Let me preface this piece by saying that I don’t have a problem with casual sex. I don’t like sl*t shamers one bit. If someone likes to have casual sex, great, good for them. I’m sure sex is very enjoyable for them. It’s just not my thing, even outside my sexual orientation (on the asexual spectrum).

When I first arrived at college, we were inundated with presentations and lectures about sexual assault, hookup culture, and dating violence. In some cases, there was almost too much information. One memorable presentation tried to frame hookup culture in a positive way and only succeeded in giving us ten days of giggling at a “blocktopus” joke. I can’t even remember context. Clearly the information given to us didn’t stick very well. The point of these lectures was to reassure the sea of probably very horny teenagers that it was totally okay to have casual sex, and I believe it succeeded greatly at that.

So school started, and with it, the parties and the regrets. I sat on the sidelines of a number of “scandals” my first year of school, the most memorable of which kept escalating on various avenues for a solid month. Thankfully for me and my friends, our scandals did not include STDs or pregnancy scares — just hooking up with the wrong people, or with the right people at the wrong time. Matthew’s Mug became notorious amongst the freshman class as the place for a drunken anonymous hookup. Yik Yak was a hotbed for anonymously discussing the aftermath of sexual escapades.

And I, with my taste for dancing, distaste for public spectacle, hesitance towards anonymity, and indifference towards sex itself, listened to my friends compare the sizes of their condom stashes and began to wonder, for the first time in my life, if there was something wrong with me.

Commonly, people in the asexual community before they learn what asexual mean believe themselves to be “broken” in some way. Since I was younger than everyone in my high school class, my mother told me that I just wasn’t developing socially as fast as they were. After I learned the words, I realized that I would have thought myself broken, most likely. And now here I was, wondering why I didn’t like casual. Why I was so hesitant to just “go on a couple of dates” just to see if I really liked whichever person I had been talking about at the time, because “it couldn’t hurt, right?”

At Vassar, most of my friends did not hesitate to compliment me when I looked good on a particular day. I knew that they valued me; I, who had spent seven years with my worthiness and value overlooked, was beginning to believe it. And then I was in the Mug, and no one was trying to anonymously hook up with me.

Did that mean no one wanted me?

Herein lies my problem with hookup culture. The self-imposed pressure of fitting into a culture focused on open expression of sexuality actually hurts people a lot of the time. Say for a moment that I had caved to the pressure I felt was inflicted on me and hooked up with someone I met on Friendsy (a college dating app), or Tinder (which I do not have), or even at some party I was dragged to. I know for myself that I would have regretted my actions and would have been uncertain how to deal with the possible repercussions. Speaking from observing my friends and their adventures in hookup culture, I would probably also have ruined a potential friendship and regretted that more than anything else.

I am all for standing up and speaking out about sex positivity and against sl*t shaming. Being part of a society where sex is not considered taboo for any party is important to me as a feminist, and I enjoy the occasional fun story about my friends’ sexual escapades. But I’m concerned that in all the talk about sex and hookup culture, people are forgetting about the sex-averse and sex-indifferent people like me who feel strange, uncomfortable, and sometimes even guilty for how they personally perceive sex. Comfort, not just consent, should be the top priority when discussing or negotiating sex, in order to keep us from thinking that we’re broken because we’re uncomfortable with casual.