So anyone who’s spent any time learning about asexuality from asexuals likely knows that many asexuals experience aesthetic attraction to people, despite our inability to feel sexual attraction. Aesthetic attraction is about the image of a person, the visual: their body, their face, the way they dress, even the way they move (though this is sometimes separated out and identified as kinesthetic attraction). Asexuals can have types, when it comes to physical appearance: certain body types they find especially attractive, hair color they prefer, eye color, style, etc. Basically, if you’re an asexual who experiences aesthetic attraction, it’s the same experience as being a sexual person feeling sexually attracted to someone hot, except there’s no sexual component to finding the other person hot.

It occurred to me that the way a lot of asexuals describe and define aesthetic attraction isn’t actually correct. Asexuals frequently mix up what I call aesthetic recognition with aesthetic attraction, and I myself have done this in the past. The most common way asexuals describe aesthetic attraction is with the nature or painting analogy: “When I feel aesthetically attracted to someone, I think they’re really beautiful and I like looking at them, but I don’t want to have sex with them–like when you’re looking at a beautiful sunset or a painting.”

It’s logical that we would make this comparison because recognizing beauty in a person, without sexual desire, is similar to recognizing beauty in inanimate visuals. But that analogy describes recognition, not attraction.

The difference applies to sexual people too: a heterosexual woman can recognize another woman as beautiful, but that doesn’t mean she’s attracted to that other woman’s physical appearance, the way she’s attracted to a man’s appearance. And yes, it’s harder to parse out what nonsexual aesthetic attraction would be like for someone who’s allosexual and thus difficult to compare it to nonsexual aesthetic attraction in asexuals, but what I’m saying is, when we talk about sexual people recognizing physical attractiveness in people of the gender(s) they are not sexually attracted to, we’re almost never talking about actual aesthetic attraction. We’re talking, again, about aesthetic recognition.

When you see a beautiful sunset, you don’t want to fuck it, but you’re also not attracted to it in the sense of being involuntarily drawn toward it. You could have a big photo print of a beautiful sunset on the wall of your home and walk past it every day without even paying attention to it, no matter how pretty you think it is when you do look at it. Try it on for size: try saying out loud, “I’m aesthetically attracted to sunsets.” Or “I’m aesthetically attracted to Renaissance paintings.” You may really like art from a certain period or in a certain style enough that you collect it and really enjoy looking at it all the time, but you aren’t attracted to the art so much as you’re appreciating it. There’s something more to attraction, of any kind, than appreciation.

Since figuring out that aesthetic recognition is not, in fact, aesthetic attraction, I’ve realized that maybe aesthetic attraction is something virtually exclusive to asexuals. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of an allosexual person feeling aesthetically attracted to someone they don’t want to fuck, which makes sense because sexual attraction is almost always inclusive of attraction to a person’s looks/body/etc. It’s possible to be sexually attracted to someone you don’t find physically hot, but if you’re an allosexual, I don’t think you can find someone physically hot without also feeling sexually attracted to them. You don’t find every single person of the opposite sex or same sex or whatever gender you’re sexually attracted to, physically good-looking or sexually attractive, but when you do see someone you think is good-looking and that person is of a gender you’re sexually oriented toward, is that attraction to their appearance ever truly devoid of sexuality?

Let me try to describe the difference between aesthetic attraction and aesthetic recognition from my own point of view. I’ve experienced both, though aesthetic recognition is exponentially more common to my experience than attraction. I am rarely attracted to people based on looks. Very rarely. As in, when I realized that aesthetic recognition is not aesthetic attraction, it became clear to me that I’ve been aesthetically attracted to fewer than ten men thus far in my life and almost never aesthetically attracted to women during the first 20 years of my life or so.

Aesthetic recognition basically entails me seeing someone who’s good-looking, whether in face or body or both, and thinking, “Oh, that person has a nice body/pretty face/nice smile/nice eyes.” There’s nothing compelling about it. It doesn’t feel much different than noticing the moon or a beautiful suit in a department store. (Actually, I’ve probably been significantly more excited by a gorgeous classic car or a high-quality leather jacket than by anyone I recognized as good-looking.) Aesthetic recognition doesn’t feel irresistible. There’s no involuntary, inexplicable draw to the other person, just because I recognize they’re good-looking by society’s standards or whoever’s. I don’t have intrusive thoughts about someone who’s good-looking, if I’m just recognizing their looks without feeling attraction. If I see a good-looking stranger at a mall on a Saturday, and I’m not attracted to them, I’m not going to think of them again after that moment.

Aesthetic attraction feels compelling. It feels like there’s this magnetic force driving me to look at someone, really look at them and look for as long as possible. When I’m aesthetically attracted to someone, I’m aware of their presence and position in the room. If I’m aesthetically attracted to a celebrity, I may seek out photographs of them just to look at repeatedly. (Pretty sure no one goes hunting for sunset photos online, on a regular basis, no matter how pretty they are.) Someone who is aesthetically attractive to me stands out in public. That might be because I am so rarely aesthetically attracted to people, but I also think that it’s a feature of aesthetic attraction abstractly. It’s sort of like, if you’re looking at a big painting and most of it is black and white but there’s a red circle somewhere–you are immediately and consistently drawn to the red circle. That’s where your eyes want to go. And you may walk away from the painting and think about that red circle again later in the day because it’s just so visually appealing to you.

