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What does it mean to be "Demi-sexual"?

Goodstyle

Goodstyle

Banned
Nov 1, 2017
1,661
This tweet from budweiser has gone viral and everyone is making fun of it:



A big reason why is that the whole thing seems confusing. Besides asexuality, which is the absence of sexual desire, the rest of these "identities" feel confusing. From my understanding, being a "grey asexual" just sounds like having a low sex drive? And the demi-sexual thing, only being horny for people you know feels pretty standard for a lot of people and kind of hard to measure. Like, I think everyone has stretches of their life where they don't feel super sexual, especially if you're in a relationship for long enough.

I don't know! Maybe I should get cancelled for this, but I genuinely want to understand what it means to be "gray asexual" and how one would even measure a sexuality as nebulous as being "sometimes horny".
 
deimosmasque

deimosmasque

Ugly, Queer, Gender-Fluid, Drive-In Mutant, yes?
Moderator
Apr 22, 2018
14,252
Tampa, Fl
It's not about just people you know. It's people you have formed a strong emotional connection with.
 

Deleted member 8861

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
10,564
budweiser... is not the account I expected to see this tweet from

either way I'm not qualified to answer your question OP. at this point I've just let go of trying to understand every little thing, identities are convoluted messes, who cares how someone chooses to describe that
 
Sai

Sai

Prophet of Truth
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
5,635
Chicago
To way oversimplify it, think of how willing you are to hook up with/be intimate with someone you just met at a bar that night. Some folks will only be comfortable being intimate with people they've formed a stronger bond with, and not someone they just met or haven't known that long or that well.
 
Ketkat

Ketkat

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,727
"A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone. It's more commonly seen in but by no means confined to romantic relationships. Nevertheless, this term does not mean that demisexuals have an incomplete or half-sexuality, nor does it mean that sexual attraction without emotional connection is required for a complete sexuality. In general, demisexuals are not sexually attracted to anyone of any gender; however, when a demisexual is emotionally connected to someone else (whether the feelings are romantic love or deep friendship), the demisexual experiences sexual attraction and desire, but only towards the specific partner or partners. "
 
LL_Decitrig

LL_Decitrig

User-Requested Ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
10,334
Sunderland
It's okay. They are sponsoring Pride and their creative team thought they'd like to use their brand to extend consciousness of differing modes of sexual attraction. They want to do that in a sensitive way, and what better way to do that than acknowledge that not everybody is raging to fuck. It's responsible promotion of alcohol consumption.

I don't understand why, in a world where Becks beer is a thing, anybody would care about Budweiser. But good for them.
 
Bradbury

Bradbury

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,856
the idea of demi is that sexual attraction only comes with strong emotional bond, it´s more than just someone you know.
Grey is the idea of someone that is mostly ace, but sometimes can have sexual attraction, it not neceserity about libido. It´s more than not feeling sexual for a time.
 
OP
OP
Goodstyle

Goodstyle

Banned
Nov 1, 2017
1,661
Sai said:
To way oversimplify it, think of how willing you are to hook up with/be intimate with someone you just met at a bar that night. Some folks will only be comfortable being intimate with people they've formed a stronger bond with, and not someone they just met or haven't known that long or that well.
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That's a lot of people! Literally every introvert I know, male or female, feels this way.
 
diakyu

diakyu

Member
Dec 15, 2018
17,544
Ah shit I think I might be one of these. A google search and a lot of this sounds like me.
 
Froyo Love

Froyo Love

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
1,503
Goodstyle said:
This tweet from budweiser has gone viral and everyone is making fun of it:



A big reason why is that the whole thing seems confusing. Besides asexuality, which is the absence of sexual desire, the rest of these "identities" feel confusing. From my understanding, being a "grey asexual" just sounds like having a low sex drive? And the demi-sexual thing, only being horny for people you know feels pretty standard for a lot of people and kind of hard to measure. Like, I think everyone has stretches of their life where they don't feel super sexual, especially if you're in a relationship for long enough.

I don't know! Maybe I should get cancelled for this, but I genuinely want to understand what it means to be "gray asexual" and how one would even measure a sexuality as nebulous as being "sometimes horny".
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I think you're making a mistake that I made a lot some time ago: I was trying to ask, why are all these different labels necessary? Can't we have a simpler system of description? But that's totally missing the purpose in building these labels in the first place.

