Posted on 10/14/2004 9:39:03 AM PDT by missyme
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.
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.
Post-modern Shakers.
bump
Shouldn't that be "post modern whackers"?
How many other nuerotic groups will be coming out since the Homosexual Disease has spread?
Healthy?
How strange.
We can give thanks to the Homosexual Agenda
And never have to worry about alimony. ;~)
Sounds more like an "autosexual" to me.
Can you say ABNORMAL boys and girls?
These people must be social geniouses.
Bunch of wankers.
Bunch Of Emo Kids...
Er, could that be because there IS something wrong with you?
Well............ one good thing about the asexuals is that they will not be spreading sexually transmitted diseases.
not that there's anything wrong with that
Hi Malakhi!
This is just the snowball effect of the Homosexual Agenda,
Asexuals, Polygamy, Beastiality, Boys wearing dresses to schools, what's next???
I'd think that religious conservatives would be happy with any movement that discouraged sex.
No, no, no... You're supposed to have sex. You're just not supposed to enjoy it. :o)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.