"Grow out of it"

When I was at school, I didn't date until much later than everyone else, and I remember that this caused a certain amount of tension between me and my schoolmates. By all accounts, there was something wrong with me: I was a dyke, or I was frigid, or I was a slut who had lots of sex but was too uptight to tell anyone about it, or I had issues with men, or I wanted to date guys but they didn't want to date me.

When I said I simply wasn't interested, that was assumed to be false -- something masking the real problem. If asked whether I wanted to have a relationship or sex eventually, I shrugged, and explained that I had no strong preferences either way, which only confused people more.

Eventually, I did start to have romantic relationships, and in my adulthood that included sexual ones. I resent that that fits the stereotypical narrative of "growing out of it" or "not being ready", because that suggests that becoming sexual is something people do, naturally and inevitably, all on their own. And if that's true, then why did my peers go to so much trouble to make sure I knew, from primary school onwards, that there was something completely and utterly wrong with not wanting sexual relationships? We were in primary school when I first remember being overtly told that this was something wrong with me -- most of my peers didn't even know what sex was (I got unusually good sex ed from my parents, at quite a young age, but it's clear to me in retrospect that this wasn't true of my peers), only that sex wasn't optional once you were at the highschool prom/in college/married (highschool proms, college, and marriage obviously not being optional either).

In other words, from a very young age, we are taught The Relationship Hierarchy. Which is something like: blood ties and marriage ties trump other sorts of ties. Sexual relationships trump non sexual relationships. You have only one partner, who shall be your sexual partner and your lawfully-wedded spouse, and no other partners, and they trump all other relationships. Marriages that produce children trump non-procreating relationships, but Thou Shalt Not Be A Single Parent. "Family" and "Friends" are distinctive sets of people, and "Family" trumps "Friends". "Friends" should mean only people of the same sex, but otherwise, same sex friends trump other-sex friends. You shall be emotionally intimate only with same-sex friends, unless you are a man, and then Thou Shalt Not Have Emotions. (Please note that I think these are social norms, rather than things I agree with -- in fact I strongly oppose many of these ideas).

Well fuck that. As my co-blogger Katherine blogged, important relationships can be constituted not only through blood ties or marriage ties, but also in other ways. Katherine used the example of flatmates, who might well constitute family.

The message here is that although I happen to associate certain kinds of emotional closeness with certain kinds of people and the relationships I have with them, and I also happen to associate certain kinds of (not necessarily sexual) physical intimacy with certain people, those are things I have largely been taught to associate, according to the Relationship Hierarchy. Some of those associations or non-associations are healthy and self-protective (it is not healthy to be close to certain people in certain ways), some of them are arbitrary and deeply harmful.

And that has all sorts of reprecussions. It means that from a very young age, before children really understand what sex is, we have taught them that boys and girls cannot be friends without a sexual connection (and men and men, or women and women can never have a sexual or romantic connection). It means that we teach kids that people who are not interested in sex or romance are wrong. It means we teach kids that queer families are wrong or oxymoronic. It means we teach kids that there is a primacy to sexual relationships above friendships that goes partway to legitimising posessive behaviours in abusive partners.

And in the context of a society in which things are sold by displaying a near-naked or hawt-and-sexy woman, or a society in which street harassment is part of many women's routine experience, this is also how we teach women that they must be sexually available all the time, to men who must always want sex. It starts before we even know what sex is, and it continues, more or less forever. I remember being little, thinking that eventually I would have sex because everyone did. I remember being repulsed by the idea then, which I attributed to being primary-school age, but years later, I'm still repulsed by the idea that one ought, to think that having sex is inevitable, or think that nobody says no to sex. That's not something I anticipate "growing out of".

There are interesting things to be said about how this relates to queer feminism, sex-positive feminism, and the socialisation of children, but this post is long enough already. What I will say is this: Kaz and I have talked about queer feminism having, on the whole, very little to say about asexuality. I've worried about writing about asexuality because I don't identify as asexual, and didn't want to be talking as if I knew about other people's experiences. But part of being a political ally, and part of creating a feminism that works for me, is examining my own investment in sexuality, and how we build the hierarchies that I, and indeed everyone else, is part of, and that harm the people around me. This isn't really a post about asexuality -- but it is me starting to do the investment work.

--IP