Asexuality: A Brief Introduction

Eventually, I started to describe myself as “Straight, but not very good at it”. But even that didn’t feel quite right. Calling myself “straight”, even with a qualification, implied that I had some sort of heterosexual tendencies to speak of. I didn’t. I saw sex all around me, but never had any desire to take part. I never looked at anyone and thought about getting it on with them. It had been years since I’d had sex, and it didn’t bother me at all. Whenever my coworkers started talking about sex, it was like they were talking about a sport I didn’t know how to play. I even thought that porn was dull and repetitive.

One day, I watched a sex scene in a TV show that ended up changing my life. Not because it was hot, not because it was erotic, or arousing, or passionately charged, or any of that stuff. It was because it made no sense at all to me. And that’s when it struck me: I never looked at sex in the same way that anyone else around me ever had. Other people liked it. Wanted it. Craved it. Chased it. Thrived on it. I couldn’t care less. That is not the reaction of a typical 31 year old man.

That incident made it perfectly clear that I was different and always had been different. I wasn’t straight, because women weren’t interesting to me. I wasn’t gay, because men weren’t interesting, either. I wasn’t repressed. I wasn’t religious. I’d never been abused. My equipment downstairs worked whenever I tested it. I wasn’t showing any physical signs of a testosterone deficiency. So… What was going on? I went searching for an answer. It didn’t take long to find one:

I was asexual.

Asexuality is a sexual orientation characterized by a persistent lack of sexual attraction toward any gender.

Well now, that was a bit of a dull and technical definition, but it’s where I had to start. You see, that’s really all asexuality is. Asexuality can be confusing, but if you just remember that definition, you’ll be fine.

Most people are familiar with the concept of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation describes who a person is sexually attracted to. For instance, heterosexual people are attracted to people of the opposite gender, homosexual people are attracted to people of the same gender, and bisexual people are attracted to people of either gender.[1] Asexual people sort of fill in the gap in that list, and are not sexually attracted to anyone.

It’s important to mention that sexual orientation does not describe behavior. It’s possible for a heterosexual man to have had sex with other men because he was curious, and it’s possible for a bisexual woman to be a virgin. Similarly, it’s possible for an asexual to take part in sexual activity and still be asexual. It’s about attraction, not action.

Like every other sexual orientation, asexuality is not a choice. We didn’t just wake up one day and say “You know what, I’m tired of sex. I’m not going to feel attracted to anyone anymore.” It’s not celibacy or abstinence. Most of us will tell you that we were born like this, and many of us went through periods in our lives where we wondered why we were so different than everyone else.

Asexuality is not a disease. It’s not a medical condition. It’s not caused by low hormones or a brain tumor. It’s not a temporary phase. It’s not the result of childhood trauma. It’s not a response to a relationship gone wrong.

Asexuality is often misunderstood. Some people think that asexuality is the same as celibacy or abstinence. Others think that asexuality is a lack of (or a desire for a lack of) all sexual characteristics. Sometimes asexuality is described as a fear, avoidance, or hatred of sex, sometimes to the point of believing that asexuality is a religious or moral statement against people who have sex. And some people think that asexuality is a statement of a gender identity. None of these are true. I hope that this book will help to dispel some of these misconceptions.

Several studies have indicated that at least one percent of people are asexual. The famous Kinsey Report on sexuality in 1948 had a scale for one’s sexual orientation, ranging from 0 for “exclusively heterosexual” to 6 for “exclusively homosexual”. In his research, he found that some people (Around 1.5% of the adult male population) didn’t really fit on the scale because they weren’t particularly sexually interested in anyone, so he labeled them as “X” and left them off the scale. Today, this “X” group would likely be recognized as asexual.

A more recent study, conducted by Dr. Anthony Bogaert in 2004, found that approximately 1% of the adult population could be classified as asexual, using the results of a survey conducted in the UK during the 90s. However, Bogaert believed that the actual number of asexual people is likely higher, as it is conceivable that people who are not terribly interested in sex would be less likely to spend the time to take a survey about sex, and would therefore be underrepresented in the results.