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. 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.
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.
