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cijay

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I'm going to be featured in the NY Times. I just don't know the date yet, I'll ask when they come to photograph me. (Sorry world but you'll have to look at my mug). I'm asking anyone who gets the paper if they can send me tear sheets.

This is one I'm a bit nervous about. While I don't care if people DO find out, I know a LOT of people who read the NY Times.

*deep breath, plugs nose, jumps in*

2014 Mod Edit: The article can be read in post #16 below.

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VivreEstEsperer

Hey, I was just going to post about this!

Six months later, this story is finally running. I got the email yesterday. They're coming to take my picture tomorrow, I'm so excited!

It will run next Thursday in the Styles section.

I can send you a copy, cijay. I just hope the small convenience store near me still has them when I come. Cus I don't want to get up that early lol. Remind me on thursday... :)

I'm slightly nervous as well, just because it's national press in my own country. Everyone will know. I don't really care though as I'm not ashamed and have nothing to hide. But it's still a little unnerving. I keep telling myself, though, how often do you have a chance to be a spokesperson for a cause you feel deeply about? How often do you get a chance to help people so much? Any minor discomfort I may feel from the article is SOO worth those two things.

Kate

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Oh, I'd forgotten about that! While I was talking to her, you called and had only a little time to talk - so she said she'd call me back later and I said for her to say 'hi' to you! Too bad we couldn't line it with the photographers to do one of those Hollywood style pictures where they crop the pic. of me and you and make it look like we're standing together LOL.

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Cate Perfect

I can get a few copies free--we have them in the bookshop and never sell out--for anyone who wants one.

Cate

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If Kate can't get one, can you save one for me?

Thanks, I luv ya' both!!!

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VivreEstEsperer

Cijay, my friend in Toronto said he can get the NYT there. Are they not available in your part of Canada?

If Cate can get some free copies that would be good, because the little shop next to me usually sells out, I'm not even positive they have copies on the weekdays, if not I'll have to get my mom to get some...

That's cool Cijay, she didn't tell me you'd said that :) When was that, about what time which day? Trying to remember when I talked to her.

I'm excited, the photographer came today and took pictures and that was very cool, my grandmother watched me and got a kick out of the whole thing... can't wait till Thursday.

Kate

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Well, I guess I didn't make the cut in the final version of the story, because I didn't get any notification that I can find. However, congrats to the two of you! I can't wait to see it!

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Carsonspire

Wow. Congrats, cijay and Kate.

I'll be buying the NYTimes early Thursday morning.

KAW, don't worry about not making the cut for the article. I was in a similar situation last year, and there is certainly an amount of relief (with the disappointment) involved, when you realize you won't have to explain yourself to everyone you know who might read the article.

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Wow. Congrats, cijay and Kate.

I'll be buying the NYTimes early Thursday morning.

KAW, don't worry about not making the cut for the article. I was in a similar situation last year, and there is certainly an amount of relief (with the disappointment) involved, when you realize you won't have to explain yourself to everyone you know who might read the article.

*laughs*

Very, very true! I wasn't actually expressing disappointment, per se. I was just stating a fact. . . Sorry if it came out a little whiney. . . :lol:

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bard of aven

If you don't mind creating an online account with them (I'm pretty sure it's free for basic news content--I have a premium so I can download the crossword puzzles :lol: ), the news content of the paper is usually online some time in the evening before the date of the printed edition. (I just checked online at 2115 EST, and some articles with tomorrows date are already posted.)

I'll post a link as soon as I find it if it's up Wednesday evening.

boa

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Eta Carinae

It's up!

http://nytimes.com/2005/06/09/fashion/thur.../09asexual.html





2013 Mod Edit - Copying and pasting the article for future reference:


For Them, Just Saying No Is Easy
By MARY DUENWALD
Published: June 9, 2005


BIRDS do it, bees do it. But not necessarily all of them. Among bees the sisters of queens do not engage in sex. And in certain species of birds - Florida scrub jays, for one - some individuals, known as helpers, do not breed but only help the breeders raise their offspring.

09asex.jpg
WHERE TO FIT? Asexuals want relationships, says David Jay of the Asexual Visibility Network.

But could indifference to sex extend to humans, too? An increasing number of people say yes and offer themselves as proof. They describe themselves as asexual, and they call their condition normal, not the result of confused sexual orientation, a fear of intimacy or a temporary lapse of desire. They would like the world to understand that they can live their entire lives happily without ever having sex.

