Sharon

“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it’s easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they’d be in discomfort because we’d be in discomfort. But their senses are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn’t distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don’t mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn’t bother them, anyway.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“As Julie Sondra Decker, author of The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, tells me, “We’re whole people who just lack that ‘driving force’ and it’s understandable in the same way that it’s understandable that someone doesn’t have ‘crafts’ as their driving force.” (Or in the way that people don’t have “not wearing sock-monkey hats” as their driving force.) “I’m not a ‘non-crafter’; I’m only asexual because there’s a word for it and because people have an objection to me not wanting to have sex. If they didn’t, my life would not have involved very much of talking about it,” she says.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. Like the occupants of our imaginary room, a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. These three things constitute its Umwelt. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world. The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us