For Them, Just Saying
No Is Easy
By MARY DUENWALD,
NYTimes on the Web, June 9, 2005
BIRDS do it, bees do it. But
not necessarily all of them. Among bees the sisters of queens do not
engage in sex. And in certain species of birds -- Florida scrub jays, for
one -- some individuals, known as helpers, do not breed but only help the
breeders raise their offspring.
But could indifference to sex extend to humans, too? An increasing number
of people say yes and offer themselves as proof. They describe themselves
as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused
sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire.
They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives
happily without ever having sex.
"People think they need to convert you," said Cijay Morgan, 42, a telephone
saleswoman in Edmonton, Alberta, and a self-professed asexual. "They can
understand if you don't like country music or onion rings or if you aren't
interested in learning how to whistle, but they can't accept someone not wanting
sex. What they don't understand is that a lot of asexuals don't wish to be
quote-unquote fixed."
Considering the pervasive advertising for drugs to enhance sexual performance,
the efforts to market a testosterone patch to boost sexual desire in women and
the ubiquity of sexual references in pop culture, it is not surprising that
those professing no sex drive whatever have been misunderstood, or at least
overlooked. Only one scientific survey seems to have been done. And
many experts in human sexuality, when told there is a growing Internet community
of people calling themselves asexual, say they have not heard of it. Yet
most of those experts find the concept unsurprising.
Three-fourths of the patients who go to the Center for Sexual Medicine at Boston
University lack any sex drive, said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, its director, who is
also the editor of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. "We call that H.S.D.D.,
hypoactive sexual desire disorder," he said.
Lack of interest in sex is not necessarily a disorder nor even a problem,
however, Dr. Goldstein quickly added, unless it causes distress, if it leads,
for instance, to conflict within a marriage or romantic relationship.
Dr. John Bancroft, the recently retired director of the Kinsey Institute for
Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, said, "I think
it would be very surprising if there weren't asexuals, if you look at it from a
Kinseyan perspective, that there's this huge variation in human sexuality."
Not all clinicians agree that lack of interest in sex can be considered normal.
"It's a bit like people saying they never have an appetite for food," said Dr.
Leonard R. Derogatis, a psychologist and the director of the Center for Sexual
Health and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Sex is a
natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive.
It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."
Asexual people often say they have been aware of their lack of interest in sex
since adolescence and that while it may have troubled them, they never knew
anything different. "I realized I was asexual about the same time I
realized I was short, when I was about 15," said Miss Morgan of Edmonton, who is
5-foot-1. "I realized I was short when everyone grew taller than me, and I
realized I didn't have sexual feelings when everyone else started expressing and
experimenting with theirs."
The Internet has provided a platform for people calling themselves asexual to
announce their collective existence. The anonymity of the Web makes it
easier to converse about the topic, said Todd Niquette, 36, a systems analyst in
St. Paul and a member of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an
Internet group. With more than 4,000 registered participants, it is the
largest such community of asexuals. "What we're really trying to find out
is: how can I feel less alone in this?" Mr. Niquette said.
His network defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual
attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older
concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail
lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.
Asexuals might have sexual urges and even masturbate, but they do not want to
have sex with other people, said David Jay, 23, who founded the Asexual
Visibility and Education Network (called AVEN by its members) four years ago,
when he was in college. Asexuals often feel romantic attraction for other
people, Mr. Jay said. It just doesn't involve sex.
Mr. Jay, who works for an educational nonprofit organization in San Francisco,
is a talkative, outgoing man with a ready smile and plenty of friends. He
is, he said, interested in "deep emotional involvement" and in raising children
(though "not necessarily having my own"). But he has never had sex, he
said, adding there is a good chance he never will.
If asexual people are commonplace, why have they not been mentioned in history
books or anywhere else before the advent of the Internet? Elizabeth
Abbott, a research associate at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, is
the author of "A History of Celibacy." She speculates that it may be
because such people have stayed under the radar. They never married
perhaps, or they entered into sexless marriages, or they had sex without wanting
to. Unlike homosexuality, she noted, asexuality has never been illegal.
Society has not always accepted it, however. As early as the Middle Ages,
Dr. Abbott said, "nonconsummation of marriage" was considered "an insult to the
sacrament of marriage" and a ground for divorce.
