I just came across this essay on sexual orientation and asexuality on the AVEN website, and I can definitely relate.
I am not asexual, because I sometimes enjoy intimacy. Or maybe I am, because I’m not all that interested in sex, and people have called me asexual for this reason. I don’t care. I am in an opposite-sex relationship. Does that make me heterosexual, even though I didn’t choose my boyfriend because he’s male? If I now am in a relationship with a man, and I used to say I was attracted to women, does that make me bisexual? Or maybe pansexual, as there is the possibility I wiould be attracted to genderqueer people? Basically, I stopped caring years ago. The labels we put on sexual orientations, are arbitrarily created by people who happen to fit them. There will always be people who don’t fit into the boxes. People who simply love whom they love and enjoy the (sexual or intimate) activities they enjoy.
I always associate sexual orientation labels with the cultural marginalization associated with them. In a culture where people in other forms of relationships than monogamous, sexual, opposite-sex relationships were simply accepted, we wouldn’t need sexual orientation labels. Yet in our heteronormative, mainly monogamous, sexualized culture, people who don’t conform to these norms, need labels that marginalize them. I can get away from these labels by asserting my straight privilege, and at the same time, I deny part of my sexual identity. Which is that I love whom I love, and I would like to figure out what I enjoy and don’t enjoy without needing to conform to rigid norms of sexuality.
“In a culture where people in other forms of relationships than monogamous, sexual, opposite-sex relationships were simply accepted, we wouldn’t need sexual orientation labels.”
Except maybe on dating websites like match.com and okcupid.com, where being able to specify one’s own sexual orientation makes the site more usable.
Why even there? There could be something similar to Facebook’s “interested in …”
On the other hand, would that force asexual people to just leave all the boxes unticked?
@ Jeroen: Here, you are assuming that asexuals would not be interested in a romatic relationship. That is not necessarily true: some asexuals are interested in having a romantic relationship (they’re just not interested in sex), while others (aromantics) are not.