The Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender

Christina Richards, Meg-John Barker, Christina Richards, Meg-John Barker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137345882
• eBook ISBN: 9781137345899
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender combines cutting edge research to provide a thorough overview of all the normative - and many of the less common - sexualities, genders and relationship forms alongside psychological and intersectional areas relating to sexuality and gender.

Part I

Sexuality

1

Asexuality

Mark Carrigan

The history of asexuality

What is ‘asexuality’? While answers to this question would once have predominantly involved references to biological processes, it is increasingly likely that someone asking this question will receive a rather different response: an asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. Bogaert (2004) was an early and influential contribution to the literature on asexuality, reporting on a secondary analysis of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL), in which 1.05% of participants reported never having experienced sexual attraction towards anyone. Follow-up studies on the next generation of NATSAL found 0.5% of respondents falling into this category (Bogaert, 2012, p. 45). While asexual people are numerous, it is still difficult to be clear about how numerous they are. First, these results do not indicate identification as asexual, but only experiences which have, in other instances, led people to identify as such. Second, there are important questions which can be raised about the criterion of having never experienced sexual attraction, reflecting different orientations to how we understand something like ‘asexuality’. The question “what is asexuality?” is much more complicated than it can initially seem.

One way to go further is to look towards the commonalities and differences which can be found among those who self-identity as asexual (Carrigan, 2012). Another is to clarify what asexuality is not, so as to better understand the topic by addressing the confusions surrounding it. Finally, we can look beyond self-identification and consider asexuality as a sexual orientation (Bogaert, 2006). This chapter will pursue all three strategies, using them as a framework through which to make sense of a growing academic literature. It will then discuss some of the key debates that have emerged within this literature, before turning to their implications for applied practitioners. The chapter concludes with a discussion of directions for future research and suggestions for further reading.

Key theory and research

The asexual community

The notion of ‘asexual’ as a social identity is a relatively recent one, consolidating through online community spaces and moving from the ‘online’ to the ‘offline’ as these communities gave rise to activists and were discovered by the media and academics. However, people not experiencing sexual attraction is certainly not a new thing (Cerankowski & Milks, 2010), nor is identifying oneself positively in these terms (Kahan, 2013). What does seem to be entirely novel, however, is the affirmative community, partly virtual though, nonetheless, obviously real, which has both given rise to and been strengthened by the growth of this identity. One identifiable strand within the asexuality literature, within which we might locate Carrigan (2011), Chasin (2010), Hinderliter (2013), and Scherrer (2008, 2010a, 2010b), has been primarily concerned¹ with understanding the character of this community, the experiences of those within it, and the relationship between the two.

Investigation of this community immediately cautions against a tendency to assume we know what asexuality ‘is’. Przybylo (2011) warns that ‘asexuality’ as an identity category should be addressed with care, given that such categories delineate ‘inside’ from ‘outside’² and, in doing so, foreclose certain ways of being asexual while recognising others. What can appear to be a converging self-identification as asexual might, nonetheless, mean very different things for different people. Some asexual people experience romantic attraction, developing ‘crushes’ and pursuing relationships, while others do not. Some asexual people are entirely indifferent to sex, some are viscerally repulsed by it, while others can derive enjoyment from sexual acts without these acts being motivated by sexual attraction. Carrigan (2011) suggested that this can be usefully understood in terms of divergent attitudes towards sexual behaviour (positivity, neutrality, repulsion) and romance (aromanticism and romanticism, which can take heteroromantic, homoromantic, biromantic, and panromantic forms). Other identifications include gray-a, commonly understood to refer to those falling within the ‘grey area’ between sexuality and asexuality, as well as demisexuality, referring to the experience of sexual attraction as something ensuing from romantic attraction and never independently of it.

