Are you an asexual?

For us Shalom is obvious that sexuality implies the way you are man or woman, the way you think, act, react as man or woman. So it is a lot more than a relationship, is about being the way you were created to be, man or woman, accordingly to your age and state of life, celibate, priest or married.

The following text is the translation of a post by a friend and also member of Shalom community Tobias Cortez on his blog “Da esquerda pra Direita”

Some time ago, if you put on any Internet search site the word “asexual” only unicellular animals would appear, maybe some bacterias, plants, etc.. Try putting the word mentioned on Google today. What appears? Asexual, in postmodernity, are men and women who, according to what you read, give no importance, do not feel attracted and have no type of relationship that is sexually oriented. Generally, those people (like more than the half of the world) confuse sexuality to the use of the genitals , or think that the only way of exercising their sexuality is through sexual intercourse.

But the problems do not stop there. An “asexual” is not defined as heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. It’s like the “asexual” is a fourth kind of sexual orientation. Many of them feel “disgusted by sex,” do not think that is important. They may even fall in love, marry and have children(!), so long as  there is no sex involved to all this! Some of them practice acts of masturbation, but do not associate this practice with sex.

Some uninformed Christians might find this amazing, “they are living in chastity.” But logically, this is absurd! Firstly because an “asexual”  understands sexuality as mere use of the genitals, or sex. In addition, this shares the worldly thinking, where a man or woman, gay, lesbian, indefinites or “no sex” is all the same thing, “a matter of choice” and nothing else.

What a reversal of values! The world gets to misrepresent what looks good! A young Christian struggling to live in chastity because he believes that this will lead to a way of ordering his sexuality. We know that sex is something willed by God and is made to unite man to woman in the sacrament of marriage, for life. We understand sexuality as a vital force that accompanies your whole being and is expressed in the way you talk, dress, relate, think, etc.. You know that sex is a gift given by God to unite the couple (man and woman!) and generate new children of God.

Live chastity in this relativistic world is an act of heroism that all young people are called to live. And as we live it, we can express to the world that we are, yes, men and women, sexual, and we want to live our sexuality intensely, but not as messy and distorted what the world offers us. We want and we’ll swim against the tide imposed in a dictatorial manner by the media that wants at all costs to convince us that we are like animals or even as bacteria! We say no to disordered sex, the ideology of gender and also this false sexual abstinence! And so we say yes to the project of Jesus Christ for each one of us in search of the state of life that God calls people to live in and the free exercise of sexuality and chaste!