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old research dealing with asexuality


Lord Happy Toast

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Lord Happy Toast

I've been interested in seeing what the world of psychology and sexology has to say about asexuality, and there isn't much there. Checking out everything listed on the wiki doesn't take that much time. Anyway, as I was browsing through Ebcohost, I somehow ran across an article from May 1983 titled "Mental Health Implications of Sexual Orientation" by Paula S. Nurius from "The Journal of Sex Research" Vol. 19, NO 2 pp. 119-136.

Research was being done on relationship between sexual orientation and mental health, and the model for sexual orientation they used (that was used by the surveys they chose to use) was the one that instead of putting everyone on a line with heterosexual at one end, homosexuality at the other and bisexuality in the middle (like the Kinsey scale), it used 2 axes--heterosexual attraction is on axis and homosexual attraction is the other. This makes for 4 sexual orientations: hetero/homo/bi/asexual.

The paper found 2 interesting things: first (bad news) is that asexuals were a bit more likely to have depression, and a bit more likely to have self-esteem problems. (Not a huge difference from other sexual orientations, and its not saying that asexuality causes low self esteem. It is quite possible that trying to force oneself into societal norms they don't fit into could cause it.) But there was one other thing I found more interesting:

8% of respondants were found to be asexual. This is a lot higher than the 1% that is widely cited. I'm guessing that it is because asexuality was based on answers to (several) questions about sexual desires and practices etc. rather than just one question. If I recall correctly, the 1% comes from a single question about sexual orientation where people could answer that they were "heterosexual" "homosexual" "bisexual" or "I have never been sexually attracted to anyone in my life."

I've been bothered by that for a while. Some asexuals have expereicned sexual attraction, but only to maybe 1 or 2 people ever. (Hardly a regular pattern of sexual attraction necessary to be in any of the straight/gay/bi categories.) However, they would be excluded from the 1% that survey called asexual. And a lot of asexuals who don't know about asexuality might mistake romantic attraction for sexual attraction (if they've never heard about the difference and have never felt sexual attraction to know the difference.) So they might be asexual but have self-identified differently.

The data that gave 8% didn't have the most reliable numbers for other sexual orientations (the data was collected from graduate students and undergraduate upperclassmen taking psychology or sociology classes so it isn't the most representative sample possible). But the numbers were at least sort of close to what the researcher expected.






2014 Mod Edit: A preview of Nurius's article can be found here. Anyone who is interested in reading the full article can PM me or the Project Team.

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That's really great, thank you for digging it up :D

For what it's worth, the Bogaert report the oft-cited 1% figure comes from acknowledges that the number could be significantly higher, due to factors such as the high rate of survey nonparticipation. It's interesting this researcher expected a number around 8%! I think I'll have to read this one myself.

Oh, and please feel encouraged to add such research you find to the AVEN wiki and the wikipedia article.

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Lord Happy Toast

I've got it on PDF but the copyright says you're not supposed to post it. Anyone who is a university student should be able to get it online via EbscoHost (that's how I found it.) If not, PM me your email, and I can send it to anyone who wants to see it. I'm wanting to get to update the wiki, but I still haven't gotten a hold of all of the sources yet. (There is a book called "The Sexually Oppressed" which is cited in the wiki and it should take a day or two to get that one because the university I attend has it in the out of library storage for books that aren't used often. So I had to request it and then they will send it to the interlibrary loan pick up place in the main library.) Strangely, there is an article cited and its name is given, and the source for the quotation is a different book. This bothers me. I'm guessing that the quotation came from the cited book, so I'm looking forward to finding seeing the bibliography to improve the citation. Also, I'll have to figure out how to work the wiki. Here is a *considerably* expanded version of what I have to add. I've been researching it for the past few days so I feel like telling someone.

