Make Anew

It was around August or September of 2016 that I began to question my sexuality. I had an idea of what I might be, which would be an Asexual. However, it didn’t feel like a right fit for me so I began to research. Much of what I knew of Asexuality came from Tumblr and from Tumblr, I learned that Asexuality was a spectrum and I decided that Demisexuality most likely described me well (Grey-Asexual if you want to be specific).

Demisexuality is when someone only feels sexual attraction towards someone after a strong emotional bond has been established. It didn’t guarantee sex, it was only a perquisite to it. I felt that it explained a lot of what I felt — why I only dated friends, for instance.

Finally! I thought, I have a name for it, I know what I am.

I kept it mostly to myself because it didn’t feel like something I would be likely to share and because I was afraid. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, I just felt afraid.

The first person I ever told was my sister, after our trip to the MET museum. I felt nervous but I figured ‘why not’? The first thing she told me that was that I just hadn’t found the right person yet. That never sounded right to me, I don’t need someone to make me feel differently about my sexuality. I don’t need to have sex to know that I don’t want to.

But that statement gave me a reason as to why I felt afraid to tell people; what if they don’t think it’s real? What if no one understands?

You’d think that the LGBT community would be somewhere I’d find someone that understood but nope, turns out that Asexual individuals can’t catch a break there either. Tumblr is known to have a large LGBT community so I just typed ‘Asexual’ on the search bar and see what came up.

Apparently, there was something of an ‘Ace Discourse’ going on and I spent reading posts after posts on how Asexual individuals don’t belong in the community, that we were just a bunch of straights trying to take spaces and resources from actual LGBT people, that we’re abusive, sick, and trying to be special. Some people want us to die or get raped.

Imagine reading stuff like that for an hour. Tumblr, of course, doesn’t represent the entire community. The discourse had stopped ages ago. But it did nothing to help me, someone who just came to terms with her sexuality. If anything, it made me even more afraid.

My Demisexuality became something of a secret. I didn’t want to hear people telling me those things.

I’m a woman — my body wasn’t ‘mine’ from the moment I was born. According to society, it belongs to them. It belongs to men, to white people and even to my unborn children. As a Latina, my body (and even my emotions) is fetishized by men, to the point that I might as well be a sex toy to them. Put yourselves in my shoes for a moment: how do you cope with being hypersexualized while being Demisexual?

Sex is natural. I don’t have much of an issue with that. But the one thing I found out while observing is that society reacts violently to people being Asexual or under its umbrella. People can have sex, abstain from having sex, or wait until marriage. But you can’t say, ‘ I just don’t experience sexual feelings. I don’t have those feelings.’

Because then people say, “It’s natural! It’s part of being in a relationship!”

If you’re a woman, then it’s selfish. People expect women to be mothers. What if Asexual women don’t want children or have sex? According to society, were not women.

It’s disturbing to see how some people are so entitled to someone’s body that they think that sex is mandatory and expected. As if consent just didn’t exist anymore.

I stayed quiet, never saying a word.

But then Trump became president.

It’s probably weird that I mentioned Trump but it was the day following the election that I made up my mind. After the election, I was sad, angry, disappointed — but I was also tired.

I was tired of having to justify my existence, my body, to people who don’t care to understand and never would.

I was just so tired.

I’m Latina, a woman, and a Demisexual. These things are some aspects of my identity that make up this body of mine. But no one cares that I’m a Mexican-Salvadoran Demisexual woman. Why was I trying to justify who I am? To people who won’t even try to understand me, anyway?

I realized that I wanted to be accepted. Who doesn’t? But I’m not enough, for them at least.

I remembered something that a professor once told me and an entire class once — that it didn’t matter that other people accepted her. She ask for acceptance or even needed it. She loved herself and accepted herself. She was happy and that’s all she needed. I decided to take her advice and just learn to love myself more.

I needed to accept myself and stop expecting it from other people. Either they did or they didn’t. If they didn’t, then that was their problem because I wasn’t going to justify my existence any longer.

It’s May 2017 and I’m still learning to love myself. I’m still learning about Demisexuality and Asexuality as a whole. But most of all, I’m learning to be happy and more open about my sexuality.

This is my body, this is who I am and I won’t justify my existence because I am.