Demisexual

A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction
unless they form a emotional connection. It's more commonly seen in,
but by no means confined, to romantic relationships. The term
demisexual comes from the orientation being "halfway between" sexual
and asexual.

I first encountered the term "demisexual" in online forums for genderqueer and other gender-variant people. It was as new to me as my own identifying term ("gender invert") is to most people in the LGBTQ scene. I'd heard of demigirl and demiboy (terms used by some genderqueer folks) but demisexual was one I hadn't encountered before.

DEMI means "half" or "halfway" -- so a demigirl would be someone halfway between gender-neutral and feminine, for example. When applied to sexual, though, it was less obvious to me what it would mean to be half-sexual, in addition to which the people who identified as such didn't appear to be using it to mean they were less sexual than most other people; instead they seemed to be using it to mean their sexual interests were confined to relationships in which they had a meaningful emotional connection.

It struck me as a pattern strongly associated with feminine sexuality. We have the cultural notion that women and girls want to have a relationship with a boyfriend, and within that context, to have good sex. That the sexuality of boys and men, by comparison, is considerably less constrained to situations where there's that kind of intimate connection. Female exceptions may exist, but where they do, their femininity is cast into some degree of dubiety by the fact that they are willing to jump into no-strings casual sex with the same non-demi enthusiasm as a typical male. Such women are often assumed to lack appropriate amounts of self-esteem (a suspicion less often aimed at promiscuous male people) and they are tagged with epithets and descriptors like "slut" and "wanton" and "easy" and a host of other nouns and adjectives that all underline their lack of normalcy, their deviance, the fundamental wrongness of them being that way.

It's reasonable to say that being demisexual is prescriptive for women, whether it is accurately descriptive or not. Girls and women are under a great deal of social pressure to take on the trappings of being demisexual, to give it lip service and keep up the superficial appearance of being that way.

It's also reasonable to point out that we have plenty of cultural images of women's sexuality as reactive to sexual attention, in such a way that a popular depiction of the very un-demi male sexuality takes the form of the seducer, the sexual pursuer who elicits female sexual participation not by connecting to women with an emotional bond but by circumventing her obligatory pretense of being demisexual and appealing to her rather non-demi susceptibility to sexual opportunities.




It certainly seems useful to split off the specific notion of being demisexual from the culturally conventional notion of femininity, because there are other characteristics that are also deemed to be part of femininity (and of feminine sexuality), such that a person could participate in being feminine without being demisexual. It gives us specificity; it lets us zero in on one aspect of a person's nature instead of referencing a huge library of loosely-associated characteristics.

I'm not sure I quite qualify as demisexual, myself. I've never craved sexual activity that was deliberately lacking in emotional connection, that's for sure, and I've always wanted to have a close intimate caring relationship. But that's not quite the same as saying I'm utterly without any sexual attraction to a stranger, a casual acquaintance, someone I don't have an emotional connection to. I can have such attractions, and I do. Acting on them is messy and complicated and more trouble than it's worth, and I hate that perpetual accusation that insofar as I'm a male I only care about sex and not for loving relationships. But once again, that's not the same thing as saying I'm incapable of finding someone quite enticingly appetizing, entirely delicious on visual and other superficial grounds. My disinclination to actually engage in casual sex isn't due to a lack of appetite outside of emotionally connected relationships.

That makes me wonder how many self-identified demisexual folks would say much the same thing: whether they'd say they completely do not feel any attraction outside of relationships, or would instead say that satisfying sexual experiences seem to be tied to caring connections and therefore they are uninclined to act on attractions outside of them.

And, because it's kind of one of those fabled living-room elephants, how being demisexual as a female-bodied person differs from being demisexual as a person who presents as male. Because the cultural context is going to paint them quite differently.

And as a gender invert, I'm especially curious about how demisexual male people who are attracted to female folks experience their sexual lives, their sexual orientation, and their gender identity. Because I found that being even as demisexual as I am to be entirely polarizing and gender-invalidating, and a big part of how I came to identify as a gender invert.

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