“HOW do I know I don’t like sex if I’ve not tried it,”
muses Rebecca Paine, 21, restating a question people have asked her
dozens of times, a question that she answers in a tone that suggests
it’s a really stupid question.
“What if I told you bungee jumping is the greatest thing in the
world. Would YOU try it?”
Bad example, I say, I am scared of heights. Hang on, is it a good
example? Are you scared of sex?
“No, I am not scared of it. Bad example. OK, what if I told you
being a brain surgeon is the greatest thing in the world, and there is
nothing better than plunging your hands into other people’s brains.
Would you want to do it?”
Actually, I don’t think they use their hands, I think they... oh,
right. Does sex disgust you? Because that is a disorder. I read it in
the Merck Medical Manual.
“It is more disinterest than disgust. Occasionally, when I
contemplate everything the sexual act involves, I think, ‘Ugh, why
would I want to do that?’ It is just something I don’t feel the
need to experience.”
I tell Rebecca, who I am interviewing because she is one of an
increasingly visible and “out” group of asexuals — people who
have never experienced sexual desire for another person — that I
remember that “Ugh” factor from when I was about 9 or 10, and
learnt how babies were made, and figured out that my parents had to do
it twice — once for each child — and my whole body winced. So I
wonder, is asexuality some sort of Peter Pan syndrome, some emotional
or hormonal retardation, where you get stuck in that pre-puberty
gross-out, body-wince approach to all things sexual?
Howard Jacobs, an endocrinologist, doesn’t think so. “A lack of
libido usually means the libido was there and they’ve lost it. I
have seen people who have not developed it, but that is a pituitary
disturbance and there are obvious delays in physical development, and
in those cases you induce puberty. But if people have never had
desire, and it doesn’t bother them, they wouldn’t come to see me.
I would be amazed if there were any hormonal basis.”
Rebecca doesn’t think its hormones either. She thinks, like many
asexuals, that it is just another way to be — hetero, homo,
transgender, bi. So how about nothing, never? Can’t that be a box to
tick? Not tonight dear, not ever, and I haven’t got a headache.
Why the sudden interest in people who aren’t interested in sex?
For a start, there’s a lot of it about on the web, a medium millions
of people use to find out how to get more sex, not none. Aven — the Asexual
Visibility and Education Network — a website founded by
David Jay, 22, an American asexual activist whose oxymoronic job
description — a no-action activist — shows just how radical it is
in a much sexualised society to not want sex. Jay would like to see
the virtual community emerge into a visible one, wearing T-shirts that
declare “A-Pride”. I tried to attend a London meeting arranged by
another group, but no one except me showed up. You don’t know
rejection until you have been stood up by an asexual.
In October New Scientist featured Jay in an article that
referred to preliminary research that showed that asexuality might be
as common as homosexuality. If this is the case, we probably all know
a few. I think I do, and these are not people who can’t get any;
they just don’t want it, and it doesn’t make them unhappy in an
“I’ve got a disorder that needs a drug or therapy” kind of way.
My friend’s mother, happily married, three grown-up children,
grandchildren, was asked, on a dare, to compose a hypothetical
personal ad for herself. She wrote: “Small, middle-aged woman, likes
cinema, long walks, gardening, doesn’t like sex, seeks companion.”
But she was of the generation that, even if they didn’t like it,
still did it, because that is what you did to make babies and keep the
husband happy.
I ring the classified ad department of a major London listings
magazine to ask if they have ever had a personal ad in which the
person classified themselves as asexual. No, they said, though people
do seek “companionship” which could mean no sex, but probably
doesn’t.
That hypothetical personal ad did throw up an interesting question,
which is does dislike of an activity you have tried, in some capacity,
and not liked, mean you just haven’t done it properly, or with the
right person, or with the right sex? There are asexuals who have
experienced sex but really didn’t like it. I ask Rebecca, who has
never had a sexual experience with anyone, if she has ever had an
orgasm.
Long pause. “Yes, but not very often, and it’s just like
scratching an itch. It is divorced from any mental process. It’s
more tied in with my monthly cycle.”
Inappropriately, this reminds me of the film Addams Family
Values when Uncle Fester is asked by his money-grabbing new bride
if he has had sex before. He says no, he hasn’t, and she says: “So
how do you know you are not having it now?” Somehow, Rebecca just
knows that not having it is better than having it. But when I ask her
how asexuality simplifies her life, her answers are all to do with
avoiding the anxiety-provoking aspects of sex. “You don’t have to
stress if people find you attractive, if your partner is cheating on
you. You don’t have to worry about who you will spend your life
with, if you are performing well in bed. There is no competition with
your friends, no stress about STDs, no worry about pregnancy.”
Zoe O’Reilly, an asexual writer, in an essay entitled “My
Life As an Amoeba”, writes: “I find that being devoid of
sexuality makes my life a lot easier. By not participating in that
aspect of my life, my time is freed for other activities: building
shrines, memorising Cure lyrics, studying forensic psychology . . .”
Though you might think with interests like that she’d be better
off having sex, it becomes apparent that the benefits of asexuality
can’t all be to do with the stuff you avoid and all the free time
you get. David Jay has a more philosophical spin on it. “Believe it
or not there is a lot of exploring to do as an asexual person. Being
out has let me be a lot more comfortable with myself. It’s let my
relationships get a lot more complicated and I think it’s allowed me
to develop an interesting perspective on the world.”
