It is defined as an attraction model: “primary sexual attraction is an instant attraction to people based on instantly available information such as their appearance or smell, which may or may not lead to arousal or sexual desire. My sexual fantasies are never physical, it will be about a guy coming over to me in a library, having the same favourite author, talking, bonding … I can’t feel an urge for anyone without that, and it’s so rare for me to find it at all.”ĭemisexuality was first coined in an online forum in 2006 by a member of Asexual Visibility and Education Network (Aven), a website designed in 2001 to provide a resource on all things asexual – asexuality being the description for a person who does not experience sexual attraction at all.īy 2004, Aven had 1,000 members today there are more than 100,000 registered users. I don’t have a physical ‘type’, it doesn’t matter what they look like. “I have sexual urges but it’s only when I’m in a relationship that has come out of an intense emotional connection first. Sophie Duker discussed demisexuality night after night at her Edinburgh fringe comedy show.īuonaiuto is keen to stress that demisexuality does not mean she never wants to have sex. Instead they tended to get “hung up” on her, she says embarrassed. She grew up in south-east London to Italian and Jamaican parents “at the lower middle class end of things” and attended an all-girls comprehensive, where she struggled to work out why she couldn’t be like her peers she didn’t have crushes, couldn’t relate to their conversations about sexual desire and didn’t feel anything for “objectively hot” boys who tried it on with her.
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I don’t have that desire at all, my brain doesn’t work that way and I forced myself into situations that just ended up giving me a lot of emotional distress.”īuonaiuto is now 30 and works as a project manager in the media. “I can’t have one-night stands or sexual escapades or fancy a random person who is interested in me. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself and have had a lot of pressure from friends and family to be a way I’m not. “I understand the perspective of people who ask ‘why do you need to label everything?’,” says Buonaiuto, “but it’s been really helpful to identify with something that makes me feel comfortable about my sexuality. But how does it affect growing numbers of young people who identify as demisexuals? Last month, in her standup show Venus, the comedian Sophie Duker discussed demisexuality with her audiences night after night at the Edinburgh fringe festival the demisexual hashtag now has more than 2 million posts on Instagram, and almost 12,000 members on Reddit’s demisexuality sub-group.
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Yet awareness has rocketed in recent years according to Google Trends, searches on “demisexuality” have surged since 2009, with the most interest coming from Australia, Canada, the US, Britain and the Philippines.
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Scepticism abounds around emerging sexual identities, and in the case of demisexuality, which falls on the halfway mark on the asexual-to-sexual spectrum, the research is slim.