From Toxically Male to Asexual: Unlearning Patriarchal Maleness
Not so long ago, a friend of mine told me that people that knew me from school were surprised to hear that I was interested in feminist topics. The reasoning given was that they believed that I thought of women as inferior to men during school. Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why was my excitement for feminist theory not that surprising to me but surprising to everyone else? And what did it say about my relationship with maleness and sexuality?
So, growing up, there were a lot of narratives around maleness that made my life harder. One needs to climb the relationship escalator, otherwise one isn’t “really a man”, for example. One needs a girlfriend before one is considered grown-up. If one hasn’t fucked before, one can’t be a man. Women and men can’t be friends. Men were more rational than women. Those narratives made my life worse, caught up in a constant feeling of inferiority, always something to prove. But I believed in them. I ingested them and made them my beliefs. I only had to accomplish the targets set for my maleness, I told myself. I was owed that position/respect, I told myself. I deserved the recognition as an equal man that I lacked so desperately. I needed to become the man patriarchal society sees as worthy. I needed to protect this little fragile masculinity with all these grand narratives.
The problem was, I wasn’t interested in relationships or sex for themselves. It was the status that patriarchal society promises man that I was interested in. Deep down, I knew that there was much more separating me from my male peers, which I can now name as neurodivergence. But in my desperation to deal with the world I was born into, I indexed into maleness to cope. This was the one area society told me how I could fix it. I needed to become a man. Have a girlfriend, have sex and all that stuff. bell hooks highlights in her book “The will to change. Men, Masculinity, and Love” that domination of women through sex and relationships is seen as a cornerstone of patriarchal maleness. [1] That was what I was chasing.
But, because I am asexual and aromantic, as I learned later in life, I didn’t succeed at patriarchal maleness. I didn’t even know what sexual and romantic interest would look like. I knew I would be weird about both romantic and sexual relationships. I knew I had boundaries that another person might not respect. I was afraid of this potential boundary violation, but also desperately needed the approval that comes with this type of relationship. It wasn’t really helping that within our dominant societal understanding, woman and man are often seen as romantic and sexual partners first, and maybe as friends if that fails. These relationships are always looked at through the lens of romantic and sexual relationships first. Not so long ago – I still didn’t identify as asexual, but already studying feminist theory – a person I know from school theorized about the woman I would one day marry in front of old classmates. Despite being weird no matter my identity, it shows how dominant society often thinks about relationships: Friendship is devalued, thus “only” becoming friends is a disappointment in the eyes of dominant society. If everyone assumes that what you really want and need is a sexual/romantic relationship with women, it is hard not act under these assumptions as well. It didn’t help that during that time, I didn’t know what romantic or sexual attraction looks like and assumed that I am attracted to these women because “that’s what is supposed to happen”. If one has no clear reference point, everything can feel like a difference. It is like the experience of someone showing you two identical pictures and telling you to spot the difference. You will find some differentiating features, even if they do not exist. Neurodivergence does not help here either, since it is really hard for me to distinguish to this day between having a crush and a hyper-fixation on a person. I still don’t really know if I ever had a crush or was just hyper-fixated on particular people. Aren’t they like, pretty similar? I can’t tell. Showing affection in ways that are not mirrored or shared by others also further complicates things. One might feel rejected, even if the way one shows affection is just not registered by the other person (and vice versa).
I blamed women for being so complicated. I wanted the benefits that allonormative patriarchal society grants men that fit in without having to participate in the relationship portion of it. This made women an object to my desire to be recognized as a “real man”. Fear of boundary violations, having boundaries that were unintelligible made women also the likely perpetrator of said boundary violations in my very cis-heteronormative worldview during this time. Knowing that a refused hug from an autistic person like me would lead to mockery, what would happen in sexual and romantic situations? A confused AuDHD Aro-Ace person in the making, trying to follow dominant narratives around maleness can look a lot like an incel/creep, if the pressure and the fear of “never being truly happy” gets to them. I certainly did look and think like one at times. Maybe I was convincing and unconvincing at the same time acting out hegemonic maleness. The potential of the aro-ace person was lurking beneath, not having a way to make sense of the world, not really formed yet.
It made me weird. Me not understanding what was happening made me uncomfortable to be around at times. I misunderstood everything and anything when it came to romantic and sexual relationships and thus my relationship with women. I never was or attempted to be in romantic or sexual relationships. I made up crushes to fit in, since one can’t achieve the desired maleness without taking the first step towards a relationship. I was always glad when nothing happened, doing as little as possible myself while still performing what I had learned looks like romantic and/or sexual interest to the best of my very weak abilities. I was also angry at them for denying me the position I was “owed”. I was one confused mess, wanting and fearing sexual and romantic settings at the same time. But buying into the narratives around maleness kept me angry and kept me busy. Trying to fix it through a sexual relationship or “fixing myself” (which would be some kind of self-conversion therapy, I guess) never worked and could never work.
Only once I unlearned and detached from these narratives, did I develop a healthier relationship to maleness, sexuality and the people around me. It is always a never-ending process though, investing in dominant maleness and the “promised land” of recognition as a man through sex and romance leaves its marks and takes time to unlearn. It wasn’t as surprising to me as to other people around me that I enjoyed feminist theory. I knew I had unfinished business with society and our expectations around sexuality and gender. I understood right away that it was the structural view of the world I was so desperately searching for. The social scripts I had been fed by society were not useful. They didn’t help me understand myself or the world around me better. They just made me confused and angry. People assumed I was comfortable in my position; a toxic heterosexual man just being complicated. In fact, I was very uncomfortable in my position, an aromantic-asexual person in the making that wanted to understand what was going on.
