Dual Asexuality Model

[binary suns]

4 hours ago, Alejandrogynous said:

 

I think this is more the fault of AVEN's set-up than anything. "An asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction," is loud and proud on the welcome page but finding AVEN's definition of sexual attraction, "desire to have sexual contact with someone else, to share our sexuality with them," takes more digging to find. For a long time, the links to the FAQ didn't even work properly. It's not surprising that it gets missed by a lot of people, who then draw their own conclusions.

The aven definition of sexual attraction is a little blunt but there are other sources that define sexual attraction similar to wiki “Sexual attraction is attraction on the basis of sexual desire or the quality of arousing such interest.”

 

google search now doesn’t put dictionary’s in my first page of google searches and I’m lazy. Also on mobile. But a lot of the online dictionaries defined it similarly. Attraction that is based on sexual desire is sexual attraction. There is more to sexual attraction  than just desire, but the easy way to identify one’s attraction as sexual is when it leads to desire. People who don’t experience desire right away still know they experience sexual attraction when they do, despite the desire not coming right away. Many sexuals don’t identify with the whole “see someone and wanna bang them”

 

 

It can be confusing for people who are desire-neutral then on identifying their sexual attraction, which is why I branch out the explanation a little more inclusively of some desireless experiences of sexual attraction, such as arousal that results from ones attraction to others. 

 

 

 

The reason why we have  a lot of attraction-blind with needs for sex identifying ace, is because of misinformation. Loving to have sex is not an ace trait. But many ace communities don’t spend the time learning about sexual attraction and so misinform new members to their community that they can want sex and be ace, and then just sealing it in to the community. 

 

 

Im not really sure what to say. I would personally prefer a definition for ace being “an ace does not feel sexual attraction, nor desire for partnered sex”

 

But imo something so direct is a little harsh because there are exceptions.  So idk what is best,, and tbh it ain’t my responsibility. 

[binary suns]

15 minutes ago, skepa said:

 

 

 it's a matter of perspective, if either attraction-blind or desire-neutral people are very low in the population (i.e. 1% or so) I still feel like it would be more appropriate to have labels for what makes you different than the population, rather than what makes you the same, 

Yeah I think this is the most compelling argument to advocate for combining grey and ace into ace, to have a larger subculture. But as of the current common paradigms of asexuality, reaching that merge is challenging. 

 

Plus like I said, for me and other greys, it’s clear we aren’t alike aces. But aren’t allo. There’s varying reasons as to why... so defining that difference is tricky... 

[binary suns]

Oh @skepa when I read the Wikipedia definition, “lack of attraction, or the low or absent desire” I read it as a clarification of attraction, not an either/or. So actually I think it’s a weak definition, as it inherently has unclear grammar. 

[skepa]

2 minutes ago, float on said:

Oh @skepa when I read the Wikipedia definition, “lack of attraction, or the low or absent desire” I read it as a clarification of attraction, not an either/or. So actually I think it’s a weak definition, as it inherently has unclear grammar. 

Oh!! very good point! I will say that https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275278342_Asexuality_What_It_Is_and_Why_It_Matters defines it as or, rather than a clarification.

[binary suns]

In my reading of that article, it heavily implied that attraction and desire are within the same concept, interchangeable. Not either/or, but rather both/and. 

 

 

 

Personally ive witnessed enough grey perspectives on this site to know that they can be seperable,

 

 

but most aces if they experience any level of attraction or desire - it is for erotic media or fiction or fantasy only, but never for the reality of sex nor a sexual relationship. Or it is weak to the point of apathy towards sex itself...

[binary suns]

Edit: both/and, in that both are inherent attributes of sexuality. Keep in mind that bogaert and a believe this article’s writer are allo, so they experience both as one experience. They don’t really “get” what it’s like to be ace and so don’t realize the information that’s inherent to their experience that no ace really “gets” 

 

... so They’re clarifying the diversity of sexual attraction to be inclusive beyond just finding people hot... it’s also wanting sex, or needing it. And it’s romantic but that’s romantic attraction  and its family-building and wanting to connect through intimacy. And many other things. It’s a pretty complex and deep and rich experience of companionship, tho many of it isn’t inclusive to one’s sexual partnership. And so defining sexuality on the “extra” stuff doesn’t really target orientation very well. 

 

 

So the simplest abstraction - is to just target attraction and desire as: feeling hot for people, and also feeling hot for sex. Really without those, for an allo it can feel woefully platonic, feeling hot for eachothers’ physical intimacy is a spark that is sorely missed if it’s lacked. 

[skepa]

I've updated the main page to remove the term asexual from each of the three groups and added a sentence under denoting why someone may or may not want to choose the term asexual vs sexual, this I think should lead to less friction imo, and more discussion which is what we want here.

[skepa]

Hey everyone! Here's a very rudimentary diagram of what I have going on in my mind about this system:

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g4oH6ByxGKurfTE9X1oPrqMHqGqQ-dbs/view?usp=sharing

 

feedback is welcome!!

[skepa]

So in the above picture, just to explain things, sexual attraction between these two groups is defined when both the attraction system and desire system are in place, and active. (Desire relates to partnered sex) when, either of these systems (or both) is removed, than the group claims they don't experience sexual attraction.

