Microlabels for the Allosexuals
Asexuals and aromantics (aspecs) are well-known for our proliferation of words to describe and define exactly how our attraction works. Meanwhile, allosexuals (people who have a normative experience of attraction) don’t seem to have many words at all to describe themselves.
Despite being aspec myself, trying to memorise the evolving list of microlabels reminds of that time as a kid when I was poking around in boxes and found a vintage reference manual.
I started reading through a double-page list of phobias. I will not ever remember words like belonephobia, but ‘fear of pins and needles’ will do the job as far as my needs go. I mean, saying the entire phrase doesn’t have that many more syllables. We’re not actually saving much breath, here. Phobias have labels to remind the phobic that their condition is serious and shared, and also that it is taken seriously by others.
We might also compare aspec microlabels to lists of collective nouns. Like, I know it was once grammatically correct to say ‘a hand of bananas’, but I’m gonna say ‘bunch’ til I die. I know from LING101 not to be prescriptive when it comes to language. Language evolves itself, and is only so flexible when it comes to attempts at deliberate manipulation for visibility purposes.
A FEW EXAMPLES OF ASPEC MICROLABELS
I’ve picked these as examples only because I personally find them difficult to remember, not because they aren’t valid:
BELLUSSEXUAL: You do have interest in certain sexual behaviours and you like the idea of a romantic relationship. But you don’t feel sexual attraction and also don’t want a sexual relationship.
MYRSEXUAL: You know you’re aspec, but you’re not sure where you fit. You seem to occupy several identities at once. (This is a problem with the language/concept map, not with the individual, by the way.) Aspecs commonly wonder things like: Am I demisexual or graysexual? This kind of self-probing is so common, it’s almost an inherent part of being aspec.
REQUISEXUAL: Your experience of sexual attraction is limited, and this is due specifically to being emotionally exhausted. Some people don’t consider this microlabel asexual spectrum because to be asexual is a ‘born this way’ kinda deal, rather than a ‘made this way due to exhaustion’ kinda deal.
REASONS ASEXUAL MICROLABELS ARE USEFUL
- It feels great to find your own people, so when we realise we are ‘aspec’ we don’t always stop there. It can be a huge relief to finally find your people. (Now how do I really find my people?)
- The experience of being asexual is the experience of constantly being on the outside, looking in. Most of us have a lifelong feeling that we are always at the edge of things, to the point where we may not have even realised the extent of our alienation until we happened upon our identity label. So our labels are very important to us.
- Because the aspec community is so very broad, no matter what aspec community you join, you’re going to find people who are very different from yourself. Microlabels remind each of us that no matter who surrounds us, we are not entirely alone in our experience. After all, someone made up a whole word to describe us! It’s basically like living with an unnamed chronic illness for decades, and then finding out it’s got a name after all! We are not the first person in the world to have it! Even if that’s the extent of our relief, it is a great salve to finally put a name to something that perplexed us, and caused pain, especially if no one believed us when we tried to explain our way-of-being in the world.
- Autistic thinkers are heavily represented in the asexual community, and Autistics are well-known for our deep-thinking. We are not known for saying, “Huh. Cool nugget, dude,” then jogging on. We find something fascinating, we dive in deep. If we find something that piques our interest, we inhale everything we can get our hands on. Our neurotype is generally good at finding big patterns. Classification and taxonomization of ideas (as well as ‘lining up’ objects) can scratch an Autistic itch which is difficult to convey to allistic (non-Autistic) neurotypes.
As usual, I feel the need to add the disclaimer that not all Autistics are asexual. In fact, most aren’t. Never assume. Autistics do have a long history of being desexualised, however, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
DO WE HAVE TOO MANY LABELS NOW THOUGH?
There’s a case to be made that, because labels function more like buckets, it’s more helpful to think of attributes in terms of a sliding scale. Here’s a good example of that, questioning the usefulness of a common labelling system: introversion vs. extraversion.
it is past time we jettisoned the useless false dichotomy of introversion vs. extroversion and just accepted that everybody has a minimum amount of social interaction, failing which, they get really weird. and everybody has a maximum amount of social interaction, exceeding which, they get really weird. these levels are different for everyone, for a variety of reasons, and have no moral dimension. and that is all.