Feminist theory delivered explanations that helped me understand the world a lot better. Dominant society didn’t. Dis-investing from gender became a feasible option within this context. Since maleness was one of the things keeping me tethered to sex and sexuality in an unhealthy way, I could let go of that a little bit, step by step. With it, my possibilities of what I could be and what the world is broadened: I learned to see the world through a non-cis-heteronormative lens. Learning to see people more for themselves rather than as potential partners for me. I learned a lot about myself and the world. But there are a lot of issues in many feminist and queer contexts regarding asexuality and aromanticism. Devaluing sex and sexuality (and, to a lesser extent in my experience, romance) [2] for myself still seemed hard and unthinkable with the tools of these contexts. But, for the first time, the narratives around sex and sexuality were the primary reason that kept me from understanding myself as asexual, and not those narratives surrounding masculinity.
Unlearning patriarchal maleness is an ongoing process and in the beginning one does not know where the journey goes. Feminist/Queer theory provided me with narratives to understand my situation, but those never fully resonated with me: “The heterosexual man who needs to unlearn his misogyny” (which will be proven in sexual/romantic relationships, of course), “the repressed gay” or “the repressed trans person” etc. I thought about all of them long and hard. I looked through my interactions and ways I interacted with the world through all of these perspectives. “Was the way I looked at the lips of men not gay?” “Wasn’t the way I struggled with masculinity the best proof for being trans?” Some narratives were more enlightening than others. But ultimately, none of them did me any favors, none of them fit or “solve the problem”. But not placing myself in this system did create doubt in the context of feminist commitments: Was I not just running away from the criticism and responsibility of being a “heterosexual cis man”? Unable to find a position that fits, I resided to being a “failed” heterosexual cis man. This was not an option given to me, but the one I could tolerate the most. It still felt wrong, that the way dominant heterosexual masculinity was critiqued in feminist theory felt at the same time appropriate and inappropriate to my situation. I remained in this awkward position for two years.
I honestly can’t remember how asexuality made it onto my radar. It only was 1.5/2 years ago, but the memory became fuzzy really fast. It probably had something to do with researching neurodivergence for the diagnostic process and at the same time re-watching BoJack Horseman. In some way, shape or form, asexuality came from two sides simultaneously, which made it something to think about. I had read and heard the word asexual a few times before, but never in a way that reached me. Most of these instances were from texts that understood asexuality as an edge case which their theories needed to solve and not something that needed a theory of itself. But 1.5/2 years ago, Asexuality finally got through to me. It was something I was able to envision myself as. Feminist theory and changing my view on masculinity definitely helped with that. I realized that the distortions I had learned to place on Asexuality (uptight, “just bad at sex” etc.) were the same ones that kept me from proclaiming to be an asexual person.
Funnily enough, now that I can understand myself as asexual, I am not sure what this does to understanding myself as a man. Canton Winer introduces the concept of gender detachment, which “refers to individually-held notions that gender presentation and/or identity is irrelevant, unimportant, pointless, and/or overall not a topic of great personal concern.” [3] In some form, I vibe with this explanation of attitudes to gender. The more I understand myself as asexual, the less I am certain what this leaves for gender. The gender I occupied for so long feels emptier, and it is constant opposition with asexuality. Maleness and asexuality pull me in different directions, and while in the past I could not fathom asexuality because I clung to maleness, nowadays I don’t know what to do with maleness, now that I understand myself as asexual. Do I want to fill the gendered space with something else? Or do I want to leave it the way it currently is? I will figure it out. Or not. Who knows!
In the end, my story is one of many. It happens frequently when people who do not fit in our dominant cis-hetero-allo-(etc.) society try to fit in. What I want to argue for, at the end of this text, is that I reject the interpretation of my life as just a confused aro-ace person, who took questionable ideas to make sense of the world. Making such a statement for myself would feel disingenuous and more essentialist than I would like to it. I really believed in these toxic norms around sexuality and masculinity. I embraced them, yet unable to live by them. I really believed these toxic ideas of sexuality and masculinity. There were aspects of myself that didn’t fit in the narratives I believed in. But during that time, I did not make them part of my self-understanding. I despised them. I reject rewriting my life in retrospect more than is necessary. The aro-ace person couldn’t live at the same time as the toxic masculine one. Some people will stay in this toxic masculine identity for the entirety of their lives, even if it might conflict with other experiences of theirs, such as not feeling sexual attraction. Thus, it feels wrong for me to reinterpret this part of my life in this kind of way. I formed these different identities from similar or identical experiences. The patriarchal masculine societal expectation and imprint will still affect my life moving forward, there is no doubt about it. I still have to combat the misogyny I ingested. But the perspective is now an asexual/aromantic, and hopefully not a patriarchal masculine one.
Looking through the same situation through a different lens is powerful. Better explanations can form a less toxic person. Emphasizing the lessons we can learn from aromantic and asexual perspectives can be really important even for allo people moving forward. Even if I had felt sexual and romantic attraction during this time, having a perspective that re-contextualizes romantic and sexual relationships like aromantic and asexual perspectives do would have been helpful nonetheless.
Notes
bell hooks: “The Will to Change. Men, Masculinity, and Love,“ 2004, Washington Square Press.
This has probably complicated reasons, but I will name two of them. 1) In hegemonic discourse women are understood as trading sex for romance and financial stability (See Nicola Gavey, Just Sex?, 2nd Edition, p.98ff.). It is thus not a “man’s thing” in dominant heterosexual society to begin with, as they want the sex, hence the idea of a trade. 2) Following from the first point, feminist critique of romantic partnership as necessary for a good life seems to be more robust than the similar critique one could voice regarding sexual relationships.
Winer, Canton, 2023, "'My Gender Is Like an Empty Lot: ' Gender Detachment and Ungendering Among Asexual Individuals." OSF. July 21. doi:10.l 7605/OSF.IO/CAG7U, p.1.
