“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?!” has by now become a pop-cultural knell, co-opted by all the straight girls in Clapham and sundry along with ‘YAAAAASS KWEEN!’ around season four of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
But, in spite of the ubiquitous cawing it’s birthed, it would seem that Mama Ru’s message of amorous introspection is increasingly being taken in earnest. As reports would have it, the demand for Eat-Pray-Love-esque self-marriage ceremonies is at its highest, with some service providers charging north of £2500 to those looking to sign up to a life of ‘sologamy’.
Though this particular practice of self-marriage might better be viewed as an extreme extension of #selfcare, there is, in fact, an elusive sexual demographic that professes to experience legitimate sexual and romantic attraction to themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, there have been rare moments when I’ve caught myself in the mirror and thought damn, but on reflection it’s mostly down to whatever I’m wearing, and I’m not sure if a fleeting appreciation of the enhanced self I’ve expensively curated through material possessions really matches up to what might fairly be described as inflected sexual attraction.
I first thought that autosexuality might have something to do with that thing where conventionally attractive white gays date their effective twins, but it turns out it covers those that experience sexual attraction to themselves. There’s also autoromanticism, which speaks to a desire to experience a romantic relationship with oneself.
The shade of difference between the two was admittedly a tricky one for me to grasp, though that changed when I considered my own love life as a sort of Venn diagram, with one circle comprising people with whom the interactions I seek are solely physical, and the other containing those with whom the relationship I’m looking for predicates on something more profound, and isn’t fuelled by the same primal desire — a romantic crush on a close friend, for example. There is, of course, a pretty significant overlap between those two groups, but there are still a fair few people that straggle in one or the other.