what even is sexual attraction though cause like
is it being physically attracted to someone, is it sexualizing or wanting to sexually interact with their body
is it wanting to fuck someone for any reason, because you’re friends and you have good chemistry, because they’re powerful and you want access to that, because your kinks overlap and sex is just a good field to play with kink
is it sexual attraction if you want to have sex with someone because you’re romantically or otherwise deeply intimately attracted to them?
What Is Sexual Attraction?
So. This is. Complicated.
This is basically the core of the question I was asking myself the whole time I ID’d as grey and demi? Like… How can I say that I experience sexual attraction “only sometimes” or “only to people with whom I have a prior emotional connection” if I don’t even know what it means??? And I asked some allosexual people and got, ahaha, not very clear responses! (I will see if I can find and dig out the one that I remember being helpful—although none of them were very helpful.)
Right now I think of sexual attraction as being aroused by bodies. Which, I mean, I think that leaves out a lot of valid sexual attractions (the word ‘sapiosexual’ comes to mind), and also does not simplify the issue much—for example, if I am attracted to the breadth of this person’s shoulders because it means they could probably pin me down and hold me with little effort, that’s not really me being attracted to them, that’s me being attracted to kink. But also to them? But only because of kink. And to me that doesn’t really count as a sexual attraction; to me that’s, I don’t know, a kinky attraction? Even if it’s tied in to the person enacting the hypothetical kink upon me.
And to me, “I want to have sex and you are the person with whom I am comfortable sharing my body” doesn’t equate to sexual attraction, either. […]
This is a super interesting conversation! Both from a subjective-experiences-of-sexuality perspective and a differing-uses-of-language perspective. As someone who, as far as I can tell, both experiences sexuality differently and uses labels around it differently than Otter, here are my two cents:
I can definitely be sexually attracted to someone based primarily on non-physical attributes. That’s not how it always is—I can also definitely be sexually attracted to people based primarily on their physicality—but it absolutely can be. And so for me (again, speaking only for me), “being aroused by bodies” isn’t a good descriptor of sexual attraction, because sexual attraction can also be about—about feeling intensely drawn to someone, intensely creatively bonded with them, feeling like their presence intensifies the vividness with which I experience myself and the world, and so craving their touch, craving—craving intense physical togetherness and the exchange of physical pleasure as an extension of that vividness. There are certain types of bonds of which, for me, sexual attraction (whether acted on or no) is almost always a component, even if, supposing we had never met and I glimpsed the person across a crowded room, I almost certainly would not think “wow I want to lick them.” (Though I can and often do experience sexual attraction in that context, as well.)
I mean, for me bodies are definitely an inalienable part of the sexual attraction equation, but for me that resides less in the other person’s body and more in my own subjective experience. My experience of sexual attraction is an inherently embodied one, and involves me wanting my body to interact sexually with the body of this particular other person—but the other person’s body isn’t necessarily the genesis of that feeling, if that makes sense. It could be! My sexual attraction for them could be sparked by their dance moves or their collarbones or their legs in stilettos or the way they smell. But it could also be sparked by the way the two of us jam on guitar together, or argue about pornography, or stay up all night talking about books. In both contexts, the attraction I’m feeling is specifically embodied and specifically sexual, and specific to a given person—it’s a feeling that would remain equally un-addressed by having sex with someone other than that person or doing something non-sexual with that person—but it can be arrived at different ways.
Does this shed any light? It’s a surprisingly difficult concept to articulate.
Wow, it’s a feeling that would remain equally un-addressed by having sex with someone other than that person or doing something non-sexual with that person – that’s got to be the most concise definition of sexual attraction I’ve ever read! Excellent, Breathed.
I’ve had just about every level of sex drive there is, at one time or another, including a ten-month stint of complete stone-cold asexual neuterness. Trying to describe it, though? Seems like describing color to the blind.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1l6tM3V