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Who are asexuals and how's their life without sex? (Spanish article)


Elisewin

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This was published this weekend (29.11.2015) in a monthly publication by spanish free newspaper '20 minutos', which is very popular here!

I think everything is well explained and documented, it mentions AVEN and the asexual census, and I think it's the first piece I see where a spanish asexual is using their real name and picture ^_^

http://www.20minutos.es/noticia/2611359/0/asexuales-asexualidad/cuando-sexo/no-importa/

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Today I learned that 3 years of high school Spanish is not adequate for reading a Spanish article.

#feelsbadman

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WaywardHeroine

Today I learned that 3 years of high school Spanish is not adequate for reading a Spanish article.

#feelsbadman

Haha, I took four years and not having a lot of luck. Anyone want to help us out and translate?

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Maybe I could try when I have some free time... but you can ask me if you have any doubts

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Ok, it was faster than I thought ^_^ Keep in mind that some terms are roughly translated because I'm not a native english speaker.

Who are asexuals and how are their lives without sex?

They don't experience sexual attraction towards any gender, but they fall in love, they can have partners and they demand the right not to be stigmatized.

Who is part of the asexual collective and how do they feel?

When Javier León (42) heard that word told by a friend, everything made sense in the indecipherable puzzle that his sexuality was until then. “You're asexual”. Those seven letters explained his lack of interest in sex, why he lost his virginity so late or the reason why he hadn't had relations for two years with his last partner. He wasn't a repressed homosexual or a 'weirdo', as his classmates had told him when he was a teenager. Since then he is a happy man.

León is part of the asexual community, those who simply don't experience a sexual desire. Asexuality has nothing to do with past traumas or volunteer celibacy. They can be people who don't masturbate frequently, never googled the word 'sex' or are not in a rush to sleep with their boyfriends or girlfriends.

“It took me a long time to have a partner and relations because of my apathy. When I did, it was because of social pressure. I didn't have that need”, says Javier. In an hypersexualized society where even car advertisings use eroticism to stimulate consumers, these people have to bear rude comments, uncomfortable questions – “When are you getting a girlfriend?” - or social alienation.

¿The fourth sexual orientation?

Characters like Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle or Sheldon Cooper from TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, for whom sex is a social formality, could be examples of asexual people in culture. After heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality, some experts point to asexuality as the fourth sexual orientation, although there is no consensum. People with a low sexual desire have always existed, although a word to define them has not existed until the 21st century.

Published studies are still few and they do nothing but confirm that asexuality exists. There aren't any worldwide studies, but about American and British population in most cases. In his writings about asexuality, doctor Alfred Kinsley pointed out an 'x' degree of americans who didn't feel sexual attraction within his Kinsley scale, which he presented in 1948 and measured up to six degrees of behaviour where 0 was total heterosexuality and 6 total homosexuality.

In 2004 Anthony Bogaert, doctor in canadian's Brock University, published the studio Asexuality: prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample in Journal of Sex Research, where he confirmed that 1% of Britons are part of the asexual group. Bogaert used data from the first british National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, made between 1990 and 1991 by a multidisciplinary team of university researchers, and published in 1994. 1,05% answered that they didn't feel sexual attraction towards anyone.

Love without sex

“I found asexuality after being married for a few years to a sexually active woman, and only now I'm starting to answer some of my internal doubts that didn't fit”, says Salva, a 46 year-old from Barcelona who started worrying at 30: “I didn't want to stay single my whole life”.

The fact that there is no desire for sex does not mean that there is no romantic attraction. “Everyone needs affection”, explains sexologist Silvia Fonseca, from Psytel clinic. “My problem is that I'm very romantic”, laughs León.

According to their romantic orientations, asexuals can be heteroromantic (if they feel attracted to the opposite gender), homoromantic (to the same sex) or aromantic (if there isn't a tendency of any kind).