In Kinsey's "sexuality of the human male" he gives people a number 0-6 to describe where they fit from "completely heterosexual" to "completely homosexual." It seems that the goal of this is that people at that time thought of sexual orientation in terms of either being heterosexual or homosexual and Kinsey wanted to challenge this. He also wanted to show that there were lots of people who were primarily heterosexual who had had some homosexual contacts/attraction and that homosexual behavior was a lot more common (= “normal”) than people thought. This has to be understood in light of the fact that such behavior was illegal at that point. But if a third of males had had at least one homosexual encounter (defined as encounter after puberty with a person of the same sex resulting in orgasm), then such laws were absurd.

However, his scale had no way to account for asexuals. They were given an “X”. In “Sexuality of the Human Male” this is barely described and is done so only in a comment on a table (despite other tables telling us that it is explained in the main text, which it isn't). He says that “X” are people with no sociosexual encounters or responses. Thus to be “X” someone must have never had sex and must have no indication of response to sexual stimuli. Number of adult males in this category was said to be 1.5% of the population.

In “Sexuality of the Human Female” published a few years later, he did

explain the concept of “X.” People are labeled as X if “they do not respond erotically to either heterosexual or homosexual stimuli, and do not have overt physical encounter with individuals of either sex in which there is evidence of any response.” He gives the following percentages of the population who he assigned an “X.” Unmarried females=14-19%. Married females= 1-3%. Previously married females=5-8%. Unmarried males=3-4%. Married males=0%. Previously married males=1-2%.

I didn’t bother to read enough to find out exactly what his measurements were and how he assigned the categories. From the definition of “X” I am guessing that numbers were derived from responses to porn for a person who hadn't had sex. For someone who had, sexual response was measured (by asking, I guess. Kinsey relied on interviews.) I imagine that this would explain the difference in number of married vs. unmarried males. Possibly unmarried males were “X” if they didn’t respond to porn. Married males were “X” if they couldn’t get an erection and/or didn’t feel sexually aroused while trying to have sex with someone. But this is just a guess from the above quotation. If this is true, it would explain the difference--he was measuring two different things.

Data after Kinsey: The wiki talks about a two dimensional scale to measure sexual orientation proposed by a guy named Storms. The date is slightly wrong. Storms published two articles dealing with the same research but looking at it from somewhat different perspectives. The article given in the wiki is the second of the two, and the two-axis model was proposed in both. The first was

Storms, M.D. “Sexual orientation and self-perception.” In P. Pliner et. al (editors) “Advances in the study of Communication and Affect: vol 5 Perception of emotion is self and others.” 1978.

The article cited in the wiki is

Storms, M.D. “Theories of Sexual orientation” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1980 vol. 38 No 5 p.783-792

The latter of these two is easier to find (its also on EbscoHost.) The other, so far as I know, only exists in print form, but our library has a copy.

The issue that Storms was dealing with was the relationship between sexual orientation and being masculine/feminine. In popular mind, when people think of what makes someone gay (or how to tell of someone is gay), they don’t think primarily think in terms of sexual behavior or sexual fantasies (what Kinsey looked for). Instead they think (thought) of gays as being very feminine males and lesbians as being very masculine females. Storms didn’t like this idea and tried to argue against it in both papers. For a while, ideas about masculinity vs. femininity worked on a uni-dimensional model (like Kinsey’s for sexual orientation). On this model masculinity is at one end and femininity is at the other end. The more feminine some is, the less masculine they are, and vice versa. In the years before Storm's publishing his article, this was being challenged and replaced with a two dimensional model with masculinity on one axis and femininity on the other. This means that people with high masculinity and low femininity are masculine. The other way around is feminine. High on both is androgynous. Low on both is “undifferentiated.”

Storms extended this model to sexual orientation. This created the category of “asexual” and also predicts that having higher homosexual attraction/fantasies does not necessarily imply having lower heterosexual attraction/fantasies.

His sample was too small to give any interesting numbers for asexuals.

