Some of these points are arguable, perhaps, but what is likely not arguable is that our cultural products are strongly influenced in ways beyond our realization by human sexual attractions and how these play themselves out in the society in which the artist lives. If so—to return to our original question—what would our art galleries be like if all the artists were completely asexual? Before I answer this question, however, let me address a caveat: There may exist now or in the past asexual artists who, in their art, give commentary on being asexual in a sexual world. Thus, asexual people might still produce “sexual” art as a form of social or personal commentary. But I am more curious about what kind of art asexual artists would produce if they ruled the art world and their asexual brethren ruled the rest of the world. In other words, what would it be like if art had no aesthetic linkage to sexuality whatsoever?[39] Would depicting a nude (and the genitals in particular) have the same fascination, and garner the same attention, as depicting, say, the middle toe does for sexual artists? I expect that in a completely asexual world, art would be very different indeed. Thus, the current bevy of nude paintings—even those that on the surface seem not to have a sexual connection, but undoubtedly do, such as Dürer’s Adam and Eve—would turn into a scattered few. Moreover, all of this to-do about what is “nude” and what is “naked” deeply reflects our sexual natures, along with our personal and cultural neuroticism about them. Thus, if we were all truly asexual, such distinctions would not arise in the first place; they would be nonissues.
My analysis here suggests that culture (or at least the meanings we derive from it) is not randomly generated but instead reflects, at least partly, our basic wishes, desires, and preferences—in short, our individual and our collective human natures. And, of course, for most people, that nature is sexual. Humans are also very visual animals, and thus it is not surprising that our sexualized pop culture and art reflects this visual acuity and fascination. So human art is particularly likely to be a visual reflection of our basic wishes, desires, and preferences, including our sexual ones. If dogs ruled the world—and, of course, some dog owners believe that this is already so—then there might be equally elaborate smell-oriented pop culture and art that reflected canines’ basics wishes, desires, and preferences, including sexual ones. Of course, the idea that culture partially maps onto human nature is not new, as there are many theories of culture that include as a tenet that human inclinations create, select, and give meaning to cultural products.[40]
Would an asexual person’s presumed lack of sexual aesthetics extend to a lack of appreciation for all aspects of beauty in the human form? I noted in chapter 3 (on history) that one asexual man, the famous mathematician Paul Erdos, was preoccupied, including aesthetically, by mathematics: “If numbers aren’t beautiful, I don’t know what is” (Schechter, 1998, p. 7).
Yet there is complexity here. Some asexual people may have an appreciation of faces and the body on an abstract level, having taken in our culture’s norms and standards of beauty. In addition, some asexual people may still have a deep recognition and lure for “romantic” beauty in others of their preferred sex if they are romantically inclined. Third, humans may have an innate recognition of beauty, independent of both romantic and sexual attraction to others. Indeed, innate “beauty” and “ugliness” sensors may exist in the human brain, and this may have to do with tendencies to approach or avoid others in the evolutionary past. For example, our ancestors may have avoided unattractive people because their unappealing features could have been a sign of a potentially contagious disease processes, and thus they would have been important to avoid. Interestingly, research has shown that infants prefer to gaze at beautiful faces more than average or unattractive faces (Langlois, Roggman, Casey, & Ritter, 1987). Thus, the mind’s beauty-recognition mechanisms may be partially decoupled from the mechanisms associated with both romantic and sexual attraction, and an asexual person may still retain some level of this appreciation for beauty.
Here is a quote suggesting that an aesthetic appreciation of others can occur in asexual people: “I could be attracted to someone. I can… you know, think they’re good looking and think they’re interesting and want to spend time with them and get to know them better. But to me it’s never, oh, yeah, I hope we end up in bed” (Brotto, Knudson, Inskip, Rhodes, & Erskine, 2010, p. 610).
Another asexual person felt similarly: “I love the human form and regard individuals as works of art… but I don’t ever want to come into sexual contact with even the most beautiful of people” (Scherrer, 2008, p. 626).
That having been said, much of the nudity and sex in popular culture and art must be a “disconnect” for many asexual people. A woman I know, when confronting the fact that she does not conform to many aspects of a traditional feminine gender role, utters the phrase, “I must have missed that day at girl school…” Painterly-minded asexual people wandering around galleries with a bevy of nudes at eye level might similarly utter the phrase, “I must have missed that day at art school…”
I must admit that I have cheated in my discussion of art and sexuality. Art is a relatively easy subject matter to deconstruct from a sex point of view, and indeed, I have thought about the sex/art connection for a number of years. As a more difficult challenge, I played a game—a kind of thought experiment—to see if I could find an aspect of modern life and culture untouched by human sexuality. One day at lunch over a bowl of soup, I thought I had, true to my task, thrown myself a curveball and succeeded. I said out loud, “Aha, food!”
On the surface, it seems that the world of food and the world of sex are far removed from one another. They are related to different desires and thus, presumably, occupy very different “psychological spaces” in people’s heads and exist in very different domains of our lifestyles and cultures.
However, I quickly realized that this was not true. It did not take long before the sexual connections to food started coming to mind—and I don’t just mean “cheesy” ones, such as the Food Network sexing up its shows with an attractive chef/host or two (no, I don’t mean replaying old episodes of Julia Child).
Here are the four sexual connections that came to mind relatively quickly: First, food intake and its control are major life concerns for many people—particularly young women—in their attempts to achieve a maximally attractive body. Achieving an ideal or optimal object-of-desire level through a beautiful/sexy body allows a woman to have great advantages in choosing the man (or the men) with whom she mates. This is because men place a greater value on women’s physical attractiveness than women place on men’s, so women’s bodies are of greater value and demand a higher price in the sexual marketplace. But women are not necessarily trying to satisfy only their current partner (if they have one); they are also trying to satisfy an “ideal,” which, from an evolutionary perspective, allows them much greater opportunities to mate successfully, even beyond their current mate. The current ideals are often influenced by the images shown in modern media of (arguably distorted) extremely attractive people, the likes of whom would have been rarely seen for most of our evolutionary history; however, they are readily seen now and have been taken on as modern “ideals” nevertheless. Unfortunately, these “ideals” are so high (and often so unrealistic) (Wolf, 1991) that they are unlikely to be met by the vast majority of women, even if women implicitly perceive them as a way to reproductive success. As a consequence, women are more prone to body dissatisfaction than men, and this is a relatively consistent trend across time (Cash, Morrow, Hrabosky, & Perry, 2004; Mazur, 1986). Women compare their bodies to these “ideal” object-of-desire forms, as represented by supermodels and movie stars, even if the images of bodies portrayed are unrealistically thin or beautiful. But the vast majority of women cannot live up to these ideals. They ultimately put pressure on many women to make themselves beautiful and sexy—to become an ideal object of desire (see also chapter 6 on gender). Controlling food intake—through dieting—is a method women use to live up to this ideal and be maximally attractive to potential mates.
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Of course, if we were an asexual species, our bodies would be radically different, particularly the genitals and secondary sex characteristics (see chapter 3). Thus the depiction of the nude human body in art would also necessarily be different. But indulge me here and assume that our bodies would be the same as they are now, as this exercise partly concerns how a sexual species with an elaborate culture, like ours, creates products infused with sex.
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Therefore, my view would be similar to those of numerous (and even more biologically oriented) theorists who have written on the intermingling of biological tendencies and culture. These theorists often do not pull punches and are upfront about biology, or at least biological processes, taking the reins of the cultural horse, by offering such titles as