Asexuality is a normal part of human sexuality
Glad to be A
New Scientist vol 184 issue 2469 - 16 October 2004, page 38
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If you absolutely, positively, have no desire to have sex, you're not alone, says Sylvia Pagán Westphal. Stand up and be counted
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... little-publicised studies of rodents and sheep suggest that asexual behaviour in mammals is not uncommon. ... [a study suggests] number of asexual people in the population, which suggested that there might be almost as many asexual people as there are gay individuals. ...
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Discovering our sexuality, we are told, is a perfectly normal process that must be celebrated. We might wish to tame it perhaps, but never negate it. Even concepts such as celibacy or abstinence work on the implicit assumption that we are deliberately rejecting sexuality. ...
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.... Elizabeth Abbott, University of Toronto.., is one of the few academics who are aware of the issue and believes it is a real phenomenon. Soon after her book A History of Celibacy was released in 1999, ...people who told her that, like celibates, they didn't have sex ... it was not a question of choice - they simply didn't want to... But societal pressures keep most asexuals in the closet, she adds.
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[as] a college student from Maine, to describe her feelings, she offered an analogy. "It's almost as foreign to me as someone saying 'You know, when you're 18 ... we're going to go to Mars'." Angela ... explains it this way: "I have never had interest in sex all my life, at all. It's like algebra. I understand the concept, but have no interest. I don't have the strong feeling about it that the rest of the world has," she says. It's like algebra. I understand the concept, but I have no interest
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... Jay ... flashes a confident smile and firmly shakes my hand as if he had known a part of me was secretly expecting a weirdo and he was glad to set me straight. Jay is no Calvin Klein model, but not unattractive either; in fact, he's kind of got the air of a young JFK Junior, tall and slender, with warm, dark eyes, and the mouth of a Greek god I can imagine young girls dying to kiss. He is living proof that it is absolutely wrong to assume asexuals shun sex simply because they can't get any. I ask him if anyone has ever tried to convert him into the realm of the sexual. "Yes, that's definitely happened," he replies. "That's actually the time that I made out with [snogged] someone." It didn't do anything for him but he ended up having a relationship with the girl - a sexless one, of course. "We had a physical relationship, more intimate in a lot of ways. We hugged each other a lot."
That Jay "likes" girls is one of several intriguing facts .... There are asexuals, for example, who have never felt the need to get close to other people, not even in a non-sexual way, and describe themselves as loners. But others, like Jay, want to connect with males or females - some people would define it as an orientation - only it seems to be purely emotional. Their desire is to find a "mate" with whom they can share interests and spend time with but not have any form of sexual relationship with. ... some asexuals are capable of experiencing bodily arousal. They get erections and some masturbate, although even while experiencing the physical cues of arousal there never is an impulse to do anything sexual with another person. A number ... told me that watching porn or looking at erotic pictures were awkward experiences that they couldn't relate to.
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The amazing degree of variation in the experiences of asexual people suggests that the underlying causes of their lack of sexual attraction are very different. Some asexuals might simply have extremely low sex drives in spite of an innate orientation towards males or females. Other asexuals might form a fourth category of sexual orientation in addition to the hetero-, homo- and bi-sexual ones, namely people who are attracted to neither gender, even if they have normal sex drives. There is no official definition for asexuality yet, but it probably needs to take all these variations into account, says Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist and human-sexuality expert studying asexuality at Brock University in St. Catherines, Canada. "The place where we draw the line is the desire to interact sexually with other people," says Brian*, a navy veteran from Virginia. When it comes to having children, some asexuals say they would like to have a baby, but most would use IVF to avoid having to have sex.
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A web forum, called AVEN (for Asexual Visibility and Education Network at www.asexuality.org) has extensive information about asexuality along with discussion forums. More than 1200 people subscribe
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Discussion of asexuality in academic circles is virtually non-existent, save for its occurrence in plants, worms and other lowly critters. "It has not been out there, there is nothing written about it," says Nicole Prause, a graduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington, who has done one of the very first studies on the subject..
But the hypoactive sexual desire label fails to acknowledge people who are happy and healthy but have a lifelong aversion to sex and feel no attraction towards men or women. It is this subset of the population whose true sexual identity has not been recognised, argues Jay. "This is a category that has socially not been manufactured yet. It's below the radar screen," says sociologist Edward Laumann from the University of Chicago in Illinois, one of the world's top experts on human sexuality. "You have to have someone who is prepared to accept asexuality as a way someone is born, like [having] blue eyes," says Abbott. This might be a novel view but it's not unreasonable, adds DeLamater. "Motivation to engage in sexual intimacy is a dimension that runs basically from zero to extremely high, and there are probably some people at that zero end," he says.
The question is whether that zero end represents a tiny sliver of the sexuality bell curve or a substantial slice. The limited research on asexual mammals suggests that asexual behaviour is actually not that rare. For example, studies in rats and gerbils done as early as the 1980s have demonstrated that up to 12 per cent of the males in the population are not interested in females. Named "duds," these animals are described as asexual in the literature. But because males are so aggressive, it had not been possible to put one of these individuals in a cage with another male to test whether their lack of interest in females was had to do with attraction to males.
In the 1990s, however, three separate teams from the US Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho, Oregon State University in Corvallis and the Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, tackled this question. In one study, young but sexually mature rams were put in a pen with females on 18 different occasions to assess their partner preference. As expected, the majority of rams mated vigorously with the ewes, but around 10 per cent did not mount the females or show any interest. Those rams were then put in a pen beside either two males or two females and behavioural tests measured the number of times the animals showed "interest" (kicks, vocalisations, sniffs, mount attempts) towards members of either sex.
Some of the rams - between 5 and 7 per cent of the population - tried to mount, sniff and sexually interact with other rams. Intriguingly, another group - some 2 to 3 per cent of the population - showed no interest towards either males or females. "They have no interest whatsoever in mating," says Fredrick Stormshak from the Oregon team. "They appear to be 100 per cent asexual." This asexual preference still held when the tests were performed one year later. Stormshak believes these asexual rams could offer a good model for understanding the basis of asexual behaviour in mammals. They could be used, for example, to see if the hormone levels in these animals are different
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... Laumann published one of the best-known sexuality surveys in 1994 (The social organization of sexuality: sexual practices in the United States, by Laumann and others, The University of Chicago Press) based on very detailed responses from almost 3500 Americans from all over the country and all walks of life. The survey showed that about 13 per cent of respondents had not had sex in a year. Forty per cent of those people considered themselves extremely or very happy in spite of this. The study also revealed, according to Laumann, that about 2 per cent of the entire adult population has never had a sexual experience. But that doesn't tell us whether these people would ever want to have sex.
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... another study of sexual practices, published in 1994, ...surveyed more than 18,000 people in the UK. Although it did not specifically target the issue of asexuality, it did include a section questioning respondents on sexual attraction. One option read: "I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all." Bogaert saw that a surprisingly high 1 per cent of respondents had chosen this last option - close to the rate for same-sex attraction, now believed to be running at about 3 per cent.
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“Asexuality is not an illness. People are using it as their sexual orientation”
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... asexual activism is indeed beginning to coalesce into a real political movement. "It's interesting because we're in the shadow of the gay rights movement, so it's a very different process now because we have things to draw on. There is also a culture that is ready to accept sexual variation much more readily than it was before." ...
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10-24-2004, 10:01 AM
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