It is an impossibly hot summer evening in St Louis, a city in the
American Midwest best known for barbecues and blues music, and I’m
driving around the streets of the town’s Central West End wondering
if this will be known one day as the place where the revolution began.
In less than an hour I am to meet its leader, a young man whose
face I have never seen though we’ve been talking for months. I know
I shouldn’t be this eager to greet him in person, to finally see
what he looks like, but then again it’s not every day you meet a
young healthy man who is 100% uninterested in sex.
In a world where lust can be bought in a pill and skin is the
marketing tool du jour, being David Jay cannot be easy. At the age of
22 he has never had sex. He has never experienced sexual attraction
towards another person and does not believe it will ever happen.
There are many others who have similar stories to tell. They talk
about growing up not being able to understand why everyone else seemed
so interested in dating, kissing and touching; in experiencing the
ritual of mating.
Common label
Until recently these people felt isolated, never suspecting others
felt the same. But now, thanks in great part to an online forum
founded by Jay, they are finding each other and identifying themselves
with a common label. They call themselves asexual, and are coming out
to parents and loved ones, declaring their asexuality to be as valid
an orientation as being straight or gay.
They are printing T-shirts and pamphlets, and discussing the
concept of “A-pride” and what it means to be “A-sexy”. They
are, essentially, announcing to the world that they are not broken or
defective, or sexually dysfunctional. Instead they have a bona fide
sexual identity that must no longer be ignored.
A few months ago it might have been easy to dismiss these
individuals as outsiders whose coming together in the era of the
search engine has given them an inflated sense of community. However,
little-publicised studies of rodents and sheep suggest that asexual
behaviour in mammals is not so uncommon. And this August, a researcher
in human sexuality published the first tentative figures for the
number of asexual people in the population, which suggested that there
might be almost as many asexual people as there are gay individuals.
The figure raises the intriguing spectre of a repressed,
underground minority on the verge of bubbling up into the mainstream.
Are we about to witness the birth of the asexual revolution?
Coming out
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.
Doctors tell us that if we lose interest in sex we must seek help with
the problem.
Unsurprisingly, one of the hardest things about being asexual is
convincing other people that there is nothing wrong with you. Tell
someone on the street that you are asexual and they’ll stare at you
in disbelief, says Jay. The immediate supposition is that you’re
just a late bloomer, he adds.
A powerful example of how people react to the idea appears in an
article titled “Eight myths about religious life,” which appeared
in Vision 2002, an annual magazine from the National
Religious Vocation Conference in the US. It states: “Question:
what do you call a person who is asexual? Answer: Not a person.
Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a
fundamental part of our human identity.”
But now, people outside the asexual community are starting to
question these assumptions. Elizabeth Abbott, Dean of Women at Trinity
College, University of Toronto, Canada, 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,
letters started pouring in from people who told her that, like
celibates, they didn’t have sex. Only in their case, it was not a
question of choice - they simply didn’t want to.
That’s when she realised that asexual people actually existed.
“The asexual can be somebody’s husband or wife,” says Abbott.
But societal pressures keep most asexuals in the closet, she adds.
“They have to hide themselves because we are in a highly sexed
society. Imagine someone who doesn’t even want it and who isn’t
having a problem if they’re not getting it. There’s not really
anyone for them to talk to.”
Something different
According to Jay, one of the biggest battles is convincing other
people that being this way is what feels right. Many asexuals
discovered their orientation in their early teens and refer to their
asexuality as something that has always been with them. One example is
17-year-old Aspen (name changed), a mild-mannered girl with big blue
eyes who lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
One summer afternoon over lunch she told me that she had looked up
the word asexual in the dictionary at age 15, hoping to find a
definition for how she saw herself. None of the explanations fitted,
so she wrote in her journal: “What am I? Like I said before I’m
not anything; not anything there’s a word for, at least…If there
were a word for what I’m starting to think I am it wouldn’t -
unlike the word homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual - have
the word sex in it. I’m something different.”
When I asked Kate Goldfield, a 20-year-old 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 take you on a space shuttle and we’re going to
go to Mars’.” Angela (name changed), a lively 40-year-old writer
from Massachusetts, 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.
Loving variety I finally meet Jay face-to-face at the lobby of my
hotel. He 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.
More intimate
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 I
learn about asexual people as they discuss some of the most intimate
details of their lives with me. 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. (Jay once worried he could never feel love, but now
knows he can. Indeed, unencumbered by sexual feelings, he believes his
is a more powerful, unconditional form of love.) In addition, 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 of asexuals told me that watching
porn or looking at erotic pictures were awkward experiences that they
couldn’t relate to.
“I get the feelings…but my body never made the mental
connection to what I would do about it,” explains Pete (name
changed), a high-school student who is in a non-sexual relationship
with a girl. “I get the arousal but when it happens it gets annoying
because to me there is really no purpose to it, there is nothing I can
do about it,” he says.
No definition
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 (name changed), 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.
