yet more asexuality...
May. 3rd, 2006 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
totchipandaEdmonton Journal article, printed April 28/06
D) None of the above - some people seem to prefer no sex at all
Asexuality could be the "new" sexual orientation
Misty Harris / CanWest News Service
In the age of prescription aphrodisiacs and celebrity sex tapes, one phenomenon nobody saw coming is asexuality - the permanent absense of lust or libido.
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) has nearly doubled in the last year to 7,500 men and women worldwide - about 150 times its membership in 2001. By one measure, the total number of asexuals in North America could be in the millions.
And now a Canadian psychologist who pioneered research into asexuality is planning an international study to determine whether its a disorder or a legitimated sexual orientation on par with homo, hetero, and bisexuality.
"Finding out what causes asexuality is a major issue," says Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist at Ontario's Brock University.
"I do endorse, or at least leave open the possibility, that this could be a unique or different sexual orientation."
In August 2004, Bogaert published the results of an uprecendented study of the incidence of asexuality. Analysing a British survey in which more than 18,000 people were questioned on their sexual practices, he found 1.05 per cent of respondants agreed with the statement, "I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all."
Because Bogaert's figure is specific to Britons in the early '90s, he hesitates to use it as a yardstick for the global population in 2006.
It does, however, provide one benchmark. If the numbers were extrapolated for North America, about 3.5 million people, including 346,500 Canadians, would never have experienced sexual attraction.
"I'm doing what I can to figure whether or not there's truly a biological underpinning to people's asexuality," says Boegart.
"I may, in the next year or so, end up bringing asexual people into a laboratory and assessing their physiological responses, their sexual responses, to different stimuli and compare them to sexual people's responses."
Cijay Morgan, a self-identified asexual from Edmonton, describes her lifelong absence of sexual urges ans "liberating".
Although able to develop crushes based on emotional interest, she says sexual desire - toward either gender - never enters the picture.
"I think it's in my hard wiring because it feels as normal as being right-handed or blue-eyed," she says.
"I didn't really think about it until suddenly everybody (in my youth) started speaking this whole new language. I thought that eventually I would think just like them. But I'm 43 now."
According to AVEN, an online network launched in the United States, asexuality differs from celibacy in that it's not a concious choice.
The Official Nonlibidoism Society, fronted by a young woman in the Netherlands, similarily explains that asexuality "doesn't mean that 'you don't like sex;' a nonlibidoist has not had a sex drive ever."
That's where asexuals tend to diverge in their views from sex therapists, many of whom explain "the experience of asexuality" as a variation of hypoactive sexual desire disorder or a state triggered by repressed homosexuality, delayed sexual development, or childhood trauma.
"You have to wonder whether they protest too much" says Joy Davidson, a certified sex therapist and author of Fearless Sex.
"There's no law against not being sexual. It's the 'ra-ra', uneducated, rigid flag-waving that I have a problem with because it doesn't give young people still in their developmental process a framework for understanding the complexities of sexuality and desire."
David Rayside, director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, believes it doesn't matter whether asexuality is inborn, ingrained, or the result of something else entirely. What's significant, he says, is how self-identified asexuals feel about themselves and the way society treats them as a whole.
"So much like the views of bisexuality, there will be people who says it's a transition, it's a cover," says Rayside.
"But I think it's more important to recognize that it's a phenomenon out there than to worry about whether it's in the same league as homosexuality in all its various forms."
D) None of the above - some people seem to prefer no sex at all
Asexuality could be the "new" sexual orientation
Misty Harris / CanWest News Service
In the age of prescription aphrodisiacs and celebrity sex tapes, one phenomenon nobody saw coming is asexuality - the permanent absense of lust or libido.
The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) has nearly doubled in the last year to 7,500 men and women worldwide - about 150 times its membership in 2001. By one measure, the total number of asexuals in North America could be in the millions.
And now a Canadian psychologist who pioneered research into asexuality is planning an international study to determine whether its a disorder or a legitimated sexual orientation on par with homo, hetero, and bisexuality.
"Finding out what causes asexuality is a major issue," says Anthony Bogaert, a psychologist at Ontario's Brock University.
"I do endorse, or at least leave open the possibility, that this could be a unique or different sexual orientation."
In August 2004, Bogaert published the results of an uprecendented study of the incidence of asexuality. Analysing a British survey in which more than 18,000 people were questioned on their sexual practices, he found 1.05 per cent of respondants agreed with the statement, "I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all."
Because Bogaert's figure is specific to Britons in the early '90s, he hesitates to use it as a yardstick for the global population in 2006.
It does, however, provide one benchmark. If the numbers were extrapolated for North America, about 3.5 million people, including 346,500 Canadians, would never have experienced sexual attraction.
"I'm doing what I can to figure whether or not there's truly a biological underpinning to people's asexuality," says Boegart.
"I may, in the next year or so, end up bringing asexual people into a laboratory and assessing their physiological responses, their sexual responses, to different stimuli and compare them to sexual people's responses."
Cijay Morgan, a self-identified asexual from Edmonton, describes her lifelong absence of sexual urges ans "liberating".
Although able to develop crushes based on emotional interest, she says sexual desire - toward either gender - never enters the picture.
"I think it's in my hard wiring because it feels as normal as being right-handed or blue-eyed," she says.
"I didn't really think about it until suddenly everybody (in my youth) started speaking this whole new language. I thought that eventually I would think just like them. But I'm 43 now."
According to AVEN, an online network launched in the United States, asexuality differs from celibacy in that it's not a concious choice.
The Official Nonlibidoism Society, fronted by a young woman in the Netherlands, similarily explains that asexuality "doesn't mean that 'you don't like sex;' a nonlibidoist has not had a sex drive ever."
That's where asexuals tend to diverge in their views from sex therapists, many of whom explain "the experience of asexuality" as a variation of hypoactive sexual desire disorder or a state triggered by repressed homosexuality, delayed sexual development, or childhood trauma.
"You have to wonder whether they protest too much" says Joy Davidson, a certified sex therapist and author of Fearless Sex.
"There's no law against not being sexual. It's the 'ra-ra', uneducated, rigid flag-waving that I have a problem with because it doesn't give young people still in their developmental process a framework for understanding the complexities of sexuality and desire."
David Rayside, director of the University of Toronto's Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, believes it doesn't matter whether asexuality is inborn, ingrained, or the result of something else entirely. What's significant, he says, is how self-identified asexuals feel about themselves and the way society treats them as a whole.
"So much like the views of bisexuality, there will be people who says it's a transition, it's a cover," says Rayside.
"But I think it's more important to recognize that it's a phenomenon out there than to worry about whether it's in the same league as homosexuality in all its various forms."
