Aline rethinks their relationship with intimacy and sexual attraction after accepting their asexuality. Special thanks to Fiona Conneely, Seth Rosner, and Sydney Klinghoffer whose voices you'd hear throughout the episode.
In this episode, Aline talks to us about the sex life of asexual people (including their own!). Since accepting their asexuality, they have had to rethink their relationship with intimacy and sexual attraction. They’ve also wrestled with and reconfigured their interpretations of relationships and desire. Aline questions the way coupled relationships are normally perceived by talking to other asexual people and listening to their stories.
Special thanks to Fiona Conneely, Seth Rosner, and Sydney Klinghoffer whose voices you'd heard throughout the episode.
This episode features excerpts from the website OMG Yes!
Warning: This episode includes graphic references to sex
Aline: For a long time, I had no connection to my body. When I was a teenager, I never even tried to explore my body, to touch it. I never felt the need.
And then one day, when I was 20, in my off-campus apartment in Lille, in the North of France, I wondered what it would feel like to sleep naked. I stripped down and crawled under my duvet.
It’s like my body could finally breathe, take up space. I’d never felt such freedom.
When I was dating Marie at 28, I felt that I needed to explore my body. I was hoping that knowing my female anatomy better would help me enjoy sex more, and give Marie pleasure.
At that time, there was a new app on the market. It was created to help women learn how to masturbate.
[Clip from OMGYes advertisement: “I just joined OMGYes.com…”]
It’s called OMGYes. It includes videos. First, women, fully dressed, explain their relationship to sex and pleasure, and describe their favorite masturbation techniques. Then, we see them in action.
[Clip from OMGYes video: “One of the things that you can do with that…”]
We see their pubic area and their hands. There’s no ambiance, no music, no sexy talk. It’s not sexual somehow.
I tried to do the same. I caressed different parts of my vulva. I circled my labia, rubbed the area up and down, and played with my clitoris. A lot of first times for me.
OPENING SONG–FREE FROM DESIRE
Alone in my bed, without anyone looking at me, without the pressure to perform, I took the time I needed to discover my body and how it works. It generated physical reactions. My body got tense, and then released.
It made me pay attention, and I realized that, in my everyday life, sometimes, there’s something—like a tickling in my vulva.
I realized that this tickling is arousal. It happens to me sometimes when my girlfriend dances with me at a very hot lesbian party, or when I hear Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing, or when two characters finally kiss in a TV show. It feels good to feel that. But it doesn’t make me want to have sex with someone.
I understand why people masturbate. I have to say, I find the release at the end very soothing and enjoyable.
I started to use a vibrator from time to time. But more like you’d use a massager. It was almost like a ritual to help me fall asleep. An action that led to reaction.
But sadly, often, it wouldn’t work. I could try all I want, but my body wouldn’t react. It would stay dry. And my usual movements would not help.
At some point, I realized that my sex drive changes according to my menstruation cycle. When I’m close to ovulation, I have some sex drive—something tiny but it’s there. The rest of the time, nothing can arouse me.
I talked about it with other aces, with friends, with people I met through work, and I realized that we all have different sex drives, and a different desire to act on them. I went back and talked to some of them about the most intimate details of their sex lives. Their words have been translated and are read by actors.
Sarah, who’s a journalist I met through work, has never had partnered sex, which means she’s never had sex with another person. But she often feels the desire to masturbate. It’s usually not a reaction to a particular situation, just a need that emerges with no reason. And it’s not something that’s limited to bed time. She can masturbate at any time of the day.
Sarah: I’m hungry, I eat, well I don’t know, I’m aroused, I masturbate. Sometimes, I masturbate before going to work because it relaxes me a little before going there. There’s a very psychological side to it. That’s it.
Aline: To fall asleep or relax before a day of work, she also enjoys imagining sexy scenarios.
Sarah: And so, in fact, there are times, I’ll invent stories like that, just because it relaxes me. And they’ll only manifest themselves while masturbating and that’s relaxing too, and it helps me fall asleep, like how I sometimes listen to relaxing things on my phone. Or when . . . well, just as a way of going to sleep, to become relaxed.
Aline: After I started to masturbate, I also started imagining sexy scenarios. It’s almost always the same. A woman, it’s always a woman, tries to seduce me. She strips down and tries to convince me to join her. She knows what she wants. The tension rises. I’m about to kiss her back. And then, nothing. The story ends.
