall. It doesn't open to anywhere. Meaning they are not attracted to any gender

I very much enjoy this metaphor. Thank you for sharing it.

[Noxyoursox]

Asexual means you do not experience sexual attraction. That's it. It doesn't mean low sex drive (some aces have high sex drive and some have lower, just like anybody). It doesn't mean you don't get romantic attraction (that's aromantic). It doesn't mean you can't love, or experience the full range of feelings, or have a fulfilling life (shitty assumptions people have made about me as an ace person). It doesn't mean you are celibate, either--some aces have sex to please a partner, or may even enjoy the actual act of sex even if they don't feel the attraction that leads to it. Others are completely uninterested in sex and some like me are sex-repulsed (not only not wanting sex but experiencing it as something disgusting and awful).

I think it's probably true that aces are more likely to have very developed fetishes or paraphilias, simply because those of us who have a strong sex drive need an outlet for it that isn't sex. For me that is vore and BDSM.

[Cowrie]

Asexual means you do not experience sexual attraction. That's it. It doesn't mean low sex drive (some aces have high sex drive and some have lower, just like anybody). It doesn't mean you don't get romantic attraction (that's aromantic). It doesn't mean you can't love, or experience the full range of feelings, or have a fulfilling life (shitty assumptions people have made about me as an ace person). It doesn't mean you are celibate, either--some aces have sex to please a partner, or may even enjoy the actual act of sex even if they don't feel the attraction that leads to it. Others are completely uninterested in sex and some like me are sex-repulsed (not only not wanting sex but experiencing it as something disgusting and awful).

I think it's probably true that aces are more likely to have very developed fetishes or paraphilias, simply because those of us who have a strong sex drive need an outlet for it that isn't sex. For me that is vore and BDSM.

So much this. I've had people say some pretty nasty things about ace people. One person obliquely said I was inferior to an amoeba back in high school, though I'm not sure she knew what they were saying, because the teacher was a tyrant about talking in class and wouldn't let me ask if the girl realized that the other meaning of asexual was a sexuality. Basically, the girl had been saying how great it would be to be asexual, and be able to have babies on your own. I said, that that wasn't the only type of asexual, and she replied, "Yes, but it's the best kind!" And when I tried to find out if she knew the other meaning was a sexuality, the teacher told me to shut up. And this wasn't even a normal class. We were watching a movie that had no direct relevance to the class content. And yet the teacher wouldn't let me ask the girl, who had been talking at least five minutes before I said a word, if she had intentionally said a single-celled organism was better than me.

[Artemis]

Those look to be from Google. I'd trust a web site for asexuals, by asexuals over something that was in all likelihood written by a straight man, i.e., the privileged sex and sexuality. (Also probably white and Christian, but those are less relevant in this case.)

...That seems like a thought-terminating cliche to me. Think I'm just gonna stick with my original assertion and call it quits here. You do you.

[Noxyoursox]

So much this. I've had people say some pretty nasty things about ace people. One person obliquely said I was inferior to an amoeba back in high school, though I'm not sure she knew what they were saying, because the teacher was a tyrant about talking in class and wouldn't let me ask if the girl realized that the other meaning of asexual was a sexuality. Basically, the girl had been saying how great it would be to be asexual, and be able to have babies on your own. I said, that that wasn't the only type of asexual, and she replied, "Yes, but it's the best kind!" And when I tried to find out if she knew the other meaning was a sexuality, the teacher told me to shut up. And this wasn't even a normal class. We were watching a movie that had no direct relevance to the class content. And yet the teacher wouldn't let me ask the girl, who had been talking at least five minutes before I said a word, if she had intentionally said a single-celled organism was better than me.

Oh yes, the whole "you can't reproduce asexually so you're not ace" thing. Words can have multiple meanings Who knew? XD
I've also had people call me a plant or a robot (actually, I've been called those things for being autistic, too), been told that my sexuality is "childlike", and of course "you just haven't met the right person." (that last one seems to get used on every LGBTQIA+ person)

[yetra]

Those look to be from Google. I'd trust a web site for asexuals, by asexuals over something that was in all likelihood written by a straight man, i.e., the privileged sex and sexuality. (Also probably white and Christian, but those are less relevant in this case.)

