By Marina Delvecchio, PhD
When I first submitted my memoir Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute’s Daughter to my publishing company’s project manager, she came back to me with a long email explaining that she had issues with me labeling my book as asexual. She confessed that she was asexual and, as this was a personal matter for her, she didn’t think it was right for me to call myself asexual or to plug my memoir as one belonging to the asexual spectrum.
I was sex-averse, she told me. But not asexual. That moniker only belongs to the “real” asexuals. The ones who have no sexual desire or sex at all.
Her response confused me; it also irked me. I was asexual for over ten years of my twenty-six-year marriage. I called myself asexual for those ten years. It was the identity that I used to wrap around my body for comfort and protection against the norms and implications for married people that pressure them into having sex even if they don’t want it. Don’t need it. Don’t want to have anything to do with it.
It irked me because I am a women’s studies professor and have taught a slew of topics related to sexual identity, including asexuality, for over ten years. Her connection to asexuality was hers. It was not mine. I had my own experiences with asexuality, and my connection to it was not hers, even though she felt inclined to tell me that because my experiences with asexuality did not reflect hers, my relationship with sex was mislabeled and wrong.
My first objection is that no one has a right to label anyone. As a professor of women’s studies, I insulate my students from outside labels, explaining what they already know: that society (and people in general) attempts to label us, define us, long before we choose how to label ourselves. Our identities are always in flux, always on the spectrum of one designation or another, because we are not born knowing ourselves. We grow into ourselves. We discover who we are and who we want to be, and we are constantly evolving until the day we can face ourselves in the mirror and acknowledge the version of ourselves that we are proud of and love despite societal outcries that say we are wrong, wrongly built, defective, and “othered”.
As an intersectional feminist, I know that sexuality is just as unique as the person who wears it. Sexuality fits the bodies and desires of people’s lived experiences differently because we are all different. No one body is the same. No one experience is the same.
Our sexuality, our desires and proclivities, intersect with our unique lived experiences and those experiences go on to intersect with the other characterizations that make up who we are and how we encounter a culture that boxes us up into homogenized bodies, insisting it knows us even while we have yet to know ourselves. Our sexual identities are complex and distinctive, and they intersect with our race, gender, socio-economic status, ethnicity, education, age, religion, etc. No one person or experience is the same. Nor should they be.
Asexuality is ubiquitously defined as a sexual identity that exists on a spectrum, and therefore, asexual persons, or Aces, express their sexuality differently. There is no one-size-fits-all. Some asexuals have sex. Some don’t. Some aces want romantic love. They choose to get married and have children, too. There are those who want companionship without romance.
There are those who experience sexual attraction and those who don’t. There are aces who fall somewhere between being sexual and asexual, and there are even some who express sexual desire only after a strong emotional connection is made. Aces can also further identify as hetero, homo, bi, or pan. The spectrum that embraces aces is as extensive and diverse as asexuality.
Sexual identity and sexual expression are just as complex as gender identity and gender expression, and no one societally imposed box or label can or should hold them accountable for their identities and expressions just to make the rest of the world feel comfortable and in control of understanding the complexities that come with being a human being.
My sexual identity and expression are just as different because they have derived from my very unique experiences with sex. Growing up in a life that included my mother’s prostitution, watching her sell herself to johns for money, and being abused by her pimp further complicates my sexual identity and the way that I express love and desire.
Perhaps I was sex-averse during those ten years of my marriage because I did not feel safe in my relationship with my husband. Maybe it was a self-imposed celibacy that kept me from having an intimate relationship with him. But for those ten years — and even before that — during my twenties — I was asexual.
I did not feel desire. I did not want to be touched. I could not be touched — by him or by anyone else. I did not feel attraction to any man — not Brad Pitt or Chris Hemsworth or my then-husband or any of the men who whistled at me, hit on me, or told me I was beautiful. I did not touch myself or masturbate or have sexual inclinations or fantasies or dreams. I only wanted human connection. To be seen and loved for the person I carried around each day without my sex attached.
My twenties, the years before I met the man I married and had two children with, were packed with dating and kissing. But there was no sex. And it wasn’t because I was a flirt or a slut or a tease, as many people called me in those days. It was because the only part of me that desired anything from the opposite sex was the girl who wanted only to be loved. To be seen. To be caressed with words, with kindness, with affection. Not sex.
Sex repelled me. I often had to scrub the memory of being touched off my skin with soap and water, as if someone else’s desire for me had tainted me.
