Understanding Asexuality

D is for desire. Sexual desire can be defined as “a feeling that includes wanting to have a sexual experience, feeling receptive to a partner’s sexual initiation, and thinking and fantasizing about sex” (Rosen et al., 2000, p. 191). Desire is another word for “lust,” or, in more colloquial terms, “horniness”—that tingly feeling that makes people engage in sexual activity and, perhaps, have a release of sexual tension: orgasm.

Desire is related to all four of the above: attraction, arousal, behavior, and cognition. It is also, for example, very closely related to people’s sexual attractions, as it usually is in reference to others. But desire and attraction also can be decoupled. One of the reasons for this decoupling is that there are separate bodily mechanisms underlying them. Circulating testosterone, for example, can have a large impact on desire, but it does not alter the direction of one’s sexual attractions.[9] In the checkered early days of reparative therapy, gay men were administered high levels of testosterone, with the idea being that a lack of sexual interest in women occurred in men because of an insufficient amount of this male-associated hormone (Meyer-Bahlburg, 1977). The bottom line, however, was this: Testosterone did not make gay men heterosexual; it just made them horny! There were a couple of problems with this reparative approach using testosterone, aside from, of course, the ethical issues. First, testosterone, although found in higher concentrations in men than women, exists in both sexes. So, it is misleading to suggest that it is a male-only hormone (see also chapter 6). Second, prior to birth, different levels of exposure to testosterone may have permanent, organizing effects on the brain (as they do on the body), and may ultimately affect sexual attractions and one’s orientation development (see also chapter 13). But in adolescence and adulthood, testosterone has “activating” effects, working like a kind of fuel on whatever disposition (i.e., brain organization) is already there in the first place. So it is not surprising that gay men, when given a boost of testosterone, became more interested in sexual activities generally but did not change their underlying attraction to men. So, in short, desire and attraction have different underlying bodily mechanisms, and hence are “decoupleable.”

In many people’s minds, asexual people must lack sexual desire (i.e., have no interest whatsoever in sexual activities). Indeed, very low desire or a lack of desire is sometimes put forth as an important definition of asexuality (Prause & Graham, 2007). I, too, think this definition of asexuality is a reasonable one, at least in some ways (Bogaert, 2006b; Bogaert, 2008). For example, I think lack of desire is more viable than lack of sexual behavior in defining asexuality.

But why I do prefer to define asexuality as a lack of sexual attraction (Bogaert, 2006b)? For one, if a person truly lacks sexual desire, then there is likely no sex drive to fuel any underlying sexual attractions, if indeed such underlying (perhaps) hidden attractions exist; thus, someone with an absence of desire would lack sexual attraction for others as well, although they still might have romantic attractions. Second, the reverse is not necessarily true: if one lacks sexual attraction, one does not necessarily have no sexual desire or drive (see chapter 5 on masturbation). Third, sexual attraction captures the core element of sexual orientation, so, if one wants to argue that asexual people do not have a traditional sexual orientation (i.e., gay, straight, bi) but instead have a unique asexual one, then a lack of sexual attraction to others is the important criterion (Bogaert, 2006b). Fourth, I think that a lack of desire may not capture accurately the phenomenon of asexuality, at least based on existing research. There is support for this view in two recent studies. Recent research on self-identified asexuals (Prause & Graham, 2007; Brotto et al., 2010) shows that they do not necessarily have a lower desire for sexual activity, but they clearly have a lower desire for sexual activity with others; in other words, they lack sexual attraction to others. Thus, a lack of sexual attraction is likely a good overarching definition of asexuality from a number of perspectives.[10]