Sexual Identity

Asexuality saved my sex life. No, seriously – I mean that. I will declare it from the middle of a courtroom, with one hand on Our Bodies, Ourselves. Asexuality, as much as sex-positive feminism and far more than any amount of “hon, you just need to get laid already,” helped me to access a confident, positive, and excited relationship with my sexual self.

Here’s the short answer: personally, what I call it is just being alive. The world can be a really beautiful place, and so can all of the people in it. When we’re observant, open, and not feeling horribly bitter or distraught about ourselves or our world, we tend to notice and appreciate beauty…

The way you framed this is tricky, because our sexuality isn’t separate from our minds and can’t be separated from our minds, just like our bodies can’t be separated from our minds. In fact, our mind is where most of sexuality really is and is what drives it the most. We can’t say something is…

Many people who identify as heterosexual have had some kind of sexual or affectional feelings or interactions with someone of the same gender, especially in childhood or adolescence. When Alfred Kinsey’s data was published in the late 1940’s in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a cultural ruckus…

I’m going to tell you a few things you probably already know, but they might be good ways to explain to anyone who doesn’t already know them. Heterosexual people are usually only or primarily romantically and sexually attracted to people of a different sex or gender than they are. That means that…

What’s it mean to be questioning, why would you or someone else identify that way, how do you deal in the process and how might you answer the question?

I don’t think it’s very realistic to expect most of us to feel the exact same way, or “equally,” about all men, all women or all people whose gender is outside of that binary. I’m not even sure, I have to say, what feeling “equally” about people, period, would be. People are so radically different…

(pagangirl’s question continued) To me, my boyfriend had been the perfect picture of masculinity–what I wanted in a man. After this revelation, I feel an aversion to him. I see him differently, and more than anything, I can’t get the thought that he’s gay out of my mind. I know I should be more…

If I only had a dollar (heck, even a quarter) for every time a young person wrote into Scarleteen to ask us if we think they might be [fill in a sexual orientation here], I’d be pretty freakin’ wealthy. This is in no way to make light of your question to us, more just to let you know that this is…

Some of what you’re describing is what plenty of people who identify as asexual describe. Many asexual people report that it’s not a matter for them of not having sexual feelings, but instead, a matter of lacking any motivation to pursue those feelings actively with sexual partners, and also for…