Imagine you're someone who identifies in that "gray asexual" territory. Your sexuality is clearly very different from the cishet "standard" that society is pushing on you, because you feel so disconnected and alienated from that standard that you start looking into queer circles for some place to feel at home. But what if that gray asexual label doesn't exist? When you tell ace people that you're trying to form a common bond and connection with that you feel sexual attraction sometimes, it's heartbreaking to have people say "Hey, you're not REALLY ace."

If you don't have empathy for those experiences, it's easy to dismiss why the label matters. But would you roll your eyes when someone says "I'm not British, I'm Irish"?
 
Fulminator

Fulminator

Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,203
Goodstyle said:
That's a lot of people! Literally every introvert I know, male or female, feels this way.
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the key is that they only feel sexual attraction with someone they are closely bonded with

most people will be sexually attracted to someone even if they don't know them, but then may or may not choose to act on it based on how comfortable they are with a stranger
 
Bradbury

Bradbury

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,856
Froyo Love said:
I think you're making a mistake that I made a lot some time ago: I was trying to ask, why are all these different labels necessary? Can't we have a simpler system of description? But that's totally missing the purpose in building these labels in the first place.

Imagine you're someone who identifies in that "gray asexual" territory. Your sexuality is clearly very different from the cishet "standard" that society is pushing on you, because you feel so disconnected and alienated from that standard that you start looking into queer circles for some place to feel at home. But what if that gray asexual label doesn't exist? When you tell ace people that you're trying to form a common bond and connection with that you feel sexual attraction sometimes, it's heartbreaking to have people say "Hey, you're not REALLY ace."

If you don't have empathy for those experiences, it's easy to dismiss why the label matters. But would you roll your eyes when someone says "I'm not British, I'm Irish"?
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This, so much this.
 
OP
OP
Goodstyle

Goodstyle

Banned
Nov 1, 2017
1,661
Froyo Love said:
I think you're making a mistake that I made a lot some time ago: I was trying to ask, why are all these different labels necessary? Can't we have a simpler system of description? But that's totally missing the purpose in building these labels in the first place.

Imagine you're someone who identifies in that "gray asexual" territory. Your sexuality is clearly very different from the cishet "standard" that society is pushing on you, because you feel so disconnected and alienated from that standard that you start looking into queer circles for some place to feel at home. But what if that gray asexual label doesn't exist? When you tell ace people that you're trying to form a common bond and connection with that you feel sexual attraction sometimes, it's heartbreaking to have people say "Hey, you're not REALLY ace."

If you don't have empathy for those experiences, it's easy to dismiss why the label matters. But would you roll your eyes when someone says "I'm not British, I'm Irish"?
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Ah, this is more understandable to me.
 

Deleted member 48897

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 22, 2018
13,623
I don't really like the notion of "sex drive" because of the way that sex is not really driven by the same sort of feedback model that hunger, thirst, etc. are -- rather than "I'm hungry, so I need food. I am eating food and soon I will be less hungry" feedback loop, sexuality is better modeled by both excitatory (I WANT IT) and inhibitory (THIS IS NOT APPROPRIATE) controls.

The thing about dealing with specific categories for this is that the dual controls are different person-to-person. There are people who don't want sex because, to put it dryly, the excitatory controls aren't very strong for them. They don't have much desire at all. Then there are people who often don't want sex because the inhibitory controls are stronger than the excitatory controls. For these people they might actually want a lot of sex, but only if they are in specific conditions where they feel it is safe to do so -- and of course the question of what constitutes safety or security is a very subjective one, which is a reason there are like 3-4 different categories here.

Arguably the former maps well to the concept of "asexual" whereas the latter maps better to what people call "demisexual". It's complicated, because like with terms such as "gay" or "straight" the identifications have cultural and social importance and aren't just descriptors of behavior, so in actual medical research you'll see terms like MSM (men who have sex with men), WSMW (women who have sex with women), etc. The more clinical terms usually associated with the behavior models are "spontaneous desire" (which arguably matches the 'default' expectations of sexual desire) vs. "responsive desire".

I'm not the hugest fan of the term because it's very broad and thus not very informative. It arguably might even apply to myself, which may well be why I don't think it's useful -- in the public sphere demisexuality/responsive desire doesn't really manifest itself much differently from the "default" model. I think the spontaneous vs. responsive desire model is a more useful one because it's a better explanation of behavior vs. "don't want sex as much as some theoretical other person".

