This is how I discovered that I’m asexual.
This. This one second of a TV-14 sex scene.
It wasn’t that I was repulsed or disgusted or bored or didn’t think the actors were “hot”. It wasn’t anything like that.
It’s a standard TV sex scene: Two characters fall into bed, exhausted from their simultaneous orgasm or whatever, but still with enough presence of mind to make sure their naughty bits are covered.
But watch it again. See if you pick up what bothered me.
The guy falls straight back, to the lower right of the frame. The woman falls straight back, to the upper right of the frame.
I was utterly baffled by the physical orientation of the two characters.
If they’re both falling straight back and they had just finished immediately prior to the cut to the scene (which is what’s strongly implied), then they should be falling straight back, in parallel, with her directly back on top of him. Or maybe side by side, with one of them rolling or sliding off.
But they’re not parallel. They’re at a roughly 45 degree angle to each other, with an intersection point around the center of her chest. That would mean their genitals are not even remotely close to one another, it’s clear that there was no mouth contact, and from a position like that, even hand contact would be awkward. I suppose they could have been masturbating together, but why would they do that in a position where neither one could see anything?
So just what in the hell were they supposed to be doing there?
I have drawn this diagram to illustrate my confusion:
As you can plainly see, there’s something strange here.
No, not with the clip from the TV show. There’s something strange in that I launched a Zapruder Film style analysis of the clip from the TV show. I didn’t once, in all of this, think “Look at those hot people having hot sex, that’s so hot”.
And then it clicked. That’s pretty much the way I’d always looked at sex. A puzzle to be solved. A curiosity. Not a desire. Not a need. Not a good time. I looked at sex differently than everyone I’d ever heard talk about the subject. There had to be a reason for that. That’s what led to the investigation where I discovered asexuality.
This is how that one second of TV sex scene changed my life.