Asexuality and Aromanticism with Aubri Lancaster

LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST EPISODE HERE.

In this podcast episode, Aubri Lancaster joins us to discuss the spectrum of sexuality and sexual orientation and how intimacy goes beyond mere penetration.

Will you define sexual orientation and sexual identity for me?

Currently, Western culture focuses on the attraction to another person primarily with a gendered look at the gender orientation. But that attraction is expected to be this collection of sexual, romantic, emotional all built into one. The truth is these are different kinds of attractions for some people. 

Asexual people may experience romantic attraction and not sexual attraction. Just as aromantic people may experience sexual attraction and not romantic attraction. And then the emotional element comes into play. We may have strong emotional ties to our friends, we are now within our culture expected to also have these strong emotional bonds with partners, which of course wasn’t always the case within partnered relationships. 

So, when we talk about sexual orientation, there’s all these things that come into play. We’re talking about sexual attraction, romantic attraction, emotional attraction, and partnering elements as well as what gender that might be. But we never stop and ask, What if you’re not attracted to anyone? What if it’s not the gender that’s creating this disconnect between this heteronormative expectation and one’s experience, but the absence of sexual attraction, or the absence of romantic attraction?

So if somebody is asexual, they may not desire partnered sex. Do they desire other forms of sex such as self sex, for example?

To answer that, we have to talk about definitions here. Libido is the body asking for an orgasm. Sexual attraction gives the libido direction that asks, Who do you want to experience this libido with? And for some people, if there is no direction they just ignore it. Other people want to satisfy it through solo engagement, and there are people who are non-libidoist who don’t experience any urge for an orgasm. Asexual people may be more likely to engage with their libido through solo play, but they don’t necessarily exclude interpersonal interactions.

Sometimes an asexual person may be interested in partnered inner relational activities?

Yes. Sexual attraction is a mechanism of arousal, but it’s not the only mechanism of arousal. There are many ways we can access sexual arousal in our bodies that don’t require sexual attraction. Now, obviously, if you are looking to do that with a person you’re not sexually attracted to, you may be less inclined to simply because why would you want to have sex with somebody you’re not sexually attracted to, but if you’re romantically attracted to them, or you are simply negotiating a consensual sexual experience with another person, there are options available. However, this is not where the asexual community necessarily focuses. There is such a broad range within the community. That’s why we keep coming back to the idea of sexual attraction because if we’re trying to define asexuality through desire or behavior, we get a lot of conflicting messaging. When we talk about that intrinsic experience of sexual attraction, then we can talk about how that affects all the behavior that we might engage in.

How did you determine your asexuality?

So, I experience romantic attraction, and I get butterflies in my stomach. I’ve experienced the euphoria of falling in love and having somebody love me in return. I’ve experienced that deep need for an emotional and romantic connection. When you have a lot of hormones flying around it can make accessing sexual arousal a little easier, especially in the first few years of a relationship. But the other elements of sex such as desire and libido, can be very fluid throughout one’s life. 

And so, I learned as a sex educator of over 16 years all these ways to access arousal within my body. But I always kind of felt like a fraud in some ways. I still never felt that I was wanting to or engaging with all the things that I had learned in the way that other people seem to be. I felt like I could help people to learn more about clitoral stimulation and lubrication, and all of these things that can help make sex more pleasurable, but the reasons behind it, that sexual attraction wasn’t there. It wasn’t until I understood the differentiation of attractions, that it’s not just sexual attraction, but there’s romantic attraction and emotional attraction and intellectual attraction, and sensual attraction and aesthetic attraction and all of these other elements until I finally said, Wait a minute; I don’t think I’ve ever experienced sexual attraction. Why is nobody talking about this? 

A huge part of my journey was learning all of these ways to help people as a sexuality educator, and finally learning about enough things to discover that this was never part of my experience. And there are millions of people that are also asexual and don’t experience sexual attraction or very rarely, or only under certain circumstances.

Can you elaborate on the spectrums of sexuality and sexual orientation?

