There is an Instagram meme of sorts going around my friends’ stories. I’ve seen it several times now (and in a few iterations); perhaps you have also seen it yourself.
The gist is basically this: you’re presented with a series of lines, each offering a spectrum of various sex and gender identities, and invited to plot your own identity on each of them. On a scale of man to woman, where do you fall? Masculine to feminine? Straight to gay? Monogamous to poly? And so on and so forth.
Whenever I’m confronted by this meme, I find myself going through a very specific trajectory of feelings. At first, I’m game to do it: why not? I’m an open book, everyone knows my deal, right? But as soon as I get down to the actual business of filling it out —
Well.
It always tends to start out fine. I’m a woman. I’m on the feminine end of things, though not all the way to hyperfeminine. I’m bisexual. But then it starts to get to other qualifiers — which can vary depending on which version of this meme you’re seeing, they’re not always the same — and I find that I’m suddenly… uncomfortable.
I have long had a policy of being vague about various details of my personal sex life. At one point it was because I was writing about sex and wanted to maintain a mystique of unbiasedness — I had it in my head that if I were openly kinky or vanilla, it might frame my work about sex in a specific light — but over time, it started to feel more like, well, just a desire for privacy. While I’m far from a celebrity, I’ve been online enough for a long enough time that I have a certain, ahem, following, and there is a discomfort from having people feel like they know me based on a collection of pixels they’ve consumed over the years.
Hence, keeping my personal life name off the internet. Hence, a certain coyness about my own sexual predilections. When I briefly ran a newsletter on the topic of anal sex, I had to ask myself if I was crossing any personal boundaries — and ultimately decided that since the newsletter was more about the topic rather than my personal experiences, I was probably fine.
So. When faced with sliders asking me to quantify the degree of romantic attraction I experience, the number of partners I prefer to have, where I fit on scale of asexual to hypersexual, I just feel — well the answer I really want to give to these questions is “nunya business.”
And that discomfort, I dunno. Is it privacy, or is it shame? A part of me feels like these things are inherently different than, say, being open about being bi or a woman — but another part of me wonders if I just think that because I’m old and from a time when people with non-normative desires were expected to stay closeted.
Certainly, “I’m just private about my sex life” is a line more than a few queers have used to avoid homophobia.
I do not have an answer to this question, but I am curious to know other people’s thoughts. Does being asked to quantify yourself on a scale of aromantic to hyperromantic, asexual to hypersexual, mono to poly, feel different from being asked about your gender and gendered attractions? Am I just weird here — or am I burdened by some biases I need to shed?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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