Some other studies that seem interesting:

In the Feb 1982 issue of Playboy, there was a survey concerning sexual behavior. 65471 males and 14963 women responded (via mail), making it the largest survey to date of people's sexual behavior. Givden an estimated distribution of 5,000,000 copies per month at that point in time, this is only about 2% of the readership, so the percentages may not be the most reliable. One of the questions asked people's sexual orientation and gave them the choices "heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual." However, 1493 males didn't report sexual identity, and 1123 reported their sexual orientation as "asexual." From what I can tell, this was done without it being an option, although I haven't seen a copy of the origional survery. I didn't want to try to dig up a copy of playboy from 25 years ago just to check. This amounts to 1.7% of males identifying as asexual. Given that this was a) asexuality wasn't given as an option and B) asexuals may be underrepresented in terms of playboy readership, I expect this number to be low. (I realize that some asexuals do use porn, but I'm just thinking in terms of percentages.)

This is found in Lever, Janet et. al "Behavior Patterns and Sexual Identity in Bisexual Males" Journal of Sex Research Vol 29. #2 May 1992 p.141-167. (The article didn't tell us much else because they decided to exclude the self identified asexuals on grounds that "virtually all men whose self identification was 'asexual' or missing would be clasified as heterosexual based on their responses to items about their sexual behavior, but a comparison of conditional means of 40 key behavioral and demographic items showed them to be too atypical to include with other heterosexuals." This was found in a footnote on p. 147)

I found one other study that had "asexuality" as an option for sexual orientation.

Andres-Hyman, Raquel, et al. "Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation as PTSD Mitigators in Child Sexual Abuse Survivors" Journal of Family Violence, vol 19, no. 5 October 2004

The people here are definitely not representative of society at large as the respondants were people recieving treatment as adults for childhood sexual abuse, but they gave 5 options for sexual orientation. "Heterosexual, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, uncertain." About 3.9% self-identified as asexual. Given that this was published in late 2004, I wonder if having read the study on asexuality done by Bogaert (also published in 2004, but I don't know the month) effected this.

One thing seems clear: the 1% of population being asexual is very likely way too low.

I'm finding it interesting (and a bit depressing that people have known about asexuality for so long and not considered it something worth looking into.) If anyone else knows about any sources I haven't mentioned, I'd love to know.

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Does anyone else take offense to the idea that asexuals are more likely to be depressed or suffer low self esteem? If anything, from what I've seen so far, it seems that the AVEN asexuals are more empowered and self-fulfilled individuals than any of the sexuals I know!

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Does anyone else take offense to the idea that asexuals are more likely to be depressed or suffer low self esteem? If anything, from what I've seen so far, it seems that the AVEN asexuals are more empowered and self-fulfilled individuals than any of the sexuals I know!

Why take offence? He's just reporting a correlation. If asexuals hadn't reported depression or exhibited low self-esteem, there would have been nothing to report. And given the general level of ignorance and intolerance of asexuality in society it's hardly a surprising result, or anything to be ashamed of.

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geronimohorse

Yes, i'm sure most of the people with self esteem issues have gotten that way from feeling different/left out. But that's bound to happen - you can't go your whole life feeling like an outcast without some kind of emotional problems.

Having said that - I can only imagine the happiness some people find in this site - I know I was ecstatic to find it - and I haven't been emotionally abused! It's great - I don't know what i'd do without it! :D

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Does anyone else take offense to the idea that asexuals are more likely to be depressed or suffer low self esteem? If anything, from what I've seen so far, it seems that the AVEN asexuals are more empowered and self-fulfilled individuals than any of the sexuals I know!

I don't allow people to offend me with shit like that.

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Lord Happy Toast

It really doesn't surprise me at all that the asexuals were most likely to be depressed and have low self-esteem. The percentages of people found to have "self-esteem problems" (as defined by a certain score on a survey I don't know much about) were

heterosexual = 25.88%

bisexual (called "ambisexual") =26.54%

homosexual=29.88%

asexual=33.57%

so the differences, while significant, were not huge. (For the groups other than asexuals, this matched patterns found in previous research that had only 3 options for sexual orientation.)