— radcarian on Tumblr
Some within the aspec community think that maybe, just maybe, we’ve collectively come up with a few too many labels. Labels are hugely helpful, for all the reasons listed above. But, you know, at a certain point the gift of seeing patterns can flick over into what we might call over-classification. Boxes can get a bit too small, the walls a little too rigid. It’s a huge comfort and a freedom to find a home in an untethered desert of alone-ness, but we’re talking spectrums here, not actual containers. And labels tend to describe containers (a.k.a. containments). Labels are both freeing and constricting at once. We must sit with that reality. Schrodinger’s Post-it note.
Here’s how I think about identity labels: While you’re busting a boiler trying to figure yourself out, go ahead, research all the microlabels. But if you don’t seem to fit anywhere neatly, or you’re not sure which labels are best for you, try not to let that cause undue stress.
Finding your own identity is kinda like creative work. As Don Draper advises the fresh-faced Peggy Olsen in AMC’s Mad Men when Peggy struggles to come up with her first assignment:
“Just think about it deeply, then forget it. An idea will jump up in your face.”
— Don Draper, Mad Men
You know it’s time to forget about micro-labelling yourself when you find yourself perseverating over whether you’re a particular label or another similar one; whether any given feature of you is down to label A or label B; whether you’re A enough to count as B, and so on.
It’s completely okay to disidentify with labels, as well.
The many microlabels used by the apec community evince the shift to sex as something you do rather than something you are more than any other sexual community.
The overall shift of sex as something you do to something you are is at odds with the low priority many aces afford sex. So we are left with a paradox.
Though ‘aromantic’ is not considered a ‘microlabel’, I personally disidentify even with romantic labelling because I can’t figure out what ‘romantic’ actually means. (I believe romance varies significantly between eras and cultures, even subcultures.) Moreover, I don’t think that word “romantic” means the same thing to any two given people. Ergo, the label isn’t useful to me. Others in the same boat would label themselves ‘Quoiromantic’: The feeling of not being able to distinguish romantic from platonic attraction and therefore being unsure if one has experienced it.
Even the deeply introspective aspec community cannot possibly have come up with sufficient words to describe all the different ways of being human in the world.
To demonstrate that point, I have concocted some attraction labels for the allosexuals.
The premise: If allosexuals were as motivated as asexuals to pattern-seek and classify how their own attraction works, these labels wouldn’t be called ‘microlabels’. They’d simply be called ‘words’. Such language would be broadly understood and no one would be dismissed as “attention seeking” for using them*.
*a common aggression hurled at aspec people — it’s all part of the epistemic injustice (the main type of injustice experienced by the aspec community)
MICROLABELS FOR ALLOS
(Attraction microlabels for allosexuals do not exist in our shared lexicon. In case you scrolled and skimmed, I made these up. To make a point.)
ICKOSEXUAL: Ickosexuals can experience immediate attraction to a new person, but catch the ick very easily. A crush might be great in almost every regard, but then this crush of yours says one disagreeable thing and poof! the feeling of attraction evaporates. As strong as the attraction felt before, now it’s flipped the other way, to repulsion.
If attraction to this person is ever to return, it will take a long time to come back, much in line with how demisexuals work.
Reality TV example: Jesse Burford from Season 10 of Australian Married at First Sight (2023), who shared a long list of “icks” with the ‘Relationship Experts’ hoping they’d find him someone compatible. What did the so-called Experts do when Jesse said he can’t stand Star Sign Chicks? They figured Jesse needs a character arc, so they matched Jesse up with Queen of the Star Sign Chicks, also into crystals, who promptly asked her new Husband his star sign over the wedding breakfast.
Audiences watched Jesse lose his initial spark of attraction in real time, on screen. Good one, MAFS!
RED-FLAG-O-SEXUAL
You’re on a date, he keeps saying super disturbing things, you recognise the red flags for exactly what they are. You know you should up and leave. But for some reason, the more he flaps his gums, the more you’re into him.
If this describes you, maybe listen to The Hook-up — How To Deal If You’re Attracted To Red Flags. The previous week they talked about When Dating Green Flags Freak You Out.
HOUSEWORK-O-SEXUAL
Doesn’t matter how hot he is — and yes, I’m gendering this — if he leaves dirty dishes in the sink, you ain’t gonna be in the mood for sex. If you’re picking up his wet towel, you’ll feel like his mother, and mothers are not sexually attracted to their offspring. There’s a solid evolutionary reason for that!
