Interesting that a lot of who we are, what we believe, and how we identify was something we figured out at 14, but didn't figure out we are hypersexual until 17, and asexual until 19.
Internet exposed us to everything we needed to unpack and understand everything else about ourselves. However, when it came to those two topics specifically, the amount of acephobia even the queer community actively fucked us up more.
I think the way sexuality is forced into asexual people scared us away from the label. We were in spaces where the only ace people we saw were the ones who made acephobic jokes about themselves.
No one is expecting you to actually secretly be super kinky or write amazing smut UNLESS you are ace. So why would a confused sex repulsed kid ever feel safe with that label? It felt like wearing a target.
Most people subconsciously think of sex as being inherently good. They will say ace people are valid as a general statement, but they will never care to work to understand ace people well enough to not be acephobic.
That understanding of sex as inherently positive will end up fucking with hypersexuals too. We heard so many people say that "kink being caused by trauma is a negative stereotype" that we were left under the impression that it couldn't be, and that we were just feeling religious shame or something. Bc literally any negative experience with or view of sex is chaled up to religious shame, and I'm so tired of it.
It's like the whole world gaslighting you, telling you you like it before you have the language to understand why you don't.