 

Some other things in the picture, that I think are interesting and need to be expanded on, is that attraction-blind individuals can not see people as hot or sexy, desire-neutral may, also attraction-blind individuals most likely lack aesthetic attraction as well, and desire-neutral individuals don't (I'll have to do a poll on this to verify)

 

[skepa]

Updated the model to include some results of the newly listed poll. It's a very small sample size, but it does show distinction between different groups, that I think was important to include.

 

The poll is here: https://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/169266-more-dual-asexuality-questions/

 

[skepa]

Added explanation of terms section, posted here for discussion:

 

So from the poll listed above we see that there is a difference between someone who Identifies as "I view people as hot/sexy and cute/good-looking, I also have no desire for partnered sex", and someone who identifies as "I don't view people as hot/sexy or cute/good-looking, I also have no desire for partnered sex,", and since sexy, hot, cute, good-looking can be fairly well categorized into attraction, it makes sense that the difference between these two groups can be called attraction-blindness. Furthermore it makes sense that "I also have no desire for partnered sex" deals with desire for partnered sex, thus the term desire-neutral is used.

[skepa]

Made a couple more edits, including removing all of the terms (attraction-blind, desire-neutral) ect, now just including people who don't find others interesting and those that do not desire partnered sex, both unlabeled. I also removed references to these terms and made the overall post more neutral.

 

I want to thank Zebrafinch who made the initial comment on these two types of individuals, which was some brilliant insight, as well as float on who had some very good feedback to help improve the wording and ideas presented, and also to thank all the other individuals that contributed positively towards this model, thank you all!

 

More feedback is of course always welcome! but I think the model is coming closer to being finished. if you think there is something to add, don't be afraid to respond I'd love to incorporate it as well!

[Wezu]

On 3/22/2018 at 2:02 PM, skepa said:

A very simple example of this would be cancer patients:

It is much better to incorrectly tell someone that doesn’t have cancer that they do, and correctly identify all cancer patients(true positives), rather than the alternative of telling someone that they don’t have cancer when they really do.

So I want to take a moment to argue this point from a purely probabilistic point of view. Let's say you have a cancer that affects 1% of the population and a test that identifies it 100% of the time. However it incorrectly tells us that somebody has cancer when they don't 5% of the time. Would you use that test? Intuitively we might say yeah, sure I would, but if you actually work out the probabilities the chance of you having cancer given that the test reports a positive is less than 20%. Even if you drop the false positive rate down to 1% you're still 50%-50% as to whether the patient actually has cancer. This is one of the great paradoxes of doing tests for things that affect small segments of the population. In order to get meaningful data you need to get that false positive rate down to zero, which I'm not persuaded your model does. Trying to pick up all of the Ace people who feel lost and confused is admirable, but the test has to be meaningful. Sure, if we pick up a few sexuals who think they are ace and discover they're not that's perfectly fine, and questioning who you are is part of life. but if 80% of the people who come through here think they're ace when they're not are we really doing anybody a favour. We don't want to create a culture where it's a revolving door where people are constantly realising they're not ace and people who are can't find significant support because the vast majority of people who identify as ace actually aren't and can't understand what that person is going through.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Wezu said:

So I want to take a moment to argue this point from a purely probabilistic point of view. Let's say you have a cancer that affects 1% of the population and a test that identifies it 100% of the time. However it incorrectly tells us that somebody has cancer when they don't 5% of the time. Would you use that test? Intuitively we might say yeah, sure I would, but if you actually work out the probabilities the chance of you having cancer given that the test reports a positive is less than 20%. Even if you drop the false positive rate down to 1% you're still 50%-50% as to whether the patient actually has cancer. This is one of the great paradoxes of doing tests for things that affect small segments of the population. In order to get meaningful data you need to get that false positive rate down to zero, which I'm not persuaded your model does. Trying to pick up all of the Ace people who feel lost and confused is admirable, but the test has to be meaningful. Sure, if we pick up a few sexuals who think they are ace and discover they're not that's perfectly fine, and questioning who you are is part of life. but if 80% of the people who come through here think they're ace when they're not are we really doing anybody a favour. We don't want to create a culture where it's a revolving door where people are constantly realising they're not ace and people who are can't find significant support because the vast majority of people who identify as ace actually aren't and can't understand what that person is going through.

Excellent comment, welcome to AVEN 

 

[skepa]

On 4/1/2018 at 11:50 PM, Wezu said:

but if 80% of the people who come through here think they're ace when they're not are we really doing anybody a favour

I agree! Which is one of the reasons why I added commentary near the bottom saying that adding more questions perhaps may reduce the number of false positives with the model(perhaps like a standardized test). It would be interesting though to see how many people from the general population this two question model would capture, and how many false positives it would contain as well. Apart of the assumption of the model is that "most" sexual people can recognize the experience of sexual attraction. Perhaps an additional question of if people can recognize sexual desire would also be useful in determining asexuality.

[Wezu]

@skepa

I will say that I'm not entirely sold on your premise, but I mainly want to make sure that whatever you come up with is meaningful so that we can at least have a discussion on the premise at a later time.

[skepa]

Updated the model to take in a questionnaire that was created from a large sample size:

 

https://avia-viridis.neocities.org/acescale.html