Related to Meredith Chivers’s work is a third line of research supporting this target-oriented view of sexual orientation: Julia Heiman’s research, which shows that women are sometimes not aware of their genital responses (Heiman, 1977). Thus women may not know how their bodies are responding sexually, at least not to the same degree as men do. As a consequence, women may not associate sexual responses to a specific target (e.g., men) because they may not be aware that genital responses to a target are in fact occurring. This difference in genital response may be partially related to the way men and women’s bodies work: erections are obvious, whereas vaginal responses are often more subtle.
If women’s sexuality is less proceptive in nature, if their physical arousal is non-category-specific (i.e., no bull’s eye in the target), and, finally, if they are not as aware of their genital responses as men are, then when women are asked to respond to questions such “who are you sexually attracted to?,” perhaps it is not surprising that some women simply do not respond in a traditional (male-oriented) way: as being sexually attracted to either males or females (or even to both). Indeed, some may report or label themselves as having no sexual attraction to others (i.e., being asexual).
Let’s return to some issues related to women’s non-category-specific arousal. A basic question that emerges from this work is this: Why do women have such non-category-specific arousal, whereas men do not? One explanation that Chivers and colleagues favor is as follows: Nature may have designed the vagina, along with related arousal mechanisms, to prepare a woman for any kind of sexual activity that may occur, willing or otherwise. At times throughout human evolutionary history, women have been subjected to coerced sexual relations. Thus, to prevent injury, the adaptive response of the vagina, along with the brain and body mechanisms that support it, may have been to respond with expansion and lubrication at the suggestion of almost any sexual activity. Thus, the vagina is a pliably indiscriminate organ primed for any sexual contact that may arise. Indeed, Chivers and her colleagues have shown that women, unlike men, also respond genitally to chimpanzee sexual activity (Chivers, 2010). Talk about non-category-specific arousal!
If non-category-specific responding in women is an injury-preventing mechanism, then one should expect that asexual women also have such mechanisms in place, and thus also have non-category-specific responding to sexual stimuli. However, shouldn’t asexual women have very different arousal patterns than sexual women? After all, if asexual women are truly “asexual,” then shouldn’t they have, presumably, low or absent arousal? Not necessarily. Recall that asexuality, by my and others’ definitions, is a lack of sexual attraction, not a lack of physical arousal. Thus, although arousal and sexual attraction are often related, and arousal may give us information (e.g., feedback) about our sexual attractions, arousal and attraction are not the same thing. Indeed, it is clear that they are often “decoupled,” and even sexual women often do not use physical arousal as a gauge of their sexual attraction/orientation—and cannot, if they are not aware of this arousal.
Lori Brotto and Morag Yule recently examined arousal patterns in asexual women. They showed that asexual women, like sexual women, indeed show non-category-specific responding to sexual stimuli—that is, some level of genital arousal to both male- and female-oriented sexual stimuli—very similar to heterosexual women and lesbians. Although this is a small study (e.g., there was no sample of asexual men), it is also an intriguing one, as the authors argue that their results give support to the notion that asexuals do not have a “disorder” as currently defined. For example, asexual women do not show low arousal (i.e., abnormally low vaginal responses) to sexual activity, as some women with sexual dysfunction do (see also chapter 11). Relatedly, the authors argue that their study provides some evidence that asexuality should be understood as a true sexual orientation, because asexual women respond in similar ways as sexual orientation groups—in other words, (nondysfunctional) lesbians and heterosexual women. Finally, this study supports the notion that non-category-specific responding (at least in terms of physical arousal) is common among women, including asexual women, and may serve a common, ancient function: to prevent injury (Brotto & Yule, 2011).
Now let’s address one of the most enduring (and endearing?) gender differences in sexuality—masturbation—and examine patterns of this behavior in asexual men and women. As mentioned in chapter 5, many asexual men and women masturbate, although they do so less frequently than sexual people (e.g., Bogaert, in press-a). But most pertinent to the present chapter, asexual men report a higher frequency of masturbation than asexual women. For example, about 50 percent of asexual men report masturbating two or more times per week, versus 7 percent of asexual women (Brotto et al., 2010).
Masturbation, then, is clearly a popular pastime for both sexual and asexual men. Thus patterns of asexuality play themselves out differently in men and women, and these patterns often mirror differences between sexual men and women. The reasons why sexual men and women differ in masturbation may also explain the differences between asexual men and women in this behavior. For example, if men and women differ in sex drive (e.g., strength and/or frequency of sexual urges), then asexual men, even if they do not direct those urges toward others, may be impelled to masturbate more frequently than asexual women. Also, the inherent differences in the way men and women’s bodies work—erections are obvious, whereas vaginal responses are more subtle—may be relevant. Thus, if asexual men, relative to asexual women, receive more obvious feedback that they are sexually aroused (e.g., notice their erections), they may be more likely to act on it (by masturbating), despite their lack of attraction to others.
As mentioned in chapter 5, masturbation, particularly with fantasies of recurring themes, is of interest to sexologists in part because it can reveal clues about sexual attraction. Thus masturbation among asexuals raises questions about whether some do indeed have sexual attraction to others or perhaps to something unusual (i.e., paraphilia). Given that asexual men masturbate more than asexual women, it also raises questions about whether asexual men have a potentially higher rate of paraphilias than do asexual women (also see chapter 10). If so, this pattern would also be consistent with differences between sexual men and women, as sexual men are much more likely than sexual women to have paraphilias (Cantor, Blanchard, & Barbaree, 2009).
Let’s now turn to gender roles. There is evidence that gays and lesbians often do not conform to traditional gender roles, with lesbians adopting less feminine behavior patterns and gay men less masculine behavior patterns than their heterosexual counterparts (Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, & Bailey, 2008). Thus, some sexual minorities do not necessarily conform to traditional gender roles, but what about asexual people? At this point, we do not know whether asexual men are less masculine than heterosexual men, or whether asexual women are less feminine than heterosexual women. There are standard techniques to assess whether someone conforms to traditional gender roles—for example, if a boy or man is interested in sports, is drawn to traditionally masculine occupations, is more aggressive, and so on—but such techniques have never been applied to a group of asexuals.
My hunch is that asexual people are less conforming to traditional gender roles, on average, than heterosexual people. One of the reasons is because traditional sexual development often may make females more feminine and males more masculine. For example, asexual women may be less feminine in attire, manner, and language because they lack what Lori Brotto and I call object-of-desire self-consciousness (Bogaert & Brotto, in progress). We argue that heterosexual women’s sexuality is often strongly linked to perceiving themselves as an object of desire in another’s eyes. We also believe that women have a high likelihood to develop sexual scripts—learned sequences of sexual behavior (see also chapter 5 on masturbation)—with object-of-desire themes. Indeed, my students and I found evidence for this in a study examining heterosexual women and men’s sexual fantasies with, for example, women being more likely than men to be turned on by having others see them as attractive, rather than seeing someone else (i.e., their partner) as attractive. Even women’s language reflects these themes, as one might expect if sexual scripts permeate our cognitions; after all, language and cognition (i.e., our thoughts) are intimately linked (Bogaert, Visser, Pozzebon, & Wanless, 2011).