Random article found

[AmoebicMe]

I hadn't seen this article before, so here it is:

http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-04-...vey-asexuallove

And:

Asexuals seek a path to love
By Benjamin Harvey



Suggestive images in advertising are omnipresent in New York City. (Pearl Gabel/CNS)


Suggestive images are the norm in Times Square. (Pearl Gabel/CNS)


The last date Vanessa Landau, 36, went on was a good one, she said, but it was going nowhere. Like millions of other couples on any given night, she and her date had dinner, talked and laughed, and then went home together.

“He showed me his [photography] portfolio, I showed him my portfolio,” she said, giggling. “It was just a great time.”

But the relationship wasn't going to be fulfilling for either of them, she said. He was a heterosexual man, and she's an asexual woman.

More and more, asexuals are avoiding the complications, pain and frustration of dating sexual people by seeking out relationships with other asexuals. Asexual groups, like one in Washington that Landau now hosts, and discussion forums are popping up across the country. Many asexuals are just looking to talk. Many others, however, are also looking for romance, and the debate over how to go about that is a heated one.

Asexuals, defined as people who feel no need or desire for sex, are just beginning to develop their own sense of what role they play in a society that is saturated with sex, both as a group seeking rights and recognition and as individuals seeking love, social scientists say.

David Jay, 22, was an asexual freshman in college five years ago when he started the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), a Web log, informational site and discussion board that helps asexuals meet others who feel the same way that they do about intimacy.

"Because the community is so young," Jay said, "questions about romance and relationships and courtship are still things we're struggling with." But "a lot of asexual people are very focused on finding a partner."

While celibates make a choice to refrain from sex, asexuals say they experience no sexual attraction at all. In 2004, psychologist Anthony Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario found that of a sample of 18,876 people in Britain, 1.05 percent reported being asexual, agreeing with the statement, "I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all." That number was only slightly lower than the percentage of people in the study, 1.11 percent, who reported being homosexual.

Landau, a self-proclaimed victim of childhood sexual abuse, said she had especially struggled with a feeling of being broken or defective, though many social scientists resist the idea that for someone to be asexual, something has to have gone wrong in their past.

"We live in a culture that says you have to want sex all the time," said Michael Kimmel, a gender issues expert and professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. "In the past, it was true that people who wanted sex all the time were considered deviant." But now it's the people who don't want sex who feel abnormal.

It is an often-painful issue that lies at the heart of asexual life. "You're sort of told if you're not interested in sex you're repressed," Jay said. "What's implied is that you have to medicate yourself and go through therapy and have sex even if you don't want to."

As a graduate of Wesleyan University, Jay knows what it's like to feel abnormal for not wanting sex. Wesleyan is famously liberal on all issues, including sexual ones. It offered a course on pornography and has a "naked dorm," a coed dormitory where clothing is optional. In 2001, students in a homosexual group took over the administration building and demanded a queer studies academic concentration, which they eventually won.

"I've had people come to my room while I was doing homework and offer to have threesomes like everyone else," Jay said.

With AVEN, though, online visitors are told it's OK not to have sex. Jay said the overriding message is, "If sex isn't fun, find other things in life that are."

For many asexuals, those other things involve intimate, if not physical, connections with other people.

"To me, it seems like people use sex to do things, to communicate things," Jay said. Asexuals find that they can communicate in other ways, and many resent the suggestion that there is some hierarchy of intimacy, with intercourse the crown.

Both Jay and Landau said their fantasies revolved around conversations. "For me," Landau said, "talking is the substitute for sex." And as she described a conversation, Landau spoke of one partner opening up to another, of a sense of euphoria and closeness intensifying, and of a climax of "soulful connectedness."

Sociologist Kimmel is wary, however, of generalizing about asexual fantasies and behavior. Sexual desire, he said, is a continuum, with different people experiencing it at different levels.

But the desire to find a mate, he said, is a very powerful cultural force. "It's pretty hard in our culture to escape the sentiment that everyone must pair up."

Perhaps that suggests the differences between sexual and asexual love may be more superficial than once thought, experts said.

"I've always thought that the phrase, 'just friends,' was kind of strange," Kimmel said, noting that studies show that the romantic relationships that last longest are based on deep friendship, not sexual attraction.

Esther Rothblum, a professor of psychology at the University of Vermont, and author of the book "Boston Marriages: Romantic but Asexual Relationships Among Contemporary Lesbians," said that asexual love and attraction "is often indistinguishable from sexual love and attraction."

"When we see a couple in love, we don't know if they are actually 'doing it' at home," she said.

E-mail: bh2143@columbia.edu

I quite like it. And to the mods, feel free to delete this if it's somewhere else.

2013 Mod Edit: The above link doesn't work, but an archived copy is here. I took the freedom of adding 2 pics in the above text since there were the specific descriptions already in.