As I’ve increasingly noticed of late, and contrary to beliefs earlier in my career about the psychological unity of humankind [ inline link mine ], not all human beings have all the human emotions. The logic of sexual reproduction makes it unlikely that anyone will have a new complex piece of mental machinery that nobody else has… but absences of complex machinery aren’t just possible; they’re amazingly common.
[ . . . ]
If you’re not around people who talk explicitly about the possibility of asexuality, you might not even realize you’re asexual and that there is a distinct “sexual attraction” emotion you are missing, just like some people with congenital anosmia never realize that they don’t have a sense of smell.
Many people seem to be the equivalent of asexual with respect to the emotion of status regulation—myself among them.
Re ‘?’ react:
[ — Inadequate Equilibria ]
[ earlier Facebook post introducing status-blindness concept ]