"People think they need to convert you," said Cijay Morgan, 42, a telephone saleswoman in Edmonton, Alberta, and a self-professed asexual. "They can understand if you don't like country music or onion rings or if you aren't interested in learning how to whistle, but they can't accept someone not wanting sex. What they don't understand is that a lot of asexuals don't wish to be quote-unquote fixed."

Considering the pervasive advertising for drugs to enhance sexual performance, the efforts to market a testosterone patch to boost sexual desire in women and the ubiquity of sexual references in pop culture, it is not surprising that those professing no sex drive whatever have been misunderstood, or at least overlooked. Only one scientific survey seems to have been done. And many experts in human sexuality, when told there is a growing Internet community of people calling themselves asexual, say they have not heard of it. Yet most of those experts find the concept unsurprising.

Three-fourths of the patients who go to the Center for Sexual Medicine at Boston University lack any sex drive, said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, its director, who is also the editor of The Journal of Sexual Medicine. "We call that H.S.D.D., hypoactive sexual desire disorder," he said.

Lack of interest in sex is not necessarily a disorder nor even a problem, however, Dr. Goldstein quickly added, unless it causes distress, if it leads, for instance, to conflict within a marriage or romantic relationship.

09asex3.jpg
NOT INTERESTED: Cijay Morgan doesn't want to have her asexuality fixed.

Dr. John Bancroft, the recently retired director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, said, "I think it would be very surprising if there weren't asexuals, if you look at it from a Kinseyan perspective, that there's this huge variation in human sexuality."

Not all clinicians agree that lack of interest in sex can be considered normal. "It's a bit like people saying they never have an appetite for food," said Dr. Leonard R. Derogatis, a psychologist and the director of the Center for Sexual Health and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Sex is a natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive. It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."

Asexual people often say they have been aware of their lack of interest in sex since adolescence and that while it may have troubled them, they never knew anything different. "I realized I was asexual about the same time I realized I was short, when I was about 15," said Miss Morgan of Edmonton, who is 5-foot-1. "I realized I was short when everyone grew taller than me, and I realized I didn't have sexual feelings when everyone else started expressing and experimenting with theirs."

The Internet has provided a platform for people calling themselves asexual to announce their collective existence. The anonymity of the Web makes it easier to converse about the topic, said Todd Niquette, 36, a systems analyst in St. Paul and a member of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an Internet group. With more than 4,000 registered participants, it is the largest such community of asexuals. "What we're really trying to find out is: how can I feel less alone in this?" Mr. Niquette said.

His network defines an asexual as someone who "does not experience sexual attraction." This definition is, of course, distinct from the much older concept of asexual reproduction, practiced by amoebas, jellyfish and whiptail lizards, for example, as well as by many species of plants.

Asexuals might have sexual urges and even masturbate, but they do not want to have sex with other people, said David Jay, 23, who founded the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (called AVEN by its members) four years ago, when he was in college. Asexuals often feel romantic attraction for other people, Mr. Jay said. It just doesn't involve sex.

Mr. Jay, who works for an educational nonprofit organization in San Francisco, is a talkative, outgoing man with a ready smile and plenty of friends. He is, he said, interested in "deep emotional involvement" and in raising children (though "not necessarily having my own"). But he has never had sex, he said, adding there is a good chance he never will.

If asexual people are commonplace, why have they not been mentioned in history books or anywhere else before the advent of the Internet? Elizabeth Abbott, a research associate at Trinity College of the University of Toronto, is the author of "A History of Celibacy." She speculates that it may be because such people have stayed under the radar. They never married perhaps, or they entered into sexless marriages, or they had sex without wanting to. Unlike homosexuality, she noted, asexuality has never been illegal.

Society has not always accepted it, however. As early as the Middle Ages, Dr. Abbott said, "nonconsummation of marriage" was considered "an insult to the sacrament of marriage" and a ground for divorce.

Asexuality, she noted, is distinct from celibacy, which implies a conscious decision to stifle a desire for sex. What appears to be the only published study of asexuality - which defined it as a lifelong lack of sexual attraction to either men or women - found that 1.1 percent of adults may be asexual. The figure was drawn from a survey of 18,000 Britons who were interviewed in 1994 about sexually transmitted diseases. The data were reanalyzed by Dr. Anthony F. Bogaert, a psychologist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, who published his findings last August in The Journal of Sex Research.

Dr. Bogaert found that 44 percent of those expressing no interest in sex were either married or living with partners or had been in the past.

One might assume that by avoiding sex and all the emotions and responsibilities that go with it, let alone the health risks, asexuals might have a comparatively easy life.