I’d like to go further, but I can’t. I’m blocked, nothing is coming to me. I just can’t picture people having sex. I actually can’t even picture myself having sex. In my scenarios, I don’t think it’s even me who’s being seduced, I’m not in my body. And the person in front of me is not someone I know or I’ve seen before. It could be anyone. It’s no one.
I know many people get excited when they think of a particular person. I don’t get it. It reminds me of something that Cecil told me. Cecil is a 26-year-old asexual man
Cecil: The first time that I spoke about masturbation was in middle school. And so, there were people who would ask me, “What do you masturbate to?” And I didn’t know how to respond. And so I said, “I masturbate to a tissue.” So there it is, I took the question literally.
And after, they would say to me, “Well no. For you to really masturbate well, you need to look at some porn, or some centerfold photo. Whatever you want . . . For Him Magazine. I think I went through a phase where I really tried to find something that truly excited me. I tried porn films—that did nothing for me and, in fact, I never really needed sexual images. For me, it’s really stress that truly motivates me to masturbate so that, in the end, I can be relieved.
When it comes to erections, the only kind that I truly know in fact is the one I have by myself and it happens naturally. I really have no memory where something provoked a sensation to the point of me having an erection. I would say that the closest thing that brought me the sort of excitement is David Gilmour’s voice in a specific song by Pink Floyd.
Aline: I’ve also found a few things that work for me. Sometimes I go on Instagram and look at accounts of underwear brands, or accounts of surfer influencers. It’s not the people I’m interested in, it’s the ambiance. I like when the pictures inspire a story.
Sometimes I focus on one thing I like—an outfit, a butt, breasts—never a face. If society has never taught me that these things were exciting, would I have found them exciting?
Émilie, a thirty something asexual woman, is never excited:
Émilie: Watching a film with an erotic scene bores me. It bores me completely. It turns me off the film, like a comedian making jokes that aren’t funny. For me,
it has that same effect, it makes me uncomfortable. To say to me, “Oh yeah, oh my God,” no, no, it doesn’t work. I don’t know, it’s like I’m–or like feeling this discomfort, you know, of a valve that doesn’t work. But it seems to work on others so that’s good.
Aline: When I started to accept my asexuality, I started asking people around me: What about you? Do you have wet dreams? Have you ever wanted to have sex with someone you met at a party? Did you ever masturbate thinking of a colleague?
I understood something. When it comes to desire, everyone’s different. I have friends who think about having sex all the time, who can be excited by random people they see on the street, and others who only desire their partner.
I’ve met a lot of people who barely or never sleep with their partner. Sometimes it’s because they have never felt the desire to have sex together, sometimes because they’ve been together for so long, been occupied with the kids or with work. For Émilie, sex is like making crêpes.
Émilie: It’s boring making crêpes, you know, it’s long, the crêpe batter, you need… I don’t have a mixer, I have nothing. So then you need a lot of elbow grease in order to mix it. So that already is annoying. Then after, it takes a really long time: the crêpes, one by one, in the pan. I try to like crêpes, but I have no desire to make them just because it’s annoying.
Aline: Émilie doesn’t have sex when she feels like it requires too much of an effort from her.
Émilie: To stop myself from sleeping an hour earlier requires excessive effort. I mean, I set the bar for excessive effort quite low and I think that’s key, really.
Aline: I feel the same. To me, sex is like a workout. An exhausting physical activity. And at night, I’m just too tired to exercise. And besides, I’d have to leave my bed after sex to pee and clean myself a bit. I don’t have the energy for that. Once in bed, I want to stay in bed. I need to trust that the pleasure I will draw from the sex is more substantial than the effort and the discomfort.
After my relationship with Izzy, I was in a friends-with-benefits situation, with Teddy, an American who lived in Amsterdam at the time. For a while, we’d visit each other occasionally and spend the weekend in bed.
Teddy loved sex. In Amsterdam, he had a very full sex life. But that doesn’t mean all of his relationships had to be about sex. Ours was about cuddling all night long, watching cartoons in bed, some kissing and occasionally having sex.
I could have told him I didn’t want any sex—he would have been fine with it—but I wanted that intimacy with him. I told him from the start that I wasn’t that into penetration but that we could do it from time to time. He told me, “as soon as you don’t enjoy it anymore, we’ll stop and I'll finish off by myself.”
Since Teddy, I haven’t had any partnered sex. It’s not something I miss, but I guess I might want to have sex again if I meet someone I like in a physical way.
