Do you see how I see? Demisexuality, Heteronormativity and The Male Gaze.
Demisexuality is "subject to some debate" as regards its status as an inherently queer identity. Both online, and in real-world LGBTQ+ spaces, demisexuals- and other identities on the asexual spectrum more widely- often face invalidation, verbal assault and discrimination due to being seen by some as intruding in those spaces and being "insufficiently queer". As you'd probably surmised from the heavy quotation marks, I have very little patience with those arguments. It's my contention that asexuality, and demisexuality in the case of this article, are inherently queer. I want to demonstrate this using the example of the relationship that I, as a demisexual, have with the dominant way of seeing propagated in our culture - the male gaze.
When I refer to a way of seeing I mean that, as a culture, our literal way of perceiving one another is shaped and directed by the perspective most often seen in media; that is to say the perspective, or gaze, of heterosexual cis men. The concept of the gaze was popularized by the work of Laura Mulvey, and basically states that this dominant perspective is something to which we all- including everyone who is NOT a heterosexual cis male- are positioned to identify with and accept as the natural, default way of seeing one another. Because it propagates a straight cis male way of seeing, the gaze positions women as object, available to the sexual desire of men and positioning the viewer to accept an experience based on the "pleasure" of visual focus on bodies and secondary sexual characteristics in particular. That is not to say that it is impossible to resist this positioning, just that culture defaults to it as normative and expected.
I've always been deeply uncomfortable with the male gaze. Not just the way it reduces female presenting people to objects and bisects their bodies into various desirable parts for men to drool over, but the fact that I was socialized into believing that this way of seeing was normal and natural. Because here's the thing: socialization only goes so far, and for me the male gaze never felt comfortable, never felt like something I should have, or even want to have. Imagine growing up in an image-saturated society, where every billboard, TV ad and magazine spread endorses and enforces a particular way of looking at female-presenting bodies, what would it feel like to not understand or be embarrassed by those images? Feeling like a goblin living on mount mistaken isn't the best feeling, especially when the cisallohet patriarchy isn't offering alternatives.
Socialization into the male gaze limited my options for understanding myself and the world around me, made me feel that I was wrong because I didn't want any part of it and, truthfully, because I didn't really understand it. This is, I think, mostly because I didn't, and was never going to, occupy the space culture carves out for the male gaze; never had the manufactured desires, attractions or the needs it exists to serve, and would spend a great deal of time feeling broken as a result.
I'll start at the very beginning (Sound of Music fans can provide their own jokes)- hi, I'm Drew, a demisexual, bi-romantic, non-binary person in the process of, shall we say, figuring shit out. I was assigned male at birth and lived the vast majority of my life somewhat uncomfortably under the guise of being a cis male.
And as such it should have been easy- the world is designed for, and catered towards, the wants and desires of white cis men, after all. The depiction of female presenting people in western media follows the pattern- most mainstream media depictions of women were seen through the lens of the male gaze when I was growing up, and still are to this day, albeit to a lesser degree. So why did this way of seeing just not speak to me? Why did I actively feel uncomfortable watching it play out on TV, in print and in public spaces?
I'm college educated, and studied the work of Laura Mulvey, Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir and others. So maybe that was it? Educate the gaze out of someone thru self awareness! At college I did think I'd just learned to be better, to question what seemed natural and inevitable to others. Was I just "one of the good ones"?
Perhaps so, but that doesn't explain how the male gaze had always made me feel uncomfortable, squirm like a teen watching a raunchy sex scene with their grandparents, and why I just didn't get it. It didn't explain why I was drawn to images that actively challenged and subverted the gaze, far more than to any image that upheld it.
Was it that I wasnt interested in women? No, that couldn't be it as my few explicit (as in, acknowledged and unrepressed) romantic crushes as a younger person were all on female-presenting people. So what then? Why did I feel bad about looking at women, even in an admiring, non-sexualised way? [Thats right, before I knew I was queer I actually had straight imposter syndrome!]
Was it because of what I now understand to be my lack of fit with the male gender, and the behaviors and performances of masculinity associated with it? Perhaps.
Was it what I now understand to be my attraction to multiple genders and queer gender presentations, with the attenuating lack of identification with the default perspective of cisheteronormativity? Again, perhaps.
While all of these yet-to-be-acknowledged aspects of myself likely played a role, it’s my feeling now that being demisexual was the most influential of all these. For me, Demisexuality, regardless of the other forms of attraction that accompany it, or the genders to whom those attractions are pointed, represents a fundamental break from the male gaze of cisallohet norms. As such, to be demisexual is to have a fundamentally queer way of being and seeing.
