CW: brief discussion of sexual assault (under the text break)
One of the commonest questions I get around asexuality is, But what does it feel like?
What does it feel like to be asexual? What does it feel like to not experience sexual attraction to anyone at all?
Imagine living in a world where almost everyone hallucinates tapirs. Most of the time, this mass delusion doesn’t cause any problems – people know the tapirs aren’t really there and can usually just enjoy or ignore their visions without it causing problems, apart from the odd embarrassing mishap. So to an outside observer, everyone’s walking around day-to-day just as if they weren’t seeing phantom ungulates around them – only everyone knows that everyone else sees them too, right?
Now imagine you’re one of the 1% of people in that world who doesn’t see tapirs. In fact, you don’t even know what a tapir looks like.
You know there’s something other people experience that you don’t, but you have no real idea of what it is. The best you can do is make guesses based on the way people around you talk and act around the subject of tapirs – and tapirs just aren’t talked about all that much.
In fact, the subject of tapirs comes up so rarely that it’s easy to forget everyone else is seeing something you aren’t.
