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
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—
There is a famous painting by seventeenth-century artist Henry Fuseli called
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?
At one point in my first paper on asexuality (Bogaert, 2004), I posed the following question: “How might people with atypical sexual proclivities respond to the statement,
So, no (secret) sexual attractions in asexuals? Well, not necessarily. My contact with self-identified asexuals has suggested that some do indeed have very unusual sexual attractions, even if they have reported little or no sexual attraction to human beings (Bogaert, 2008). For example, some masturbating asexuals have indicated to me that there is a persistent theme, often very unusual, in their sexual fantasies. In other words, some people who lack attraction to others, some of whom identify as asexuals, do indeed have a paraphilia.{It is important to remember that many asexuals do not masturbate and/or have no fantasies (or at least no consistent theme in them), and hence do not have a paraphilia (see chapter 5 on masturbation).}
Also, the issue raised in chapter 5 of the “disconnect” between fantasy and masturbation for some asexuals is relevant here. In particular, the fantasies of asexual people, when they do occur in a consistent or systematic way, often are constructed in such a way that they
One asexual person on the AVEN website describes it this way: “I almost invariably think of fictional characters. My thoughts have never involved people I know, and they have never involved myself” (Vicious Trollop, 2005, July 25). Another on AVEN writes, “It’s scenes in 3rd person; I may have a generic male character which is kind of me, but it’s still separate from me, mentally watched rather than participated in” (Teddy Miller, 2005, July 25).
Still another AVEN participant writes, “The point isn’t voyeurism, either: the scene doesn’t turn me on because I’m watching it, it turns me on because it’s sexually charged (and I’m acting as an emotional leech). I may have a character that I identify more with… but it’s not a stand-in for me; it acts like a viewpoint character in fiction” (Eta Carinae, 2005, July 25).
These quotes suggest that some asexual people’s fantasies, when they do have them, do not involve their own identities. Instead, their fantasies more often involve people they do not know or, more specifically, fictional