I recognize that aesthetic attraction works differently for different asexuals, and for the romantic aces, aesthetic attraction can be tied into romantic attraction. But for me personally, I’ve come to understand that aesthetic attraction doesn’t actually have much to do with who I choose to get to know and who I form emotional bonds with or don’t form them with. Aesthetic attraction is this background experience for me. It’s nice when it happens, but because it usually isn’t happening and because I intellectually understand that aesthetic attractiveness doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s overall appeal as a potential friend, it’s basically a blip on my radar. I don’t need to be aesthetically attracted to someone to be emotionally attracted to them, and just because I’m emotionally attracted to someone, doesn’t mean I’m going to find them aesthetically attractive.

The strongest experience of aesthetic attraction I’ve ever had in person was to a man who most closely resembled my ideal type. Total stranger. Never formally met him. A friend of mine did meet him (this was in college), then said to me, “If you want, I can introduce you.” To which I said, “What would be the point of that?” I absolutely loved seeing him around campus, loved the feeling of being so drawn to his looks, but I also figured, “He’s straight, he’s got a girlfriend, odds of me getting what I want in a connection with him are nil, so why bother?” Just because he was hot as shit, doesn’t mean we would’ve gotten along as people anyway. I heard he was a great guy, but that says nothing of our personal compatibility.

I’ve definitely experienced secondary aesthetic attraction: which is described as, “I met someone cool, I developed feelings for them, we formed a meaningful friendship, and now I can see them as physically attractive, even though I didn’t see it when we first met. Now I can appreciate certain features of their face or their body, their smile or their laugh, etc.” It’s basically the brain fucking with you, distorting your perception of someone because you like them or love them. If they were a stranger, you wouldn’t look at them twice because you don’t actually find them visually, physically good-looking. But once you love them, now all of a sudden you can like the way they look not because their looks are objectively great but because their looks belong to them. It’s their face, their eyes, their voice, their body, their hands, their hair, whatever. You love them, so you come to love these visual parts of them, too.

In this vein, something like internet dating or internet socializing in general, is really weird for me because

a) on the one hand, very few people strike me as physically/visually attractive

b) physical appearance is most of what I have to go on, when browsing a sea of strangers online (or even in person)

c) I’m aware of this disconnect between who I think is physically attractive and who I actually end up feeling emotionally attracted to.

It’s not that aesthetic attraction is totally unimportant to me. I do want to be aesthetically attracted to my male partner, for instance. Powerfully attracted. I know what that feels like, and I want it to be part of the dynamic between us. Yet of all the emotionally significant relationships I’ve made in life, few of them included aesthetic attraction and hardly any of them started with aesthetic attraction. When I’m looking at people online, I’m aware that I’m ignoring people based on their looks alone, while also being aware that I don’t need to be aesthetically attracted to someone, to love them and adore them and have a really rewarding relationship with them. So aside from the fact that I don’t actually want a normative romantic relationship with anyone, online dating just…. doesn’t really make sense for me.

Another I thing I want to briefly mention, on the subject of aesthetic attraction from an asexual perspective, is my own recent realizations of how my aesthetic attraction experiences have been influenced somewhat by internalized sexual attitudes. Namely: the sexual objectification of the female body and the eroticizing of female same-sex sensuality and physical affection in the media.

Since I was a child, I’ve been attracted to men: emotionally, aesthetically, sensually. I felt passionate love, infatuation, and desire for men who I wanted to either be romantic friends with or be a normative romantic couple with. (I went through a phase, growing up, where I assumed I wanted normative romance + monogamy + the whole shebang.) I could feel strong aesthetic attraction to male bodies, to men who I emotionally fixated on without even being attracted to their looks at first, and I’ve always been aware that I really want and value sensual/physical/nonsexual intimacy in my emotionally significant relationships, even without sensual attraction to specific individuals in the picture. I was having all of these feelings toward boys and men for years before I discovered asexuality was a thing and before I started to identify as asexual. I assumed I was straight, yet at no point did it naturally occur to me to interpret my emotional and sensual attractions to men as sexual. I never worried about the possibility that I wanted to fuck men and just didn’t know it. I knew I didn’t. No matter how deeply I loved a man, no matter how much I wanted to be close to him or to have a physically intimate relationship with him, I knew I didn’t want or need to have sex with him. Even while those feelings and attachments were happening and I had an active libido, I knew I wasn’t sexually desirous toward men! And I had a much cruder understanding of sexuality and attraction back then, during my teen years, in comparison to now.

