I couldn’t resist the latest trend, the one that I can’t ignore these days, the absurdity that is the asexuality movement as my first substantive post about our culture of overcorrection. The antecedents for this mashup of juvenile straight-edgery, prudery, and feminist kvetching about the male gaze have been percolating and cross-pollinating for a good decade. When the rage for promiscuity as our evolutionary destiny made popular by “Sex at Dawn” faded, the pendulum swung to sapiosexuality. Its devotees were mostly guys who failed to make good with conspicuous copies of “Sex At Dawn,” who then embraced a shoe-less, Five Fingers lifestyle and professed arousal at a mate’s reading comprehension, in lieu of coy banter or a comely figure. When that fizzled, the internets predicted the era of the demisexual, only to be usurped by the ascent of the non-binary and replacement of all things sexual with gender, as if they were never conjoined.
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One of the most striking criticisms of my writing from the admonishing mouths of my ex-agent and ex-manager years ago was prescient in ways I then couldn’t understand. After discussing television and feature pitches I was developing, the line went silent. The rep who played good cop intoned, ”There’s too much sex and violence in your work.” I laughed then as I do now, trying to disguise the cackle as a wicked cough triggered by the LA air, smokey and acrid from the latest fires. It was autumn 2019. Sam Levinson’s EUPHORIA was the talk of the town. THE JOKER was slaying the box office to the chagrin of critics. It felt right that fabulist decadence and desperate anarchy resonated with the masses. Baffled, I struck back, “Is there such a thing as too much Sex? Sex and Violence make the world go round.”
My retort only made them angrier. The good cop turned bad, and the bad added another reason to label me as difficult and lash out at me when it suited her needs. Their criticism hinted at a zeitgeist I’m usually good at reading or intuiting. Asexuality wasn’t on my radar then. Now it’s all the rage.
In stark contrast to its dictionary meaning, the asexuality they wanted me to embrace and even proselytize isn’t just a lack of sex, a void where attraction is expected. Even chastity is insufficient as description and virtue. The asexuality movement in its current iteration is an ideology opposed to the meaning, significance and centrality, of sex in culture and art, and for us as a species.
There have been widely reputed asexuals during the course of history, many mistakenly labeled, with Alfred Einstein being the most notable. Would we begrudge the hygiene-averse, wooly-haired father of relativity for his Manichean pursuit of a purely cerebral existence and the conclusions that relativity and libido don't’ mix? No need. The most intelligent man in modern history was as horny as the next. Notably more restrictive than Anglo-Puritan and sectarian religious mores - even Mormons can get it on to procreate if wearing the ultra-chic temple garment - the asexuality movement is all contrarian nihilism, and my favorite modern ill, sanctimonious narcissism intent on the annihilation, if not erasure, of eros.
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I had my first frank discussion about sex and asexuality when I was in 2nd grade. Over an aluminum hot lunch tray in a basement cafeteria, I listened to my then bestie Jessica declare that her parents had never had sex. She was quite proud of the fact. It was the only thing she’d ever boasted about, unaware it was a categorical impossibility. Until then, I hadn’t realized the devout interpreted the virgin birth central to Catholicism as a literal and universal expectation.
And devout she was. Jessica was raised by her grandmother, a fanatically strict Mexican Catholic. Lest I attract ire or earn a nasty slur, her Grandmother’s religious fervor was on par with the Grandmother’s of famed Mexican horror director Guillermo del Toro. He often mentions being subjected to several exorcisms at her hands, a desperate effort to expunge his fascination with the creatures that would populate his oeuvre. Jessica’s apartment, across the street from our Catholic grammar school, attached to Notre Dame, a landmark Romanesque Revival church, felt like an extension of the holy domain. Candles, Virgin Mary paintings, statues, rosaries, and all manner of religious curios littered every surface. Every room was a shrine, every corner an altar, if not to the son of God himself but to the ideal of virginal purity.
