The Daily Whatever, May 4: Demisexuality
Is it an identity? Or a proclivity? A GenX discussion...
Happy Sunday, friends!
Today Lawrence Winnerman and I had a great conversation about this story I wrote about demisexuality:
But really, it was a conversation about much more, including...
When does something cross over from being a modifier to an identity?
Do neo-identities like demisexual belong on the LGBTQ+ continuum, or are they taking up space where they don’t belong?
Is identity immutable?
Does it harm tweens and teens to identify as asexual or demisexual, because they apply a label that might be hard to escape over time?
How can asexuality be a spectrum, when the “a” prefix means “not” or “without.” No means no, right?
Then we ended the live with our weekly picks for Substacks to follow. I recommended Jacqueline Dooley, a memoirist who writes beautifully about living with grief, and Lawrence recommended Füsun Aydın, who he believes will be “capital f famous” as a memoirist and novelist one day for her lyrical prose.
We’d welcome your thoughts.
And we thank Polly Walker Blakemore, Peter William Murphy, Damon Kenner, and many others for tuning in.
Join us all week long at 10am ET/7am PT for The Daily Whatever here on Substack.
Love you mean it!
Dana DuBois
The memoirist
Dana DuBois is a memoirist and Gen X word nerd based in the Pacific Northwest. She founded I Write Out Loud, her Substack publication, where she writes across a range of subjects; parenting, music and pop culture, relationships, and feminism are her favorites. She co-hosts The Daily Whatever Show. Em dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semicolons make her heart happy. All stories by Dana
Lawrence Winnerman
The science fiction writer
Lawrence Winnerman is a science fiction writer in Fort Wayne, Indiana. After twenty-five years leading technology programs at Amazon and Microsoft, he was chief operating officer of Blue Amp Media. In his Substack publication, The Hinge & The Near Field, he writes about AI and democracy and is serializing his novel Light Shines Through. He co-hosts The Daily Whatever Show. All stories by Lawrence
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