Given that this was 1983, most asexuals didn't know much of anything about asexuality and had likely never heard of asexuality. A lot of people come to AVEN wondering if there's anyone else in the world like them. Finding out that there are and that its ok to be asexual probably helps self-esteem considerably. The question becomes "does sexual orientation cause problems?" or "Does societal attitude towards sexual orientation make certain problems more likely?" Correlations can't answer the question, but one answer seems more likely.

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(There is a book called "The Sexually Oppressed" which is cited in the wiki and it should take a day or two to get that one because the university I attend has it in the out of library storage for books that aren't used often. So I had to request it and then they will send it to the interlibrary loan pick up place in the main library.) Strangely, there is an article cited and its name is given, and the source for the quotation is a different book. This bothers me. I'm guessing that the quotation came from the cited book, so I'm looking forward to finding seeing the bibliography to improve the citation.

Sorry, my fault. Yes, it's from the book cited; Myra T. Johnson's paper is a chapter in the collection "The Sexually Oppressed" edited by Gochros and Gochros.

Also, I'll have to figure out how to work the wiki.

It's really simple. Start out playing around on a userpage, I bet you'll get the hang of it in no time.

is a *considerably* expanded version of what I have to add. I've been researching it for the past few days so I feel like telling someone.

AWESOME. Unfortunately, all the research I know of is what's in the Wikipedia article, which was transferred to the AVENwiki.

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Does anyone else take offense to the idea that asexuals are more likely to be depressed or suffer low self esteem? If anything, from what I've seen so far, it seems that the AVEN asexuals are more empowered and self-fulfilled individuals than any of the sexuals I know!

I don't allow people to offend me with shit like that.

Agreed. It didn't surprise me when I read it.

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Lord Happy Toast

I just got a copy of "The Sexually Oppressed" and now it makes sense because its a collection of essays. I also now have a copy of the first book on the wiki (Sexual Orientation: a Human Right) which seems to refer to some other books that may actually have something. Last night I decided to try "Google Books" to see what I could find, and some book by "Bell and Weinberg" kept getting cited. Apparently the library is supposed to have it, so I'll go see what it says.

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Does anyone else take offense to the idea that asexuals are more likely to be depressed or suffer low self esteem? If anything, from what I've seen so far, it seems that the AVEN asexuals are more empowered and self-fulfilled individuals than any of the sexuals I know!

I don't allow people to offend me with shit like that.

Agreed. It didn't surprise me when I read it.

I should clarify that I wasn't surprised at the finding. These days depression can be found in just about any group of folks.

I just hate that it always comes up. As someone who lives with the lifetime label of "depressive" I hate that people point to various aspects of my life and say "Oh, that--that's why you're depressed" when it has nothing to do with my sexuality or my childhood or the kind of car I drive! There are as many kinds of depression as there are people, and I don't happen to believe that my sexuality is in any way linked to my depression.

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Lord Happy Toast

I've updated the wiki and the article on wikipedia if anyone wants to check it out or fix anything you think is wrong.

I found a few more things in digging up old research.

First, the article in "the sexually oppressed" about asexuality in women is really good. I would strongly recommend it. The author says lots of the same things people have been saying about asexuality on AVEN--asexuals being left behind by the sexual revolution, criticisms of people thinking asexuality doesn't exists or is a problem that needs to be fixed, etc--is said, but it was all said 30 years ago. (1977). The book might be a bit hard to come by, but I think its worth it.

Second, I found that there is some source that has been quoted in several other books that describes asexuals as lonely, isolated, depressed people. (for example, read the footnote on this page. "(formatted by mod for space)")

It turns out that the research that is cited has nothing to do with asexuality as described on AVEN. The relevant study is a group of gays and lesbians who have low sex drive and few sexual partners. One of their biggest complaints is difficulty of finding sexually partners--not a complain I hear often on AVEN. Also, in that study, how people were put into the "asexual" category is a little suspicious (not well explained and rather subjective).