Our few sources of information about the size of groups within the asexual community, as opposed to the distribution of asexual people within the population at large, come from The Asexual Awareness Week Community Census. Conducted in 2011 as part of a broader visibility project, this community-led project collected responses from 3430³ respondents about their demographic characteristics (Miller, 2011). While there are obvious issues of self-selection and social selection attendant to internet-based research, particularly when recruitment is enacted through in-group networks, this is a broader point applicable to much of the existing literature on asexuality rather than a critique that can be made specifically of the census (Carrigan et al., 2012).⁴ The results of the census reflect the aforementioned diversity within the asexual community, with 56% of respondents reporting identification as ‘Asexual’, 21% as ‘Gray-asexual’, 21% as ‘Demisexual’, and 2% as ‘None of the above’. Attitudes towards oneself having sex were variable, with a greater proportion of asexually identified respondents reporting complete repulsion (25%) than was the case with Gray-As (8%) and Demisexuals (6%). However, reported indifference was lower among these respondents (24%) than among Gray-As (32%) and Demisexuals (34%). Significant numbers of respondents among these latter two groups, who can too easily be reductively conceptualised as being ‘less asexual’ but not sexual, reported an attitude of repulsion towards oneself having sex. Completely repulsed Gray-As (8%) and somewhat repulsed Gray-As (43%), as well as completely repulsed Demisexuals (6%) and somewhat repulsed Demisexuals (31%), serve as a reminder of the complexity of these categories (Miller, 2011). Another important finding is those asexually identified respondents who reported that they ‘Enjoy having sex’ (1%) and the larger number of Gray-As (4%) and Demisexuals (11%) for whom this was true.

While the asexual community⁵ emerged online, with a number of diverse strands preceding the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) and the emergence of many other online spaces across a range of digital platforms, we risk missing the reality and significance of these engagements if we construe them solely as ‘virtual’. Certainly, the internet was crucial, with the diffusion of information and communications technology in the late 1990s facilitating an “ability to maintain contact with others irrespective of their geographical location, with the flexibility of asynchronous contact and without huge cost implications to the sender or receiver” (Evans, 2013, p. 82). This allowed an otherwise geographically dispersed group to begin to talk, compare experiences and elaborate new ways of thinking about their selves and their lives.

Nonetheless, the possibility to connect in such a way does not account for the needs and desires served by such a connection, nor does the simple fact of this communication being ‘online’ help us understand the rich array of ‘offline’ activities which have emerged around the globe. In fact, the online/offline distinction arguably hinders us in making sense of the activities and associations which have emerged from these early beginnings. As will be discussed later in the chapter, the need for support and acceptance that the community serves, described by Scherrer (2008) and others, must be understood in terms of the assumptions, habits, and judgements encountered within the broader social and cultural context. Another risk is that talk of online communities can convey an impression of inwardly looking groups talking to each other about themselves. While these online dialogues have been important both for individuals and for the asexual community as a whole (Carrigan, 2011), they have gone hand-in-hand with many outward-facing strands of activity, in which members of the community have sought in a variety of ways to engage with journalists, academics, activists, and policy makers.⁶ For instance, AVEN has project and media teams, with the latter collaborating with journalists and broadcasters on many occasions. In recent years, asexuality has received widespread attention in print and broadcast media around the globe (Bootle, 2009; Wallis, 2012; Westphal, 2004).⁷ It is receiving institutional recognition, for instance as part of the Home Office’s hate crime strategy United Kingdom (Home Office, 2012). It is also the subject of at least one novel, as well as a play, both known by the author to be in preparation.

Confusions surrounding asexuality

Both empirical data and anecdotal evidence attest to the confusions which surround the topic of asexuality (Carrigan, 2012). Its ironic ‘sexiness’ as a research topic (Cerankowski & Milks, 2014) reflects these confusions. The fact that it remains so counter-intuitive to many, even if it is becoming more familiar in at least some quarters,⁸ contributes to its appeal as a research topic.⁹ Its interestingness derives from its capacity to act as a new lens with which to view sexuality (Bogaert, 2012), but this intellectual appeal as a starting point for rethinking taken-for-granted assumptions is the flip side of the everyday difficulties faced by asexual people, with sheer intellectual non-comprehension ensuring that stigmatising reactions to asexuality are pervasive.

