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The Sexual Spectrum


Yanagi

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So I was reading a book called The Sexual Spectrum - Exploring Human Diversity by Olive Skene Johnson, published in 2004 and found a reference of a study that mentioned asexuality.

So about twenty years after Kinseys's reports, a team lead by Alan Bell and Martin Weinberg of Indianna University conducted lengthy telephone interviews with almost a thousand homosexual men and women in the San Fransisco Bay area. These findings were compared to a heterosexual group comparable in age and education.

Their study was published into a book Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women in 1979.

Bell and Weinberg divided their homosexual subjects into five groups:

The 'closed-coupled' group who were similar to happy married heterosexual people. Partners in this group were closely bound together and their partnerships tended to be the source of their sexual and interpersonal satisfactions. They had the smallest number of sexual problems and least likely to regret being homosexual.

The second group, the 'open-coupled' group, were also living with sexual partners but unlike the 'close-coupled' group they were unhappy with their relationships and tended to seek satisfaction with people other than their partners.

The third group, the 'functionals' group, tended to be the swinging singles group whose lives were organized around their sexual experiences.

The forth group, the 'dysfunctionals', were people who could be described as the stereotypical tormented homosexuals. They had the most sexual problems and generally regretted being homosexual. They tended to think about themselves as sexually unappealing and had the most difficulty finding partners.

And last but not least the fifth group, the 'asexuals', who tended to be loners. The reported less interest in sex and had a poor opinion of their own sex appeal. Not surprisingly, people in this group tended to have sexual problems.

Unfortunately I can't find their book on amazon otherwise I'd buy it. This info was taken from another book so I have no idea whether the terms used are accurate to the original study. I think it's neat though that asexuality would be mentioned in 1979 even though it's got a sad spin on it.

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I found a copy on Ebay, if you're interested.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370245887155&rvr_id=&crlp=1_263602_263622&UA=WVO%3F&GUID=d479d5111240a0e203a62736fec32c7e&itemid=370245887155&ff4=263602_263622

Oh! And I found it on amazon, too, a couple of copies:

http://www.amazon.com/Homosexualities-Study-Diversity-Among-Women/dp/0671251503

I find this stuff very interesting, and if I weren't so broke (and not to mention too busy to read anything other than my textbooks), I might buy it myself. :)

I'm often surprised about how long certain things have been around. Often, things that seem new actually aren't new at all, even the terms for those things.

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I found a copy on Ebay, if you're interested.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=370245887155&rvr_id=&crlp=1_263602_263622&UA=WVO%3F&GUID=d479d5111240a0e203a62736fec32c7e&itemid=370245887155&ff4=263602_263622

Oh! And I found it on amazon, too, a couple of copies:

http://www.amazon.com/Homosexualities-Study-Diversity-Among-Women/dp/0671251503

I find this stuff very interesting, and if I weren't so broke (and not to mention too busy to read anything other than my textbooks), I might buy it myself. :)

I'm often surprised about how long certain things have been around. Often, things that seem new actually aren't new at all, even the terms for those things.

Ha that's why it didn't show up on the first page of search results! It's out of print. *Sigh*

You might be able to find the first book I mentioned in your local library, The sexual spectrum, but most of the info about that study was posted here.

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You might be able to find the first book I mentioned in your local library, The sexual spectrum, but most of the info about that study was posted here.

Yeah, that's a good idea. I might check it out during summer break. :)

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I found one more reference of asexuality in the book The Sexual Spectrum. It was grouped in with a bunch of different orientations mentioned with in brackets beside the term 'a lack of sexual attraction' as a brief description. It's not a continuing theme in the book but it was at least mentioned.

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Lord Happy Toast

Way back when, this was briefly discussed in a thread about old research dealing with asexuality. There isn't much of interest in the Bell and Weinberg study. It's not really clear what they even mean by "asexual" and their operational definition isn't clear. Pretty much, the people who were having less sex (often not by choice) were thrown into this category. I recall them being described as depressed, isolated, alone, frustrated at not having sexual partners, and the like.

In looking at the old thread, it looks like I didn't post anything about that book because, after reading it the relevant section (which is only a couple pages), I didn't think there was anything really worth citing.

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Wow that is an old thread.

I know it is rather depressing but I rarely find any mention of asexuality anywhere and what I found interesting was the fact that the study was from 1979.

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I read that book when I was researching the biology of homosexuality. I thought it was a really good book and used it as the main resource for a research paper. But eventually I stopped caring about the biology of homosexuality because there's so much knowledge and yet so little really known. I no longer believe in that Kinsey scale crap and think most of it is irrelevant. I don't need to define myself on a spectrum any more than I need to define myself in a binary. Isn't asexual outside the Left to Right spectrum? What about agender? Sexuality is not just a straight line from straight to gay. It's much more complex than that.

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