Why I Wear The Rings
An Introspective and Reflection Upon my Experience as an Asexual and the Issues That Plague our Identity in Modern Media
Four nights ago, I had a dream.
I was at my local theater to catch a movie, but what played was far from what I bought a ticket for. I was instead presented with several various messages and media posts I sent throughout my early teenage years. Some, upon reflection, were not real, some completely nonsensical, but many were actual things I had said to people full of information I regret ever sharing. Sat in that seat, I was forced to relive some of the hardest moments of my life: my initial grapple with my sexuality and identity, my trauma from instances of sexual assault, and the deconstruction of what my experiences mean from the perspective of the southern U.S. conservative Christian home I was raised in, all through the words of an idiot kid who still had no concept of the permanency with which he spoke.
Waking up the next morning was not as easy as I would like to pretend. I knew that dreams were, quite literally, all in my head, but what really stuck with me was the looming necessity of self-reflection and closure that I had blocked off for years. So, I went back into the questions to give younger me the answers he never got. This is that closure.
The first thread I went back to was with an old friend from middle school. I haven’t talked to her in a few years, but at the time she was the one most aware of my journey pre-coming-out. When I was thirteen, I was first confronted with the concept of sexuality. Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before. Every Sunday morning in church I would hear that it was time for me to start caring about my future, figuring out who my eventual wife would be and planning to be prepared to handle leading a family. Meanwhile, people my age were starting to really care about dating and relationships and love in a way that i just didn’t. I thought maybe it would come with time, but two years came and went and nothing changed. Except now I was clearly the odd one out among my peers. In an effort to fit in, I essentially gaslit myself into having a ‘crush’ on someone I knew, and went on with my life.
Days passed by and this supposed attraction was nothing more than an excuse to get out of uncomfortable conversations on the topic among friends, but it did eat away at the back of my mind as something ‘normal people’ felt until eventually I accepted it as fact. This was when I reached out to the friend I mentioned earlier. Back then, she was basically the only person I talked to at all about anything emotion-related, but more centrally to THIS story, she was quite close friends with the person I had this made-up interest in.
I was quite nervous so I tried to pick up the conversation where it had left off a few days prior, but she clocked what I wanted to talk about immediately. I didn’t know at the time if she was just trying to let me down easy or if she was actually being genuine, but it had the same effect regardless. She told me that the person I had convinced myself I had a thing for was actually aromantic.
It was a word I had never heard before, but it quickly consumed me. I almost immediately forgot about the romantic feelings I had gaslit myself into as I researched the worlds of asexuality and aromanticism. Within 24 hours I had an account on asexuality.com (AVEN) and identified myself with the asexual label.
Rereading that message history was quite painful and embarrassing knowing what I know now, but without it I would likely still not have a word to describe the way I felt.
As high school went on, one of my friends came out to me as trans, and he and I bonded over our shared experiences with our identities. We went to small Christian schools in North Florida, and although I was able to mask my identity from people well enough to fit in and not cause any issue among the people who were less accepting, having that friendship was vital to me making it through the hate slung my way during those years. That connection likely would have never happened were it not for that conversation I had prior that I had been avoiding revisiting for all these years out of a distaste for how my past self approached things.
I say all of this for one reason: I am very fortunate that I had people in my corner through my struggles that could help me find the words for what I was feeling, but so many do not. Asexual representation is almost entirely nonexistent in media to the point where so many people have never even heard the word. The little representation we do get is okay at best and at times completely villainizes us or makes it out to be something that is to be cured. The DSM-5, the premier authority for diagnoses in psychology, considered it to be a mental disorder all the way until 2013, and still holds to that unless a patient self-identified as asexual beforehand.
Now, I don’t want to dissuade writers from including asexual characters in their stories. In fact, I think the biggest problem is that not enough writers do this. What I want to look at is why the disconnect is so large. Why do allosexual writers struggle so much to depict asexual characters with any amount of nuance even when they are actively trying to be inclusive?
The first and most notable example is the infamous House M.D. episode “Better Half”, where House is hell-bent on proving an asexual woman isn’t actually asexual. As the show typically does, the writers let House win and it’s established that the woman’s husband isn’t asexual, he just had low libido and erectile dysfunction caused by a tumor, and the woman isn’t asexual either, but was just lying in order to stay with her husband.
