Mourning brooch.

19th c. American, lignite (jet) memento mori jewelry, hand clasping bouquet with rose garland below, brass clasped pin back, 1.25"h x 3"w x .5" d

Because we live in a society that demands sex as much as it punishes it. That both glorifies and demonizes sex. Sex is only good within very specific contexts but if you don’t like those contexts or act within them, suddenly you are perverse and wrong. Even people with healthy relationships to sex, relationships, and attraction still face pitfalls that complicate matters–partners who don’t have healthy relationships or maybe they can’t get a partner at all. Break ups. Factors that affect their libidos or interest in relationships. Periods where sex and romance don’t matter at all because something else is a priority.

And of course, your gender, sexual orientation, race, class, and every other identity impacts not just YOUR relationship to sex and all that but also everyone ELSE’S relationship and response to your sex, relationships, attraction. And the identities of the people you are and aren’t attracted to impacts that too! From the race of your partner to same gender relationships to people who prefer fat partners to whatever the fuck else… all of this impacts the complications around sex, relationships, and attraction.

And yet it is only people on the ace and aro “spectrums” who are obsessed with pretending their relationships to these things are wholly unique or special. That they have created new social classes. They are obsessed with feeling different because they think there is some homogeneous relationship to sex and love that the rest of the world is partaking in that they are somehow excluded from. When really everyone has something complicated from, their own hyper specific contexts where they do or don’t want sex or love or whatever.

Nothing about your relationship to sex or love makes you more or less LGBT. If you are gay and don’t want to have sex, ever, you are still gay. If you are cisgender and straight and only feel capable of sexual desire for longterm monogamous partners and even then, you only want to fuck on Tuesday mornings and Friday nights.. you’re still straight. You haven’t discovered a new class of heterosexuality that is “queer’ or different. Rather, EVERY person who is heterosexual is different in how they perform or experiecne it. You are the same in your difference. A cishet who doesn’t ever want sex because of trauma is no more or less cishet than one who wants sex all the time because of trauma or a cishet who doesn’t ever want sex because they don’t feel sexual attraction or whatever else.