this video was brought to you by my amazing patrons over on patreon if you want to be part of the community which has perks including a patreon discord monthly recommendation list care packages and more then the link is in the description i've just taken the plunge and gone full time doing youtube and some other creative things which are going to be announced very soon so your support over there quite literally makes these videos happen okay so this video has been a long time coming for a while rowan ellis asexuality was the top search term involving my name on youtube and that was before i'd made a single video on the topic so today i'm going to be giving the people what they want honestly i was putting this off because let's be real for a long time there wasn't a whole lot of asexual representation to look at and i haven't been about that under NUMBER_TOKEN minute video live for a while now plus just because i'm a stressed out little asexual lesbian doesn't mean i'm going to be interested in every ace character that pops out the woodwork but over the past few years asexual representation has been gaining momentum this emergence of characters across different shows and movies who seem to be asexual whether it's explicitly labeled in canon or not has led to an increase in awareness of the sexual orientation in the mainstream we've had representation appear in cartoons soaps comedies and more this has the potential to create a modest but not insignificant snowball in the coming years with showrunners and writers who previously had no idea that asexuality even existed including the experiences in their writing and potentially allowing asexual creators more understanding and openness when pitching their own stories of their own identities but as this video will show there's still a long way to go i went into writing this script worried that i wouldn't have enough to say for a whole video when in fact i managed to have too much to say so i'll be making a follow-up video to this about some common problems around asexual representation both videos are totally standalone so you don't have to have watched both but i guess if you're new to this channel and you like this video then consider subscribing to make sure you see that second one as well so partly because of this lack of representation in the mainstream combined with our woefully lacking sex education system and general cultural assumptions around sex i'm sure there'll be some people watching this video who might have heard of asexuality but aren't entirely sure what it actually means so i thought it would be pretty useful to start off by quickly addressing the question what is asexuality with the understanding that labels can broadly describe identities but don't necessarily need to strictly define them two people who both identify as asexual may have different experiences or feelings towards sex sexual attraction or desire asexual is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of feelings experiences and identities i feel like i'm being very like queer big sister everyone's valid here but i do think it's worth saying at its core being asexual means experiencing little to no sexual attraction sexual attraction is generally about being attracted to a specific person that then leads to a desire for sexual contact with that person asexual is not the same as aromantic
START_SELFPROMO_TOKEN this video was brought to you by my amazing patrons over on patreon if you want to be part of the community which has perks including a patreon discord monthly recommendation list care packages and more then the link is in the description i've just taken the plunge and gone full time doing youtube and some other creative things which are going to be announced very soon so your support over there quite literally makes these videos happen okay so this video has been END_SELFPROMO_TOKEN