On the complete opposite side of this issue is the Bojack Horseman character Todd Chavez. He is far and away the biggest ace character we have that doesn’t make a complete mockery of who we are, and actually treats the identity with some respect. However, many in the community still take some issue with the fact that he’s portrayed as “too silly and childish” and “needs to grow up” which is a stereotype we’ve been trying to shake for quite some time.
What looking at these two characters showed me was that there is a desperate lack of nuance in asexual representation. It’s either a joke trait that gets tagged on to the nerdy personality (your Sheldon Coopers of the world), a problem to be fixed, or occasionally a well-meaning addition that is just a little too narrow in its view. Yet I don’t want to say accurate representation is a lost cause. Asexuality is such a spectrum of people and personalities and experiences that opens the door for so much potential in portrayals that just seems to get ignored.
I often find that the most accurate representation of my personal experience does not come from canon ace media at all, but rather from some explicitly allo media. I have three songs that I found to have something unintentionally to do with the ace experience.
“This was the most honest I’d been about my mental health and the feeling I have with impostor syndrome. … It’s interesting to hear people at all levels of their careers who’ve felt like they’re not good enough for something, or friends of mine who didn’t feel worthy. I thought that was an interesting concept to explore.”
- Lewis Capaldi, on the song ‘The Pretender’
First, The Pretender by Lewis Capaldi. The pre-chorus of “To tell you the truth, I'm the fraud in the room and I know that // But you never will, in my mind, it's instilled not to show that” was instantly one of the most relatable things to my experience prior to accepting my identity that I had ever heard. It’s a rather simple concept, and that feeling of everyone around you being different and fitting in while you ostracize yourself can be applied so much.
“I feel like everything I do is a lie // And all the words just further pull the wool over eyes // I know I'm no good at being who I am away from the light // I'm the pretender, what can I tell ya? Designed to deceive // So, tell me who you want me to be?”
After coming to terms with my asexuality, I was briefly in a relationship. I had a real struggle in that, despite being aware of aromanticism as well, I just didn’t connect with the term on the same level and I still felt like there was something out there for me. I was so caught up in convincing myself of that that I forgot about the fact that another person’s emotions and feelings are also at stake, and I felt like I was always about to get caught in a lie or that I was leading her on every time we spoke, despite the fact that my brain told me that what we had was real. She tells me it’s fine now, but I do still have regret from how long I let that go on knowing how uncomfortable I was in it and knowing how much that could have hurt her. This song gives me peace of mind in knowing that there are people out there with similar experiences who do feel that from time to time and that I’m not alone in my struggles.
Next, Ruin My Life by Quadeca. This song is just a piece in the puzzle of the narrative of his latest album, Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, which tells the story of a solo sailor setting off on a journey to the horizon to try to find the purpose in his life. This song specifically speaks to the overwhelming sense of isolation the sailor feels at this point in his voyage. But I think that much of this is comparable to the ace experience.
“When I was young, I was so certain // I thought that I would find my person”
The allosexual and heterosexual world we live in conditions children to look for love and for a partner from a very early age, well before they have time to interact with and deconstruct their identity. So much of my childhood and early teenage years were spent scouting out what I would want in a partner long before I ever considered if I wanted one at all.
“Still I am young, or so they tell me // All of the time in the world here to help me”
The first question asked to many an asexual-identifying person upon coming out is “What if you just haven’t met the right person yet?” Although often people are well-meaning, this is so deflating to hear after the struggle of building up to coming out to someone. If someone is comfortable with the asexual label, then great. If later they decide it doesn’t work for them anymore, then great. Labels don’t have to be permanent if you think they no longer fit you. The dismissiveness of a whole identity on the off-chance that someone may change their mind down the line does not actually help those people that do, but instead washes doubt over someone who finally feels confident in their identity for maybe the first time in their life. It’s a conflict I know many close to me have repeatedly struggled with.