Always a smart ass with a taste for philosophical rigor and a proclivity for debate, I pushed back “If your parents hadn’t had sex, you wouldn’t exist.” She could only repeat her position. ”My parents didn’t have sex.” Eyes downcast, she returned to the homemade lunch I knew was superior to mine. Jessica, stern, yet not combative, defended her faith and resigned her 7-year-old self to the fate her religion exalted and prescribed for her, martyrdom and virginity. With slumped shoulders, always shroud in the hand-knitted shawl of a spinster, the plump, sagging ankles of a Mediterranean widow, Jessica’s body had already embraced a life bereft of flirting and fucking.
More appreciative of Catholicism’s pagan visuals and rituals in adulthood than during my parochial years, I can’t understand how the devout could interpret the thinly veiled eroticism of Catholic art with a celibate gaze. How could Jessica pray to St. Sebastian, a 3rd-century doppel for Timothée Chalamet, the lithe Adonis with exquisite bone structure, pierced and martyred for his religious devotion, as a plea for virginity? How did her Grandmother genuflect at the Pietà, the Virgin Mary’s ecstasy at having the son of God in her intimate embrace, on her teet, as an advert for virginity and a life-long pledge to asexuality? Had they been aware of the irony, Jessica and her Grandmother would have certainly submitted to exorcisms of their own.
The ball back in my court. “Ok, you don’t exist. If you don’t exist, I can’t talk to you.” In a moment of mean girl self-righteousness that disturbs my adult self, I ignored Jessica for the next few days. In the final rhetorical coup de grâce, without asking, I helped myself to one of her Oreos. (No racial symbolism here - sometimes an Oreo is just an Oreo). It wasn’t stealing if she didn’t exist.
Was my knowledge of sex, at least confidence in it, premature chutzpah posing as worldliness? Armchair arrogance before having been in the trenches of sexual warfare? Was I trying to write myself into a Judy Blume novel before I’d even read her? By the second grade, I considered myself initiated to the subtext of sexy stuff.
The most handsome boy in school had tried to kiss me on the playground, an advance I rebuffed with a shove and Blondie lyric. “I'm not the kinda girl who gives up just like that, oh no.” The school’s budding sex offender had already exposed himself to me in the bathroom during a nap-time bathroom trip. And then there’s my name. The perceived and wished for derivation from the Japanese concubine has exposed me to sexual innuendo since I remember talking. “Is that like Geisha Girl?” said with a rakish grin by many, including a school priest on my first day of Kindergarten. When I joined the world of dating apps, a lifetime of these misguided flirtations and prophecies taught me not to use my Christian name.
Despite the urge to self-mythologize, like most girls at a very young age, I’d been sexualized, an unspoken rite of passage, a dry run for puberty. In stark rebuke of the dictums of 1st and 2nd wave feminisms, I embraced it and the accompanying insight. It’s how I learned before my first in media res experiences that sex itself is lurking everywhere, the supplicant to a different trinity, one of joy, danger and the unpredictable.
After years of pitying her naïveté, I only now realize that Jessica’s rabid belief in virginity and exhortation of asexuality, like most feminists, was rooted in having no idea what sex was or could be. Raised by her overzealous Grandmother, it was sin and more sin, the forbidden. Without the vomitous sounds of her parent’s early morning quickies through thin city walls, how could she? Would she ever mistakenly unearth her father’s PlayBoy Collection, or chance upon a brother unwinding with a large bottle of Palmer’s Cocoa Butter?
The next year I transferred school and never saw Jessica again. I have no way of knowing if she maintained her Grandmother’s devout lifestyle and joined a nunnery. Of course, I hope she rebelled, threw off her shawl, strengthened her ankles with a killer pair of come-fuck-me pumps, headed out into the world in search of a vibrant life, that she’s enjoyed enough grunting and moaning to pity her Grandmother’s faith. Perhaps, it’s more likely that without me to educate her about sin, that she met like-minded deniers of the centrality of sex, and for decades has been fomenting this movement of the asexual as radical if not a beautified visionary.
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Like all extremes, this overcorrection will suffer a reversal, a correction that may already be upon us. I’ve remained steady mining the forbidden subtext in my writing and in the subjectivity of my female characters, with several sex and violent-heavy pilots. With Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film POOR THINGS, and rumors of a LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER adoption in the works… Is there the whiff of a pro-sex renaissance in the ether?