that awkward moment when you're asexual and most major religions have turned your orientation and your identity into a fetishistic ideal to try to force other people to live up to

Thursday, July 12, 2012

that awkward moment when you’re asexual and most major religions have turned your orientation and your identity into a fetishistic ideal to try to force other people to live up to

it really creeps me out to hear over-zealous religious people talking about how “all humans” have a sex drive and that we must “turn to god” to “save” ourselves from living in lust because that just isn’t true

i don’t have a sex drive and i’ve never had a sex drive and i’m an atheist and my religious status has never had anything to do with it

and having a sex drive doesn’t make you a bad person it just makes you a kind of person who is different from me and there’s nothing wrong or depraved about that because it’s okay to be who you are

religious peoples’ insistence on forced abstinence just comes across as a lot of self-loathing bullshit

if you aren’t asexual or, to put it in religious terms, you don’t already feel naturally called to a life of celibacy and/or chastity, if not having sex doesn’t come as easily to you as breathing, if you are the sort of person who wants to have sex, then i really have no fucking clue why you would try to force yourself into the life of a priest or monk, unless deep down inside you you were terrified that having a sexuality means you’re dirty

it doesn’t

it really doesn’t

i’m not more “pure” than anyone else for being the way i am and it certainly doesn’t make me a better person and it really bothers me that my more sexually active friends get called things like “slut” by the same people who turn around and creepily fawn over me and my virgin status because they think i’m “pure” because that makes no sense and it is wrong of them

those people are creepy and they have problems with how they treat other people and they have really terrible purity fetishes and it’s sort of unhappy-making and gross

when i was little i used to think that the role of a monk or a nun would be great for someone like me, it seemed perfectly clear that we are all different and that we all have different roles to play because diversity is beautiful, and my path is one in which i don’t have sex but other people’s paths might be ones in which they have a lot of sex or have children or build bridges or make art and it all seemed perfectly reasonable and normal

i don’t understand why they call my fucking identity a “higher calling” when it’s not, it’s just a different calling

and when i think about people denying their sexualities or denying a part of themselves just because they are afraid, because they think that being a certain way makes them filthy or wrong, because they don’t want to be themselves, because they honestly believe that the sort of lifestyle i lead is something to get excited about, something to put on a pedestal, something to worship or obsess over, i get really unhappy

because it isn’t, i’m just me

and i feel like what i am has been appropriated, somehow, and i don’t like it.