Third, In the Storms 1980 article referred to in the wiki, it mentions that not including asexuality as a sexual orientation may result in mistaking asexuals for bisexuals. This is true, but if you look up the example he cites, it is weird. The "research" was done in the early 70s when little was known about bisexuals (there called "ambisexuals"). So the researchers came up with a definition of bisexual that required people to have had a fair amount of sexual experience with both sexes, but never had a long term sexual relationship with anyone (how is that part of bisexuality????) They got 6 males and 6 females like this, and got each one sexual partner of the same and of the opposite sex for each subject. Then the subjects would engage in some particular sexual activity and the researchers would watch and see if the "ambisexual" could achieve orgasm. They used 3 different sexual methods per sex of partner, and to make sure each was used, the sexual partner would initiate the sexual activity and the research subject would passively respond (to make sure that they tried out everything.) The results showed that with a couple of exceptions (3) everyone was able to orgasm to everything. I'm not sure exactly what that showed, and I was shocked that research like this was even possible. Nowadays we need IRB (Internal Review Board) approval for human subjects research, but wikipedia says that started in 1974. That explains a lot.

Anyway, how does this have anything to do with asexuality? In addition to having the subjects have sex a bunch of different ways, they asked them what they had sexual fantasies about. The heterosexual and homosexual subjects (in other parts of the study) tended to have fantasies about having sex with attractive people or potential partners, etc. Other studies have found the same thing for bisexuals. But in this study, the "ambisexuals" did not have any fantasies about people they found attractive. Instead they only fantasized about previous sexual encounters or faceless, anonymous people. So maybe these were really sexually active asexuals???

I've still got one more article I'm trying to find.

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geronimohorse

Mate, this stuffs really interesting. Keep it up, i'm dying to hear more!!! :D

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Lord Happy Toast

I'm now at home for a couple weeks for winter break so I no longer have my library access. I had thought that I had pretty much the last thing I wanted to check out concerning asexuality.

Berkey, B. R., Perelman-Hall, T., & Kurdek, L. A. (1990). The multidimensional scale of sexuality. Journal of Homosexuality, 19, 67-87.

It was in the bibliography of the much cited 2004 Bogaert article, so I looked it up. It does make occasional mention of asexuality but has (almost) nothing interesting to say, and they don't seem to know much of anything about it. The article is concerned with bisexuality which is not dealt well with in the Kinsey scale which makes bisexuals look like heterosexual/homosexual hybrids who aren't exactly one thing and aren't exactly the other. So a scale that has homoerotic and heteroerotic on two different axes works better. (And they looked at other things as well.) This model requires at least mention of asexuals. They didn't have any in their sample because of sampling methods--they recruited from gay, lesbian, and . bisexual organizations and from personal acquaintances. However, when they noted that they had no asexuals, they said something I found interesting: asexuality is rare. And they cited a book.

Kolodny, Masters and Johnson "On sex and human loving" 1996. I am curious what that book has to say but I'll have to wait a couple of weeks to get it. If anyone is dying to look it up themselves and let us know, that'd be great. But I imagine that Christmas is keeping most of us busy (and away from the library.)

Also, it seems that bisexuality has been widely seen as a legitamite sexual orientation much recently than hetero and homosexuality. The study that might have been about very sexually active asexuals was mentioned in "The Multidimensional Scale of Sexual Orientation" and the reason for the strange requirements of identifying "ambisexuals" was the belief it was something of an excuse to avoid long term relationships. The book that study was found in is

Masters and Johnson "Homosexuality in Perspective" 1979.

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Lord Happy Toast

This isn't old research but it is something interesting that I found. In New York's "Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act" it specifically includes asexuality as a sexual orientation. http://www.oag.state.ny.us/civilrights/sonda_brochure.html Since it is dated from 2002, I'm guessing that they included asexuality because of its inclusion in "Sexual Orientation: A Human Right."