And of course there's a certain irony to this coming specifically from a beer company (cf "rape culture") but then when has actual corporate behavior stopped a company from making weak-albeit-informed gestures toward inclusion?
 
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Casualcore

Casualcore

Member
Jul 25, 2018
1,303
My spouse is demi-sexual so I'll take a stab at it. In the decade we've been together, they've really only noted someone's attractiveness I think maybe twice. They can notice beauty but do not want to approach, kiss, touch, or be intimate with people they see. They don't want to have sexy-times with anyone except me. It's just not something they're interested in at all. They require a deeper feeling of romance, connection, and love to even want to kiss someone. We don't have sex often for people who live together, but we make out all the time. They definitely have strong romantic and sexual feelings for me, so they don't identify as asexual.
 
Nacho

Nacho

Member
Oct 25, 2017
8,123
NYC
I think you're conflating sexual attraction with romantic feelings. They're separate. Additionally I think you're just having a hard time understanding that people self-label their sexuality. You're saying 'it's just low sex drive', it you attempting to put a label you feel you understand on someone who says that label is not accurately describing their sexuality.
 

Deleted member 32561

User requested account closure
Banned
Nov 11, 2017
3,831
Goodstyle said:
That's a lot of people! Literally every introvert I know, male or female, feels this way.
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It's a bit deeper than that though. It's like, they don't ever experience sexual attraction towards anyone, ever, unless they have an emotional connection. To the point of not getting crushes on celebrities or fictional characters just based on appearance like most people do.
Froyo Love said:
I think you're making a mistake that I made a lot some time ago: I was trying to ask, why are all these different labels necessary? Can't we have a simpler system of description? But that's totally missing the purpose in building these labels in the first place.

Imagine you're someone who identifies in that "gray asexual" territory. Your sexuality is clearly very different from the cishet "standard" that society is pushing on you, because you feel so disconnected and alienated from that standard that you start looking into queer circles for some place to feel at home. But what if that gray asexual label doesn't exist? When you tell ace people that you're trying to form a common bond and connection with that you feel sexual attraction sometimes, it's heartbreaking to have people say "Hey, you're not REALLY ace."

If you don't have empathy for those experiences, it's easy to dismiss why the label matters. But would you roll your eyes when someone says "I'm not British, I'm Irish"?
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Good post.
 
Bradbury

Bradbury

Member
Oct 28, 2017
1,856
Also, I´m glad OP is open to listen and learn, but please, don´t put someone identitity in " " just because you don´t understand it yet.
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

Member
Oct 25, 2017
39,054
Funyarinpa said:
budweiser... is not the account I expected to see this tweet from
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Budweiser was one of the first major brands to actively market to the LGBT community. A lot of the ads started by just being vague about them, not implying anything (Subaru and Volkswagon did something similar... for instance, Volkswagon's "da da da" ad from the superbowl like ~15, 20 years ago is considered an ad that is a stealthy appeal to homosexuals, one that heretosexuals don't notice), like it'd be a group of 4 guys standing around arm in arm and enjoying some ice cold bud lights, but then they progressively came out with more overt advertising. I think Budweiser was one of the first major brands to outwardly just market with homosexual couples in their ads, too.
 
Prolepro

Prolepro

Ghostwire: BooShock
Banned
Nov 6, 2017
7,310
It's like being Perseus or Achilles but without super powers or basically anything cool and you don't sleep with anyone.
 

Deleted member 8861

User requested account closure
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Oct 26, 2017
10,564
The Albatross said:
Budweiser was one of the first major brands to actively market to the LGBT community. A lot of the ads started by just being vague about them, not implying anything (Subaru and Volkswagon did something similar... for instance, Volkswagon's "da da da" ad from the superbowl like ~15, 20 years ago is considered an ad that is a stealthy appeal to homosexuals, one that heretosexuals don't notice), like it'd be a group of 4 guys standing around arm in arm and enjoying some ice cold bud lights, but then they progressively came out with more overt advertising. I think Budweiser was one of the first major brands to outwardly just market with homosexual couples in their ads, too.
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that's pretty cool actually

might be a bit heterosexual of me but what's the "da da da" ad about lol
 
Username1198

Username1198

The Fallen
Oct 27, 2017
8,125
Space, Man
It means you're into half god half humans

Real answer

A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone. It's more commonly seen in but by no means confined to romantic relationships.
 