But during the small handful of times, during the last few years, where I found myself aesthetically attracted to women, I would have a moment of panic. “Oh, my God,” I thought. “Am I experiencing sexual attraction? To women? Is this a new development in my social makeup?” I would analyze what I felt in those instances of attraction, to death. I’d re-read descriptions of sexual attraction online, trying to see if what I had felt–usually for no more than a minute or two, toward strangers in public places–matched up. I would question myself: what do I want from these women? Am I sensually attracted to them? (Nope!) What am I feeling in my body? What’s going through my head when this happens?

Then, through conversations with people close to me, one of whom is an asexual woman who’s always been more attracted to women than men, it dawned on me that I was freaking out over nothing, for really fucked up reasons. If I compare the years and years worth of attractions and attachments I’ve felt for men to my aesthetic attraction to women I don’t even know, it becomes apparent that what I’ve felt toward the women wasn’t any different than what I felt toward men I had been aesthetically attracted to in the past. In fact, my attraction to women, which is as sporadic and infrequent as my attraction to men, is pretty weak in comparison to what I’ve felt for men. If what I had felt for men never gave me pause, never caused me to question my asexuality, why the hell should my similar attraction to women give me pause? I know for a fact that what I felt toward strangers based on their looks alone didn’t even include sensual attraction, because for me, sensual attraction is a direct result of emotional attraction and attachment: I always want physical affection and intimacy in the abstract, but I’ll only desire physical affection and intimacy from you specifically if I already love you.

I think the reasons behind my irrational anxiety about finding women aesthetically attractive are twofold:

1. As my ace friend pointed out, women and women’s bodies are sexually objectified in the media all the time, by everyone. Women are taught to view themselves and each other as sex objects, and the most popular type of presentation of a woman is one that plays up her physical attractiveness in a sexual way. Women are never just pretty or beautiful; they’re sexy, the point of their physical beauty being to attract sexual attention. We are not taught that nonsexual aesthetic attraction to women is possible. Women are either sexy or ugly. Their beauty is located in their degree of sexual desirability.

2. In this same vein, same-sex sensuality and touch between women is often eroticized subtextually because media is created by and for the heterosexual male gaze, and straight men think lesbianism is hot. I’m not talking about actual lesbians in TV shows and movies, having actual lesbian relationships or lesbian sex. I’m talking about straight female characters who have a sexually suggestive scene with each other, where one woman is applying sunscreen to the other woman’s bare back in such a way that we’re supposed to find it a little sexy–even though they’re not going to fuck and even though they’re straight. It’s about fantasy. The fantasy of straight men viewing women as sex objects in whatever way turns them (the men) on.

This isn’t just an issue between females, though. We’ve now reached a point in American culture where no matter what the gender combination is, everything is sexualized and romanticized: every kind of affectionate touch, strong emotion, verbalization of love and affection, demonstrations of how much one values the relationship one has with someone else. Basically, the message is: “If you want or feel anything for anyone that goes beyond the most superficial, unemotional, non-physical, meaningless ‘friendship’ possible, you’re romantically and sexually attracted to that person. The only reason you would want to touch them, love them, be emotionally intimate with them, is because you want to fuck them and be in a romantic relationship with them.” We’ve taken every kind of marker of emotional connection between human beings and narrowed down the context in which they can happen to one highly specific type of relationship: the romantic-sexual couple relationship.

Men and women can’t be friends. Men can’t be friends. Women can’t be friends. Unless by “friends” you mean people who hang out together casually in public spaces and don’t give a flying fuck about each other. Oh, and they better keep at least three feet apart from each other at all times.

In American media, there is no presentation of an emotionally intimate, physically affectionate or sensual, deep, meaningful friendship between two characters–regardless of gender–that is not eroticized and/or romanticized by the TV show/movie itself or by the audience. Everything is either gay or straight because everything is sexual.

(And sexual people act shocked when I say that they don’t give a shit about friendship. Or when I suggest that asexuals may be capable of a type of nonromantic, nonsexual love that sexual people are incapable of.)

I wasn’t concerned because I felt attracted to women’s looks. I was concerned by the possibility of that attraction being sexual, as I would be if I had any reason to question whether my attractions to men are sexual. Now that I understand my aesthetic attractions to women are no more sexual than my aesthetic attractions to men, I can relax and reflect on how silly it was for me to react to my own noticing of attractive women as if it was somehow fundamentally different than my noticing of attractive men.

If I can want and be both attracted to a man’s appearance and very sensually, physically intimate and affectionate with a man, without wanting sex from him, I can feel that way about a woman, too. Finding someone, anyone, physically good-looking doesn’t mean you want to fuck them and it also doesn’t mean you should pursue an actual reciprocal relationship (of any kind) with them. Aesthetic attraction is not romantic attraction or emotional attraction or sensual attraction. Aesthetic attraction isn’t love. And even sensual attraction can happen apart from romantic attraction, apart from aesthetic attraction, and apart from sexual attraction.

It might not be true of romantic-sexual people, but I can be very attracted to someone visually without wanting to know them or touch them or fuck them. And I can want to touch someone–sensually, affectionately, intimately–without wanting to fuck them or be in a normative romantic relationship with them and without feeling aesthetically attracted to them. Gender doesn’t make a difference.