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0:00:01
Taboo science. It's hard to label a person. With a term that didn't exist until centuries after his death. But that doesn't stop the Internet from trying. Search for lists of famous asexual rules from history, and you are bound to run into Isaac Newton. You know, the guy with the apple. Knewton actually did way more than come up with a theory of gravity and the laws of motion. He also developed essential theories of calculus. He invented a telescope He's the one who theorized that white light was made up of every color of the rainbow. Without him, we wouldn't have that pink Floyd album cover. And the walls of college dorm rooms would be all the lesser for it.
0:00:50
He did a lot of things in his life. He didn't do everything if you see where I'm going with this. It said that on his deathbed at age eighty-four, he admitted that he had never had sex with a woman. Now, that leaves room for some interpretation. Maybe he'd had sex with men. But if you look at his life, there's a good chance that he never had sex with anybody. He was really busy making groundbreaking discoveries and he kinda kept to himself. In fact, aside from a male roommate situation that most likely was not sexual. And later a long period living with his niece and her husband, most of his social interactions were him picking fights with other intellectuals. He would have loved Twitter.
0:01:35
What's interesting is how our interpretation of Newton's orientation has changed. See, several biographers of Newton have suggested he was gay But those biographies were written decades ago and times are changing. Today, the Internet is full of people claiming that he was probably asexual. Not only did asexuality not exist as a concept when Newton was alive, it barely existed in the nineteen eighties. Even now, it's a niche concept. There's a good chance you haven't even heard of it, but you should. Because asexuality pushes the boundaries of what most people think they know about how attraction works. Like Newton's prism, it breaks attraction up into every color of the rainbow. And it might even make you learn something new about yourself.
0:02:27
I'm Ashley Haymer, and this is Taboo Science. The podcast that answers the questions you're not allowed to ask. Asexuality is such a niche concept that there's very little research into it. But lucky for me, I found someone who is studying it scientifically. Well, my name is Canton Weiner, and I'm a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of California Irvine. Specifically, I study the relationship chips between gender and sexuality.
0:03:12
And lately, I've been studying asexuality, which is an umbrella term and a spectrum that refers to people who experience low or no sexual attraction. The work that I'm doing right now is part of my dissertation. Hopefully, I'm done with that in May and moving on and into the world. So I'll check back in with you. But I've done seventy-seven interviews with people on the asexuality spectrum. And along with that, I did a digital ethnography where basically I find myself interacting a lot with asexual people online, whether that's on Twitter, on Avon, or other asexuality-centric spaces, like sub edits. For example, that focus on asexuality We'll get to the importance of Avon or the asexuality Visibility and Education Network later on in the episode.
0:04:02
So asexuality refers to people who experience low or no sexual attraction. Sound simple, if a little surprising. But that simple definition belies a really complex set of identities. Typically, I think when people hear asexuality, they think well, first of all, they've probably never heard of it at all. But if they have, I think they're likely to assume it means that someone who doesn't experience any sexual action at all. And for some asexual people, that is very much the case.
0:04:31
Some asexual people like Sarah Costello. She's the co-host of the podcast, sounds fake, but okay, and most recently, co-author of the book of the same name. The podcast looks at love, relationships, and sexuality through the lens of asexuality and aromanticism. And Sarah identifies as a romantic asexual or aero a's. So I don't experience romantic attraction to any people of any gender, and I don't experience sexual attraction to any people of any gender. I am the type of airways person who's not interested in, like, pursuing romance or sex anyway because some people are, like, that's still something they want even if they don't you'll be attraction necessarily. But for me, that's just like something I'm not interested. So I'm I'm just, you know, vibing single single for forever. But you can certainly be asexual and still feel some amount of sexual attraction.
