Understanding Asexuality

time periods recognize that sex, at least under certain circumstances, causes “insanity” illustrates my main point: sex, in many manifestations, and perhaps even at its core, is mad.

When liberal-minded observers hear about the sex scandal of a celebrity (e.g., David Letterman) or a sports personality (e.g., Tiger Woods) or a politician (e.g., Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn), they typically do not decry what might be perceived by more conservative observers to be the shocking immorality of the acts, but rather the shocking stupidity of the perpetrator’s behavior in getting caught. And it is clear that there is at times an almost wanton disregard for any kind of careful planning or thoughtful execution in relation to behaviors that, if discovered, could do serious damage to their reputations and careers. Even more telling is that many of the people caught in such scandals are incredibly bright, savvy, and highly functioning in the social sphere.

One might argue that this wanton behavior has less to do with the maddening effects of sex, and more to do with a sense of entitlement and disregard for others that seems to go hand in hand with power, status, and narcissism. Partly true, I expect, but this is likely not the whole story. For example, it does not explain the often careful and thoughtful behavior these men routinely display in other areas of their lives. If behavior in these other domains were chosen carelessly, it could be almost as damaging to their careers as an awkwardly planned sexual liaison. In addition, if one prefers a “power explanation” over a “sex explanation” to account for this wanton behavior of men of celebrity and status, one would still have to account for the tricky interplay of power and sex, particularly in men. For example, there is a surge of testosterone (potentially affecting both sex drive and feelings of power) in men after they win at competitions (Carre, Putnam, & McCormick, 2009). In short, it is very difficult to disentangle power from many men’s sexual motives (and vice versa). It is also hard to argue that sex is not at least partly the culprit underlying the seeming irrationality of the behavior leading to these scandals.

There is an antidrug ad showing an egg sizzling in a frying pan. The caption reads, “This is your brain on drugs.” Perhaps an equivalent one should be reserved for sex (“This is your brain on sex”), since brains on sex, including the brains of celebrities, politicians, and sports figures, do irrational things.

Three months after his bizarre car crash and a myriad of rumors, Tiger Woods[29] emerged on February 19, 2010, from his public hibernation to offer a mea culpa for his extramarital affairs and their impact on his family, friends, fellow players, fans, and sponsors. One of the more interesting elements of all this was the astonishing degree of interest in this story, relative to all the other issues of the day. One newspaper headline asserted boldly, “The world stops for 13 minutes” (Broad, 2010, February 28). Not literally true, of course, but almost: the New York Stock Exchange did stop trading for the thirteen minutes to watch the spectacle of Woods’s carefully crafted news conference. “Tiger Woods News Conference” was also the highest-rated Google search term by midday. The level of interest in this story, as with the scandals before and after it, was driven by sexual curiosity. This is not to say that there weren’t other angles that made people curious to watch or to hear or to read about it (e.g., the business/sponsorship impact), but the only angle that drove it to this level of fury was clearly the sexual one.

Also, consider this: the fact that a relatively conservative, business-oriented newspaper—Canada’s The Globe and Mail—would say that the “world stopped” (Broad, 2010, February 28) illustrates a main point of this book, that one’s view of the world—including the perception of whether it seems to stop or seems to run at a breakneck pace—is filtered through the different lenses that we have for seeing it. Most people see the world through sexual lenses, just as business-oriented people often see the world through business-oriented lenses; the lenses we wear—sexual or otherwise—are often no longer obvious to us, just as a long-worn set of spectacles over the years becomes imperceptible to the wearer and may even feel like part of his or her own face.

What much of the public and the media did not realize was that Woods’s apology was borne out of his need to complete a number of essential “steps” in his “sexual addiction” treatment, similar to the therapeutic steps required in Alcoholics Anonymous. These steps include an apology to all those whom his sexually addictive behavior (and its sequelae) has wronged in one way or another. It is perhaps fitting that it came in the form of a highly rated press conference, which was meant to reach not just family and friends but also fellow golfers, his fans, and sponsors, because the scandal and fallout probably affected—rightly or wrongly—many millions of people.[30]

One of the interesting elements of this episode, however, was the fact that part of the public and much of the press wanted Woods to have a public shaming. They seemed to want him to admit that his sense of entitlement led to arguably excessive sexual behavior—including, evidently, threesomes with prostitutes. But why was this sexual shaming necessary, or at least interesting to us? Is it because sex is embedded, even pathologically so, in our culture and in the way we think?

But let’s push the point further by turning it on its head. Why is it that Tiger Woods’s sense of entitlement should not have spurred a public apology, a shaming, over his other excesses, ones that are arguably much more harmful to the planet and humanity than his sexual ones? Why isn’t he apologizing for his egregious and excessive consumption of the world’s resources and pollution of the planet? Why isn’t he apologizing for his private jet, his gas-guzzling vehicles, and the energy consumption in his houses, which could otherwise run a small country? (That is also an interesting “threesome,” by the way.) More importantly, why aren’t we more interested in that apology, rather than the one we got? Why wouldn’t the world stop for thirteen minutes for that? I think you know the answer: Because it is not about sex, and people are mad about sex.[31]

Summary

Sex is the great story of life (see chapter 1), but it is also truly and utterly mad. Some might argue that, yes, it is mad, but it does not have to be so. It is our culture that makes it mad, and if we were to strip away the neuroticism and hypocrisy from it and “raise the children right,” it would not be so. Whether this is true or not, it is an interesting argument to consider. What definitely is true is that the current state of sex should make us cautious about assuming that the absence of sex in one form or another—asexuality—is pathological. I discuss this subject—whether asexuality is indeed a disorder—more fully in my next chapter.

CHAPTER 9 Do You Have Hypoactive Skydiving Disorder?

Is there only one right way to live a human life? Must people have certain experiences to make their lives worthwhile and healthy? Most of us grapple with these kinds of questions, as they help us to understand our goals, setbacks, and achievements in life. I’ve also grappled with these questions from an academic perspective, because I was (and still am) trying to understand whether asexuality should be considered a disorder (Bogaert, 2006b). This is the subject of the present chapter. I examine whether asexuality should be seen as unhealthy, and I do so from a number of different perspectives; in other words, I try to put on a number of different lenses and see what I can see.

From one perspective, we might argue that asexuality is a disorder because it goes against life’s natural order of things; after all, sex is a natural process, and the desire to “do it” with others is what all (sexual) life strives to do in one form or another. This view of asexuality as disorder uses a lens crafted by evolutionary biology. Thus, asexuality (i.e., a lack of sexual attraction) may seem to contradict an important biological imperative: sex is the means by which humans reproduce, and thus to eschew this aspect of life may seem to fail at a basic goal of life—to reproduce.

When an organism reproduces, its genes are passed on to future generations. The “winners,” or the best- adapted organisms, are the ones that pass on the most genes to future generations. The most maladapted are the ones that don’t pass on genes (or that pass on the fewest genes) to future generations. Most human beings do the replication game, or attempt to do this, through sexual reproduction. Thus a sexual