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Do you consider asexuality to sexuality to be a continuous spectrum?


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Because when I first heard of it that's kind of how I pictured it & how it made sense to me, but from what I've read I get the impression that's not how people imagine it.

Kind of like the kinsey scale could be one axis, and asexual to sexual another. xb

Or like the autistic spectrum, everyone is on there somewhere. Which makes pretty much everyone at least a tiny bit autistic, & similarly everyone at least a tiny bit asexual?

Ask me to clarify if I don't make sense. xD

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If I'm understanding you correctly, I agree. Sexuality isn't just black and white, and I think it's possible to fall anywhere in between. This is why AVEN has terms like gray-asexual to desire people who don't think they are fully sexual or fully asexual.

I think a lot of things are continuous spectrums, society just tries to put things into two categories because it's "easier" to think of things that way.

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It depends on if you think a sexual person can be "a little bit asexual" and/or if an asexual person can be "a little bit sexual". There are a lot of strong opinions on that on AVEN.

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I feel like with say gender going from male to female you'd have a distribution which dips in the middle, so it makes sense that there are two main categories.

But I imagine sexuality to asexuality would be more of a normal distribution, so the categories are more arbitrary because there's no dip in probability between sexual & asexual? Say you took the mean and determined that point +/-some percentage to be "sexual", & then said the 1% at the non-sexual end were asexual... where does that leave all the people who are equidistant from those two points?

That's probably explained badly & too math-ily. :/

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Not really. I consider asexuality to be a direction, not a value. So either you're "pointing" toward asexuality or you're not. Whether someone will have sex is a completely separate issue, and if you have an innate desire for sex, no matter how weak, you're not asexual in my books. Yes, this means that I consider it possible for someone never to want sex(because they have a low sex drive, because they're repulsed, and etc.), yet to be "sexual". A lot of the "grey-asexuality" configurations to me are something separate from asexuality.. They just have similar symptoms, but they're a different thing.

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Well, yeah. It's kind of hard to picture all people fitting neatly into two absolutes. Especially since there doesn't seem to be a consensus on what one of those absolutes strictly is. I don't think it's a simple spectrum though. I think there are a lot of things going on and that people who are technically in the same place on a continuous spectrum may express it very differently.

I also don't think everyone is a little bit asexual. Also, the continuum would be skewed same as the gay-bi-straight scale is.

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I would say sexuality probably isn't a normal distribution, since it seems like most people tend to fall more on the sexual side of things.

I also would say there probably are people who are "purely" asexual or sexual, and asexuality isn't just taking the bottom 1% of the spectrum if that makes sense.

Although, like I said before, I do see sexuality as a spectrum, just disagree with some of your specifics.

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Or like the autistic spectrum, everyone is on there somewhere. Which makes pretty much everyone at least a tiny bit autistic, & similarly everyone at least a tiny bit asexual?

It doesn't mean that everybody is "a tiny bit autistic", but that not all people that have autism have it to the same degree. And no, not everybody is a tiny bit asexual because asexual is the absence of something (some say desire for partnered sex, others sexual attraction) and it makes no sense to speak of a spectrum in that regard. Only sexuality, that is a spectrum. Anyway, I do like to think of asexuality as the furthest possible point of one side of the sexuality spectrum.

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Only sexuality, that is a spectrum.

What exactly is a spectrum about sexuality? The amount of sex drive?

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No idea, actually. Sexuality is too complex to narrow it down easily, I guess. But that some people identify as greysexual for various reasons while others don't is reason enough for me to think sexuality is a spectrum.

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Francoise Wang

I don't think asexuality is a spectrum with one dimension. I think the sexual-asexual spectrum has many many dimensions. It's not some people are "more asexual" than others. There are lithsexuals who experience sexual attraction a lot, but never desire to have sex with the person they're attracted to. There are demisexuals who only experience sexual attraction and desire sex when a strong emotional bond is formed. We can't say lithsexuals and demisexual are asexual in different degree. They are completely different sexuality, and no one is "more close to the asexual end" than the other. There are people who are 100% sexual or 100% asexual, but those people who falls in the grey area (not 100% sexual and not 100% asexual) shouldn't be seen as "somewhere between sexual and asexual", they have completely different sexuality from sexuals and asexuals. Human sexuality is way too complicated to use a spectrum with a few dimensions to express it. I think the sexual-asexual spectrum has infinite dimensions, and of course we haven't discovered all the dimensions.

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Yeah there are so many variations , for example some people only have sex with people they love , myself I cannot connect sex with love , some people only do some sexual things but don't mind who they do it to , some people watch porn , some don't , some people like kissing , some people don't , some are repulsed by sex , some are just disinterested , and some people change their mind in the matter all time , yeah it's a forever on going spectrum of personal preferences .

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I guess for me, I agree with the "Bell Curve" thing. which kind of makes it a continuous spectrum.

[and then like... to whom one is attracted would be like an inverse bell curve of sorts, if that's possible. XDa]

I feel like asexuality kind of turned the whole "sexuality" spectrum from a simple value system on a line [like a connected line between 1-10] into a more complex x-y graph where I guess X would be to whom you're attracted and the Y would be how often do you experience sexual desire.

But this still could become an even more complex 3-D model of some kind when it includes different kinds of attraction [aesthetic, sexual, platonic, romantic, yada yada]

...

So perhaps it's more of a rectangular prism now. o woa

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Any model presents a simplified view of the world. The benefit of this simplification obviously is an easier conception of the data than it would be the case from individuals. The question is whether a model is useful or not.

If you consider only sexuality and asexuality as two discrete characteristics, you have a very simple model that is easily understandable and interpretable. However, this model fails for persons that do not clearly fit into either category. This can be resolved by defining a continuous spectrum of sexuality. In this case, you end up with a slightly more complex model, but have a much more accurate image of the persons. Also the continuous model has certain drawbacks, for example it does not describe variations like demisexuality or personal preferences etc. You can include this in the model as well, for instance by defining multiple independent scales that are on perpendicular axes. If you continue with this, trying to fit any thinkable experience, you will end up with a very complex model that may be highly accurate, but is too complicated to be really useful.

In my personal opinion, the continuous model is favorable, since it is fairly simple yet decently accurate. This also aligns well with other models measuring human experiences/personality, like the Kinsey scale (homosexual–hetorosexual rating scale) or extraversion–introversion. A strict distinction into asexual vs. sexual groups appears to oversimplify our world, while a more complex model seems to be unnecessary sophisticated and individualistic to describe (a)sexuality generically.

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