In sum, all of these factors—pleasure, the creation and rehearsal of sexual scripts, and various health benefits—may have conspired to create an impulse in humans to be the rather compulsive masturbators that they are (call it a “psychological masturbation mechanism”).
My second dumb question is this: Do asexual people masturbate? This may seem like a bit of an odd question, given that asexual people should have little interest in sex (right?). Despite the seeming peculiarity of it, the answer is, yes, some asexual people masturbate. In a recent study by Lori Brotto and her colleagues, about 80 percent of asexual men reported that they had masturbated, and about 70 percent of asexual women reported they had masturbated (Brotto, Knudson, Inskip, Rhodes, & Erskine, 2010). There was no comparison group of sexual people in their study, but these percentages (80 percent; 70 percent) were only somewhat lower than the percentage of people who reported masturbating in a national sample of the United States population. This is an extraordinarily high percentage, given that asexual people are perceived to have no sexual desire! However, although interesting, these findings may not be representative of the asexual population, as they likely represent only those who frequent the AVEN website (the most popular asexual website). These individuals may be more liberal and adventuresome (e.g., more curious about masturbation) than average asexual people. There was no information on masturbation available in my first study of asexuality using the NATSAL-I data (Bogaert, 2004) (see also chapter 4). However, in the follow-up to this representative British sample (NATSAL-II), I found that 42 percent of asexual people had masturbated in the last month (Bogaert, in press-a). This percentage is, as perhaps you might expect, lower than the percentage for sexual people (70 percent). Also, this 42 percent figure may be significantly inflated, because it reflects the responses of those asexual people who had some sexual experience with a partner; those who didn’t, unfortunately, were not asked about their masturbation habits. One might expect that asexual people with no sexual experience are less likely to masturbate (thus, the 42 percent should be a lower figure), because sexual behaviors tend to correlate with one another (i.e., people with more sexual experience also tend to masturbate more). But we can’t know this for sure. The broad and more important point, however, is that some percentage—perhaps a substantial percentage!—of asexual people masturbate, or at least have tried it once or twice.
One important point to take away from the research on masturbation among asexual people is that it reinforces the notion that asexuality is a diverse phenomenon: there are some who do engage in masturbation (a seemingly sexual behavior) and some who do not. In other words, there are different types of asexual people.
My next question, then, not really that dumb, is this: Why do some asexual people masturbate? It’s not really a dumb question because asexuality should be associated, presumably, with low, if not totally absent, sexual activity, and thus pondering why some asexual people engage in this form of sexual expression is a legitimate question.
Of the main reasons for masturbation (i.e., pleasure, rehearsal, health) mentioned above, which is the most likely to explain why some asexual people masturbate? The rehearsal function is not likely to be of ultimate importance for many asexual people, because they are not inclined to play out elaborate sexual scripts with partners.[23] However, releasing physical tension and health are likely important. In line with this explanation, some asexual people discuss masturbation in a health-oriented, utilitarian fashion: for instance, they sometimes engage in it to “clean out the plumbing” (Brotto et al., 2010, p. 611). Here is a similar quote from another asexual person discussing masturbation on AVEN: “It just feels like there’s a tension or something my body needs to release, but my mind has no interest in it whatsoever” (AnyOtherName, 2010, August 22).
This explanation for masturbation—as a pure physical release—may seem a bit clinical and devoid of other elements typically comprising a sexual experience. Yet it is important to keep in mind some of the distinctions made in chapter 2—namely, that one can have physical arousal (e.g., gain an erection, have lubrication, an orgasm) without necessarily having, for example, sexual attraction to (or desire for) others.
Such quotes also suggest that the sensation of masturbation experienced by some asexual people may not be particularly “pleasurable,” at least in not in an intensely “sexual” way. It may still feel good, to some degree, in the same way that releasing any tension and buildup feels good to people (i.e., as a relief). And, as mentioned, some sexual people may masturbate, at times, for this reason: merely to release tension and pelvic congestion, and less for the intense sexual pleasure of it.
For other asexual people, there may still be sexual feelings and/or intense physical pleasure, similar to how most sexual people feel when masturbating or having sex with a partner. Thus, another reason why asexual people masturbate is relatively straightforward and similar to why sexual people do it: for physical pleasure. At this point, however, we do not have good data on what percentage of asexual people derive intense (sexual) pleasure from masturbation. I expect that some asexual people do, and if so, this would again suggest that asexuality is a diverse phenomenon: some asexual people do not masturbate, some masturbate with “sexual” pleasure, and some masturbate without much sexual pleasure. If it is true that some asexual people do still experience intense (sexual) pleasure, it is again important to keep in mind some of the basic distinctions raised earlier: that one can have a deeply (subjective) sexually pleasurable feeling of arousal without necessarily having a deep sexual connection with or attraction to partners (in other words, one can have that sexual feeling of arousal and still be “asexual” as I define it; see chapter 2). Relatedly, it is certainly true that sexual people sometimes have sex and masturbate without necessarily connecting the sexual pleasure to anyone specifically. So, for example, sexual men and women may enjoy the sheer physical sensation of intercourse without necessarily being attracted to their partners. A very sexually experienced gay man once recounted to me that he enjoyed vaginal intercourse with women more than anal intercourse with men, because of the sheer physical sensation of his penis being stimulated by the tubular architecture of the vagina, along with the lubrication it provides when a woman is physically aroused. Thus, as we have suggested, subjective physical pleasure and sensation associated with arousal can be divorced from one’s attraction to others.
My next dumb question is one that I actually posed to an asexual man: What do asexual people masturbate to? This was clearly a bit of an odd question for him. For most masturbators (well, okay, much of the planet), this question is relatively easy to answer. They often masturbate to a fantasy, a conjured-up image of a favorite person (or group of people), a picture, moving or otherwise, of sexual scenes. In other words, they masturbate to some sort of image or story of what they are sexually attracted to. For example, a young woman may masturbate to a story line of an erotic novel she has read, perhaps replacing the heroine with herself in the fantasy, or, as mentioned, to an image of hunky Brad Pitt. A young man may masturbate to the image of a seductively posed nude woman in a magazine or on the Internet, or, as mentioned above, to harem-like fantasies.
This is evidently not so for many asexual people who masturbate. In fact, the asexual person, perplexed, did not answer at first, and then only responded when I saw him on the next occasion, after having thought about it, and discussing it with some asexual people on the AVEN website. He suggested that many asexual people just masturbate to nothing in particular. This makes sense, as asexual people with sexual desire (or urges, but lacking sexual attraction) do not direct this desire toward anyone (or anything). So, the question of what an asexual person masturbates to is, perhaps understandably, nonsensical, or best answered with “nothing in particular” (or at least nothing of particular sexual relevance to the asexual person).
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This is not to imply that when (sexual) adolescents engage in masturbation with fantasies, they do so with the conscious intent of building sexual scripts into their psyches. Rather, this is done unconsciously; it just happens, especially after the fantasy/script is paired with (often repeatedly!) rewarding sexual pleasure and orgasm. If unconscious, one could argue that asexual people still retain the ancient mechanisms of masturbation (even an incentive to masturbate), which would have served this rehearsal function in our evolutionary past, but which is a somewhat useless byproduct for them now. However, as we will see later in this chapter, asexual people may be less likely to build sexual scripts into their psyches, because (perhaps not surprisingly) their masturbation is often without fantasy.