0:05:29
For many people on the spectrum, they actually do experience sexual attraction, but it might be just at very low levels or in very context-dependent situations. So the term demisexuality is often used to refer to that type of experience. Demisexuality refers to a lack of sexual attraction to anyone you don't have a strong emotional connection with. It's different than waiting to have sex until you have a deep bond with someone. Since in that case, most people feel a sexual attraction, but just hold off on having sex. Demisexuals feel very little or no sexual attraction to anyone until they've formed a strong emotional connection with someone, which is the only time they feel sexual attraction. That's why demisexuality lands squarely on the asexuality spectrum. There's a ton of variety, right, both in how people experience the traction and on what people's sexual activities like, what their relationships are like, whether they experience other types of attraction such as romantic attraction. And it's really exciting. It's these very different ways of thinking about sexuality than I think most people are used to, but they're really useful even for people like me who don't fall on the asexuality spectrum.
0:06:47
One of the most useful concepts I've learned while making this episode is the split attraction model. This basically says there's no one type of attraction. You can be sexually attracted to someone without being romantically attracted to them. You can be romantically attracted to someone without being sexually attracted to them. You can be attracted to someone in all sorts of other ways. There's sexual attraction, but also romantic attraction, photonic attraction, That's an interest in being friends with someone. Aesthetic attraction. An appreciation for someone's good looks. Sensual attraction. A desire to physically touch or be close to someone in a non-sexual way, like cuddling. We could probably spend the entire podcast talking about all of the different categories. The reason why the term split is used here is is pretty simple actually. It's just to convey the idea that these various different types of attraction don't necessarily need to align with one another.
0:07:44
As someone for me who's like an airways person, who can still look at someone and be like, that is a really hot person. I'm like looking at that person. Like, for me, I'm like, oh, that's like an aesthetic. Sort of thing. I have always been pretty involved in, like, fandom. And so, you know, seeing other people in the fan of being, like, oh my god, so and so person is like so hot and I'm like, you know what? I agree. I have no urge to have sex with them. I have no urge to make out, like, and none of those things I'm interested in, but I could just stare at this photo of them all day, and I will. Like, seeing, like, a really amazing photo of Zendaya. Like, I'm like, oh my god. I don't wanna have sex with her. And I'm like, just I just wanna burn this into the inside of my eyelids.
0:08:30
Learning about this foot attraction model is really just learning that not all attraction is in one big bucket, and it can be separated out. If you want to view it in one big bucket, can, but just accepting that not everyone views it the same way. As an allosexual, that's the word for people who do experience sexual and romantic attraction. I absolutely understand this concept. There are people that I've felt an aesthetic attraction to, and that's as far as it goes. There are people I've felt a platonic attraction to and just really wanted to be their friend. There are people I've felt a sexual attraction to because they looked exactly like Michael c Hall, but they listened to a lot of Alex Jones and believe nine eleven was an inside job, so the romantic attraction just isn't there. But I hope his music career is going well.
0:09:19
While asexuality in the split attraction model are incredibly new as concepts, They describe phenomena that have been around as long as humans have. And there are scientists who have described things like asexuality for centuries. The very famous sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, for example, who is working in Germany at the the turn of the century. So, like, late eighteen hundreds. We have notes from him that explains. He's interacting with people who don't really experience sexual attraction. He doesn't use the word asexual sexuality to describe that, but it's probably what we would call it today. Magnus Hirschfeld developed pioneering theories on sexuality and was one of the first to promote the idea of trans identities and the gender spectrum in like nineteen ten. The book burnings you've seen photos of from Nazi Germany, a lot of that was his research.
0:10:12
And then a little bit later in the nineteen forties and the nineteen fees, another sexologist, Alfred Kinsey, which people might be a little bit more familiar with. He also actually documented people who did not experience sexual attraction. Alfred Kinsey is obviously famous for the Kinsey Scale, which says that heterosexuality and homosexuality aren't the only options. Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. But what we talk about less when we talk about Kinsey is that he also had a category x that just doesn't fall on that scale at all. And again, he wasn't using the word asexual to describe these people, but that's probably how many of them would identify if that language had been available to them at the time. So he did two different studies actually, one on men, one on women, and he found that about one percent of the men who he interacted with fell in this category x and almost twenty percent of women, which is interesting to see the least. That's a statistic that holds up. Men are the minority in the asexual community. We do have some data already large scale survey data sets that show women far out pacemen in identifying as sexual. So it tends to be that surveys find that about sixty percent of people who identify as asexual, also identify as women, only ten percent as men, and then the remaining twenty whatever percent as something else, right, as non binary to put a simple term on it. So men are outnumbered by all other gender categories in a sense, which is very interesting.
