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7:55pm February 28, 2013

Separated by a Common Language

codeman38:

[This is my post for the February 2013 Carnival of Aces on the subject of language and communication.]

It’s pretty much a given that those of us on the asexual spectrum use language in novel ways to describe our experiences. Because so many concepts involved in asexuality simply didn’t have a nice, convenient word at hand, we’ve taken existing words and given them new meanings, or even invented new words out of whole cloth, in order to explain them without a lot of awkwardly long phrases. (And as a perusal of the asexuality tags on Tumblr reveals, a lot of non-asexuals just can’t wrap their heads around the idea of words having more than one meaning, bless their hearts.)

(…Yes, I’m originally from the southern US; why do you ask? ;-))

But there’s a sort of corollary which gets even less attention: just as asexuals’ use of language can be confusing to non-aces, the opposite can be true as well. That is, the way that non-aces use language to describe their experiences of attraction can be confusing, even misleading, to an asexual.

I honestly think that these sorts of semantic differences were a large part of the reason I didn’t even realize I was different from the norm until my late twenties. I’d assumed that everyone else was using words to mean the same thing I had assumed them to mean…and, well, it turns out that my assumptions were completely off base.

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Regarding the arousal vs attraction thing, my ex boyfriend (not asexual in the least) once described to me the early stages of starting to get erections. And as he put it, “It takes time to learn that geography homework shouldn’t mean ‘dick up’”.

Which makes me wonder if sexual people have erections without attraction as well, but somehow their erections get trained more and more towards attraction as they get more and more used to having them? I don’t know, not having a penis, but I found his descriptions interesting. (He also used to describe it as a “semaphoric signal of arousal” and grumble about it.)