Much of the sense of community that emerges when Brian and others
talk about their collective status as asexuals comes from the fact
that they have found a virtual neighbourhood where they constantly
interact. “It’s made it a whole lot easier for us to find each
other,” Brian says.
One such web forum, called AVEN (for Asexual Visibility and
Education Network at www.asexuality.org)
was founded by Jay in 2001 and provides extensive information about
asexuality along with discussion forums. It began with fewer than 50
members but now boasts more than 1200. People from all over the world
have visited the site: from Saudi Arabia, Japan and Cuba.
Convincing the sceptics
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.
One reason is that the bulk of research on human sexuality has been
driven by the problems sexual activity creates, such as sexually
transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy. “Concern about those
problems is what produces money to do research,” says John DeLamater,
a human-sexuality expert from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And even when researchers do study people who are not having sex,
it is always on the understanding that sexual inactivity is a problem
that needs fixing. “Hypoactive sexual desire” is listed in the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) - the bible of
psychologists and psychiatrists. The manual says this can happen
during adolescence and persist throughout a person’s life. It is
considered a disorder if it causes the person distress.
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.
Below the radar
“This is a category that has socially not been manufactured yet.
It’s below the radar,” 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% 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.
Sheep studies
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% 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% of the population - tried to
mount, sniff and sexually interact with other rams. Intriguingly,
another group - some 2% to 3% 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% 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.
Not having sex
Although such studies might offer insights into asexuality in
people, comparisons between such different creatures as humans and
sheep are controversial and should be made very cautiously. The
closest we have got to understanding human asexuals comes from studies
- mostly surveys - of people who report not having sex.
Obviously this category not only includes people who see themselves
as asexual but also people who are simply unable to have sex because
of old age or ill-health. Nonetheless, these surveys offer some
interesting clues. 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% 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% of the entire adult population has never had a
sexual experience. But that does not tell us whether these people
would ever want to have sex.
It is only recently that sexuality research has begun to focus less
on behaviour and more on people’s desires as a better measure of
their sexual preference. Bogaert has just published the very first
study estimating the prevalence of asexuality in the population using
this notion and the results are intriguing (The Journal of Sex
Research, vol 41, p 279).
Same-sex attraction
In his analysis, Bogaert looked at another study of sexual
practices, published in 1994, that 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% of
respondents had chosen this last option - close to the rate for
same-sex attraction, now believed to be running at about 3%.
Prause took a different approach in her - as yet unpublished -
study of asexual people. Instead of looking at older data she decided
to recruit asexuals via the internet and ask them questions about
their sexual experience, their arousability and desire levels.
What she found, though she stresses the results are very
preliminary, is that people who describe themselves as asexuals (41
responded to the survey) seem to have similar levels of sexual
behaviour to other respondents, suggesting that they are often having
sex when they don’t really want to. More importantly, says Prause,
her study suggests that asexuality is not some kind of illness.
“People are using it as their sexual orientation,” she says.
A pride
If asexuality is indeed a form of sexual orientation, perhaps it
will not be long before the issue of “A” pride starts attracting
more attention. AVEN’s online store sells items aimed at promoting
awareness and acceptance: one T-shirt proclaims, “Asexuality: It’s
not just for amoebas anymore,” and there’s a thong that reads,
“It’s only underwear. Get over it.”
Jay has been working hard at raising awareness: giving talks,
networking with other organisations and getting the issue of
asexuality aired in the media. He thinks 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.” After raising money through
the AVEN website, Jay designed, printed and distributed 5000
educational pamphlets. The front panel reads: “not everybody is
interested in sex”.
Positive identity
DeLamater says he sees several parallels between this flurry of
activity and the beginnings of the gay revolution in the 1970s. “In
that sense they are very much like what happened in the gay and
lesbian and transgender community; a group of people who originally
were treated and thought of themselves as strange or deviant or not
fitting somewhere who gradually come together and create a positive
identity out of those characteristics,” he says.
One example of that transformation is the fact that people are
coming out of the closet. “I was so excited about finally
discovering myself that I just went out and told a few of my friends
and it kind of spread,” says Pete. By finding this positive identity
and being open to loved ones about it, some asexuals, like 23-year-old
Esther Dail from Colorado have even been able to fill
“traditional” societal roles by getting married to sexual
partners. “He doesn’t push me,” says Dail of her husband, with
whom she doesn’t have intercourse and whom she told about her
asexuality when they were dating.
Bogaert and other academics believe that while the idea of an
asexual movement is not far-fetched, it is likely to have less impact
and momentum than the gay revolution because the notion of asexuality
is uncontroversial. “It doesn’t repel, it just doesn’t
appeal,” says Abbott. But who knows, maybe 10 years from now we will
live in a world where it’s totally cool to be “A” and being a
“happy single” is no longer considered an oxymoron.
Source by Sylvia Pagan Westphal, October 14, 2004 - New
Scientist Print Edition ©2004