The first time I had sex was with the man that I moved in with and married four years later. I was twenty-five. Interestingly, I don’t remember it. I remember all the kisses, some of the orgasms, the fooling around, but I cannot recall the first time I had sex with him. And I am a memory hoarder. I remember everything. But sex was such a huge issue for me, such a complex one, that my brain has expunged the memory so that I cannot reclaim it. That is hard for me. I don’t remember if I liked it. If it hurt. If I hated it, clenched my eyes shut, and left my body to get it over with. Not even my body remembers.
Even during my marriage, before I stopped having sex, I did not have sex a lot. I had trouble getting pregnant because I did not have sex often enough. It was only through IVF treatments that I was able to have my daughter even though I was “super fertile” according to my doctor and produced thirty-six eggs after my first and only treatment.
Sex always felt like a duty, an expectation. What normal people did. How normal married couples expressed their love. I had to drink to have sex, my brain dulled and my body’s anxieties muted by alcohol in order to have sex with my husband. I also had to be in love. Feel safe with the man who would occupy my body in ways that many johns had occupied my mother’s body when I was a child and hid in the closet until they paid her and left our home.
The day I stopped having sex with my husband was the day I knew I didn’t love him, didn’t feel emotionally safe with him. He was unpredictable, inconsistent, and unconditional in his expressions of love toward me. He claimed to love me after telling me he felt nothing but anger for me. He wanted a divorce but then told me he loved me and just wanted to get a reaction out of me.
He raged at me, shut me down with explosive yelling, bullying me until I cowered and did what he knew his behavior would do to me: shut me up, make me curl into myself until I was the kind of woman, wife, and mother he wanted me to be. Compliant. Quiet. Obedient. Non-resistant. And then he told me he loved me. I could not trust him, and the body that he traumatized with his expressions of fury and dominance did not trust him enough to be touched by him.
I lived with him for the next ten years unsexed, asexual, with no desire to physically connect with him until the day his rages turned to our son, and he tried to make our sixteen-year-old compliant by physically asserting his masculine prowess, grabbing him by the t-shirt with his fist, jamming his finger in our son’s face, and threatening to kick his ass. I stayed with him for the sake of my kids until I realized they were better off without him.
I didn’t think I would ever have sex again. I had no desire to meet anyone, to date, to do anything other than find joy in my independence, my work, and my kids. Sex repelled me, but so did men. A life without them seemed like a gentle, empowering way to live. In peace. In comfort. In a life that Kate Chopin wrote about in the late 1800s: a life in which no one else’s will bent mine out of love or obligation.
Today, I am having sex. Not necessarily because I love sex. I don’t. It’s because I love the man I am having sex with. He is kind and good and patient. He makes me feel safe and loved. He is a guest in my home, in my bed, and in my body — which is always mine and mine alone. Sex with him is a way to hold him in my arms, kiss his face, and connect with him in an intimate way that I don’t connect with anyone else. I don’t know what any of this means, but neither does anyone else. This is my story and mine alone. It is the story of my body, and sometimes, I am not even privy to its secrets.
Whether I am unsexed, asexual, or sexual, it is all up to me. No one has a right to designate who I am or where I belong in the spectrum of sexuality or asexuality. All I know is that sex is complicated. I am complicated. My experiences with prostitution and abuse have fostered in me a complex response and understanding of sex that I am still working out. In my fifties, I am still evolving, still growing, and still trying to understand who I am and where I belong in this life that will continue without me when I am gone.
As much as we try to make sense of each other so that we feel comfortable and safe when people whose behaviors we don’t understand or agree with are placed in homogenized and labeled boxes, it’s none of our business. It’s not our job to label anyone outside of our lives and our own lived experiences. We are all different, complex people with complex lives, and our differences should be respected because our differences are what make us unique and uniquely beautiful.
Marina DelVecchio, PhD, is a college professor and writer who lives in North Carolina with her children and three feral cats. In addition to her online publications in Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, and The New Agenda, her book publications include ‘Dear Jane’, ‘The Professor’s Wife’, and ‘The Virgin Chronicles’. She teaches women’s studies and literature through the lens of bibliotherapy, guiding her students to connect with literary heroes who write for power and self-assertion. ‘Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute’s Daughter‘ (July 16, She Writes Press) is Marina’s raw, honest account of how sex has affected her life and examines provocative and important sexuality themes through a feminist lens. Marina was born in Greece to a violent prostitute, then adopted by a cold and unloving virgin from New York. As a result, her sexual identity is mixed up in a pervading sense of fear and shame that bleeds into other areas of her life as she grows older, particularly her marriage and raising her children. Lacking the tools to understand her mothers, Marina uses self-erasure to define herself – until she finally becomes fed up with the same patterns and decides to claim her own power.