The Albatross

The Albatross

Member
Oct 25, 2017
39,054
Funyarinpa said:
that's pretty cool actually

might be a bit heterosexual of me but what's the "da da da" ad about lol
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Back in like the late 90s or early 2000s, Volkswagon had this ad of two guys driving around town in a Volkswagon Jetta or something picking up curbside furniture. The ad was one of those "quirky VW ads" from back then, and had this catchy song that went "da da da..." in the background. If you heard it, it'd stick with you. For hetereosexual people, like me, I seriously never thought twice about that ad as being something marketing to the homosexual community, but then I heard a story about it like 15 years later about how many people thought that ad was specifically showing a gay couple buying furniture together and that it resonated as, like, one of the first mainstream TV ads marketing to gay people. Subaru did something similar in the 90s when they realized that their market data was showing that Subarus were really popular with "Head of Household women," which was like a weird outlier for Subaru back then, as they weren't really marketing to women in particular... but an ad exec figured it out, that gay women were identifying with the Subaru brand, so Subaru went in aon an experimental ad campaign specifically marketing to lesbian women. And now of course even my gay women friends call Subarus "Lesburus" semi-joking, semi-serious.

I read an article in the Atlantic or something about this a year ago, lemme find it.

Well that didn't take long: https://www.theatlantic.com/busines...-came-to-be-seen-as-cars-for-lesbians/488042/

dMW6Ihe.png


"When we did the research, we found pockets of the country like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon, where the head of the household would be a single person—and often a woman," says Tim Bennett, who was the company's director of advertising at the time. When marketers talked to these customers, they realized these women buying Subarus were lesbian.

"There was such an alignment of feeling, like [Subaru cars] fit with what they did," says Paul Poux, who later conducted focus groups for Subaru. The marketers found that lesbian Subaru owners liked that the cars were good for outdoor trips, and that they were good for hauling stuff without being as large as a truck or SUV. "They felt it fit them and wasn't too flashy," says Poux.

Subaru's strategy called for targeting these five core groups and creating ads based on its appeal to each. For medical professionals, it was that a Subaru with all-wheel drive could get them to the hospital in any weather conditions. For rugged individualists, it was that a Subaru could handle dirt roads and haul gear. For lesbians, it was that a Subaru fit their active, low-key lifestyle.
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For its first Subaru ads, Mulryan/Nash hired women to portray lesbian couples. But the ads didn't get good reactions from lesbian audiences. What worked were winks and nudges. One campaign showed Subaru cars that had license plates that said "Xena LVR" (a reference to Xena: Warrior Princess, a TV show whose female protagonists seemed to be lovers) or "P-TOWN" (a moniker for Provincetown, Massachusetts, a popular LGBT vacation spot). Many ads had taglines with double meanings. "Get Out. And Stay Out" could refer to exploring the outdoors in a Subaru—or coming out as gay. "It's Not a Choice. It's the Way We're Built" could refer to all Subarus coming with all-wheel-drive—or LGBT identity. "Each year we've done this, we've learned more about our target audience," John Nash, the creative director of the ad agency told the website AdRespect. "We've found that playful coding is really, really appreciated by our consumers. They like deciphering it."

The delight among niche audience groups in "decoding" the hints in Subaru ads surprised the marketing team—and in the case of its gay-friendly ads, so did straight audiences' ignorance. While many gay and lesbian consumers loved the shoutouts in the license plates, straight people would only notice features like a bike rack. Poux, who helped come up with the license-plate idea, says he held focus groups with straight audiences where he'd show ads featuring gay couples. Even after an hour of talking about gay issues, they'd think a man was shopping with his uncle.
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Oh and here's the VW ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_s5-R_JE4c


Then in the 1990s, as society changed, brands started testing the waters with coded ads. Robert Klara, a staff writer for Adweek, compares it to a two-way mirror: The ads contained messages that straight audiences would miss, but gay audiences would pick up on.

"If you were a member of the gay community and you saw an ad you would say, 'They're talking to me,' " Klara says. "Like, you remember the famous VW 'Da Da Da' commercial?"
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The 1997 ad for the Volkswagen Golf, called "Sunday Afternoon," featured two guys driving around. It's been called memorably ambiguous.