0:11:53
Despite the Magnus Hirschfeld's and the Alfred Kinsey's of the world, asexuality as a concept didn't really come about until the rise of the Internet. Yeah. Asexuality is newer than the animated gif. Yes. That's how I say it. Moving on. So it's like the late nineties. We really see a big consolidation of people who are using this term to describe themselves. In two thousand one, David j found the asexuality, Visibility, and Education Network, or Avon, which continues to be a really important focal point. On the Internet for asexual people, the asexual community continues to this day to be a highly online community. And so when we think about the rise of asexuality as something that people are aware of and using as an identity to understand and explain themselves, we also have to think about the Internet.
0:12:48
Many asexual people go their whole lives without being able to identify their asexuality. Canton Weiner has written about how a lot of asexual people start out as identifying as bisexual or pansexual. Just because they feel the same low or nonexistent level of attraction to people of all genders. And often, once they discover asexuality and start identifying that way, they continue to use those earlier labels too. But the internet and Avan in particular are often the only way they even know asexuality exists. Sara Costello was lucky enough to encounter the concept of asexuality pretty young, but even she went through a journey to label herself that way.
0:13:30
I was a child of the Internet. I was a child of Tumblr. And so I had seen these terms online when I was in, like, high school. But I I didn't identify with them right away. For a while, I was like, oh, well, maybe I'm like, demisexual, which falls under the asexual umbrella. But then I was like, no. That's silly. I'm not I'm not that.
0:13:48
You know, when I was in high school, I challenged myself a lot academically. I did a lot of sports. I was just, like, busy. Right? And so a lot of my other friends were the same way. And so I was just like, I don't have time to date. And so on the occasions that someone might ask me out, I would just, like, come up with an excuse. And I was just, like, you know, I'm just I'm too busy for that. Like, whatever. Like, it it's not of interest to me right now and that's And then I got to college, my freshman year, and I started being like, even if I were a late bloomer, I feel like it would have happened already.
0:14:23
Like, I feel like I would have been interested in sex and romance by now. And so that's when I kind of returned to those terms that I heard of years before. Asexual I was able to kind of land on that pretty quickly. A romantic took me a little bit longer to be sure about because like, what is romantic attraction? Like, it's all very loosey goosey. But, like, by the end of my freshman year of college, I had kind of landed on those terms. And I was like, okay. That's where I'm at. And I have been there ever since.
0:14:58
Something that took me a long while to wrap my head around for this episode is that many asexual people still have sex lives. Hell, many even masturbate. And that's because, well, I'll let Sarah recite this honestly brilliant slogan. The way you identify is about attraction, not action. And so you can still enjoy the action of having sex even if you don't feel sexual attraction to someone. Because if you think about it, there's no way everyone on this planet has been sexually attracted to everyone they've ever had sex with. Like, there's just no way. But you can still have had a good or a decent time, you know, because it is just a physical thing that you can do that brings pleasure to some people. You can choose to still have sex a lot of times if people do experience romantic attraction and they have. A romantic partner and their partner is interested in sex and they're like, I'm down for it. Like, they might have sex with their partner or they might just have sex because it feels good. Like, there are so many reasons to do something. It's just an activity you can do in the same way that, like, you can shake hands with someone. Like, you can masturbate. You can have sex with someone. Like, it's just it's just an activity that you can do that you might enjoy.
