Asexuality: Not Feeling Sexual Attraction and What It’s Like

This video chronicles one person's experience being asexual.

Tags: emotion/desire, lgbtq, sex/sexuality, asexuality, heteronormativity, identity, media, representation, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2015
Length: 2:25
Access: YouTube

Summary: This video is an animated story of a young asexual’s life and her experiences. Asexuality is defined as the lack of sexual attraction to any gender. This is different from celibacy. While a person who is celibate (i.e., someone who choses not to have sex) can still experience sexual attraction, most  asexuals are simply not interested in sex. There are asexuals who have sex, but they do not feel sexually attracted to their partners. They may chose to have sex for intimacy, or to feel closer to their partners, but it is not out of sexual attraction. This person's story started out when they were in middle school. The author says that she started to feel different from her friends around that time. This is when most of her friends started to talk about their crushes, which the author never had. Around the same time the author noticed that all of the books they read centered on romance and sexual attraction. This made her feel even more out of place, due to lack of representation in the media, and she felt very alienated. To fit in with cultural norms, the author made up crushes so as not to seem different from her peers. This, however, did not work and she started avoiding the subject of crushes altogether. The author felt as though by not participating in this part of school culture she came off as aloof and "different." Not a pleasant feeling. So, when the author went to high school she started dating to see if she might "get it." However, she was disappointed, as she still didn’t understand everyone’s obsession with the opposite sex. After not doing too well dating men, the author thought she might be gay. So she started dating girls. The results, however, were the same. The author still did not get the appeal of dating or sex. This lead the author to think that she was broken and alone. She felt as though she could not fit in with social norms and was alienated by hyper-sexualized media. Finally, the author found an online community of fellow asexuals. Being able to label how she felt and knowing that there were others like her helped the author finally stop feeling broken. This video is useful for talking about sexualities, and how media representations (or a lack thereof) affects people. If you never see anyone like yourself represented in the media, you start to feel like you’re the problem and that you don’t belong. By finding others like herself, the author was able to accept herself and finally come to terms with her identity. For additional resources, check out The Sociological Cinema's other videos on asexuality.

Submitted By: Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall

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