It’s a Point of Pride

I’ve always had a weird relationship with sexuality.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, I’ll rewind a bit to say that while I don’t typically make a huge effort to get personal in my writing, it seems to happen just a matter of course. While I’ve tried several times over the years to scrub myself from my writing and present a more objective viewpoint, I’ve slowly but surely come to the realization that the writing I like to read and to write always has the aura of the writer behind it allowing it to glow and pulse with life. So I’ve started to embrace the fact that my writing is often just another expression of the very flawed, messy person that I am, doing my best to express feelings that I have difficulty sharing in any other way.

Having whiled away the past several months mostly with very limited interaction with anyone outside my household, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who I am and why I feel the way that I do about various things. One of the biggest things I’ve been forced to accept about myself is that I have a huge case of imposter syndrome that’s unlikely to go away any time soon. I often feel like I’m just not good enough at anything that I try to accomplish, and that anyone who thinks otherwise must be fooled somehow (because apparently being terrible at everything else somehow makes one a genius at manipulating other people). I’ve done a lot of work to try to stop my brain from obsessing over these thoughts, but I think these feelings of inadequacy are just a part of who I am. The best I can do is use those feelings to work toward fitting into the shoes of the person that people seem to think I am.

I promise this is going somewhere.

I’ve spent many long years writing about anime as some recent posts will confirm, and one thing that’s been common over the years (though varied in the severity of how I’ve expressed it) is my ambivalence toward the portrayal of sexuality in media. I simply chalked this up to a distaste toward sexism and homophobia, because the portrayal of sexuality in media unfortunately too often has a misogynistic or homophobic component. Anime in particular (or possibly it’s just that I mostly watch anime) makes me cringe a lot of the time, because its expression of sexuality is so often reduced to T&A or surprise nudity, and so often seems aimed at a very specific demographic of consumer.

While this kind of material would set me off on a rant when I was a younger, greener reviewer, age has brought with it a more toned-down anger response and a more measured understanding about how this type of material fits into anime culture. But whether aimed at me as an audience member or not, there’s almost always some aspect of fanservice that makes me uncomfortable, especially the way in which it’s front-loaded into an anime series and serves as a tonal definition of a story that might be perfectly passable without it. I always assumed this feeling was simply a consequence of being a member of a marginalized gender and/or experiencing various sexual traumas throughout my life, and treated it as a useful set of opinions that could help out other anime viewers navigating the fandom from a similar state of mind.

As if to somehow mirror my silly anime fanservice opinions, my relationship to my own sexuality has definitely been characterized by ambivalence and occasionally discomfort. I won’t sugar coat it – I’ve always understood myself as being fairly low-libido unless the stars have aligned just perfectly to feel otherwise. While this in itself isn’t a bad thing, I’ve been in relationships where this became a point of shame and strife. For many, many years, I’ve struggled with assuming there was just something wrong with me and my body. In past relationships I’ve been shamed into getting medical tests done simply because my sexual disinterest was considered by some to be abnormal enough that it deserved some kind of diagnosis. At the time I struggled with a lot of anxiety about my supposed “brokenness” because my feelings and experiences were framed as being extremely outside some arbitrary healthy baseline. I felt unloved, harassed, and abused, and better yet, I did a great job of bottling up all those feelings for a long time.

As if to set myself apart further, I’ve also known many people over the years who are comfortable talking about how much their sex life means to who they are. While I think that’s great for them I’ve just never had the ability to directly empathize. For me, sexual desire is something that’s kind of there and that I don’t dislike or outright avoid, but if I never had it again I don’t feel as though my life would be incomplete. You know, like peanut brittle, or iceberg lettuce. Yet I feel like I’m surrounded by a society that sees these things as a gourmet meal.

That said, I don’t have any trouble getting invested in the emotional bonds of relationships, including romantic ones. As much as I would like to see more adult relationships portrayed in fiction, I find a lot of emotional safety in stories that could be considered “chaste;” stories like Kimi ni Todoke or My Love Story, where plot and relationship progression are measured in things like the characters holding hands for the first time or simply spending time together while blushing profusely. In my own life, I feel like this has always been an easy concept to understand; as my current relationship has developed over the years and become more complicated and nuanced, I can’t deny how giddy I still get holding hands in public or hugging my husband. I feel like those small acts are more interesting and fulfilling to me that more adult acts.

The reason I’m writing about this here and now rather than keeping it to myself (I mean, this is an anime blog, not a self-help blog), is that I recently learned that there’s language that describes who I am and how I feel – Demisexual. It’s an identity that exists on the asexual/graysexual spectrum. It’s described as only having sexual attraction to someone with whom you have a deep emotional connection (and not always on a consistent basis). Once I realized that this described how I felt, a lot of my past experiences started to make sense. I realized how I’d been burdened by trying to fit myself into a box that was never my size to begin with. And I’ve begun to make some peace with the fact that my feelings and opinions on certain material may just never match up with the mainstream, because I’m not mainstream, and that that’s okay.

That said, I can feel that wonderful imposter syndrome lurking around the periphery again. The reason I decided to post about this now is because of Pride month, and yet I feel like my own struggles with sexuality don’t amount to much when compared to what others have had to deal with and why they need a pride celebration in the first place. I’m in a straight relationship and my internal differences will be invisible to most. I feel like my situation is likely a little bit difficult to understand. I feel like I’m trying to make space for myself in someone else’s area, or that I’m piggybacking on others’ marginalization. I feel like, aside from this, I’m a fairly typical, boring person, and maybe this is just my brain’s misguided search for attention.

So I have to keep telling myself, this is me. There’s nothing wrong with being me and trying to be proud of that fact. I can’t be expected to please everyone, all of the time. And I should be proud of my writing and my opinions, because I try my best to keep them faithful to who I am.

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Thanks for indulging me just this once; I know this might not be what most of my readers are looking for when they visit. I promise I’ll be back to regularly-scheduled anime writing soon!