There are a lot of different ranges that come into play. One of the things I like to mention, as far as the spectrums go, is this is the language that is coming out of these communities. This is intrinsic language, things that people have come up with to help describe internal experiences, so that we can actually have conversations about those internal experiences and not just behavior. 

What is sexual attraction? That in and of itself is a question that certainly an asexual person is not necessarily the best one to answer. But at the same time, it’s what we have to understand in some form to know that we’re not experiencing it. So, for some people, sexual attraction is just finding somebody sexually appealing, or it’s a really intense urge to just drop their clothes and have sex with that person right then and there. 

So, even understanding what that means is its own spectrum. But when we’re talking about spectrums, think of a spectrum of colors. When we have limited language for colors, we literally have the limited ability to see colors in a spectrum. The more words we have for colors, the more we can see them. For example, the colors teal and turquoise you can literally see them in your head and differentiate between them. If you are unfamiliar with those colors, you’re going to have a lot more trouble understanding and visualizing what that is. So, all of these labels and tools of the asexual community are about creating and identifying positionality within these spectrums. They’re just tools. They’re tools to help us communicate our needs and boundaries and define community. 

When you have this idea of sexual attraction, and you have people that recognize that they don’t experience it in what is a socially normative way, we have to then express it in some way which may be that we either don’t experience it and are therefore asexual, or maybe we’re in the gray sexual range and experience it rarely or to a lesser degree, or only under certain circumstances. 

Demisexual is one of those “only under certain circumstances” where the person needs an emotional connection in order to access sexual attraction. And then we move into discussing all the relations that we have toward the favorability of having sex. Somebody can be sex favorable, sex indifferent, sex averse, or sex repulsed. And while this may not be directly linked to that sexual attraction, for some people, it’s a very important part of how they experience their asexuality and being able to say that they are not only asexual, but they are sex favorable. They may want a term like QPO sexual to help them communicate that. Or if they want to express that they enjoy giving sexual favors but not receiving them, they may prefer the term plassio sexual. If they like to receive sexual favors, but they really don’t want to give them because they don’t experience any sort of pleasure or drive to give, that would be VANOS sexual. It can get a little confusing when you’re first starting to learn all of these terms. It can be a little overwhelming, but again, we just have to remember these are tools. And the more we understand these tools, the more we understand our own positionality within the spectrums of sexuality in general.

Might an asexual person still experience intimacy and marriage?

Intimacy has gotten really conflated with sex. I think part of that is because social media makes it so difficult to say the word sex, so people try to find alternatives. Unfortunately, when we use intimacy as a stand in for the concept of sex, we lose the value of using intimacy to also describe all of the ways that we can connect non-sexually and non-romantically. All of those differentiated attractions I talked about can also be different forms of intimacy. You can have emotional intimacy, that is non-sexual, non-romantic. You can have intellectual intimacy, you can have aesthetic intimacy, and sensual intimacy. Sensual intimacy is really more about the intimacy of physical contact with another person. And again, it doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic. 

When we start to de-center sex as the ultimate idea of the expression of love and connection within a relationship, and start to look at all the other ways that we can value the connections we have in our lives, we can start to see that while our society seems to put this modern normative expectation forward, there are so many other wonderful ways to connect.

So, my husband and I love watching TV together and having conversations and laughing and sending each other memes and funny things. And, you know, massage can be a very beautiful form of sensual, affectionate intimacy that doesn’t require sexual arousal. I think understanding what sex means in general can be very confusing for some people, because there’s this assumption that it must mean P in the V. But you don’t have to have penetration to have sexually arousing experiences. 

What do you enjoy? What fulfills you? What makes your heart sing when you’re spending time with another human that you care about? Think about all the other ways that we connect with our partners when we’re not engaged in sexually arousing, romance inducing activities. There’s so much more to life.

To hear Aubri talk more about the spectrum of sexuality, intimacy, and asexuality specifically, listen to podcast episode #162 on Vaginas, Vulva, and Vibrators. 

You can find Aubri on Instagram @acesexeducation and her website Ace Sex Education https://www.AceSexEducation.com/.

LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST EPISODE HERE.