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mesotablarI was just adding interests to my profile and all of them were hotlinked except one: apressexual. I know it is not a common orientation label, that is mostly why I use grey-A, because generally I am only willing to give people the definition rather than explain very personal experiences to strangers. Sure, if you are really interested I'm sure my 'What could I be?' posts on AVEN are still around which explain my experience in some detail surrounded by too-much-information and trigger warnings.
Also trying to divide up my attractions in the little boxes people want me to do to 'justify' my choice of label is super painful, and also really rude. Those people were bullies, but I wasn't informed enough at the time about the concepts in the a-spec community spaces to think there was another way.
But the point I want to focus on for this post is, am I really the only one?
Surely not! I say. There is a word and a flag and a flag made out of the word! So someone must have made the word for a reason, and there must have been demand for a flag....right? right?! or was this word I identify as coined as some literary exercise in theoreticals and the flag created because someone wanted to pretend they were doing something useful when they got bored and decided to play on MS Paint?
I know what I'll do, I'll use the mighty search engines to find the others!
First I'll use Bing because why not! oooh 9,000,000 results buuuuut of the nine results on page 1 five are about 'ape sex' (specifically bonobos), one is for 'aegosexual' (why is it even in my results? apart from being a different concept the words aren't even that similar) and most of the others were the standard dictionary type meaning. Now I understand why people hate Bing.
I did find this:
If I ever want to clothe myself and accesorise my house with Pride merch. So I guess it is good to know someone thought it worthy enough a label to make an animal mascot and commercialise it (armadillos are legit cute). But oh would you look at that, their 'apressexual' tags at the bottom of the page also have no hyperlink. I can't help but wonder how their sales are going.
One result was this, which isn't that interesting in itself but it leads me to here, which may be where the word was first coined which at least proves to me that the prefix wasn't coined as an abstract possibility because the author tags #I'm apresplatonic. If anyone finds a mention before Wednesday, 10 June 2015 please let me know.
On to Google:
Lots of dictionary definition pages, the only entry on the twitter tag #apressexual is a definition, there is a glitched empty Pintrest page, the DeviantArt page for Pride-Flags (who just does pride flags but they are super nice people), and this:
A creepy glass(?) heart along with the dictionary definition. The pride flag glass heart I find particularly problematic because it is apparently part of a card set called 'Love Is Love' by Reyna Pelcastre. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it for me, and also NO. It is interesting though that apressexual and apresplatonic are designated as 'common' cards in the set.
One amusing thing came up here, but I'll quote the fun part:
"Greek beautiful boy occupied apre-sexual or suprasexual dimension, the Greek aesthetic ideal.Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescents in a way that today brings the police to the door. the adolescent in bloom is a synthesis of male and female beauties(Paglia 1990:115)." (sic)
On AVEN most of the comments are mine but 3 are not (one of those is the orientations master-post). Of the other two:
one person is using it as a reference point in many to explain the potential form of their experience.
Then there is this thread where pretty much no-one has heard of the term before and seem to all agree that feeling one attraction with sexual is normal and apressexual is a term that is not needed as it explains a 'normal' sexual experience. But to all of them it is a theoretical, no-one identifies as it except perhaps the questioning OP (who as of writing this was on AVEN a total of 2 days and has not returned)
Okay, now for Tumblr. Admittedly I didn't dig too deep here because I fear what will claw out at me...
This anonymous ask on just-graysexual's Tumblr is heartwarming in it's validation of apressexual being a possibility for the OP (after the AVEN thread left a bad taste in my heart).
This other anonymous ask on the same Tumblr is specifically asking for information on apressexuality which sadly gets the answer of
"It could be because it’s not really popular, so there are not a lot of people that talk about. Which makes information hard to find. (I’m also becoming highly suspicious that older tumblr posts are not showing up in searches, because I know that I tag things and they should show up, but they just don’t. It’s weird.) So maybe anything earlier is probably just gone.
I’ve tried to research it, but I did not get to far."
So in conclusion, apressexual is a recent label that doesn't get discussion, it gets dictionary definitions without examples. People who may identify their experience as being apressexual may get scared off of the term because of social derision or simple lack of information. While the people who do indeed identify with it might leave it out of their orientation labels or be silent because they want to avoid explaining it or justifying it, or maybe it is just not that important to them.