0:16:15
One thing that I quickly found is that many asexual people are are really tired of being asked about their sex habits, including masturbation, which totally makes sense. Right? I think it's often the first place that people who are allosexual or or not asexual often gravitate to. But that said, something that I've learned by doing this research on asexuality is that libido, insects sexual attraction and even sexual desire are three different things. Right? And so we often use those terms interchangeably, but there are subtle that I think important differences between them. So the reason why in a nutshell, many people on the asexuality spec do still masturbate is related to still having a libido even if you aren't necessarily experiencing sexual attraction. Sex feels good. You don't need to feel sexual attraction to feel sexual arousal. Sex also works as a release valve. Which is another reason an asexual person might wanna do it. Like, they have the sort of urge that they feel like they need to get out of their system, you know. And so that's another reason why someone might masturbate or have sex with other people even if they don't experience attraction because libido and attraction are not necessarily the same thing.
0:17:36
When we come back, the difficulties dating as an ase person and how traditional psychiatry does a disservice to people on the asexual spectrum. So we've established that just because your ace doesn't mean you don't have sex or even masturbate. But the assumption that asexual people don't have a sex drive and worse that they're not interested in human relationships at all, that can be really harmful. If we live in a society as we do, that assumes that everyone does and should experience sexual attraction, that can cause problems for people who although they're asexual still want to be in a romantic relationship. Right? Many people who are on the asexuality spectrum still want romantic relation and many don't. Right? Both experiences are valid and common in the asexual community. But I think for many, it can be really difficult To date, for example, to find someone else who's going to accept you as an asexual person when you're trying to date. And since asexual people make up only a very small portion of the entire population. We don't know for sure what the number is, but it's around one percent is what most people tend to estimate. You can't just rely on dating other asexual people, especially if you aren't living in a large urban area. So I think intimacy, forming intimate relationships can be a big challenge, and it's certainly something that comes up quite often in my interviews.
0:19:16
Is one misconception that people have that maybe it's it's lonely? Yeah. Absolutely. Especially for arrows in particular or when people assume that asexual and aromantic are, you know, synonymous. They're like, oh, so, like, you're like a robot you don't experience. Love, and it's like, that's not true at all. You know, people think that the be all and all is like a romantic sexual partner. Like, it's like, you gotta find the one. It's so important There are absolutely people who once they find that partner, they're like, I'm done. That's it. And then they kind of throw their other friends away. And it's like, What are you getting out of that? Like, now you just have this one person and if something goes wrong with that person or even if you just wanna talk about something that they don't understand, like, having full relationships and photonic friendships is so important. You don't have to automatically prioritize your romantic sexual relationships just because they're romantic and sexual. If you look at all your relationships and you're like, this is the most important Great. Sure. That's fine. But it's about not having an automatic hierarchy.
0:20:31
Some asexual people even want to have children and families, and some don't, you know, like the rest of humanity. Wanting to have kids has nothing to do with your sexuality. There are straight people who don't want kids. There are gay people who do want kids. You know, it's it not connected at all. But for me, like, I had to see that that was an option. And then I was like, oh, Yeah. No. I don't want to get married. White pick a fit. Like, that's not for me.
0:20:59
When it's pushed on to you so much as a kid, Like, again, that's why representation and having a robust community is so important so that people can see like, oh, there are other ways of doing things that are also totally fine and totally great. I don't know about you, but a lot of this makes sense to me. There are so many cultural norms we just accept as the way things have to be. And sometimes it takes people who don't align with the majority to show that there's another way to do things. That's exactly why Canton wanted to study asexuality in the first place.
0:21:32
I'm really convinced by this lesson that black feminist scholars have shown over and over and over again that when we focus on the margins of society, we certainly learn about the margins themselves, but we also learn a great deal about the center. And so asexuality exists at the margins of both the heterosexual and the queer world making it this really analytically and theoretically important place for us to focus our attention. So I I'm looking at the margins because I think it'll tell us about the margins. We we don't know enough about that, but we'll also learn about more central experiences. We'll learn about heterosexuality. We'll learn about other experiences of queerness. But like other experiences of queerness, asexuality can come with its share of discrimination. I mean, we already covered the way it's nearly impossible to even know asexuality exists unless you're in the right corners of the Internet. But even when people do know about it, many on the outside don't believe it's real.
