Scarleteen

So I've known I was on the asexual spectrum since I was around 12. I don't feel sexual attraction to real people or want a sexual relationship. That hasn't changed, and I doubt it ever will.

However, as I've started to go through the more emotional/mental/behavioral (idk what to call it) side of puberty over the last half a year or so, I have developed a much higher libido, and started masturbating quite frequently (almost daily, sometimes twice or thrice a day) and much more intensely.
With this increased libido I have developed more of an interest in reading and sometimes writing smut (mostly fanfiction), whereas before I was very sex repulsed. Mind, I'm still sex repulsed when it comes to my real life and people I know (as well as most celebrities, with maybe one possible exception who plays a charcter I crush on so I project my attraction to the character onto him).
Anyway, it's been an exciting and eye-opening experience, but also a scary one and, along with some occasional sexual attraction I've been feeling towards fictional characters and scenarios, it's led me to change how I label myself from black-stripe ace to aegosexual.

The problem is that identifying as aegosexual and interacting with sexual media like this has given me some big imposter syndrome about whether I'm really asexual. The fact that my high libido has me thinking about sex an uncomfortable amount doesn't help with this.
I've also developed some (pretty mild) internalised aphobia; occasioanally I feel guilty and unnatural and disgusting for masturbating and thinking about fictional sex like this. Infamous internet caricatures like the incel gooner and crazed fujoshi have not helped with these growing feelings.

How can I get over this shame and feel comfortable in being very interested in sex but only when its not real. I always feels like I'm a disgusting horndog or a pick-me fraud and it's making me hate myself.

Hey again, PennyDuck.

So, I want to first say that there's nothing disgusting about sexual desire, about masturbating, or about interest in sex. No matter what you are or aren't feeling or doing, I can assure you you're not a "disgusting horndog" because even though I understand you've experienced sexual repulsion, that doesn't actually make these things repulsive. They're all common, typical parts of being a human being. The internet as a whole is not a place I'd say is particularly sex positive -- much like most of the world isn't -- so sexual stereotypes you find there don't come from anything sound or informed, they mostly come from things like ignorance, oversimplified thinking about sex or sexuality or bias. My best advice is to try and evict them from the real estate of your mind. <3

I like to always remind people that all of human sexuality can, and often tends to, to at least some degree, shift and change over time, and that's particularly the case when people are moving from childhood -- and we'd say that 12 is someone on the edge of childhood, typically -- to adulthood. It would be pretty unusual for the way you experienced and understood your sexuality at 12 to be the same at 14, 18, 25, 40 or older. As we grow and change and expand as whole people, so, too, does our sexuality tend to.

No one is an impostor if and when or because some part of their sexuality is shifting or has shifted. So, even in the event that it turns out some day that asexuality, or asexuality as you have known it or experienced it so far, doesn't feel like a fit for you anymore because you feel very differently, that won't have meant that when it did feel like a fit you were an impostor. It just would mean that you changed in this way over the course of your life, much like if you went from believing in a god or not, or liking tomatoes or not, or being a visual artist or not. A static state of near anything over the course of a human life is highly unusual.

Do you get what I'm saying? How do you feel about it?