Asexuality, she noted, is distinct from celibacy, which implies a conscious
decision to stifle a desire for sex. What appears to be the only published
study of asexuality -- which defined it as a lifelong lack of sexual attraction
to either men or women -- found that 1.1 percent of adults may be asexual.
The figure was drawn from a survey of 18,000 Britons who were interviewed in
1994 about sexually transmitted diseases. The data were reanalyzed by Dr.
Anthony F. Bogaert, a psychologist at Brock University in St. Catharines,
Ontario, who published his findings last August in The Journal of Sex Research.
Dr. Bogaert found that 44 percent of those expressing no interest in sex were
either married or living with partners or had been in the past.
One might assume that by avoiding sex and all the emotions and responsibilities
that go with it, let alone the health risks, asexuals might have a comparatively
easy life.
"But I think we exchange all that for a different set of trouble," Mr. Jay said.
"Sex is very central to life in a lot of ways, and one of the real challenges of
being asexual is trying to figure out where you fit."
That problem typically arises during the teenage years. "I knew when I was
16 or 17 that sex was just something that seemed tremendously important to
everybody else but that I just didn't get," said David Warner, 55, a technical
writer and editor in a Virginia suburb of Washington.
Like many other asexuals, Kate Goldfield, 21, a student at Goucher College in
Baltimore, once thought she might be a lesbian. "I decided I must be gay
because I knew I wasn't straight," she said. But she said she has since
realized that she is not sexually attracted to women either.
Asexuals say they are often told that they will change when they meet the right
person or when circumstances change, but those predictions do not ring true to
them.
"Why do I need sexuality in my life so much that I should divert my time and
energy to finding out what it is that will turn me on?" Mr. Jay asked.
Physicians have found that they can prompt sexual desire in both women and men
by giving them supplemental hormones. And some scientists suspect that
hormones might be involved in some cases of asexuality. Or, Dr. Bogaert
suggested, it could be that certain brain structures may have developed
differently in asexual people.
Dr. Derogatis agreed that low hormone levels usually underlie low libido but
said sometimes psychological mechanisms come into play. "Some of these
people may have a very powerful phobia about sex," he said.
Yet a small and still unpublished survey of 1,146 people -- including 41 who
described themselves as asexual -- conducted in online interviews by Nicole
Prause, a graduate student in psychology at Indiana, found that asexuals do not
resist having sex because of fear. Rather asexuals "only lack the
excitatory drive," Ms. Prause said in an e-mail message.
Barry W. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at American University and an
author of "Rekindling Desire," a self-help book for married couples, said many
people who experience inhibited desire would be well advised to examine that
inhibition because it may turn out to be the result of fear, rather than a
natural desire to forgo sex. "You have to respect people's individual
differences," he said. "But for the great majority of people with
inhibited desire the answer is not asexuality."
People often experience periods of asexuality. Many married couples give
up sex after a number of years, said Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the
University of Washington in Seattle and the author of "Everything You Know About
Love and Sex Is Wrong." "Some people are relieved to not only back-burner
sex, but to no-burner it," she said.
Mr. Jay acknowledged that some asexuals have spent -- or will spend -- some time
being sexual. "We'll have people in AVEN who get into a relationship where
suddenly they enjoy sex, and we have many people who say they used to enjoy sex
but really not anymore," he said. "But the majority of the community is
pretty stable."
A 32-year-old man in Dallas named Keith (he declined to give his last name) said
he had tried to cope with his asexuality by marrying. "I thought that
getting married would fix me and suddenly I would become interested in sex."
After six years he and his wife were divorced, and now he is living with a
younger man in a relationship that he described as loving and romantic but free
of sex.
Mr. Jay said he believes asexual people can learn to negotiate relationships
with sexual people.
"In high school and early college, when I would sense that someone was hitting
on me, I would go into defensive mode and be like, 'O.K., this can't work,' " he
said. "But since then I've realized that if someone is going to approach
me sexually, it means they like my personality."
In recent months many people have logged on to the asexuals' network Web site to
learn to understand better partners or spouses who are asexual, Mr. Jay said.
"There's a real desire out there to figure out how do you manage relationships
without sexuality?" he said. "We don't have anything like a self-help book
we could write on this yet."
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