0:22:31
In my work, I asked people about asexual erasure in what that means, what it looks like. And people said, Well, it means that people assume it's impossible to be asexual. And then I asked Well, do you think that gender influences the way that this happens? And at at this point, many of the people who are women or their assigned gender at birth a female. He said, well, yeah, actually, I guess the assumption is, like, how does that make me different from other women? Right?
0:23:03
All women experience low sexual desire. And so what that means is that for men, asexuality is largely erased through impossibility. And for women, it's largely erased through unremarkability, which I think also reflects some very negative cultural frameworks about sexuality where we deny women SEXUAL AGENCY. Gosh. AND THAT I CAN IMAGINE IS A SLIPRIE SLope BECAUSE IF A WOMAN SAYS THAT SHE'S Asexual AND YOU ASSUME she's just like every other woman that means that, you know, maybe she could be convinced to have sex with you eventually and that is that gets to some dangerous territory. Exactly. It's a window into rape culture in a workplace. It it shows basically that if you're assuming that it's not unusual, for women to experience low sexual desire, but you still feel entitled to having sex with them. What does that tell you about our ad attitudes towards sexual agency and consent. It's very troubling. And women aren't the only group who get stuck with these harmful stereotypes.
0:24:04
Many people who are racialized as people of color say that that racialization makes it harder in many ways to identify as asexual And there are various reasons for that. One of them is that many people of color are basically stereotyped as hyper sexual. So for example of black people in the United States. This is a negative demeaning stereotype that many black people are are forced to deal with. And when you're framed as being hyper sexual, I think it can make it even less believable, sometimes to other people that you are indeed asexual. Meanwhile, there are other racialized statuses that have kind of the opposite problem. And some ways of being framed as like absent of being sexually desirable as hyposexual in a way, like Asian men, for example, in the United States, are often framed this way. And that can still create challenges in identifying as asexual because it's like, well, you aren't asexual. That's just normal for people in that sexual category, which is of course untrue but very challenging for people who are members of this the screws.
0:25:11
But what may be worse than someone saying you don't feel the way you do? Is someone saying you shouldn't feel the way you do? There's a diagnostic label in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental orders, or DSM, known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD. Psychiatric use this label to diagnose asexual people. Even though there are specific differences between asexuality and h s d d, For one, the DSM itself says that HSDD causes, quote, marked distress or interpersonal difficulty and quote, which wouldn't apply to asexuals who are happy in just, you know, vibing. And second, hypoactive sexual desire disorder is about sexual desire. We've already addressed how asexuality doesn't necessarily mean a lack of desire or libido it's just a lack of sexual attraction. But that doesn't stop psychiatrists from putting asexual people through some really traumatic stuff. We live in a social world that assumes that everyone does and should experience sexual attraction.
0:26:23
So many people in the asexual community refer to this as as like compulsory sexuality, right, that you need to be sexual. You need to experience sexual attraction. And so many people who I've spoken with talk about going to physicians, going to counselors, therapists, and basically being told that they have a disorder, that they're sick, and that they have a problem that needs to be fixed, rather than just having a legitimate sexual identity. There's a history of this. Unfortunately, within psychology as a field, where, you know, homosexuality was also deemed a disorder and something that should be fixed. And so, asexual people speak about being subjected to conversion therapy, which I think is surprising to many people who aren't part of the asexual community. Where basically they're having interactions with medical professionals or people in the psychology field who are trying to shore them more less as being asexual. This is not rare. In a survey of LGBT people in the UK in twenty eighteen, asexual respondents were the most likely of all orientations to say they had been offered or actually undergone conversion therapy.
