I asked if it made any difference if I should cross the line

[sovay]

Formulated in a friend's comments, transplanted here with minor emendations so that I remember it:

Since I continue not just to dislike but feel actively alienated by the term "demisexual" even though conceptually it is the closest of the extant labels to the mode in which my attraction to other people operates (all physical interest in a person follows from emotional and intellectual interest in them: I have never had a sexual partner who was not a friend first and I don't even seem to develop crushes on people I do not know; I suspect it of being linked on some level to the part where my interest in people's bodies does not take their sex or gender as a relevant consideration), it appears that my personal fix-it is "philosexual," because the connotations of Greek φίλος "beloved" do not confine to a particular kind of love. The professor from whom I learned Greek always translated φίλοι as one's "near and dear," encompassing family, lovers, friends. "Philosexual" would accurately convey for me the sense of "hot for the one you love" which is totally lacking from the construction of "demisexual," where the focus is on the half-quality of the sexuality over the experience of its activation. Now I just have to hope this term was not previously coined by some deeply skeevy human being and that's why it never caught on.

(My alienation and welcome to it: speaking personally, I don't feel I do sexuality by halves, and sociologically I have a lot of problems with the idea that a person only counts as a fully sexual being if they want to climb strangers like Kangchenjunga. I understand the value of the term by the number of people who use it as a self-identifier, but the idea that I should consider the manner in which I acquire my partners a significant part of my sexual identity remains, honestly, peculiar to me.)

Comments

[mrissa]

I feel like if we ever live in a truly civilized culture, we'll find even wider variation than we do now in what elements of "the same" identity are important to different people. There are currently white people in the US who have honestly no idea where their ancestors came from as well as white people who are deeply culturally invested in their ethnic origins, and everything in between--because all the options are basically safe at this point, for the vast majority of white people in the US. I hope that at some point we can be in the same place with relational structures: that some people will have "I acquire my partners this way and this is how many and what terms" as major pieces of personal identity and some may not even be able to tell you how they're put together that way because it's just not something they've been forced to make important. And everything in between.

[sovay]

I hope that at some point we can be in the same place with relational structures: that some people will have "I acquire my partners this way and this is how many and what terms" as major pieces of personal identity and some may not even be able to tell you how they're put together that way because it's just not something they've been forced to make important. And everything in between.

I hope so, too. I would like things to be that unmarked.

[asakiyume]

YES