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Is there any Asexual History?


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There was a BBC doc (or maybe PBS)on Liz the 1st's sexuality and gender that suggested that she may have been trans or intersexed. There is even a town in England that claims she died there as a child and was replaced secretly by a boy with similar features. They dress a local boy up as her every year. She probably was a virgin though. I think a savy political mind like hers would have used male flirtation to her own advantage even if she never planned on being with them. I forget the name of the doc though...

That wouldn't make much sense since Henry VIII was obsessed with getting a male heir, so even one that they saw as 'deformed' would be better than none. In all likelihood she was a virgin, though whether she was in love with Robert Dudley or whoever could have been gossip (maybe she was ace but not aro, or she was just good friends and everyone wanted her to marry somebody). If she had married, she'd have had to have given up the throne to whoever, and I don't think she was willing to do that.

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Paul the Apostle (as in writer of a good portion of the New Testament) also seems to have been openly asexual, at least to his friend/student Timothy: (After talking about sexual needs in marriage and how a couple keeps each other from sin by being faithful with each other.)

"I say this as a concession, not as a command. 7 I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that." (Corinthians 1. 7. 6-7)

When I first read that it was really important for me because not only was asexuality acknowledged as being a thing, but one of the most important writers in a major world religion (which also happens to be my religion) was asexual, and saw it as a gift.

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Doesn't Matthew 5:27-28 indicate that, according to Jesus Christ, feeling sexual attraction is a sin? Sorry I can't figure out how to paste the text on my tablet, but it basically says not only shalt thou not commit adultery, but feeling lust toward a woman is committing adultery with her in your heart. (He's talking to a bunch of guys, but it presumably still applies in other gender combinations.) This is quoting Jesus too, rather than some other random shmoe the Church decided to worship.

Even though it probably wasn't any more biologically prevalent at the time, it seems that asexuality was the expected social norm in the Victorian era. A sex drive in a woman was pretty much considered a medical problem, and it was treated with equipment that basically worked like a sex toy. It was frowned upon for men too though. It's my understanding that Christianity didn't originally do genital cutting--the reason male genital cutting was recently (or still is) prevalent in a lot of Christian-majority populations is because it was restarted in the Victorian era as a way to reduce sexual pleasure or punish masturbation. Then the trend stuck, and since society now thinks sex is cool, they say genital cutting makes sex better (but only for men being cut).

For sake of argument:

The point of the Jesus story was actually that a group of men (probably elders and well-respected in their town) were planning to stone a woman to death for having been caught committing adultery (no word on her lover, double standards). Jesus started writing in the sand for a while (many scholars believe he was writing the sins which the elders had committed secretly), then got up and basically said "Yes, physically cheating is a sin. So is eyeing a woman (or man) and wanting to cheat with them. So let the man who is without sin throw the first stone at this adulteress." The elders left one by one, and Jesus said to the woman "Are you the only one left?" "Yes, teacher, everyone's left." "Go, then, and sin no more." The point wasn't that wanting sex was a sin (I mean that was implied) but that every one of those 'righteous' people were as sinful as the adulteress so they had no right to judge her.

I don't know about the genital cutting (do you mean circumcision? that's in the Old Testament, and there are lots of debates about it in the New Testament) but what the elite of the elites did in Victorian times and what they said were crazy different. Children born out of wedlock were pretty common, especially with the lower classes, even though those mothers were looked down upon. Also I think that the issue was more Hysteria- the clinical name for literally anything women thought being a disease. Want voting rights? Sick. Want custody of your kids? Sick. Want your husband or dad not to beat you? Still sick. Feeling depressed 'cause your baby died? You need somebody to feel up your genitals.

The fact that most couples had a lot of kids (Queen Vicky really loved her husband IRL) and the Victorian Era actually had a lot of porn (which I will not link here because it makes me (a non-repulsed) feel kind of sick) kind of proves that parents, grandparents, or great-great grandparents probably shouldn't be trusted about their sex lives because they don't want you getting STDs and such.

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I would love to think my personal hero, Howard Lovecraft, fell somewhere on the asexuality spectrum and I have found a bit of, albeit circumstantial, evidence to back it up. Lovecraft was married, however he married late, had no children, and, when asked about their relationship after Lovecraft's death, his widow replied 'had performed satisfactorily as a lover, though she had to take the initiative in all aspects of the relationship.' - transliterated from Wikipedia, cited from de Camp, L Sprague. Lovecraft: a Biography. If anything, more telling than simply being without a romantic partner, as he was more interested in his wife's home cooking than taking the initiative in their relationship. While I cannot speak on the content of his personal letters, I did find the scarcity of female characters in his writing a bit odd. The only one I can think of off the top of my head was a minor character in The Horror at Red Hook. His writing being drawn from his thoughts and feelings, it seems as if he was closer with his friends than his romantic partner. And as if all this is not enough, he wrote a lengthy, quite formal, and painfully dry essay on why cats are, in every way, the superior pet. But maybe I am just seeing what I want to see.

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Some years ago I saw a documentary movie about count Wladyslaw Zamoyski. It was a guy who won the trial with Austro-Hungary on one mountain lake and it was a very important success for Polish people. He invested in and made famous Polish mountain retreatment Zakopane. He lived all his life with his mother and sister and never married or had any kids.
Wikipedia mentions that his sister also stayed single:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82adys%C5%82aw_Zamoyski

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  • 1 year later...

Two more: I heard a program on radio 4 a few months ago about the Roman satirist Juvenal.  He was described as misogynistic and not in favour of homosexuality. Juvenal on marriage: Can you submit to a she-tyrant when there is so much rope to be had, so many dizzy heights of windows standing open, and when the Aemilian bridge offers itself to hand? 

 

On a more positive note, Rosalind Franklin, who took the first x-ray images of the structure of DNA.

i read a biography of her years ago, and there was no mention of her having a sexual or romantic  relationship.

 

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