Aside from these arguments against pathologizing asexuality, there is lab research on arousal that may support the idea that asexuality is not a disorder. As mentioned in chapter 6, research has demonstrated that asexual women, like sexual women, show non-category-specific responding to sexual stimuli; that is, asexual women show some level of genital arousal to both male- and female-oriented sexual stimuli, very similar to heterosexual women and lesbians (Brotto & Yule, 2011). Thus asexual women do not show low arousal (i.e., abnormally low vaginal responses) to sexual activity, as women diagnosed as “dysfunctional” often do.[35] Indeed, the authors of the study argue that this work gives additional support to the idea that asexuality is a sexual orientation, like being gay or straight, because asexual women respond physically in ways that are very similar to their (non-dysfunctional) homosexual and heterosexual counterparts.
Let’s return to the issue of distress, but from the flip side. There are often hidden benefits to asexuality that need to be considered when making a final determination about the question of whether asexuality is a sexual “disorder.” In fact, psychologists Nicole Prause and Cynthia Graham found that asexuals report significant advantages to their asexuality. The top four were as follows: (1) avoiding the common problems of intimate relationships, (2) decreasing risks to physical health or unwanted pregnancy, (3) experiencing less social pressure to find suitable partners, and (4) having more free time (Prause & Graham, 2007, p. 351). Perhaps we can add to these the issue raised in chapter 8: Asexuality avoids the madness of sex. Let’s call these point the big five benefits of asexuality.
At this point, you may be thinking: Yes, the author is right that these arguments show that asexuality is not necessarily a disorder. And yet, if you are a sexual person, you may also have a vague notion, a feeling you can’t shake, that regardless of these arguments, asexual people still must be missing something. After all, doesn’t (partnered) sex entail a special passion, excitement, and thrill, which asexuals must be missing out on?
Maybe. But who am I to say—and who are you to say—what passion is right for a given individual? Have you ever skydived before? Of course, most people haven’t and have no interest in it. I have, and for me, it was a thrill. But do those who have not had, and do not want to have, this experience have a disorder? So, if you don’t want this experience, should we diagnose you with, say, hypoactive skydiving disorder because you eschew this thrilling life activity?
I was recently invited to give a talk on asexuality to the Society for Sex Therapy and Research, or SSTAR. (Such organizations often try to find a catchy acronym to make their group memorable. I like theirs: “STAR” with a stutter.) SSTAR is the main conference for the world’s sex therapists. Attendees come from a variety of backgrounds, including medicine, psychology, and social work, and all are trained (or in training) to help people with sexual problems.
Frankly, I was nervous to give a talk to SSTAR. Although trained in sexology, I’m an academic, and like most academics, my work primarily relates to teaching and research. Thus, unlike SSTAR members, I am not a sex therapist or even a clinician. These folks work in the trenches, even if those trenches sometimes lie on (or near) Madison Avenue and can be mined for gold. Thus, I did not know if I was a lone sheep set loose among two hundred battle-ready and hungry (clinical) wolves.
Another reason I was nervous was because a past surgeon general of the United States was in attendance. She was in one of the front rows looking at me, and I was looking at her.
However, the most important reason I felt nervous was because I was arguing that asexuality should not (necessarily) be construed as a disorder. Years before, I had gotten into fights—no, not fistfights—with some clinicians who I felt were putting inappropriate pressure on some asexuals to become sexual beings. Moreover, the majority of the attendees at SSTAR have spent their professional careers trying to increase (healthy) sexual behavior in their clients. Thus, I felt that they, like the few clinicians I had interacted with, would consider asexuality a disorder that needs fixing. So, my expectation was that I would be either coolly received or hotly dismissed.
In my talk—a bit shakily delivered, I have to admit—I unpacked many of the issues above, including various arguments against asexuality per se being viewed as a disorder, the contention that sex itself is a very odd activity that often causes mental lapses (see chapter 8 on the madness of sex), and the argument that, of course, passions differ among people. I also ended with the skydiving analogy mentioned above, complete with a picture of someone soaring through the air.
To my surprise (shock, in fact), there was hearty applause when I showed my skydiving picture and said my punch line: “If not interested in this activity, should you be diagnosed with hypoactive skydiving disorder?” Evidently, a significant number of clinicians, perhaps a majority of these modern therapists, recognized that sex is only one of many possible passions that people can have, and felt that we shouldn’t impose our valued passions on others. In this applause, there may also have been recognition that some of their colleagues have possibly been overdiagnosing sexual problems and imposing, perhaps if only implicitly, their own values on others.
So, is there only one right way to live a human life?
CHAPTER 10
A Monster in All of Our Lives
John Money, perhaps the most famous twentieth-century sexologist after Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson, was inspired once by a poem he read outside a cottage on Fire Island (an island retreat just outside of New York). The first line read, “There is a monster in all of our lives.” Money amended the line, adding the adjective “unspeakable” to the word “monster,” and used it to frame the main idea of one of his many books on sexology (Money, 1994). He believed that this phrase—unspeakable monster—was an apt description of the sexual and other secrets that often plague people. Thus, a monster is often lurking, although the person does not (or cannot) speak directly about it. However, an astute observer can discover it by some telltale signs, particularly irrational behaviors, as the person tries to cope with life’s challenges.
There is a famous painting by seventeenth-century artist Henry Fuseli called The Nightmare, in which a sleeping woman is seductively draped over her bed, and a monster—in this particular case, an incubus—sits on her belly. An incubus is a legendary demonic creature that has intercourse with sleeping women. From a psychological perspective, the male incubus and its female equivalent (succubus) are creations of the mind that symbolize humans’ powerful and uncontrollable sexual nature, along with, perhaps, our desire to abdicate to supernatural forces our personal responsibility for any disturbing sexual inclinations; hence, artful characters to represent Money’s notion of an unspeakable monster.
Unspeakable monsters are specific to the time and the culture in which one grows up and lives; thus, they are partially socially constructed. Average adolescent boys from a strict Catholic upbringing in the 1950s in the Western world probably had masturbation as their unspeakable monster, whereas the masturbation monster of today for average adolescent American boys, Catholic and otherwise, may be less ferocious than it once was.
It is probably true that, if you accept Money’s description, many sexual people have unspeakable (sexual) monsters. The chapter on the madness of sex attests to this fact: untold numbers of people have sexual secrets that plague them. But do some asexual people also have monsters, unspeakable and otherwise? Although not attracted to others in a traditional sense, asexual people may be sexual in other ways, and some may be reluctant to reveal this (Bogaert, 2008). For example, some asexual people may have odd paraphilias that they do not want to discuss with the world, and that perhaps they are even reluctant to admit to themselves. So, are some asexual people truly and utterly mad, just like the rest of the sexual planet?
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Whether someone with low arousal should be construed as having a disorder (especially if he or she has no distress about it) is, of course, another issue to consider.