I have been identifying with apressexual for over a year now, and now I see that my general silence has helped continue the confused pain of others out there. If I give context and my own experience to the dictionary definition that seems to be all there is maybe those questioning can more easily accept or reject it and move on.
Also trying to divide up my attractions in the little boxes people want me to do to 'justify' my choice of label is super painful, and also really rude. Those people were bullies, but I wasn't informed enough at the time about the concepts in the a-spec community spaces to think there was another way.
But the point I want to focus on for this post is, am I really the only one?
Surely not! I say. There is a word and a flag and a flag made out of the word! So someone must have made the word for a reason, and there must have been demand for a flag....right? right?! or was this word I identify as coined as some literary exercise in theoreticals and the flag created because someone wanted to pretend they were doing something useful when they got bored and decided to play on MS Paint?
I know what I'll do, I'll use the mighty search engines to find the others!
First I'll use Bing because why not! oooh 9,000,000 results buuuuut of the nine results on page 1 five are about 'ape sex' (specifically bonobos), one is for 'aegosexual' (why is it even in my results? apart from being a different concept the words aren't even that similar) and most of the others were the standard dictionary type meaning. Now I understand why people hate Bing.
I did find this:
If I ever want to clothe myself and accesorise my house with Pride merch. So I guess it is good to know someone thought it worthy enough a label to make an animal mascot and commercialise it (armadillos are legit cute). But oh would you look at that, their 'apressexual' tags at the bottom of the page also have no hyperlink. I can't help but wonder how their sales are going.
One result was this, which isn't that interesting in itself but it leads me to here, which may be where the word was first coined which at least proves to me that the prefix wasn't coined as an abstract possibility because the author tags #I'm apresplatonic. If anyone finds a mention before Wednesday, 10 June 2015 please let me know.
On to Google:
Lots of dictionary definition pages, the only entry on the twitter tag #apressexual is a definition, there is a glitched empty Pintrest page, the DeviantArt page for Pride-Flags (who just does pride flags but they are super nice people), and this:
A creepy glass(?) heart along with the dictionary definition. The pride flag glass heart I find particularly problematic because it is apparently part of a card set called 'Love Is Love' by Reyna Pelcastre. Love has absolutely nothing to do with it for me, and also NO. It is interesting though that apressexual and apresplatonic are designated as 'common' cards in the set.
One amusing thing came up here, but I'll quote the fun part:
"Greek beautiful boy occupied apre-sexual or suprasexual dimension, the Greek aesthetic ideal.Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescents in a way that today brings the police to the door. the adolescent in bloom is a synthesis of male and female beauties(Paglia 1990:115)." (sic)
On AVEN most of the comments are mine but 3 are not (one of those is the orientations master-post). Of the other two:
one person is using it as a reference point in many to explain the potential form of their experience.
Then there is this thread where pretty much no-one has heard of the term before and seem to all agree that feeling one attraction with sexual is normal and apressexual is a term that is not needed as it explains a 'normal' sexual experience. But to all of them it is a theoretical, no-one identifies as it except perhaps the questioning OP (who as of writing this was on AVEN a total of 2 days and has not returned)
Okay, now for Tumblr. Admittedly I didn't dig too deep here because I fear what will claw out at me...
This anonymous ask on just-graysexual's Tumblr is heartwarming in it's validation of apressexual being a possibility for the OP (after the AVEN thread left a bad taste in my heart).
This other anonymous ask on the same Tumblr is specifically asking for information on apressexuality which sadly gets the answer of
"It could be because it’s not really popular, so there are not a lot of people that talk about. Which makes information hard to find. (I’m also becoming highly suspicious that older tumblr posts are not showing up in searches, because I know that I tag things and they should show up, but they just don’t. It’s weird.) So maybe anything earlier is probably just gone.
I’ve tried to research it, but I did not get to far."
So in conclusion, apressexual is a recent label that doesn't get discussion, it gets dictionary definitions without examples. People who may identify their experience as being apressexual may get scared off of the term because of social derision or simple lack of information. While the people who do indeed identify with it might leave it out of their orientation labels or be silent because they want to avoid explaining it or justifying it, or maybe it is just not that important to them.
I have been identifying with apressexual for over a year now, and now I see that my general silence has helped continue the confused pain of others out there. If I give context and my own experience to the dictionary definition that seems to be all there is maybe those questioning can more easily accept or reject it and move on.
