way we think, feel, and behave are determined, arguably, by our sexuality.
However, one does not have to resort to arguing from the scientific value of decoding the mystery of human nature to make the point that sex is an important academic pursuit. Sex clearly has a profound effect on humans on practical levels. Consider two sisters who are close in age but who differ in their sexual orientation, one being straight and the other lesbian. Will their life trajectories be the same? The answer is, of course, in some ways, yes, but in many others, no. The sisters ultimately will have very different lives, in large part because of their differing sexual orientations. Sexual orientation—like many components of sexuality—plays a profound role in our social circumstances and life choices, including whether we marry, where we live, or whether we have children. For example, the majority of heterosexual women give birth to children and the majority of lesbians do not. Data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) in 2002 confirm this, with 65 percent of heterosexual and bisexual women having given birth to a child, compared to 35 percent of lesbians. Thus, the study of sexuality is clearly relevant to a variety of scientific disciplines, including demography (Baumle, in press), which attempts to understand trends related to marriage and fertility, among other issues.
Beyond basic scientific interests, sexuality also relates to health and social issues, often profoundly so. The list of relevant health and social ills is long: overpopulation, environmental degradation, gender inequality, sexually transmitted infections/diseases, divorce/family disruption, and marital and child abuse. Take, for example, the issues of overpopulation and the environment. Does anyone think that these are not affected by people’s sexuality (e.g., their contraception practices)? This is not to say that sex is the only contributing factor to these and other health and social issues, but rather that all of them are affected by human sexuality, and for some of these issues, the case could be made that sexuality is the underlying factor in their development. Thus, if one truly wants to improve the world, sex is a subject that cannot to be ignored.
So, the fuss about sex is well deserved. Sex affects much of our lives, and its meaning and ramifications do not just have to do with the “act” itself. At a most basic level, sex is about human life. Interestingly, major health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are recognizing the central role of sexuality in human life, along with the myriad of ways it impacts health. Consider WHO’s (n.d.) working definition: “Sexuality is a central aspect of being human and encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction.”
At this point you may be wondering whether I am perhaps inadvertently undermining the task ahead: to convince the reader that asexuality is an important scientific inquiry. Note that when I refer here to asexuality, I mean the real deal—that is, a complete lack of sexual attraction and/or sexual interest (see chapter 2 on definitions)—and not just a middle-age, on-again, off-again malaise about sex, as mentioned above. And so, given sexuality’s central importance in human life, is it then true that
There are many reasons why it matters. In fact, I think the study of asexuality matters so much that I was compelled to write this book on it. Here are some of my reasons why asexuality matters and why I am writing this book.
First, there is value in the opportunity for members of an overlooked and under-studied population to be able to read about and understand issues relevant to them. Thus asexual people might be interested in finding out more about themselves, and this is reason enough to write a book on asexuality. This is not a new concept: books are written about (and to) specialized audiences all the time.
But this book is written not just for asexual people, or even just for research scientists studying asexual people. It is also written for anyone interested in learning more about sexuality. For example, a book on asexuality may satisfy curiosity—both scientific and public—about a sexual minority that has been overlooked until recently. Thus many readers will get a chance to peek into and learn more about a world that is sexually different from theirs. Aside from satisfying curiosity, such glimpses into new worlds may have health and social benefits, as exposure to sexual minorities may help to increase general tolerance and acceptance. This idea—called the “contact hypothesis” of prejudice reduction—is often associated with psychologist Gordon Allport (1954), but the original theory has been extended beyond personal contact to encompass exposure through the media, including books (Cameron & Rutland, 2006).
A book about asexuality is also a book about sex (how could it be otherwise?), and therefore many of the reasons listed above to study sex apply equally well to the study of asexuality. For example, recall that one of the reasons to study sex is that it informs a number of scientific disciplines, including demography, which studies, among other things, fertility and marriage. There are no published data on the fertility of asexual people (a topic well worth looking into), but in the first published study on asexuality using a national probability (or random) sample of adults in Great Britain, I found that 33 percent of asexual people were currently in a long-term relationship (e.g., married), compared to 64 percent of sexual people (Bogaert, 2004). Thus, the study of asexuality reveals how variations in sexuality profoundly affect one’s (demographically relevant) life trajectories.
There is another equally important reason to study asexuality that has not yet been mentioned. Asexuality offers us a unique opportunity to look at sexuality through a new lens, affording perhaps a clearer (or at least new) view of what sex is and what it is not. In fact, this is one of the reasons why asexuality is interesting to a sexologist like me: It reveals hidden truths about sex. In the same way that homosexuality allows us to understand heterosexuality, and vice versa, asexuality allows us to make broad comparisons to understand sexuality as a whole. This is also why a book on asexuality matters.
In support of my argument, consider further the example above: 33 percent of asexual people were found to be in long-term relationships, compared to 64 percent of sexual people. Again, this information provides evidence that life circumstances often differ between asexual and sexual people, but in these figures (in particular, the 33 percent for asexual people), there is also something interesting revealed or at least suggested about the nature of human sexuality and romance.
We often use the words “sex” (or “sexuality”) and “romance” synonymously; in other words, sex equals romance and romance equals sex. “Romance” is perhaps the softer, gentler, and euphemistic word for “sex” (more on the meanings of romance in chapter 2), but the two words are often used interchangeably. In commercials for an erectogenic drug, advertisers tell men to “Buy Discount Cialis and Enjoy a Romantic Weekend” (ED Pills, 2010 March 30). Of course, we all know what that means: Use this drug and there is plenty of sex ahead, boys! Indeed, the ad goes on to suggest that “With a single pop of Cialis, you will not only enjoy a romantic night; expect a weekend of sizzling nights with your beloved.” So, romance equals sex.
But are romantic relationships always the same thing as sexual relationships (or, to put it somewhat more complexly, does romance always imply a sexual component)? Recently, some psychologically and evolutionarily minded theorists have argued that sex and romance, although often co-occurring, are two different things. These theorists argue that the brain architecture and cognitive processing for lustful attractions emerged at a very different time in evolutionary history than those for romantic attachments (Fisher, 2004). Romance may have evolved relatively recently in our evolutionary history, developing out of processes related to how children attach themselves to parents (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). So, over evolutionary time, the brain architecture and processing originally reserved for securely attaching ourselves to our mothers—a good thing—has been co-opted and modified to allow us also to attach ourselves to our romantic partners. Presto: romantic love is born! In contrast, our faculty for sexual desire and attraction (“the lust system”) may have evolved from the ancient animal mating and sexual attraction systems, much older neuropsychological systems than the attachment system in the brain. So what are we to make of asexual people who form long-term (and presumably) “romantic” relationships (33 percent)? The fact that many asexual people, who presumably do not operate from a lust/sexual attraction perspective, have an operating romantic-attraction system gives support to the idea that the sexual attraction and romantic attraction systems are indeed different. Thus, asexuals who are in relationships and have romantic attachments to their partners are an important
The study of asexuality offers a unique opportunity to view sexuality through a new lens, but, perhaps more importantly, this new lens affords a distant, wide-angle view of its subject. When scientists examine a phenomenon, they often try to remove themselves from it so that they can view it more objectively—to view their earthly phenomenon as if they were, perhaps, looking down from space. Asexuality may provide this kind of distance from