Just as there is a certain type of unsisterly woman who dumps all
her friends as soon as she meets a boyfriend, I wonder if the opposite
is true for asexuals: that somehow platonic friendships are more
important, more intense, than those of people who do pursue or have
sex. Jay says, somewhat cryptically: “The distinction between friend
and lover gets a lot blurrier. This can open up some new possibilities
but also make things pretty confusing.”
Rebecca cites an extremely close friend, a woman in her fifties,
with whom she links arms and holds hands. “I am not sexual but I am
very tactile,” she explains. But does Rebecca’s friend understand
and appreciate that? Or does she want more?
Todd Niquette, 36, found that his close friends who want to get
closer haven’t always understood what asexuality means for him.
“In my twenties, I did develop an obsession with one long-term
female friend, but I was not emotionally mature enough to turn this
into anything concrete. I was desperately trying to understand what it
meant to be involved with a person who saw closeness and intimacy as a
physical thing with a perfectly normal impulse for sex. I just
disassociated and shut down when it came time for intimate sex. All
the wonderful talks, letters and trips together were not enough for
her.”
Geraldin Levi, 26, a Dutch “non- libidoist” writer and
comedienne who also runs a website (www.theofficialasexualitysociety.com),
dismisses the idea that friendships become more intense but says:
“You can’t help who you fall in love with. You love some friends
more than others, but that is the same for everybody.”
She also refers to “a deep, true love untainted by lust”. But
sexual people say that when they don’t want to have sex with
someone. They say: “Let’s not ruin the friendship with sex”, but
often go on to do just that. It is one thing not being able to help
whom you fall in love with, and quite another for an asexual to pursue
the conventional ideal of settling down with a life-long partner and
having a family. Some asexuals do express this desire; indeed there
are countless heterosexuals in loveless and sexless marriages, but
surely that is why you leave a marriage, not enter into one.
I write to a man seeking a wife on the Aven network. I tell him I
am a journalist and though I can’t marry him — even I wouldn’t
go that far for a story — I would like to hear how he intends to go
about the wife and children business without having sex. He writes
back accusing me of not being a journalist at all, and adds: “Unless
you won’t mind marrying me, I ain’t really interested.” Then he
finds out I am a journalist, and writes back to confess that actually
he is not asexual, not really, but has “a life-long sexual fetish
which leaves me totally incompatible in terms of the usual
interaction. This causes a dirty, shallow lifestyle which I would
dearly like to leave behind in favour of a stable marriage with a
family.” He adds that he would never reveal his fetish to his
unsuspecting asexual wife, should he manage to procure one.
This is where shame rears its useless head. Mr Fetish is full of
it, but tellingly, asexuals seem to be free of it. Quite rightly,
where is the shame in not having, or wanting, sex? Historically, that
is what good and pure people, spiritual people, are like. Celibacy, if
by choice, is a self-discipline. Though asexuals say they don’t
chose asexuality, but it chooses them. Which is why it seems perverse
that medically, asexuality is looked upon as a dysfunction, and
pharmaceutically, a biochemical problem that can be cured with a pill.
A low or non-existent libido could be a sign of something else,
such as depression, but there would have to be some indication that
the low libido bothered the person who had it. Dr Petra Boynton, a
psychologist who specialises in human sexuality says: “I think there
is room for a much wider spectrum of sexual behaviour than we
acknowledge, but we seem to be intolerant of the idea of not having
sex at all. But there are groups of people who have never had sexual
feelings and this does not bother them, it does not mean they are not
happy.
“The happiness we feel when we have regular sex is based not just
on the sex but on the fact that you are getting on well with your
partner, you feel good about your body, you are healthy — and
asexuals can feel these other things.”
For Todd Niquette, who says he “tends to shut down” if a person
he approaches as a friend expresses a sexual interest in him, this is
intrusive. Without expressing unhappiness with his asexuality, he
still feels a very strong sense of otherness. “Early home movies
contain repeated evidence of me looking over someone’s shoulder,
then moving away from the group with a wry expression on my face. Not
much has changed.”
IT'S A FREE CHOICE
IT is no coincidence that Rebecca, David and Geraldin are all in
their twenties. The vast majority of people discussing asexuality in
the Aven forums are under 25. The girls talk about “adult” being
15 years away and discuss the implications of asexuality for issues
such as having children with the assuredness of women who haven’t
yet realised that they have a biological clock, let alone what one
might need to do to stop it ticking.
Cate, not someone you would want as your babysitter, calls children
“little freedom-sucking, weirdo, alien-looking things”. Bee
writes: “I love children, and would love to be a mother. But I
can’t see it happening as I can’t even find anyone who will accept
me or love me and the whole sexual side of things.”
And listen to Magda, 25, who has been married for two years and
whose lack of interest in sex is beginning to erode her relationship:
“I have never been interested in sex nor enjoyed it. It literally
hurts me somewhere in my brain. If I am asexual, I am very fine with
that, it’s not something I wish I could change.”
At the moment these young women have decided that they don’t want
sex, but at a later date they, and their biological clocks, may decide
otherwise. And if they don’t? So what. It’s a free country.
Source by Michele Kirsch, March 17, 2005 - Times
Online ©2005