"That's a textbook example," Klara says. "Heterosexuals who saw those two just assumed they were friends or roommates, whereas the gay community assumed they were boyfriends."
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LL_Decitrig

LL_Decitrig

User-Requested Ban
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
10,334
Sunderland
Goodstyle said:
I don't know! Maybe I should get cancelled for this, but I genuinely want to understand what it means to be "gray asexual" and how one would even measure a sexuality as nebulous as being "sometimes horny".
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You shouldn't be cancelled for this. Not at all. Never.

Sexuality is confusing because it's so personal, and when somebody introduces a new model it's guaranteed to confuse people. If you look at well loved films like Life of Brian you'll see that they felt quite free to satirise what was then known as trans-sexuality. The Eric Idle character wants to be recognised as a woman. The subtext is that you'd have to be mad to want to be a woman in Palestine during that period. Films have to be edited and there might have been more in the original script, but what was distributed helped to change minds. Just not on the topic of gender.

The team also included the openly gay writer/performer Graham Chapman, who plays Brian in the film. Graham was a longtime collaborator with his fellow writer John Cleese, and continued to work with John when they both joined the Python team.
 

Deleted member 8861

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
10,564
The Albatross said:
Back in like the late 90s or early 2000s, Volkswagon had this ad of two guys driving around town in a Volkswagon Jetta or something picking up curbside furniture. The ad was one of those "quirky VW ads" from back then, and had this catchy song that went "da da da..." in the background. If you heard it, it'd stick with you. For hetereosexual people, like me, I seriously never thought twice about that ad as being something marketing to the homosexual community, but then I heard a story about it like 15 years later about how many people thought that ad was specifically showing a gay couple buying furniture together and that it resonated as, like, one of the first mainstream TV ads marketing to gay people. Subaru did something similar in the 90s when they realized that their market data was showing that Subarus were really popular with "Head of Household women," which was like a weird outlier for Subaru back then, as they weren't really marketing to women in particular... but an ad exec figured it out, that gay women were identifying with the Subaru brand, so Subaru went in aon an experimental ad campaign specifically marketing to lesbian women. And now of course even my gay women friends call Subarus "Lesburus" semi-joking, semi-serious.

I read an article in the Atlantic or something about this a year ago, lemme find it.

Well that didn't take long: https://www.theatlantic.com/busines...-came-to-be-seen-as-cars-for-lesbians/488042/
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oh this is awesome and pretty wholesome :) thanks
 
whytemyke

whytemyke

The Fallen
Oct 28, 2017
3,789
You have sex but only enough to reduce your energy by 1/4 of where it was at before you started.
 
Ms.Galaxy

Ms.Galaxy

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
1,653
I'm demi, and basically I don't really feel any sexual attraction towards people unless I have a relationship of sorts with them regardless of their gender. Like, you can give me pictures of a hot person by any standards you have doing sexually provocative poses, and while I can acknowledge their appeal, I just cannot get sexually stimulated by them. Meanwhile, give me similar pictures of any of my friends, and I will likely get aroused.
 
LL_Decitrig

LL_Decitrig

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10,334
Sunderland
whytemyke said:
You have sex but only enough to reduce your energy by 1/4 of where it was at before you started.
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I like this idea.

"Sorry I did my quota."

"Loved that, but I'm only halfway there. Now kindly fuck off. Next!"

I'm not a hugely sexual person (except for wanking) but I can imagine the frustration of having somebody just give up on you. I don't initiate sex without asking myself if I'm up to the task of satisfying my partner. Otherwise why bother?
 

Deleted member 35598

User requested account closure
Banned
Dec 7, 2017
6,350
Spain
Ketkat said:
"A demisexual is a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone. It's more commonly seen in but by no means confined to romantic relationships. Nevertheless, this term does not mean that demisexuals have an incomplete or half-sexuality, nor does it mean that sexual attraction without emotional connection is required for a complete sexuality. In general, demisexuals are not sexually attracted to anyone of any gender; however, when a demisexual is emotionally connected to someone else (whether the feelings are romantic love or deep friendship), the demisexual experiences sexual attraction and desire, but only towards the specific partner or partners. "
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Not sure I get it...
 
samoyed

samoyed

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
15,191
Ex-Actarus said:
Not sure I get it...
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It means the demi needs to form an emotional bond with a person first before feeling sexual attraction towards them. Like, assuming you're a cis-hetero man, you might see an attractive woman and think "I desire her sexual companionship". A demisexual wouldn't feel this way until they get to know the attractive woman.
 
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