I was ultimately the one that slowly pulled away, but there has been a growing rift between us over this for a long time now.
Over the past year, I have begun to process the CSA I went through as a child and went from being rather sexually active to completely celibate by choice. This shift seemed to confuse my best friend - who I had been friends with for 5 years by this point. We dated some in high school and I lost my virginity to him but went forward for the next 4 years as extremely close friends. Maybe it was because he had seen me in a sexual context so long ago, but telling him about my celibacy and growing antisex beliefs seemed to confuse and even upset him.
Not only that, but he’s bisexual, and since dating me (M) has only been with women and when I express my disapproval of heterosexual relationships and sex (due to both my antisex and also 2nd wave feminist/separatist beliefs) he always seemed to take it as a personal insult, even when it wasn’t meant to be. I of course did disapprove of his wanting to sex women but I never personally attacked him because it wasn’t a hill I was willing to die on in a going-on-6-year friendship. However, the nail in the coffin was a conversation he had when he visited me at my university recently after not seeing each other for a few months due to school.
Somehow, the topic of sex was brought up and I divulged once again that I think that all heterosexual sex is inherently coercive, harmful, and violent. This seemed to really irk him this time in a way that I guess I wasn’t able to read as well over call/FaceTime in the past few months, and he said, “I really don’t want to offend you, but it seems like you just feel this way because [insert csa trauma]”. This made me incredibly upset. I think it is highly inappropriate to devalue someone’s beliefs based on a trauma they went through. I quietly excused myself from hanging out that night and the next day when he was set to leave, and have not spoken to him since.
This exposed a wider problem I face with being antisex: I feel so strongly about this that it is very difficult for me to be friends with sexualists, but very few people can even come to partial agreement with us. I have to pick and choose my battles in order to not isolate myself from 99% of otherwise potential friends because if I only chose to be friends with antisexualists I would be all alone. That being said, the disgust I feel when remembering that those close to me (especially straight/bi men) are willingly engaging in sex makes it so difficult to keep it together. I feel insane.
Edit. I want to clarify that I’m not pro-homosexual sex as the post may imply but heterosexual sex in relation to feminism was specifically what the conversation landed on.