cultural and psychological factors, than men’s (Baumeister, 2000). One example is that women may have a period of several months of intense sexual activity (masturbation, intercourse) and then several months of no sexual activity. This pattern is less common in men, who maintain a more constant level of sexual activity (e.g., through masturbation, one-night stands) despite, say, the ending of a romantic/sexual relationship. As psychologist Roy Baumeister notes, Kinsey himself made this observation: “Discontinuities in total [sexual] outlet are practically unknown in the histories of males” (Baumeister, 2000, pp. 681–82; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953).
Gender differences in asexuality often seem to mirror gender differences in sexuality. In other words, the gender differences mentioned above also occur in some way between asexual men and asexual women. First, if a main gender difference is that women are less sexualized (i.e., they have lower sex drive and less sexual attraction) than men, one would expect women to be overrepresented on the extremely low end of the sexuality distribution— that is, one would expect to find more asexuality among women.
Is there evidence that women are more likely to be asexual than men? Yes, there is (Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, in press-a; Brotto, Knudson, Inskip, Rhodes, & Erskine, 2010). For example, in my first study of asexuality, about 70 percent of the asexual people in NATSAL-I, a British national sample, were women (Bogaert, 2004). Interestingly, some indirect evidence that women are more likely than men to be asexual is that “asexual” partnerships (i.e., “Boston marriages”) have been identified as a relatively common pattern among women forming relationships with women (Rothblum & Brehony, 1993), but, to my knowledge, such partnerships have never been identified as a relatively common pattern among men forming relationships with men.
What is it from a psychological or developmental perspective that makes women less likely than men to form strong sexual attractions to others? One possibility relates to masturbation differences between men and women. As suggested in chapter 5, masturbation, particularly linked with fantasy, may afford “learning/conditioning” experiences leading to more permanent sexual attractions. For example, if partners of a specific gender routinely show up in the fantasies (or pornography) to which one masturbates, then those partners may become part of one’s permanent sexual attractions. If so, women who do not masturbate, or do so rarely, may not develop strong sexual attractions to others.
A biological explanation compatible with the masturbation explanation is hormones. Lower testosterone in women relative to men may create in women a less intense urge to masturbate, leading to fewer conditioning experiences and, ultimately, to fewer permanent sexual attractions to others.[25]
Another explanation relates to the flexibility in women’s sexuality (Baumeister, 2000). Women’s relatively flexible sexuality may make them, compared to men, more affected by social and cultural influences. Thus, if social or cultural influences are extreme, or at least atypical, women’s sexuality may vary from the norm, including in the development of asexuality. Underscoring this point is the fact that women can adopt celibate lifestyles, sometimes construed as a behavioral “asexuality,” for political purposes—for instance, as a protest against male-dominated society (Fahs, 2010).
Our conception of sexual orientation, or at least how it is traditionally measured, also may be relevant to gender differences in asexuality (Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, 2006b; Bogaert, in press-a). Most sexual orientation measures imply that one’s orientation is always “targeted” toward others, either males or females (or both, if bisexual). For example, a sexual orientation question may be posed as follows: “Who are you sexually attracted to?” The phrase “attracted
At least three lines of theory and research support this target-oriented view of sexual orientation. First, there is evidence that
Second, Meredith Chivers’s recent work on men and women’s arousal patterns (e.g., genital responses to erotic pictures or films) suggests that men are more target oriented in their sexuality. Her research has found that men’s sexual arousal is usually directed toward one sex or another: women if they are heterosexual, men if they are gay. Women’s sexual arousal is much more diffuse, and not specific to a category of sex/gender. Overall, women will respond genitally somewhat less than men to various types of erotic imagery, and usually to
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
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