DECLINE-O-SEXUAL
Within romantic relationships, your sexual attraction wanes after X amount of time, independently of how the other person is, or how they behave. (I actually think this might be way more common than is commonly talked about, or admitted to, and I’d like to see more allosexuals acknowledge how, after the first stage of limerant sexual attraction, pretty much every normatively attracted partnered person slips into what the aspecs call a ‘demisexual’ phase, in which a different form of attraction based on emotional closeness hopefully develops.)
“I fell most deeply in love with my wife when we were in our late twenties, after we were already married. It had little to do with sex. It was the first trimester after we knew that she was pregnant. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for her. Suddenly she was a new person. I remember a special day in particular when we went to a motel and had a nice dinner, then went swimming, and had an evening of dancing and fun. Then we went to bed and to sleep just holding each other. The sex wasn’t important anymore.”
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
But some people work in the direct inverse direction.
LOVE-O-SEXUAL
Love necessitates sex, but sex doesn’t always or may never make love a possibility. For me, love is in the head. It needs the physical resolution of sex with the other, and if this is not possible, all one can do is stew in his own juice and hope it goes away.
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
Note that this man is not describing demisexuality, although at first glance it may seem that way. Demisexuals do not experience sexual attraction unless a close bond is formed first. This man is saying he does experience sexual attraction in normative fashion, and that if he’s in love with someone he feels the strong desire to have sex with them.
I feel this is a normative way of experiencing attraction, and it would be really good if allosexuals in this category understood this about themselves. Too often, asexuals find themselves in relationships with allosexuals who say at the outset that they’re fine without sex. But as the relationship progresses and they feel more and more deeply in love, they find that love does, indeed, necessitate sex.
Many people go through their entire lives without knowing this about themselves, perhaps because they’ve never been in a relationship with an aspec person, or with someone whose attraction works very differently from theirs.
Of course, life’s big project is Knowing Oneself, and no one can be blamed for doing their best at any given time with the self-information available to them. That we don’t talk more deeply about attraction in mainstream sex education and elsewhere is everyone’s hermeneutical injustice.
FOREPLAY-O-SEXUAL
This is pretty much standard. So standard, we don’t have a succinct name for it.
GENDER-O-SEXUAL
It seems some people are attracted to gender performance rather than to the person per se, even if they also happen to love the person. The part they find sexually attractive is their performance of gender.
This seems especially true of sexist men and women who have internalised strict gender rules:
Women in sexy, feminine clothes excite me — women who wear pants or slacks or pantsuits or flat shoes disgust me and make me impotent in my relationship with them.
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
The extent to which this type of attraction depends on sexism is something worth understanding, uncomfortable though it inevitably is.
The following comment suggests that some people are very bifurcated in the way they regard ‘personalities’ versus ‘the sexual bodies they inhabit’:
“As for loving men, well, yes, I sure feel a strong affection for some. If they were in women’s bodies, I would like them as I like women.”
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
From the same report, what are we to make of the following response?
“I like women who are just plain soft and cuddly. I love breasts of course but I’m even more turned on by nipples. They’re like little penises.”
— The Hite Report on Male Sexuality: How Men Feel about Love and Sex, 1987, by Shere Hite
The respondent loves body parts most commonly associated with women, but his addendum suggests he has a strong appreciation for male body parts, comparing female nipples to a penis. He may simply be trying to explain that he likes nipples because, like penises, they can be a clear indication of arousal, and it’s good to get bodily feedback. Or, he may be describing a mindset in which he does not make a clear distinction between male and female body parts, or that the distinction is not as clear as the binary gendering of bodies would have us believe.
And I think that’s great.
There you have it — finally, a few words** to describe how attraction works, and to encourage introspection among the allosexuals, not just the asexuals! After all, it shouldn’t just be up to us aspecs to understand and disclose to friends, family and potential partners exactly how our attraction works. If aspecs are expected to get into the weeds, everyone can get into the weeds.
To know yourself. This is everyone’s life project. See you among the swamp grasses.
*These concepts absolutely already exist. People understand them. It’s just, the allos use sentences, or paragraphs, where aspecs use the shorthand of words.
honestly my advice for people questioning if they’re aro is kind of the same as my advice for people questioning if they’re trans which is do less worrying about whether or not you inherently fall into this arbitrary category and do more considering what you want in and from your life. like ultimately deconstructing societal ideals of what relationships (or gender) should be like and figuring out what you want them to look like in your life is what matters and whether or not you experience romantic attraction is kind of immaterial
— ale-arro
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.