I’ve talked to many aces about their sex lives, and it helped me think of sex differently. I like the way Émilie and her husband handle things. They’ve been together for 20 years now and for a long time, their misunderstanding of each other’s desire has been a source of tension. That changed when Émilie discovered the concept of asexuality. They started to look at their sex discrepancy differently.
Émilie: From a numerical point of view, nothing has changed. That means that we have neither more nor less sex since my realization of being asexual. We already had a little. It was a problem. Today, we also have a little but it’s no longer a problem. That’s it, that’s what has changed.
We know that it’s not because he’s not doing something that would arouse me, that it’s not because I would like to look elsewhere, and that it’s not, like, I have a hormonal problem or something that needs to be fixed. That’s just how it is, we’re like that. Our relationship will function with this concept of asexuality.
Aline: Émilie’s spouse even suggested that they wouldn’t have sex anymore but Émilie didn’t want to make that decision. She does sometimes enjoy those moments with him, when it feels right: .
Émilie: I sometimes dream of having sex with my spouse. And when I wake up in the morning, I take that as a sign that my body is biologically ready. The times when I have some desire somewhere in me I want to take advantage of this opportunity because that’s when the sex is pleasurable between us, and when it lasts longer, and when I am truly enjoying myself, too.
Aline: When she picks when they have sex, Émilie doesn’t feel like she’s forcing herself.
With Teddy, I never felt like I was forcing myself. I wasn’t having sex with him to prove something to myself. I wasn’t doing it because he was pressuring me. I was doing it because I wanted to, because I wanted to share that moment with him. I wasn’t put in a situation where I had to say yes or no to his propositions. I was part of a team. We were listening to each other and making decisions together.
After Teddy, I thought that when I’ll be in a new relationship, I would use this and the relationship Émilie has with her husband as a model. The only difference is that I wanted to be in an open relationship.
The idea that people owe each other fidelity has always seemed weird to me. Why can’t people sleep with someone else if they want to? How can they be expected to be fully satisfied with monogamous sex life? I found it hard to believe that two people can want the same things at the same time, with the same frequency, for the entirety of their relationship.
Maybe it’s because I don’t care for sex as much, and that it seems naturally separated from romance. I’ve met a lot of other aces who have a hard time understanding the concept of sexual fidelity. It’s the case of Cecil.
He’s currently in a relationship with an allo-sexual person he met on a dating app. Allo-sexual is any person who’s not ace. Cecil has had partnered sex in the past, out of curiosity, and he didn’t care much for it.
Cecil: I used to say to myself that maybe I’m not sexually attracted to people, but maybe sex itself can please me, like the way masturbation destresses me. Maybe sex could be the same. So I would say to myself that I would try sex and, if it pleases me, I’d continue and, if it doesn’t please me, well, I can live without it. And so I threw myself into dating apps and I hooked up with a guy and then later with a girl, but, in fact, I didn’t feel any pleasure. For me it did absolutely nothing. It was especially boring. I’ll stick to that.
Aline: So now, with his girlfriend, he’d rather not have sex. If she wants to sleep with someone, she can do so with someone else.
Cecil: It’ll never happen with me. Better she does it with someone else and even from a romantic point of view, in fact, because I’m polyamorous. I’m open to that and she’s open to that, so the essential thing between us two is to say to the other that we’re seeing so and so. I still seek physical contact, even if it’s not sexual—to hug, to kiss, to sleep together, there you go.
Aline: When I’d tell people my views on open relationships and how that’s what I envision for myself, they’d look at me with perplexity. They’d tell me it’s obvious that I’ve never been in love. That when you’re in love, it’s much more complicated, jealousy easily creeps in.
Maybe they were right and I wondered—Will I ever know how it feels like to be in love? To be so in love that you’re jealous? And if I never fall in love, will I ever be able to have my own family?
OUTRO MUSIC
Producer: Free From Desire is an original podcast by Paradiso Media. Written and narrated by Aline Laurent-Mayard. Produced by Suzanne Colin and by me, Yael Even Or with additional production support from Morgan Jaffe and Molly O’Keefe.
Executive producers are Emi Norris, Lorenzo Benedetti, Louis Daboussy, and Benoit Dunaigre. Sound design, editing, and mix by Théo Albaric. Additional editing by Yael Even Or and Morgan Jaffe.
Studio recordings by Marin Grizeaud and Théo Albaric. Production assistants are Lucine Dorso, Brendan Galbreath, and Sofia Martins. Editing intern is Bryson Brooks.
Original music by D.L.I.D. Our theme song is Freed from Desire by GALA. Cover Art by Super Feat.
This episode features excerpts from the website OMGYes.