"But I think we exchange all that for a different set of trouble," Mr. Jay said. "Sex is very central to life in a lot of ways, and one of the real challenges of being asexual is trying to figure out where you fit."

That problem typically arises during the teenage years. "I knew when I was 16 or 17 that sex was just something that seemed tremendously important to everybody else but that I just didn't get," said David Warner, 55, a technical writer and editor in a Virginia suburb of Washington.

Like many other asexuals, Kate Goldfield, 21, a student at Goucher College in Baltimore, once thought she might be a lesbian. "I decided I must be gay because I knew I wasn't straight," she said. But she said she has since realized that she is not sexually attracted to women either.

Asexuals say they are often told that they will change when they meet the right person or when circumstances change, but those predictions do not ring true to them.

"Why do I need sexuality in my life so much that I should divert my time and energy to finding out what it is that will turn me on?" Mr. Jay asked.

Physicians have found that they can prompt sexual desire in both women and men by giving them supplemental hormones. And some scientists suspect that hormones might be involved in some cases of asexuality. Or, Dr. Bogaert suggested, it could be that certain brain structures may have developed differently in asexual people.

Dr. Derogatis agreed that low hormone levels usually underlie low libido but said sometimes psychological mechanisms come into play. "Some of these people may have a very powerful phobia about sex," he said.

Yet a small and still unpublished survey of 1,146 people - including 41 who described themselves as asexual - conducted in online interviews by Nicole Prause, a graduate student in psychology at Indiana, found that asexuals do not resist having sex because of fear. Rather asexuals "only lack the excitatory drive," Ms. Prause said in an e-mail message.

Barry W. McCarthy, a professor of psychology at American University and an author of "Rekindling Desire," a self-help book for married couples, said many people who experience inhibited desire would be well advised to examine that inhibition because it may turn out to be the result of fear, rather than a natural desire to forgo sex. "You have to respect people's individual differences," he said. "But for the great majority of people with inhibited desire the answer is not asexuality."

People often experience periods of asexuality. Many married couples give up sex after a number of years, said Dr. Pepper Schwartz, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of "Everything You Know About Love and Sex Is Wrong." "Some people are relieved to not only back-burner sex, but to no-burner it," she said.

Mr. Jay acknowledged that some asexuals have spent - or will spend - some time being sexual. "We'll have people in AVEN who get into a relationship where suddenly they enjoy sex, and we have many people who say they used to enjoy sex but really not anymore," he said. "But the majority of the community is pretty stable."

A 32-year-old man in Dallas named Keith (he declined to give his last name) said he had tried to cope with his asexuality by marrying. "I thought that getting married would fix me and suddenly I would become interested in sex." After six years he and his wife were divorced, and now he is living with a younger man in a relationship that he described as loving and romantic but free of sex.

Mr. Jay said he believes asexual people can learn to negotiate relationships with sexual people.

"In high school and early college, when I would sense that someone was hitting on me, I would go into defensive mode and be like, 'O.K., this can't work,' " he said. "But since then I've realized that if someone is going to approach me sexually, it means they like my personality."

In recent months many people have logged on to the asexuals' network Web site to learn to understand better partners or spouses who are asexual, Mr. Jay said.

"There's a real desire out there to figure out how do you manage relationships without sexuality?" he said. "We don't have anything like a self-help book we could write on this yet."

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Eta Carinae

Keep trying? Or go back another day and try again? Sometimes I get logins that don't work for me, either.

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First, that bugmenot site is very nifty. Thanks for the link Inkburrow

All in all a pretty good artilce. Seemed to cover both sides. Of course it included the crazy doctor who compared desire to have sex with desire to eat, those people always make me laugh. And I may have to look into more info on these "Florida scrub jays."

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WOW!! Check out that ad for Skyy vodka, right next to the article. Boy, that woman is hot!

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Carsonspire

Cijay, Kate, DJ, and everyone else who interviewed for this article:

You all deserve a :vis: and of course some :cake: . You were all well-spoken and the article is relatively fair. I just wonder why they decided to put it in the "Style and Fashion" section.

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"Sex is a natural drive, as natural as the drive for sustenance and water to survive. It's a little difficult to judge these folks as normal."

Ha! Joke's on you, guy!

Good article. And woh! The number of people they spoke to really makes our case forcefully.

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Nice article! Good job guys.

BTW Member Count at 4151 at 8:53 a.m.... I imagine membership will increase starting at 9ish as everyone who has commuted and read the article or read it at breakfast or starts to read it on the computer goes to work/accesses computer...

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