0:27:38
And yet, others on the LGBT spectrum aren't always a good source of support. If you have straight people who are trying to relate to a gay person, they can say, oh, they're just like me. It's just that they experience that attraction to someone of the same gender. Whereas when you look at asexuality, and a romanticism. It totally flips people's worlds on its head and they're like, what do you mean you don't experience that at all? And so even in, like, really welcoming queer communities, I didn't have anyone being, like, it's totally fine and normal if you don't experience this attraction at all.
0:28:15
Asexual people exist both at the margins of the heterosexual world and of the clear world in some very important ways. And so there's this sense that you don't quite fit within heteronormativity, right, the expectations of what it means to be a a quote unquote normal straight person. But you also don't fit a lot of course on about what it means to belong in the queer community. And I think that can be very challenging because you have this almost permanent outsider status, no matter what space you're in. And I think particularly for the queer community, that's a really important thing for us to be thinking about. Because, first of all, I think that the queer community is one of the best things about it, to me as a queer person, is that emphasis on inclusion and diversity, but we're failing to be as inclusive and to embrace the diversity of queer experiences as much as we should when we aren't making an effort to understand asexual experiences.
0:29:21
If the stuff in this episode sounds a lot like your experience and you think you might fall in the a sec tool or a romantic spectrum. First of all, I'm kinda honored that this podcast could do that for you and I'd love to hear from you even if it's anonymously. But second, what the heck are you supposed to do now? It's tough, and I think the number one thing to tell people is if you are not ready and you don't think people are ready to hear it, you are not obligated to come out. You do not have to. And, you know, there are some people who, like, they know their families will not be accepting, and that's that sucks. It's really rough. But if it's not safe for you to come out, don't feel like you have too. There are so many other welcoming communities that you can you can be a part of. But if you do want to come out and you do want to explain to the people around you baby steps. I think they're not going to completely understand it the first time.
0:30:30
We actually have an episode of our podcast. It's episode eighty seven that, like, is basically us giving the TED Talk of asexuality that, like, people can use as a resource to be like, okay, here are the basic things you need to know just generally without, like, diving too much into, like, So do you have like, what what in a second that because there are all the questions I wanna answer right now. But it's something that it can take time for people to understand. And that can be really rough. Like, if you if you come out to someone and they just, like, don't get it yet, like, that hurts. And that's not it's not a fun experience. It is something that people can learn over time, but it is such a change in the worldview if they don't know what asexuality is. That, you know, it just takes time.
0:31:16
And I was very lucky in that my parents were, like, super accepting. My sister was already out. So, like, I I never worried about them being accepting, but they had a lot to learn still. And they had a lot of questions. So it was still a process for them even though they were always like, we support you. We don't really know what this means, but we support you.
0:31:38
And if you're lucky enough to have that experience, that's wonderful. But even with people who are like so welcoming, it often takes them time. To really absorb it. And that sucks. But it is what it is. And you can really just kind of arm them with resources and the stories of other people so that you can show them how being a spec can lead to, like, a really fulfilling and lovely life. Once they get that, then they can be like, you know what? Yeah. Cool. Great. That's you. Thanks for listening. Big thanks to Canton Weiner and Sarah Costello. You can follow Canton on Twitter at Canton Weiner and find his research through the links in the show notes. Sarah's podcast is sounds fake but okay. And her new book is sounds fake but okay. An asexual and a romantic perspective on love, relationships, sex, and pretty much anything else. There's also a link to that in the show notes.
0:32:42
Taboo science is written and produced by me, Ashley Haymer. The theme was by Danny Lapotka of DLC music. Episode music is from Epidemic Sound. If you need music for a project, use the referral link in the show notes. It'll give the show a little kickback. It helps everybody. If you like the show, you should subscribe to the newsletter. You'll get extra info about the episodes and the chance to answer questions that will appear on future episodes. You can find that sign up box on the website, tabu science dot show. The next episode will be out in two weeks. See you then?
That's a that's a statistic. That's a statistic. That's a number that holds up.