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A-Sexomatic: Dealing with asexuality
They love each other and live together -- but don't have sex. Asexuals finally come out of the closet.
By Dorothy Woodend
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If you believe, as Bette Davis quipped, that "sex is God's joke on human beings," you're not alone. Using the bell curve analogy for human sexuality, for every hump in the middle, there are extremes at both ends: those with an amped sex drive and those who can take it or leave it. This became clear to Seattle-based author Joan Sewell when she asked her husband how much sex he'd have in an ideal world. "Oh, I don't know," he replied. "Maybe five or six times a week." This revelation was one of the things that prompted her to write I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido.
"My sex drive couldn't ride the huge cultural sex wave that kept coming in," writes Sewell. "Instead, I was being beaten against the beach. The culture had turned, and there was no way to push back the tide. The sexperts, the pro-family traditionalists, the feminists and the skin peddlers of the media were all on the same side now, hoping to tug my sexuality in a more lustful direction to sell their products or save my marriage."
"In a society that's all about sex, imagine how you must feel when you don't want to do it," says Toronto-based author Elizabeth Abbott, whose book A History of Celibacy is primarily concerned with sex -- or the lack thereof. "Even the word 'frigid' makes someone sound cold," she says.
What is considered normal?
When it comes to sex, however, what's considered "normal" is in a constant state of flux. When Oprah Winfrey tackled the subject of low sexual desire on her show, it proved to be a revelation for Sewell. "Oprah said that an estimated 40 million American women were suffering," she says. "In the back of my mind, I thought, 'How could nearly half of women be dysfunctional? What is the norm, and who's deciding it?'" Until recently, doctors and scientists viewed a lack of desire as a pathology or sexual dysfunction, but their viewpoints just might be changing. When Procter & Gamble sought approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2004 for its female sexual-desire disorder "treatment" -- a testosterone patch called Intrinsa -- testimony from academics, sex therapists and women's health activists on the FDA advisory committee led the agency to deny its request. Dr. Lori Brotto, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, first became aware of asexuality's prevalence in society in her job as a sex therapist. "I saw a lot of people with low desire -- people who would say 'Well, I'm just not a sexual person.'" She was sufficiently intrigued to launch a study of asexuality -- research that began with an online survey of 250 asexually identified people from around the world. She is now in the midst of a follow-up project with 15 individuals who were invited back for in-depth interviews. "These interviews have raised a lot of questions," says Brotto. "We are finding that asexuality is not a sexual dysfunction."
Instead, asexuality may represent a fourth sexual orientation, explains Dr. Anthony Bogaert, a psychology professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., who undertook one of the first studies into the existence of human asexuality. "You can be attracted to the opposite sex, the same sex or both sexes," he says. "But, until recently, the fourth orientation -- being attracted to neither sex -- has not been addressed."
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