“At my best - when money is good, I’m in good health, and I’m traveling - sexual attraction never crosses my mind.” Jane, a woman exploring asexuality, agrees. “It’s something that I don’t have to deal with.” That untapped energy and spectrum of emotion goes instead into Paramo’s artwork. “I have thought about the fact that sometimes sex can be like a distraction,” Paramo adds. “ kind of equate asexuality to like some sort of miserable existence because you’re without sex, and people see sex is like the ultimate enjoyment,” Paramo says. Paramo says a life free from focusing on sexual behaviors can be liberating.
Paramo looks at asexuality as not necessarily choosing to abstain from sex or successfully skirting temptation, but notes that “temptations” might lie elsewhere.
Michael Paramo - creator of AZE journal (originally known as The Asexual) and moderator for the Facebook group The Ace and Aro Advocacy Project - is a digital artist and researcher who identifies as homoromantic and asexual.