Posted 22 April 2007 - 03:05 AM
Here you are - Sorry about the long post. Conclusions are half way down if you want to scroll through.
Notes from the 18th Congress of the World Association for Sexual Health/1st World Congress for Sexual Health, Sydney, April 15-19 2007.
Background
This was an international conference for >1000 delegates from a variety of professions related to sexual health. (Sexual health covers all aspects of sex and sexuality, not just STDs and sexual disorders.) They included sex therapists, sexual health clinicians, obs/gyny consultants, people involved in the development and delivery of sex/sexuality education programmes and academics studying various aspects of sexuality in society or the medicine of sexual disorders.
All the delegates received a bag containing the programme and various leaflets. One of these leaflets was from AVEN. The web address was on one side and the other side had a series of bullet points covering the key points about asexuality i.e. the AVEN definition of asexuals, the difference from celibacy, HSDD etc.. The final point said we encourage discussion and research, and the bottom of the leaflet had the question “what do you think?”. The leaflet was intended to inform people what we mean by asexuality, to suggest that this should be recognised as a minority sexual orientation, and to encourage people to think about implications for their work. I also left business cards bearing the AVEN web address on tables in the exhibition hall and a surprising number of these (>100) were taken. I wore a t-shirt with the web address on and several people approached me as a result of that.
The programme is at the conference website www.sexo-sydney-2007.com and I’d be pleased to pass on info from the abstracts book if anyone is interested in a particular presentation (I’ll have to re-type them though as there isn’t an electronic version). There was only one on asexuality (see thread in World Watch) but I attended lots of others on relevant topics e.g. HSDD, sexuality education, relationships, interaction between biology and psychology in sexual functioning. I talked to quite a few presenters about how their work related to asexuality and also spoke to as many random people as I could. Apart from having interesting general conversations, my ‘mission’ was to 1) explain what we mean by asexuality, 2) point out that there is a lot of diversity amongst asexuals, as within other orientations, 3) convey why it is important for professionals not to have a mindset which pathologises lack of sexual attraction 4) convey why it is important for society to recognise asexuality as an orientation rather than just “leave us to get on with not having sex”.
Conclusions
Everyone I spoke to was friendly and seemed interested to talk to me. It was really nice to be welcomed to such a forum. These are the key observations/conclusions from the conversations I had:
1) Few people were using the word asexual in the same way as AVEN. They were either unsure of what it meant, used it to mean people who aren’t sexually active for whatever reason (e.g. low desire due to depression, inability due to medical conditions, for religious reasons) or used it to mean people who never engage in any sexual activity (therefore excluding people who masturbate).
2) Everyone either agreed that it was biologically plausible for people not to experience sexual attraction (even if they thought only a tiny minority would be like that), or they actually knew someone they thought fitted the description but hadn’t identified as asexual.
3) Everyone agreed that asexuals don’t need to be diagnosed with a disorder (as you’d hope!) but they often hadn’t thought about how the lack of awareness of asexuality can itself cause problems.
4) People varied in whether they thought a label was needed to describe people who don’t experience sexual attraction. Some recognised that it is difficult to talk about something without a word to describe it and that people who don’t experience sexual attraction could feel isolated if they don’t relate to the prevailing sexuality discourse (i.e. you are hetero-, homo- or bisexual and if you don’t experience attraction you have a disorder). However, others were inclined towards the ‘lets embrace diversity and don’t apply labels’ view. [My argument against this is that you don’t have to apply labels to individual people but you need a word out there to talk about the phenomenon in general.]
5) From points 1-4, I believe we need to work particularly hard to a) clear up confusion arising from our adoption of the word asexual B) move from professionals vaguely agreeing with the concept of asexuality to actively recognising it as an orientation in their work.
I think communicating with professionals is really important: Therapists and sexual health workers should know about asexuality so they can distinguish and appropriately treat asexuals and people who are suffering from disorders; Academics conducting research will help us understand ourselves and help society understand us; All types of professional are called upon as ‘experts’ by the media and policy-makers so they have a significant influence on how society views asexuals. This complements the excellent popular-media and university/LGBT-outreach work that I read about in the AVEN fora. I think it would be really good for AVEN to have a presence at future conferences and engage with the various relevant professional societies. If you have been doing such work I’d love to hear from you.
PS I funded this myself so don’t worry that your Paypal donations are being used on expensive conference fees!
Help
- and go.
would love to get some information if you could gather some on the asexuality talk they have on the Monday, or information about stuff in sydney etc.... * jumps up and down* im soooo poor 
that does 
