Academic Discussion of David Jay and AVEN History

[Pramana]

I found a journal article by sociolinguist Andrew Hinderliter which discusses the early history of asexual communities, including David Jay’s decision to adopt the attraction-based definition and the motivations for favouring inclusive definitions and for introducing the self-identification principle. Hinderliter identifies as asexual and his account is based on personal correspondence. Here are some excerpts:

“The definition of asexual has had a very different history… In the spring of 2001, David Jay, then a college freshman, created a website called the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), which originally consisted of only static content. On that site, he gave the definition of asexual as ‘A person who is sexually attracted to neither gender.’ He then emailed the page to the heads of several campus-based LGBT groups around the United States, thinking that they would likely know something about asexuality. While they did not know much about asexuality, one told him about transgender issues and problems with the phrase ‘either gender.’ On the basis of this, the definition was modified to ‘Asexual: A person who does not experience sexual attraction,’ which is still the definition on AVEN’s front page.”

“In David Jay’s time in college, he saw numerous ‘queerer than thou’ discussions, discussions of ‘who is really a lesbian,’ etc., and on AVEN, he wanted people to be able to talk about asexuality in a way that avoided this. He also had a number of friends in college who were ‘sex positive queers,’ and he felt they would have a strongly negative reaction to any sense of asexual elitism (personal correspondence, January 11, 2011). Related to these were two areas of controversy early in the history of the online asexual community, which were formative in the community’s development. In Jay’s (2006) account of this history, the first division that occurred concerned ‘anti-sexuals,’ who thought that people who were asexual were better than those who were not. The second division involved a group who thought that only people who did not masturbate could be asexual.”

“This second view is exemplified by a Dutch woman named Geraline Levi Jones (Miss Geri), who joined HHA in early 2002. She was keenly interested in promoting asexual visibility, especially through performing arts. She and David Jay tried to collaborate, but were ultimately unable to do so because of disagreement over whether people with a sex-drive/people who masturbate can be asexual. Miss Geri took the position that they cannot. As David Jay’s primary interest was in constructing asexuality as an identity that people found to be helpful in making sense of their lives and navigating relationships, he strongly believed that anyone who felt that identifying as asexual made sense for them should be allowed to do so. Feeling that what people do or do not do in private with respect to masturbation has little consequence for their social relationships, he held that it made perfect sense for masturbation to be consistent with an asexual identity.

At some point, Miss Geri made her own website: The Official Asexual Society. It had forums that were rarely used, and it even had a survey people could fill out, which would then be sent to Miss Geri who would tell people if they were asexual or not. In December 2004, the site’s name was changed to The Official Nonlibidoism Society.”

“Independently of either AVEN or Haven, a genderqueer identified individual named Nat Titman created the community Asexuality on Livejournal in April 2002 to be an explicitly sex-positive community about asexuality. The community was created to talk about asexuality, and its creation was motivated by Nat’s sense that another LiveJournal Community (Asexual) was overly anti-sexual. The initial language for describing asexuality was based on discussions Nat had had in online transgender communities. They also found discussions of who was ‘really’ whatever queer identity to be unhelpful and favoured the most inclusive definitions possible. David Jay found this community and contacted Nat, and the two then collaborated together on AVEN – for instance, Nat wrote the Big FAQ for AVEN, much of which is still used in AVENs FAQs.

In Nat’s version of the history of the early asexual community (personal correspondence, February 2, 2011), the early splits in the asexual community were somewhat different than the ones in David Jay’s recounting of the history. According to Nat, there was no early rift over anti-sexuality; rather anti-sexuality is an inevitable part of any asexual community that does not actively fight it – people who have felt rejected by dominant society’s views of sexuality will often react against it negatively, especially when first coming to accept their own asexuality. The first major split in the asexual community was, in fact, led by David Jay and Nat. In the early asexual community, what connected people was not having sex. By defining asexuality in terms of sexual attraction rather than behaviour, and explicitly positioning it as a sexual orientation, a much different vision of asexuality was offered. According to Nat, the second major division in the asexual community concerned whether people who masturbate can be asexual, and this occurred when the Official Asexual Society eventually came to recognise that AVEN’s vision of asexuality was much more widely accepted.”

“The way AVEN defines asexuality has several important implications. First, it makes asexuality broad enough to include people who do not experience sexual attraction but do/feel other things often considered sexual, such as masturbation and non-sexual attraction. Second, by making it about sexual attraction, it is not about behaviour, thereby contrasting asexuality with celibacy and making having sex consistent with an asexual identity. Third, it positions asexuality as a sexual orientation, thereby encouraging people to think about asexuality with terms similar to other non-heterosexual sexual orientations (for those who are accepting of these), such as the importance of acceptance, understanding, respect, not assuming pathology, not trying to change sexual orientations, etc.”

(Andrew Hinderliter, How is Asexuality Different from Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder?, Psychology and Sexuality, May 2013, Volume 4, Issue 2, pages 167-178)