Let's define things- demisexuality is a largely asexual experience, with little or no sexual attraction unless and until a close bond is formed with someone. Under those conditions and under those conditions only can sexual attraction be felt, and even then it is not certain to happen. Let that sink in for a moment- a largely asexual experience, without sexual attraction for the vast majority of your existence. When I say its a largely asexual experience I mean it- I have been sexually attracted to perhaps 3 or 4 people in my life, and in only one of those cases am I certain about that. So what does this largely asexual experience mean for the male gaze, and how is the way of seeing it shapes fundamentally queer?
The male gaze, as I have suggested, is fundamentally concerned with the consumption of the female subject and their body in the name of sexual attraction and conquest. It packages and presents female presenting people, and mostly cis women at that, in order that they be objects of desire for heterosexual cis men. It intentionally disempowers women so that they are seen as attainable and sexually available. In essence, it is a fundamentally sexualized way of seeing.
An asexual male, or amab, without or mostly without sexual attraction, is somewhat of an anathema to a fundamentally sexualised take on the world. If the female body is not sexually attractive then it serves no purpose for me to look upon it in the way the male gaze intends. This is more than likely a key part of my lifelong discomfort with it- I was just too queer!
Not finding the subject of the male gaze to be sexually attractive or alluring is in some way to read the images it proffers "wrongly", to see its mechanics laid bare and often embarrassingly obvious. In short, to read it as an outsider. This is the basis upon which queer reading of images is founded, and is for me a source of great joy in contrast to my earlier confusion.
As a demisexual I often find nothing but a blank in a camera shot that winds around a female body, inviting me to salivate as it goes. Nothing but awkward awareness of what the director intends, what I " should" feel as a viewer, and the chasm between them. Its a familiar feeling, that absence. Its the same I felt when male friends hooted and preened at the "hottest" girl in class, when magazine photospreads and page 3 of national newsrags offer nothing to me but aesthetic appreciation (at best) and often a simple "meh" at the desperate artlessness of it all.
In truth it was an alienating and lonely existence outside of the implied gaze of men everywhere; an awkward, shuffling half-smile of a life as a gaze designed to manufacture cishet attraction entirely fails to so that, and no other options seem available. In short, it is the same foggy existence that many queer people feel lost in before they find their words and their people.
For me, to live as an assumed male outside of the options provided by cishet society is to be fundamentally queer: your way of engaging with, and looking at, female presenting people to whom you are romantically attracted is queer, since it holds none of the predatory or reductive force of the male gaze. Your way of engaging with a media dominated by the "sex sells" maxim, and predicated on exploiting sexual attractiveness in order to ship product, is fundamentally queer.
You exist outside of these mechanisms for triggering desire-based impulses, you are unaddressed, uncalled- you are queer.
Even if years of my life were lived in the belief that I was some kind of failed heterosexual, I was never not queer and simply didn't "see" as society intended.
To put it bluntly, to be demisexual is to be queer. Demisexuality distances and separates one from the male gaze and the sexual attractions and presumptions upon which it is based. Demisexuality also therefore distances and separates from one of the core precepts of cisallohet society and one of the key "training tools" that uphold the patriarchal structures of that society.
Demisexuality fundamentally alters ones relationship with the world around them and queers the perspectives available in that world. There are many ways to be queer, and, while demisexuality may not involve attractions to same or multiple genders, its extremely limited and context-specific attraction poses a direct challenge to the fast-food consumption of female bodies upon which the cisallohet patriarchy is based. Demisexuality is a queer orientation by definition.
I think that's one of the reasons that the discovery of my demisexuality was such a moment of joy. Actually, momentS of joy is probably more accurate, since its not a light bulb that comes on, but a series of streetlights that illuminate one after the other until you can see a sign at the end of the street that reads "This is what queer joy feels like: Welcome!".
Finding demisexuality as a label just explained so much about my life, opened doors to other queer identities I had repressed or not really considered beyond fleeting moments, and showed me that how I saw the world and other people in it was not aberrant, not wrong, just queer. I have a queer gaze, not a male cisallohet gaze, and knowing that now, that's a source of comfort.
This is not a universal story; I dare say that the altered relationship with your self, your body and the world around you that demisexuality brings is not limited to me alone, but may not be true for everyone. This is my story, though, and for me demisexuality is one of the cornerstones of my queerness; without the way of being and seeing that it provides my life would be far more confused and painful, cut adrift from my community and myself.