Javier León, antropologist and publisher, was educated in a world where love and sex are tied to a partner and where the lack of relations means that the feelings wear out. “Some of my exgirlfriends claimed that a couple is not a real one if there is no sex. For them that was a friendship”, he says. This vision of love has lead him to have an irregular sex life. {?}

Asexuals do not reject sex, so they can “force” some relations although they don't appeal to them. With his first girlfriend there was no penetration, with others, relations were “almost normal” and with his last partner (after finding his orientation) there was no sex in two years of relationship. “I also dated a sexologist for seven years”, he says. “Even though she understood that I didn't need as much sex as the rest, she always tried to excite me to have relations”, he specifies.

“Being in a couple where one is asexual and the other sexual depends on the agreement that they both make. Some have sex to go on with the relationship, whereas others have an open relationship” says Moisés Catalán, president of the national queer association El Príncipe Lila. Like others, Javier León lives in what seems to be a contradiction but is actually very logical: he has seen porn movies “out of curiosity” and he masturbates “every six months or three or two” because even though his desire is low, he keeps a biological impulse.

Regarding sex nothing is set in stone. What yesterday was divided in only two categories, heterosexuality and homosexuality, nowadays has evolved towards a more plural and realistic range of possibilities. Montse is an example. This catalan thought she was asexual {the text says sexual, but I think it's a typo} until she met her current partner: “I started feeling things for him that I didn't know”. She is a member of NGO El Príncipe Lila and she met her boyfriend in a group that was created for meeting asexuals in her city. She looked for understanding, not a partner. “Without thinking about it, besides making new friends I met the love of my life”. Now her orientation has a different name: demisexuality. She is only able to feel sexual attraction when the emotional union is very strong and intimate.

A wide online community

The lack of references is one of the problems that young ones have. For this reason Javier León decided to write the book Asexualidad: ¿se puede vivir sin sexo? (Asexuality: is it possible to live without sex?), that together with Diario de una asexual (Diary of an asexual girl) by Lucía Lietsi, is one of the few references in Spain. But there is one place where these people are free of prejudices: internet. Miguel (not his real name) is part of a group of asexuals who, unlike Javier, are afraid of social rejection and prefer to hide behind an Internet nickname. He found the word “asexuality” at 18 in a Google search.

“When I first fell in love I never had sexual fantasies with her, my fantasies were about how would it be to live together, eating, going out...”, says this young man who is still a virgin and has never had a girlfriend. “I've been branded homosexual, asocial and having trouble finding a partner”. Miguel is sure about it. For now, he doesn't want to share it with anyone. Every time he has confessed to a friend, the answer has been “try it first and then talk”. “It seems that asexual means broken or impotent and in women's case, frigid. People see it as a bad thing”, he complains.

Experiences like this have helped the creation of a big Internet asexual community. “A boy says 'no' to a very beautiful girl and he is thought gay, there's no other possibility. Males especially live it with a lot of pressure, because the social stereotype associates being masculine to a sexual behaviour”, says a representative of AVEN (The Asexual Visibility and Education Network). This website, founded in 2001 by David Jay, has more than 76.000 members in the whole world. Using a nickname they can talk about their doubts, feelings or ask questions without fear of being humiliated.

Even though we can't use this 2.0. 'family' to make a general profile of asexuals, it is a reliable meter of how this online community is on a worldwide level. Data of The Asexual Census, in which 14.210 people participated, shows the huge diversity of the group. Those who considered asexual distributed their sexual identity in completely asexual (49%), demisexual (11,1%), greysexual (those who only experiment sexual attraction in specific situations, 16,2%). The other 23,4% did not identify with any of them. It is a very young community, average is 22,4 years old, although the age of members goes from 13 to 77 years old.

Why doesn't this wide community go out of the 'digital closet' and form a solid and tangible collective? Teacher Teresa López, author of the thesis La identidad asexual: de la masculinización social a las redes sociales virtuales (Sexual identity: from social masculinization to virtual social networks) considers that it could be about fear of social rejection. “In United States and United Kingdom they go to demonstrations and there is a visible collective, but in Spain we are slightly behind. In Spain there is a high aversion of uncertainty, also in the sexual field. They are more embarrased, more afraid and they dare less”.

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