🍃 Branches (key topics): Queerness, Gender, Sociology, Media Studies,
🍂 Roots (Status): #seedling

What is Asexuality

• The earliest scholarship on asexuality viewed it predominantly as a medical disorder.
• In the early 2000s, scholars began to conduct studies of asexuality that viewed it more as an identity, rather than as something to be 'fixed.'
  • On early scholar was Anthony Bogaert, who "used data from a national probability sample (N>18,000) of British residents to investigate asexuality, defined as having no sexual attraction to a partner of either sex" (Bogaert, 2004: 279).
  • His findings suggested that 1% of the population identified as asexual (Bogaert, 2004: 279).
• In much of this early scholarship, I see little reference to the split attraction model, which has become quintessential to current modes of identification within the online ace community.
  • Storms (1908), for example, is quoted in Bogaert (2004) as classifying "heterosexuals as individuals who are highly attracted to the other sex (i.e., high in heteroeroticism), homosexuals are individuals who are highly attracted to the same sex (i.e., high in homoeroticism), bisexuals as individuals who are highly attracted to both sexes (i.e., high in both heteroeroticism and homoeroticism), and asexuals as individuals who are not attracted to either sex (i.e., low in both heteroeroticism and homoeroticism)" (Bogaert, 2004: 279).
    • This terminology is not how I would describe my asexual identity today, nor how I see others (of any sexuality) describing their experiences; particularly, the use of -eroticism as a root word seems to have fallen out of fashion except for in very specific contexts (i.e., the term homoerotic has a new, more restricted meaning).
  • What Bogaert does get right is something that people outside the ace community still get wrong to this day: "note that the definition of asexuality here concerns a lack of sexual attraction to either sex and not necessarily a lack of sexual behavior with either sex or self-identification as asexual" (Bogaert, 2004: 279).
    • Bogaert goes on to say, "sexual behavior and sexual self-identification are of course correlated with sexual attraction, but, for a variety of reasons, one's attraction to men or women and overt sexual behavior or sexual self-identification may have a less-than-perfect correspondence" (Bogaert, 2004: 279)

Aphobia

• On the topic of aphobia, Bogaert presents a refreshingly nuance, albeit imprecise, view: "It is interesting to speculate why asexual people have been overlooked when discussions of sexual variability are presented. Perhaps this group is relatively invisible because their inclinations do not lead to overt sociosexual activities that would bring attention to their activities. The absence of sexual activities and the inclinations that induce this absence are not likely to bring public attention or scrutiny, either positive or negative. Neither, of course, has it been illegal or perceived as morally wrong to have such inclinations. Therefore, unlike other sexual minorities (e.g. gay people), asexual individuals would not have had to face public scrutiny from the press, religious institutions, or the legal system. (This is not to say, of course, that in their private and family lives asexual people have not felt pressure to take on traditional sexual and reproductive roles.)" (Bogaert, 2004, 284)

Useful References

Statistical Analyses

• ACT Aces Asexual Experiences Final Report
• Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, A. F. (2004). Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample. The Journal of Sex Research, 41(3), 279–287. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4423785
• Patterns of Asexuality in the United States

Asexuality and Gender

• Asexual Women and Men, Ruspini, 2013

Ace History

• Finding Asexuality in the Archives
• Lisa Orlando, Author of the Asexual Manifesto (1972)
• My life as an amoeba
• The Tumblr bloggers buliding a canon of asexual history