Is asexuality as common as homosexuality and bisexuality orientations?

[Guest]

Is asexuality as common as homosexuality  and bisexuality orientations?

[Philip027]

Not even close.  Why do you think the world at large knows about homosexuality/bisexuality but not asexuality?

[Ceebs]

Far from it.

[Horse Ham Radio]

It varies by which study you read. In some there are only 3 or 4 times as many LGB people as asexual people, but in other studies the ratio can be put at 30 times or greater LGB people.

 

So somewhere between 3 and 30 times as many LGB as asexual...

 

Given that asexuality is something many people don't know they are or haven't heard of (as opposed to LGB), I would say the ratio is probably closer to the lower end though.

[everywhere and nowhere]

11 minutes ago, Philip027 said:

Not even close. 

 

8 minutes ago, Ceebs said:

Far from it.

Less common - probably. But I don't believe that it's "not even close". I don't believe that asexuals make up only 1% of society, I believe that the real percentage is closer to 5%.

A bit of analysis: How many asexuals are there?

[Philip027]

I believe the real percentage is a lot less than 1%, so we'll agree to disagree on that.

 

The linked article already recognizes asexuality as an "umbrella" term (something I personally don't agree with), which means of course it's going to have a more generous figure than 1%.

[Horse Ham Radio]

The definition matters a huge amount when working out percentages.

 

I've seen studies claim 15% or more of the population as asexual, but they have used an extremely broad definition. For very strict definitions you can get <0.5% or even smaller values.

[Philip027]

Hah, yeah.  If I were anything like 15% of the population, I'd have felt a lot less lonely since my adolescent years.

[AstrophelDragon]

30 minutes ago, everywhere and nowhere said:

A bit of analysis: How many asexuals are there?

This seems pretty reasonable to me. It's also kind of hard for me to believe that only 1% of the population is asexual because I know a lot of ace people. Maybe it's just unconscious selection bias in my friends, but still

[Philip027]

If I limited my friends to ace people, I'd simply have had no friends growing up whatsoever (not far off from the reality, to be fair) because I never came across any, or at least nobody that I suspected of being so.

 

The best I could hope for was recognition/respect.

[Guest]

sort of... "lesbian, gay, and bi" people are 3.5% - asexual people was previously measured at 1%. You look at it one way, it isn't much of a difference.  Like, the study checked if someone "never felt sexual attraction to anyone" - and there are asexuals who don't realize that their attraction is not sexual attraction. There are asexuals who want intimacy and enjoy sex, but don't feel attraction or even desire for literal sex, just physical intimacy. And there are asexuals who feel a need for sex in general, but never feel any targeted sexual attraction, and might confuse their horniness for sexual attraction, not really noticing or putting weight to the lack of actual attraction. There are also asexuals who feel sexual attraction, but never feel desire for sex. Many of these are a small portion of asexuals as a whole, but it could increase the amount to 1.5% I expect.

 

There are more lgb people than asexuals though, that's for sure.

[Purple Red Panda]

13 minutes ago, hois said:

and there are asexuals who don't realize that their attraction is not sexual attraction.

That was me for decades. I think there are likely to be many people who aren't aware of their own asexuality. Hopefully as ace visability increases more folks might become aware of asexuality and be able to undertand themselves a bit better. Being ace but not knowing it can be very confusing, at least that was my experience.

[Broken Doll]

Some of my co workers know about asexuality because their local LGBT group raises awareness on it. I don't see much of that in my own enviroment, tbh. 

[Janus the Fox]

It be a surprise if a full comprehensive study put any figure of Asexuality just as equal or more than the percentage of LGBT in the future

[Sally]

We have no way to know, since to do so would require that everybody in each country reveal their orientation to some global data-catcher.  Since asexuality is not yet known to the general public anywhere, it's likely that it's more common that we'd guess.   I didn't hear about it until I had already lived most of my life, although I now know that I've always been asexual.  If you'd asked me decades ago, I would have said I was heterosexual.  

 

Homosexuality is evident because people are seen to be "with" a person of the same sex/gender.  That doesn't work with asexuality.  

[Sarah-Sylvia]

around 1% makes sense. imo

 

And gay/bi being like 5 times more. (maybe)

[nanogretchen4]

In the US 3.5% of the population identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.

 

There is widespread awareness of these orientations due to decades of activism and publicity. Greater awareness is not necessarily a matter of greater numbers.

 

I honestly do not think we know how many asexuals there are. The answer is going to depend heavily on how we define asexuality. If we include everyone who does not look at total strangers and have an immediate urge to have sex with them, that's probably the majority of the human population. If we include only people who have no intrinsic desire for sex with other people, that's going to be a much smaller number. Without a clear and meaningful definition, it is impossible to even begin gathering meaningful statistics.

 

If we were to agree to do research based on no intrinsic desire for sex with other people, we would need to do a lot of visibility work before most asexuals would know that they are asexual and would say so on a survey. 

 

We do not know that asexuality is necessarily less common than being lesbian, gay, or bisexual. 

[Sally]

9 minutes ago, nanogretchen4 said:

If we include only people who have no intrinsic desire for sex with other people, that's going to be a much smaller number.

I think that's a pretty good definition.  But as I said, there could be a more-than-small number of asexuals if asexuality was known by the general public, especially including older people who just thought they were inept sexuals, as I did.