Understanding Asexuality

Anthony F. Bogaert UNDERSTANDING ASEXUALITY

For LB.

Acknowledgments

A sincere thanks to the following people who helped at various stages of the development of this book: Carolyn Hafer, Sasha Noorgaard, Malvina Skorska, and the editorial staff at Rowman & Littlefield. Your support and generosity are greatly appreciated. I would also like acknowledge the love and support of my mother and father throughout the years; my academic career would not have been possible without them.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction

I teach and research human sexuality in two academic departments—the Department of Community Health Sciences and the Department of Psychology—at Brock University in the Niagara region of Canada. My university is supportive, and I expect that most of my university colleagues respect my work, but a few of my fellow professors are a bit dismissive of what I do. Some joke about what must go on in my human sexuality courses (e.g., “Your small-group seminars must be quite the party!” or “I bet there’s a lot of hands-on learning in your courses!”). Others tout my courses as the first to deserve a “little trimming” when university budgets are subject to cutbacks, the suggestion being that sex is taking up too much of the undergraduate curriculum, when, of course, more important and pithy matters could (and should!) supplant it. Still others question the utility of government grants being earmarked for the study of human sexuality.

Why do some of my colleagues treat my research and courses this way? I imagine that they do so, partly, out of a lingering notion that sexual activities, including teaching and research about sexual activities, have to do with the unseemly, the naughty, or at least the “unserious” side of life. I expect that the seed of this notion is sown very early in the lives of most Westerners (including in these few nonsupportive colleagues), germinates and reaches its peak during adolescence, and then persists in some form into adulthood. In fact, evidence of the persistence of this notion is charming, to a degree, when I witness my (usually male) colleagues revisit the raunchy side of their adolescence and engage in sex banter over a few beers.

I also imagine that these colleagues feel this way because they, like many of their fellow baby boomers, have slipped unawares into their current stage of life: middle age. (By the way, I have also reached this milestone, and have started to label it, somewhat bitterly, as the stage of “middle-aged ugly.” I call it so because, alas, our beauty—what little we may have had of it—has now faded, and we are saggy and increasingly hairless geeks.[1] Cruel as it may be, fickle Hollywood, with its eyes fixed on beauty, has begun to give us the cold shoulder.) For some of my colleagues, with the best of their youthful charms and vigor behind them, sex is now increasingly off the radar, and a somewhat “de-sexualized” worldview holds sway. This reflects, of course, a natural transition most adults experience as middle-aged bodies start to change and preoccupations shift to other fancies, including, say, helping one’s children negotiate their lives. The famous psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, aptly summarized this life stage as one preoccupied with generativity: the care of future generations (Stevens, 1983).

But some of my middle-aged colleagues’ newfound worldview has—yikes!—begun to undermine my work, as they have now started to give me looks and behave as if they have had an epiphany on academic values: Why should the study of sex matter so much, when for the vast majority of the moments in our lives, we are not engaged in it, and when the majority of our thoughts and preoccupations are not confined to this rather strange activity, even though, granted, they may have been years ago?