I agree with the sentiment but there's no need to go that far with the assumptions. More importantly we should just trust people to understand themselves.

Think I'm just gonna stick with my original assertion and call it quits here. You do you.

If you don't want to discuss this more that's fine, but just to add on something you might not have considered, these labels don't have much to do with finding the "right word". Language is never going to be perfectly logical, so any arbitrary standard based on dictionary definitions saying "this is what this has to mean, you don't count!!!" can be incredibly hurtful. In all likelihood it's a label that took a person a long time to figure out and be comfortable with. So it's really not your place to correct someone else's identity even if you mean well.

I too identified as asexual for some time before realizing it was more complicated, in my case it being an aversion caused by gender identity issues, which as I came to be more comfortable with I came to identify with asexuality less. But that was for me to figure out and no one else. If someone had told me "you're not really asexual, that's misleading," that would've been very fucked up and probably set me back in understanding myself.

Sometimes it's better to be accepting of other people using language differently than you do, and in a community as sexually diverse as this one, I hope this kind of identity policing doesn't happen in the future.

[GleaningJot]

Another thing that people should keep in mind is that asexuality is a spectrum, just like hetero/homosexuality, so a lot of people fall somewhere in between. When you have a hard time identifying with allosexuals (aka. everyone else), that community becomes a very useful place for support, no matter how you specifically experience that lack of interest.

This might be a bit tl;dr, but I definitely think I fall somewhere in the "gray area" between sexuality and asexuality, because I've never, ever been interested in sexual intercourse with anyone ever, and I'm getting closer to 25, so it isn't just a matter of being a "late bloomer" or whatever.

Another thing that points towards it is that even when it comes to weirdly specific fetishes (that are definitely sexual on their own), I don't understand targeted sexual desire towards other people or even things, so all these "who's you favorite pred/prey" threads don't really make any sense to me, and neither does rule 34. It feels like some kind of a weird cosmic joke that people are playing, but it's so pervasive that I've just got to accept it and play along.

I don't know what it's like to think that someone has a great ass or how on earth can a personality be "sexy". I just don't intuitively make that connection, although I can understand it in a purely intellectual way. I do pretend to be just a regular straight person irl, except every time people talk about sex, I often turn the whole thing into a joke to avoid serious discussion, because that's way easier than pretending to relate to feelings that I've never had in my life. Whenever that isn't appropriate, I can sort of steer the discussion towards romance, which I can understand a bit better, but it's almost like I've got a sort of red-green-blindness or something in terms of those feelings, so some important ones are missing, and it's difficult to BS them without sounding like a virgin and risk being called out on it.

But yeah, on the other hand, sometimes I do go and jerk off to weird stuff that have absolutely nothing to do with sex or any kind of interaction between people, so I'm probably like, 70-80% asexual with the rest being weird kinkiness that's incompatible with 99% of humanity, as well as some fairly normal romantic feelings, that do nothing to me in a sexual sense.

I mean, I can be so in love with someone that I can barely sleep at night because I'm so excited, but touching that person doesn't feel like anything special, and I don't involve them in sexual fantasies either. That's probably the most troublesome aspect, because when you're honest about it, it will often make the person think that they're just not attractive enough because of some personal flaw or whatever, so it's a very delicate subject. I've thought of trying to involve kinks to sort of override this, but it's honestly more for the partner's sake than anything, so they could maybe experience a sexual encounter that I could be at least partly into without having to fake everything. If the idea of having sex with someone who couldn't care less makes you cringe, then you'll definitely want to avoid dating someone who says they're asexual.

Edit: apparently people mentioned the spectrum thing right on the first page, shoud've read the whole thread before writing this, lol. I disagree that philias make you unfit for asexuality, though, because sexual orientation isn't about what you wanna do, it's who you wanna do stuff with.