Bojack Horseman Saved My Life

Okay, so that’s a slight exaggeration, but if I said that Bojack Horseman changed my life, that would be quite accurate. I don’t simply mean ‘changed my life’ by giving me something new to watch and enjoy, although to be honest living in isolation for almost a year of various lockdowns has meant that I cherish shows like Schitt’s Creek and Bojack for bringing laughter (and occasional tears) to my otherwise relentlessly monotonous days.

What’s so great about this show? Princess Carolyn for one is a magnificent creation – if Amy Sedaris had done nothing else, that performance alone should grant her immortality. However there is one character above all who struck a chord with me that I really was not expecting: not the titular antihero, whose cynicism and lack of fulfilment assuredly mirror my own, but the asexual Todd Sanchez.

A little background on me. As a teenager I once flirted with a school friend (we were both a little tipsy). I was quite unprepared when he proceeded to take my hand and place it on his genitals. He was not happy that I had no wish to fondle him, indeed he mentioned my perceived frigidity to other friends. For a long time I considered this to be the closest (luckily for me) I got to a ‘Me Too’ moment; now I realise it was more than just an incident of unwanted sexual attention – it was a signal that I was not all that interested in sexual attention from anyone.

On a separate note, I learnt a few years back that the ‘friend’ in question had died (oddly we’d drifted apart after the forced genital-touching). I found I was unable to mourn him, which really should have alerted me to the fact that there was more to what he did to me than my subconscious chose to register.

How long have I thought and felt that something was wrong with me, that I was not functioning as I should? That I was, in the old sexually critical term, ‘frigid’, because although I was attracted to men, it was not a sexual attraction. Unsurprisingly this did not bode well for the relationships I endured – my first boyfriend (14 years my senior – because I liked him as a person rather than a sex object) was not particularly adventurous in the bedroom, but even so I was never comfortable with anything more than mutual masturbation. I digress, but in hindsight his treatment of me reeked of gaslighting. As a naïve teenager I would not have been aware of the signs, but after two years on and off (mostly off) I was sick enough of the emotional manipulation that I walked away and never saw him again.

Subsequent relationships (if they can be called that) were equally destructive, not because the men in question were gaslighters who made me feel like an impotent failure, but because I was unable to reconcile the fact that I liked them but didn’t want to jump their bones (one of them referred to me rather caustically as ‘sexually anorexic’). In my folly I even tried Grindr, hardly a salubrious experience at the best of times. Mercifully I only had two meets, which were enough to drive home the belief that I was broken.

I had of course come across the term ‘asexual’ before, but the proffered definitions (in the media at least) indicated someone who had no attraction whatsoever (sexual or romantic) for other people. That did not fit me – I was still romantically attracted to men, I just didn’t have much interest in having sex with them. It was only with the character development of Todd Sanchez that the veil was finally lifted. Here was someone who had no sexual attraction to other people (or indeed anthropomorphic animals, but that’s another subject) but crucially who still wanted to meet and date other (asexual) people.

So thank you to Bojack Horseman, firstly for the many hours of entertainment in these miserable days, and secondly for opening my eyes (and my mind) to the reality – and indeed the normality – of being asexual. It has taken me a long time to reach this stage of self-awareness, to be able to stand up and say, ‘I’m asexual’, and to know that – contrary to my long-standing fears of being abnormal or dysfunctional (I am after all a Bojack at heart, as much as a Todd) – I am not quite alone.