I grew up in a pretty conservative society. So it’s not surprising that I was taught that promiscuity is a sin, having multiple sexual partners in a sin, and of course, pre-marital sex is a sin. As you can imagine, many of my peers were unfazed by these ultra-conservative “teachings” and some of them went on to have pre-marital sex with more than one partner. In my case, falling into the trap of believing that having multiple partners is immoral wasn’t actually too much of a stretch. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to have lots of sex. I couldn’t imagine why anyone could possibly want to have multiple partners. In fact, I still can’t. *shudders*
Because having strong sexual needs is not something I fully understand or have experienced, it wasn’t too difficult for me to confuse it with immoral behavior. Of course, at the time, it had never occurred to me that I was different from the norm* in any way. Thus, it wasn’t much of a stretch for the conservative ideology to convince me that promiscuity was the work of the devil, and as such, I held a number of non-liberal views. For example, I never thought slut-shaming was a problem. After all, why wouldn’t you call someone out on immoral behavior?
Do note that I am speaking of a time when I was an impressionable teenager. I did, in time, come to possess thinking brain cells. There did come a time, as I transitioned into adulthood, when I questioned all these things I was taught. Among them, was also that homosexuality was a sin. In my early twenties, I tried to understand the idea of being homosexual or bisexual or having the freedom to have as much sex as you want, and I also began to question my own sexuality. As I compared myself to my peers, it occurred to me that I was different. I had never been in a relationship and I never particularly looked forward to one day having sex, or even wanted to have sex. I evaluated whether I was exclusively attracted to men, or whether my attraction extended to females, and I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. It was, after all, difficult to separate the concept of attraction from wanting to have sex. If sexual desires never extended to an object of affection, does that even count as attraction?
When I ultimately started looking up asexuality on the internet (and got most of my information from asexuality.org), I realized two things.
1) I didn’t need to fit into a label. I am no longer much bothered about figuring out exactly what my sexual identity was. People had suggested I “experiment”, but I didn’t particularly want to. Upon reading the descriptions and explanations of asexuality, gray-sexuality, demi-sexuality online, I found I could relate to a lot of it, felt better about making a step towards understanding myself better, and learned to feel comfortable not fitting into a traditional label. I’m comfortable being the way I am. At twenty-seven years old, I have never been in a relationship, sexual or otherwise, and this doesn’t bother me anymore. If this changes in the future, then I hope it will be a good experience, but if not, then I am okay with that.
2) But more importantly, I began to understand other people better. I had been unwittingly viewing people through an asexual lens. Just because I didn’t have the same desires they did, I thought there was something wrong with them for having them. Why should I judge people for fulfilling certain needs when I have never experienced them?
It may be easy to think that women who slut-shame other women are either jealous of a lifestyle they wish to have but cannot due to restrictions of society, or that they are buttoned-up wet-blanket prudes. But sometimes, it may be because they just don’t understand women who happen to have different preferences. And that is why, I have concluded, it is important for us to explore our identities, and explore them in relation to other people, because that’s how we learn tolerance and empathy.
(Note: * By different from the norm, I mean the norm as accepted in pop-culture, especially as portrayed in media. Now, the media I grew up with usually tended to completely ignore sexuality, so in some weird sense, asexuality was the norm even if it isn’t acknowledged as a real thing. Which makes sense, because in my conservative culture sex isn’t viewed as something you do for pleasure, it’s something you do to procreate. For an asexual person, it can be easy to miss why this view might be problematic.)
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 