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Third, In the Storms 1980 article referred to in the wiki, it mentions that not including asexuality as a sexual orientation may result in mistaking asexuals for bisexuals. This is true, but if you look up the example he cites, it is weird. The "research" was done in the early 70s when little was known about bisexuals (there called "ambisexuals"). So the researchers came up with a definition of bisexual that required people to have had a fair amount of sexual experience with both sexes, but never had a long term sexual relationship with anyone (how is that part of bisexuality????) They got 6 males and 6 females like this, and got each one sexual partner of the same and of the opposite sex for each subject. Then the subjects would engage in some particular sexual activity and the researchers would watch and see if the "ambisexual" could achieve orgasm. They used 3 different sexual methods per sex of partner, and to make sure each was used, the sexual partner would initiate the sexual activity and the research subject would passively respond (to make sure that they tried out everything.) The results showed that with a couple of exceptions (3) everyone was able to orgasm to everything. I'm not sure exactly what that showed, and I was shocked that research like this was even possible. Nowadays we need IRB (Internal Review Board) approval for human subjects research, but wikipedia says that started in 1974. That explains a lot.

Anyway, how does this have anything to do with asexuality? In addition to having the subjects have sex a bunch of different ways, they asked them what they had sexual fantasies about. The heterosexual and homosexual subjects (in other parts of the study) tended to have fantasies about having sex with attractive people or potential partners, etc. Other studies have found the same thing for bisexuals. But in this study, the "ambisexuals" did not have any fantasies about people they found attractive. Instead they only fantasized about previous sexual encounters or faceless, anonymous people. So maybe these were really sexually active asexuals???

I've still got one more article I'm trying to find.

Hey, I'm like that! I thought I'd grow out of it, but then again, maybe not.

I self-identify as bisexual, and I wouldn't call myself a sexual asexual. You know how some asexuals say they're heteroromantic or biromantic or whatever? It's like the opposite of that--oblivious to one level of attraction but normal on another. I wouldn't call that one level "romantic attraction" because it's more than that, and less--I like romance, but I dunno, there's something not there that is there in most people.

This thread made me do a kinda doublethink because I had wondered why other kids, developing, would start getting crushes on people or talk about how someone was cute or whatever but I never did but still have a lot of sexual urges. It doesn't really bother me, so I guess I didn't feel weird or assume it was normal, but it looks like there's a distinct phenomenon going on here that'd warrant someone to actually define it.

I'm attracted to sexual features like women's breasts and one person can strike me as attractive more than another, but I only have to think about someone a little and they all become equally attractive. If I'm aroused by thoughts, it's of faceless sexualness or memory of actual touch in my past--but even that's faceless. It's not like I'm cold or don't like people--I love people--but the person isn't the sex to me, and the sex isn't the person.

And I'm not going to add "If that makes any sense" because it does make sense but we don't have the cultural background to communicate it in a universally acknowledgeable way.

Yay! You taught me something about myself.

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Lord Happy Toast

I found a reference to asexuality in a human sexuality textbook published in 1981. "Sexual choices : an introduction to human sexuality" by Gilbert D. Nass, Roger W. Libby, Mary Pat Fisher.

"In addition to the influence of our biological gender and our learned gender roles, our sexual identity is influenced by whom we eroticize as sex partners. Some of us are turned on by people of the other sex (heterosexuals), some of us are turned on by people of the same sex (homosexuals), some of us are turned on by both sexes (bisexuals), and some of us aren't turned on by anybody at all (asexuals)." p. 15

To make things even more interesting, rather than just leaving asexuals as a word in a list and then ignoring it from then on, on the next page there is a short section called "Asexuals Come out of the Closet." which quotes from Arthur Hopppe, "A New Sex Fad," San Francisco Chronicle, October 10, 1979 (which I can't find online, unfortunately as that publication only seems to have internet archives going back to 1995) . The article combines "asexual" and "celibate," but is still kind of amusing. It a fictitious interview between the author and the president of the "militant asexual liberation movement."

Here's my favorite quote:

"Answer: ...We members of A Lib are stressing A pride. When we are asked our sexual preference on employment forms, we boldly write down, none.

Question: Are you discriminated against nevertheless?

Answer: We sure are. We're presently fighting a case against the Marine Corps. they're trying to dishonorably discharge a young private who admitted to being a practicing asexual when they caught him reading War and Peace."

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