One common confusion is to equate asexuality with celibacy, such that a lack of sexual attraction (asexuality) is conflated with a choice to abstain from sexual acts (celibacy). If the two groups are considered from a historical and sociological perspective, this distinction can appear less sharp than it might initially seem,¹⁰ as the voluntariness upon which the contemporary understanding of celibacy depends can come to seem distinctly slippery when considered in specific contexts. However, for present purposes, it is more important to recognise the frustration that this pervasive confusion causes for many asexual people. More significant is the widespread assumption that everyone experiences sexual attraction. This licenses the normative claim that everyone should experience sexual attraction, such that its absence constitutes grounds for assuming the operation of some pathology which has interrupted ‘normal’ sexual response. This is a common assumption which is bound up within a broader cultural politics of (a)sexuality: for instance, Kim (2011) who explains how asexuality has long been associated in a negative way with the lives of people with disabilities (see Iantaffi & Mize, this volume). This assumption of the universality of sexual attraction, such that its apparent absence is understood in pathological terms,¹¹ is deeply problematic, and, it will be argued, it is particularly important to question this from the perspective of applied psychology. It can seem a common-sense assumption until questioned, but it contributes to a situation in which many asexual people perceive themselves to be living in relatively hostile environments (Gazzola & Morrison, 2011) and in which otherwise well-meaning people can act in ways which are unintentionally stigmatising and harmful to asexual people (Carrigan, 2012). As will be discussed, this experience of hostile circumstances can often be seen to explain the ‘distress’ which is used to license a clinical attribution of pathology.

The psychology of asexuality

While these sociological and social psychological considerations might be particularly important when engaging with asexual people in an applied context, underlying questions remain concerning the psychology of asexuality. Though a sociological approach to the question “what is asexuality?” will tend to reject, or at least complicate, the terms of the question itself, the main tendency in the psychological literature on asexuality has been to treat it as a sexual orientation. This issue was addressed in an early paper by Bogaert (2006), which asked whether it is “useful to consider a lifelong lack of attraction as a unique sexual orientation, distinct from, say, the three main categories of heterosexual/straight, homosexual/gay and bisexual?” (p. 244). As Chasin (2011) notes, this treatment of asexuality as one of four mutually exclusive orientation categories has longer-standing roots within the sexualities literature. The ensuing understanding of asexuality as the ‘fourth sexual orientation’ certainly resonates with some within the asexuality community. However, one of the problems with this is that it excludes those who experience sexual attraction rarely, as well as those who have experienced it in the past but no longer do (Chasin, 2011). The broader issue this raises concerning the need for longitudinal research will be discussed later in the chapter. The important point for present purposes is that this operationalisation of asexuality, whatever methodological virtues it may or may not possess, cuts rather uneasily across the asexual community. If we assume the viability of the underlying concept that asexuality is a ‘fourth sexual orientation’ which previously eluded systematic recognition, this may not seem problematic. But the cases of those who rarely or formerly experienced sexual attraction can illuminate the cases of those who never have, and vice versa (Carrigan, 2011).

In an earlier paper, Bogaert (2004) recognises that “there may be a number of independent development pathways, perhaps both biological and psychosocial, leading to asexuality” (p. 284). This suggestion is rendered yet more plausible when we consider the aforementioned diversity within the asexuality community. While the sociological literature has remained (necessarily) agnostic on the aetiology of asexuality, it has established a strong body of evidence that, if asexuality is a state susceptible to explanation, it certainly is not a unitary state. Therefore, we should not only consider multiple pathways leading to asexuality but recognise the possibility that a diversity of states are being subsumed under the category ‘asexuality’. This then raises the question of whether it is coherent to talk about asexuality in terms of an underlying sexual orientation. Certainly, we could interpret the diversity within the asexual community in terms of psychosocial factors inflecting an underlying shared orientation. Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Sexuality
• Part II: Gender
• Part III: Relationships
• Part IV: Psychological Areas
• Part V: Intersections
• Index