Attraction has such a degree of performativity to it that it genuinely is one of the reasons why it took me so long to figure out that I'm ace.
This has been discussed before, but I was thinking specifically of how, when I was a kid, it was common for girls to pick a boy to pretend to like. And I do mean pretend to like; I've talked to many (bi or straight) women who admit that, in retrospect, those "crushes" were theatre, it was the behaviour expected of little girls and so they danced to that tune even if they didn't actually feel any romantic or sexual attraction towards anyone yet. I remember, for instance, in pre-school my friends and I had a game in which we'd pretend to be damsels in distress so that our princes (that is, the boys we "liked") had to come save us from whatever imaginary enemy or affliction we'd made up that day. Having a "crush" on a boy was the contrivance that we accepted to be able to play this game β literally! I chose my crush (the same one I'd "have" for almost all of primary school) because my friend suggested we play this game and we all needed a prince. None of us liked any boys back then; like me, we all sat down, thought about it for a bit, and picked a boy. [Note: one of my childhood friends turned out to be bi, the other is straight.] And a bit later, "having a crush" extended beyond the fantasy of play: seeking their attention in class, giggling when they looked at us, writing our names within hearts, saying that we'd marry them when we grew up, etcetera. Perhaps the other two felt something akin to attraction even then, or their chosen crushes would eventually become genuine, I don't know (for me, it sure wasn't the case), but the point that I'm trying to get at is that a lot of the motions that we go through when it comes to attraction β the social protocols of having a crush β are learnt and put in practice at a very young age, before one can say for certain that those feelings are there and true.
When we hit puberty, there wasn't such a substantial change to the overall performance of attraction. There's a new dimension to it β an awareness of sex, the awakening of libido β but, from my perspective, it's the same play on a similar stage. So, in primary school, the allo kids played their heteronormative/amatonormative role as much as I (aroace) did β I didn't feel anything then, and I didn't have actual reason to believe that there would be a difference between myself and my peers post-puberty.
(In my case, I should probably say that I did have a sexual awakening: I experience and have experienced arousal since puberty, it's just not provoked by or directed at anyone. My lower abdomen gets hot sometimes just because and that's pretty much it, it's a purely physiological phenomenon. But I knew what the feeling was, and I did indulge in erotica and masturbation to satisfy said arousal. This is another reason why it took me so long to realise that I'm asexual, because I do get horny and I do like smut β but sex has to be abstracted from a real life scenario and my own sense of self (i.e.: I am not part of the fantasy) to be able to enjoy it.)
The mix of heteronormative performance and the taboo around sexuality in a society that nevertheless markets sex also made it so that the coversations that I had with other people regarding actual sexual desire were... hm. There was a natural curiosity around this topic that made it inevitably come up in conversation. But the way people (and particularly boys, though girls too) talked about it, it was focused solely on the bodies that they found attractive, not how desire felt, the urges that seeing those bodies arose. And, again, it was all under a veneer of performative heterosexuality (performative allosexuality, in my case, since I identified as bisexual at the time), an inclination to conform to the expressions of sexuality that everyone else manifested. So the discussions about sexual desire that I had with my peers (as well as most public discussions around sex that I've ever heard) felt kind of plasticky. They lack sincerity and instrospection. And so, it makes it very easy to think that allosexuality hinges on performance β my thoughts went something like this: "I'm bisexual because I say that I am, because boys and girls are pleasing to the eye and I express that they get me hot (even though they don't really, it's supposed to be a turn of phrase, right?). I'm not going to question why I have to remove and abstract myself from the equation entirely in order to think about sexual acts, because the quid of the question is that I've expressed out loud an interest in sex, and I've done it in the same terms that everyone else does (not in depth at all)."
I'm thinking about this, actually, because I've started reading Lou Sullivan's selected diaries, We Both Laughed in Pleasure, which contain (among other things) honest and intimate descriptions of his sexual and romantic feelings as he experienced them as a kinky gay trans man in 1961-1991. It's sexual expression devoid of that patina of cisheterosexual acceptability and porno-ified perception (of both the self and of the person of desire). And I'm kind of struck by how unfamiliar those feelings, as described by Sullivan, are to me.
When I accepted that I was ace, it was after a couple of years of doubts and because I realised that I wanted no part in any sexual fantasy that I might have had; that there had never been anyone that I wanted to do something sexual with. But every once in a while, I'll wonder if I'm something closer to graysexual (because, as I mentioned, I have a working libido) and if gender dysphoria might play a bigger part in my discomfort than I thought (and it sure does play a part, by the way. The expectation of getting naked in that context freaks me out). However, when I read accounts like these, unfiltered and raw and queer, the contrast makes me feel surer of my identity. My horniness truly comes about without direction and without desire for another body. And I don't think I would've come to understand that if I had continued to take as true the performative sexuality that is the norm in most social spheres.
