Don't Stone the Abstinent

I've been asked about my sexuality and it seems that because I require more than your average one or two words to explain it, it means I am abnormal. I am abnormal because I choose to be abstinent and people can not accept this. What I have come to find is that sexuality is enforced for adults where it is denied to young people. Choosing to express one's sexuality differently than the majority only seems to become a crime against nature when one has crossed that artificial and arbitrary edifice into adulthood, into the coven of humanity. It seems voluntarily going without intercourse is a greater crime against nature than forcing others to involuntarily abstain.

It's as if human sexuality is some prize to be won for years spent in enforced abstinence. Suddenly as an adult, you're supposed to be living it up, you're required to be expressing your sexuality, enjoying it, because you earned it. Decadence is how adults celebrate the fact that they've made it to adulthood, it's how they reap the benefits bestowed on them for simply being an adult, and one of the most obvious is the way they are expected to express their new-found sexuality. The adult way of doing things is indeed steeped in unhealthy decadence. Sexuality is natural, and however an individual chooses to express or not express it should be acceptable (as long as it doesn't conflict with the rights and dignity of others)--this either/or extremism between involuntary abstinence and involuntary decadence is not. It's a perversion.

Because adults enforce that no individual below their line in the sand edifice for sexuality is allowed to be sexual, they expect and require sexuality from each other. Abstinence is first required, expected, and then it is stoned to death. People react, with the same shock, to the incongruities of a sexual child as they do at an asexual adult--or at least, an adult with a sexuality that deviates from the norm. If one has to explain their sexuality in more than one or two words, then it is considered abnormal.

Normal sexuality for adults is whatever advertisers have told us it is. It is an erection at the sight of a beer bottle, a sleek car, or a hamburger. What is normal for the adult only becomes an abomination, it seems, when the same effect rubs off on a child. Children are not supposed to have a normal sexuality after all, they are in fact required to have no sexuality. When they express a sexuality, it is an automatic abomination--so says the west.

However, it seems the moment a youth reaches this magical deadline, sexuality is not just expected from them, but demanded of them. Adults will not accept one of their own confessing to be asexual, or at least, confessing to have a sexuality that is not one the consumer culture has picked out for them. When adults speak candidly about their sexuality when gloating on their self-defined "ability to be sexual," they react with little more than scorn when one member of their group does not jump right in line with their sexual fetish proselytizing. Sexuality is demanded from the adult, and with it, the open and constant expression of it, lest they become outsiders.