“[It’s] about trying to change yourself in some way but being fearful of people you care about looking at you differently. I’ve had moments in my life where i want to change something about myself but I’m sort of hesitant to because i don’t want people in my life to think of me differently or stop being around me. … I can definitely see how that would resonate … I imagine they have gone through that feeling a lot”
- AmethystBad, when asked about the song ‘Recognize’ and how it could be interpreted as relevant to asexuality/the queer experience
The last song I want to talk about is Recognize by AmethystBad. I attached a quote above from the artist after I asked him about my interpretation yesterday. Obviously, coming to terms with your identity isn’t ‘changing’ yourself, but it can change how you view the world and how you approach certain things in life. On top of that, coming out to someone is an immediate change in the dynamic between yourself and who you came out to. There’s always the possibility that people are not quite as accepting as you had hoped.
“Oh, I'm terrified // 'Cause it's either this or stay petrified // My mind, it tells me I'm in paradise // But do I look like someone you don't recognize /…/ There's only so much I can get away with faking”
That constant fear of being caught or exposed when you aren’t ready to go public with something is an experience that unites so much of the LGBTQ+ in our personal lives. Sometimes it does feel better and more secure to let the status quo continue, and sometimes it is, legally speaking, the safer option. That doesn’t make it any less difficult to live something you aren’t.
Each of these songs dance around the same common point: the struggle of not fitting in. None of the artists are asexual, though, so why do I think this speaks so specifically to us in ways that our other representation does not?
I believe there is only one true difference between our struggle and the struggle these songs portray: ours is more internal while theirs is external. The Pretender comes from Capaldi’s imposter syndrome with his fame and success as an artist. Quadeca’s struggle in Ruin My Life is about being physically removed from the rest of society. Recognize is about not allowing yourself to be authentically you around your current circle. Aspects of this bleed over into asexuality, but there is a difference. The sailor in Ruin My Life could just return to land and reintegrate into society. Asexual people, on the other hand, fight that issue internally. The world for so long teaches allonormativity, even going as far to claim it is part of what makes us human sometimes, and doesn’t present an alternate route to live by, thus forcing the questioning asexual to find the terms to speak of their emotions completely on their own. We can often feel separate from everything, including LGBTQ+ spaces, as we experience sexuality in such a different way than any other group. It’s a constant battle of “do I even belong here” that you have to fight with the world around you and even sometimes with your own groups. Different types of attraction are so easy to confuse for one another especially if you have never experienced one or multiple of them, so feelings can easily get misconstrued and leave you unsure of the terms you placed upon yourself.
Asexuals can present in so many different ways, view sex in so many different ways, experience the full romantic spectrum in different ways, but we did all at one point have to discover what asexuality is. It may not be that much of a struggle for everyone, but it is still something to grapple with, and something you may never be fully sure of. That level of nuance does exist in media, but for whatever reason never seems to bleed over into asexual characters unless they are written by asexuals.
I encourage any authors/writers/artists to think about this when it comes to potentially writing asexual stories or asexual characters. We are so much more than just asexual, and our shared identity is so much more then “I don’t really care for sex”. People deserve to have their stories told, and we can do a much better job when it comes to asexuality, aromanticism, and queer identities as a whole.
This gap in media is why I wear the rings when I’m in public. I often get stopped and asked what the ring on the middle finger means, or why I wear a white one opposite the black one. I’ll always answer. I’ll always tell them that the black ring on the right middle finger is for asexuality, and the white one on the left middle is for aromanticism. It’s for general awareness, but specifically it is for the person who is questioning or not confident in their asexuality, or maybe doesn’t have the words for it yet. It’s for the closeted kid who knows about the rings, but may not have the means or the space to wear them themselves. It’s for the person who felt alienated by J.K. Rowling’s dismissive comments about their identity one year ago today that brought out a hate brigade against asexuals online. It’s for the aces out there who feel alone in their identity and need someone they know they can approach about it, or even just see that someone like them exists in the real world.
Those are the people who need our help this International Asexuality Day. The rest of the world needs to know about us, but today is not their day. Today is for those who don’t feel like they belong, so that they might know there is community for them out there, and that they aren’t broken, no matter what the world tries to tell them.
Remember that we can fight because of who came before us and for the sake of those who come after us.
Happy International Asexuality Day and best wishes in your respective journeys.
Signing off,
Aaron C.