Daily Targum (Rutgers University student newspaper)

[Onceburned]

Its a positive third hand story, but you will need to supply an email address to see the whole thing.

The Ineffables





2013 Mod Edit: The above link doesn't work anymore, but a copy of the article can be found here. For future reference:

The Ineffables

Published April 05 2005
The Daily Targum

For those of us who are not out of the loop enough to be truly in the know, there's a new revolution in town - the asexual revolution.

Now I know you're going to sigh at the prospect of another overthrowing of the status quo on some minor front that affects a miniscule proportion of the population, but this one is about sex, so that sigh had better be a short one.

The latest sexual genre to come out of the closet, asexuals are people who just aren't interested in sex, or to be more specific, do not experience sexual attraction, be it with men, women or other fauna or flora.

The phenomenon of asexuality has been associated with sexual aversion disorder and hypoactive sexual desire disorder, but to associate it with sexual disorder is to classify it as a handicap or a lacking that must be rectified.

Homosexuality has only recently managed to crawl out of that abyss in the minds of the general public, with gay men and women finally beginning, in modern societies, to be able to live openly homosexual lives without being seen as dysfunctional and wrong in the head (not to mention elsewhere).

Asexuality is similarly viewed in general as a dysfunction and an abnormality by society, when it is acknowledged at all. But because asexuals are not sexually deviant in a positive sense, meaning they aren't having too much of the wrong kind of sex, their situation of having either little or no interest in sex is often ignored or attributed to something else, like prudishness or depression.

Asexuality, according to Canadian researcher Dr. Anthony Bogaert, is not simply a secondary symptom but completes the gamut of sexual possibilities from highly heterosexual to bisexual, homosexual and, finally, not very sexual at all.

It was his research on 18,000 Britons in 1994 that sparked this "outing" of asexuals that has begun across the world from Australia to Belgium to the United States.

Bogaert's research, which was presented in a paper in the Journal of Sexual Research in August last year, showed that at least 1 percent of the population surveyed responded that they had never experienced sexual attraction to anyone.

His research also showed that some factors that influenced asexuality in people were gender, socio-economic status, religion and health. More women, for example, responded they were asexual than did men.

Social factors cannot, however, explain away asexuality as a human disorder that is biologically not viable. According to the New Scientist, several studies were conducted with sheep in the early 1990s to determine if other animals experience differences in sexual orientation. Out of the 10 percent of rams found to be completely uninterested in mating with ewes, between 5 and 7 percent showed homosexual tendencies, and, yes, 2 to 3 percent just weren't interested.

While asexuality, like homosexuality, appears in mammals of various species, neither phenomenon is thought to be particularly biologically useful to the survival of species, but both exist anyway and cannot be ignored.

In my opinion, a little asexuality is just what this world needs. This is a world where one has to scratch one's head to come up with a non-cliché about the overabundance of sexuality. I refer, in this case, to the industrialized West because the industrialized East and the nonindustrialized East are another ball game, pardon the pun. Here, sex sells - see every prime-time TV show on the planet. Now that the ruffled feathers from the gay revolution of the '70s have settled, even homosexual sex sells (see "Queer as Folk," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," "Queer Eye for the Straight Girl," "The L Word"). We are so surrounded by an activity that really should only take up a minor part of our lives that it begins to stifle and neuroticize even the most accommodating of us. Given this overstimulation, a little dose of asexuality to clear the sinuses actually sounds quite blissful.

Clearly what is to be done is to not do the deed - or rather, to not think about it because asexuals, who can still have sexual lives, tend to be obsessed with sex to a much lesser degree than the average Joe.

Asexual awareness has increased over the last year, since an article on Bogaert's paper appeared in the New Scientist, and a slew of articles have been written on it - finally another new twist to the haggard old "sex story"!

I stumbled upon the phenomenon not through a clumsy third-hand article on it (like mine) but through the Asexual Visibility and Education Network at www.aven.org. The site, set up by a young American asexual but frequented by people from all over the world, offers a great forum in which they can share their experiences and nonexperiences. The network works to help asexual people become more comfortable and aware with their sexuality, as well as to gain recognition and acceptance of asexuality as a valid form of sexuality from the general public. It also boasts a pithy, witty asexual merchandise page - from which I stole the title of this particular column - not to mention plenty of links to other asexual Web sites and online communities, my favorite link being "Haven for the Human Amoeba."

But alas, from what I've read, true asexuals - people who aren't just going through a disgusted-with-sex phase in their lives because of a nasty experience or because they just can't get any at the moment - are still a very small minority of the population.

This can make it hard to live a completely content life when society as it exists today still demands, to a certain extent, a homogeneity of sexuality - namely, active heterosexuality.

According to some people in today's society, anyone who doesn't fit that model either has something wrong with them and has to be fixed or has to be avoided because it might be contagious.

[bard of aven]

Nice. Too bad our url is wrong, tho.

boa