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Kelly

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For small part of the population, neither opposite nor same attracts

Posted on Sun, Jul. 10, 2005

Sexual Orientation

For small part of the population, neither opposite nor same attracts

By STEVE BARNES Albany Times Union

Xendara is a pixeish, raven-haired woman of 22 who never in her life has been sexually attracted to another person.

In the past, the Albany, N.Y., college student might have felt — and almost certainly would have been told by shrinks as well as society — that she was sexually flawed or broken or defective, that there was something wrong with her. And that she was alone.

But, brought together by the Internet and bolstered by a growing body of scientific research, Xendara and others like her are becoming increasingly visible as a community.

They call themselves asexuals, and they insist that theirs is a valid, fourth orientation, after straight, bisexual and gay. There’s nothing wrong, they say; it’s how they were born. And as powerful as the sex drive is for most every sentient creature, they’re just not interested.

That’s not to say they don’t have close friendships; they do. And many asexuals form deep emotional bonds that they define as “romantic” — resembling those commonly understood as coupledom, except for the lack of sexual behavior.

Asexuality isn’t celibacy — the refusal to act on attraction. It’s the absence of attraction.

“Our society surrounds us with sex. They use sex to sell tires. But that purely sexual stuff I totally don’t understand,” says Xendara, a biology major enrolled in the New York state university system’s Empire State College. Xendara, who uses only one name, says, “I’ve had people try to explain it to me. Flings and casual sex and people just seeing someone and being attracted to them, having sexual chemistry: It mystifies me. I’m like, `Why would anyone want to do that?”’

Although lack of interest in boys initially led Xendara to consider herself lesbian, having no sexual attraction to girls, either, made the label asexual a more comfortable fit.

It was also more confusing: Gay Americans have been a visible and vocal presence for decades, but nobody seemed to be talking about asexuals.

David Jay was similarly lost as a teen.

“In early high school, all of my friends started talking about how they were attracted to people, who they had crushes on, and I just didn’t understand why sexuality was such a big deal for everyone else,” says Jay, now 23 and employed in the nonprofit sector in San Francisco.

Jay says, “I was very aware that this transformation my friends were going through, becoming sexual people, wasn’t happening to me.”

He spent a couple of years assuming he was a late bloomer. Then, in 2002, he came to a conclusion: “I said, ‘All right, I’m going to start thinking about what it means to not be sexual, trying to figure out how to live my life the way I am instead of trying to be something I’m not.’ ”

Neither Jay nor Xendara sought out a therapist or psychiatrist. Instead, they, like gay, lesbian, bi and questioning teens of the past decade, turned to online sources to help them understand, with safe anonymity, what they were feeling and where they might fit.

A key resource for Xendara was the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. AVEN is a Web site ( www.asexuality.org), blog and discussion board devoted to providing information about and helping define a nascent community.

Founded by Jay when he was 20, AVEN now has more than 4,000 members worldwide. There are asexuals from Boston and Brisbane, Georgia the state and Georgia the country, northern California and Nigeria, and a whole bunch in Britain. The site’s “Meetup Mart” section has posts titled “Anyone from Italy?” and “Cowboys and cowgirls (from Calgary)?” as well as “Vegan Straight-Edge Anarchist” and “How do we find each other?????”

That last question is key, and a prime reason for Jay’s starting AVEN. “I knew they had to be out there,” he says.

Xendara says, “I never thought I was the only one. I knew there had to be others. I just didn’t know where they were.”

She still doesn’t. Even though she has presented informational programs on asexuality at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and a local gay and lesbian community center, Xendara remains the sole asexual she knows.

Statistically speaking, there are indeed others — up to 4-1/2 million Americans, a population perhaps half to a third the size of those who identify as gay/lesbian, bi and transgendered.

Kelly :wink:

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I think that was the NY Times article. It certainly is getting picked up by a lot of papers

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bard of aven

Permit me to disagree. The first line in the NYT article was "BIRDS do it, bees do it." And the NYT article did not mention Xendara.

boa

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opps :oops: my apologies. I knew I had read it before. I should have seen which paper it was before I posted. It was the Philadelphia article

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Permit me to disagree. The first line in the NYT article was "BIRDS do it, bees do it." And the NYT article did not mention Xendara.

Sure? I read that first line somewhere. (EDIT: D'oh! I forgot to read Cartoonist's reply)

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