the sexuality blogpost!

So, I recall identifying myself previously as asexual. Now I've discovered there's many more facets to sexuality in general, I might have a more nuanced description for what I am.

For the still-rather-crude description, I identify as genderqueer (will elaborate later), biromantic and asexual.

But that's still going too general. Pigeonholing feelings. I don't think it describes precisely what I feel, and the fact is that sexuality is a mess of things that, like species, people like to classify and organise to aid understanding.

Let me start with, um, conceptual interest. The romantic interest in a particular individual as an idea, a collection of habits, a personality. This would encompass--having crushes on people in books, people I've never seen, people known via the internet. In this case, I'll have to say I have more interest in males, but males who display conventionally feminine personality traits more than others. I like reading about a male who's pretty, refined and gentle. Females rarely interest me in this way unless they're striking, though I cannot off my head think of any female fitting into this.

Then, there's purely visual interest. Visual attraction to a person's face from a glance, real or fictional. Here it gets more even, and slightly stranger. A very clear pattern I've noticed: I'm rarely interested in real-life people this way. I don't find real people's faces that attractive on a whole, and much prefer stylised, animated ones of many styles and sorts. Following this, I've had single-glance crushes on both males and females, though a pattern holds--I'm more interested in the guys who look effeminate or gentle, and the girls who look masculine or powerful. In males, long hair, long eyelashes and formal attiring draw me. In girls it's almost the opposite--short or messy hair, masculine attiring, a rough-and-tumble look. Only female crossdressers work for me.

Now something slightly different from the above would be physical attraction. This isn't attraction to a person's face or attiring or projected image (though it can overlap); it's attraction to the body itself. This is best judged, I think, through picturing the respective genders in form-fitting attire. Now here, I have no interest male bodies at all; in fact I'm quite revolted by them. But girls, I find visually arresting. Particularly curvaceous ones.

Then there's romantic attraction--and this is hormonal? The attraction to a person whom I have gotten to know personally and feel interested in in terms of more than outwards appearance alone. Here I've got a greater interest in males than females, by number (though I can probably count off the number of people I've felt this way for on one or both hands). These are mainly my schoolmates, all in fact. There are passing fancies too, attractions of this sort that lasts no more than two days, but they're insignificant most of the time and don't cause any detectable change in myself or my behaviour.

The last level would be sexual attraction. This involves any physical intimacy (kissing, fondling, massaging) and, yes, sex of any sort. And I am not interested in any of this, at all. In fact I think I display a phobic response to anything of this sort. I don't want to be penetrated. I don't want to be kissed. I'm not interested in any intimacy of the sexual sort, at all. The funny thing here is that I like to read about the all the above except for sex itself; I like to watch animated kissing. But once it enters live action territory and, needless to say, personal experience, I want nothing at all to do with it. Even if the guy is someone I have a crush on or find visually appealing (though it may just be a case of not knowing anyone personally whom I find has a nice face).

I'm sleepy now so my writing's dumb and clumsy but you get the idea. At this point I'm still unsure about all this but I can't go around waving this full description of my sexuality in the faces of everyone who winds up discussing it with me!