I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath. “We’re living in an age of dating apps and swiping left or right. Of Twitter and Tinder and Grindr and Instagram, where everything is sexualised to sell. Where beauty is an illusion, Photoshopped, and Botoxed in the name of perfection for one goal: sex. And let’s not even start on movies, books, hell, even music film clips are R-rated now. And to 99% of the population, it works. It sells, right? And it’s ingrained into each generation that sex equals love. Sex equals marriage fulfilment; I’m pretty sure even most churches say that marriage needs to be consummated and is for the sole purpose of procreation.” I shook my head. “I mean, really. Fuck that noise.”

That earned me a few chuckles and even Jordan smiled.

“But we know different. Sex doesn’t equal love. Sexual physicality is not the finish line; being sexually intimate with someone is not the only expression of our emotions. Except society thinks it is. Society and, by association, social media tells us sexual intimacy equals love. And the crux of this representation is that sexuality is normalised, mainstream. Which means asexuality is the opposite of that. Stigmatised, and anyone who doesn’t want sex, doesn’t like it, isn’t attracted to it, or is even repulsed by it, is labelled as not normal.”

I looked at each of their faces. “When I was sixteen, I told my then-boyfriend, who also happened to be my best friend, I wasn’t comfortable fooling around. And I certainly didn’t want to have sex. He thought I might have just needed more time or maybe I was scared of being gay. Maybe there were a dozen possibilities but he couldn’t fathom that I just…” I sighed. “I just wasn’t interested in that aspect of a relationship. And you know what he said?” I smiled sadly. “He laughed at me and asked what was wrong with me. He said he thought about sex all the time. He said all normal teenagers thought about sex all the time and that gay guys thought about it even more. He dismissed me, laughed, and made jokes at my expense. And I can tell you, it didn’t get much better as I got older and told other people. But there it was, the one word that would haunt me for years.”

A few people nodded. I didn’t even have to say it.

Normal.

“There’s a difference between normal behaviour and normalised behaviour,” Nataya said. “Normal is subjective. And by whose definition should we fit anyway? Do we take normality from people like my grandma who is horrified by just about everything we see on the internet, or do we take normality from guys who think it’s normal and completely okay to send dick pics to people they’ve never met?”