About 10 years ago, Keith Huntington Derrick remembers watching an episode of “House,” where a character was diagnosed and treated for being asexual. In the past, some doctors treated asexual people as if they had a mental health condition, something that has changed recently thanks to the efforts of asexual people.
The framing of asexuality in the episode, the first time Huntington Derrick had encountered the concept, struck him as negative. “That sort of colored my perception of it,” the 40-year-old from Atlanta tells TODAY.com.
But it did inspire him to start researching asexuality and eventually realize that’s how he identifies.
“It did raise a couple of questions in me because for a good three decades of my life, I was forcing myself into relationships I didn’t want to be in, doing things I didn’t really want to do because it was a normal thing to do. I felt obligated to do those things and then I would feel broken,” he recalls.
Eventually, Huntington Derrick decided to connect with the asexual community and explore asexuality. “I didn’t know that it was OK to be the way that I was,” he says.
What is asexuality?
“(Asexuality is) a sexuality, a sexual orientation, for people who experience no sexual attraction or very little sexual attraction,” KJ Cerankowski, an associate professor of comparative American studies, gender, sexuality and feminist studies at Oberlin College, tells TODAY.com. “People also consider asexuality a spectrum.”
That means some asexual people never feel sexual attraction and have no interest in sexual relations. Others might experience sexual attraction at certain points in their lives, but because that state isn’t “permanently true for them,” they may still identify as asexual, Cerankowski says.
“That definition (of asexuality) is always about a negative, about a lack,” he says. “So, it feels important for me to also add that asexuality is also about a different way to organize one’s life in terms of relationships and kinship and friendship and partnerships that don’t have to center around sex or romantic attraction.”
While asexual people have likely existed throughout history, people lacked the language to discuss it. When Alfred Kinsey investigated sexuality as part of the Kinsey scale in 1948, he noted some people, whom he called Group X, couldn’t be placed on the scale because they didn’t experience sexual attraction, Megan Carroll says.
“We had no language for asexuality,” Carroll, an assistant professor of sociology at California State University San Bernardino, tells TODAY.com. “That term did not really come into popular parlance until the front of the century, really like 2001, when (the Asexual Visibility and Education Network) was founded … put out a definition of asexuality.”
David Jay founded AVEN with “two objectives, one to really advocate for asexuality as a genuine sexual orientation and the second to build up that natural community of asexual people,” Michael Doré, a member of AVEN, tells TODAY.com. “We have to build a community and really get the word out.”
What makes a person asexual?
Being asexual means having a lack of or limited sexual attraction toward others. But asexuality is more nuanced than that.
“Asexuality is definitely a spectrum,” says Carroll. “There’s a lot of identities within the asexual umbrella that represents experiencing levels of sexual attraction that are not considered the norm.”
Gray asexual people, for example, feel sexual attraction rarely or in certain situations. Demisexual is “a pretty common sub-label,” for people who only feel sexual attraction after an emotional connection started, Carroll says.
While asexuality relates to sexual desire, Cerankowski notes that some asexual people “might masturbate, for example, because they do feel sexual arousal. They just don’t want to share that with another person.”
“The asexual community, they also distinguish between sexual attraction toward another person and sexual desire or libido, which is sort of a different mechanism,” he says.
Do asexual people fall in love?
Some asexual people absolutely fall in love. Even though asexual people might not be interested in sex, many are interested in romantic relationships, where they enjoy a partnership that looks on the surface to be like any other.
“Two-thirds of asexual people do experience normative levels of romantic attraction or desire a romantic relationship,” Carroll says. “But without the sex bit.”
That means one-third of asexual people are considered aromantic, “which means that they’re just not interested in romantic partnerships,” Cerankowski says. “That also is its own spectrum … so there might be some asexual people who are also aromantic. There might be aromantic people who are not asexual.”
Those who are aromantic but not asexual would be likely to pursue causal sex but not relationships, Cerankowski says.
Asexual people who desire romantic partnership may have certain gender preferences for their partners, such as hetero romantic, homo romantic, bi romantic or pan romantic.
“There are asexual people who are romantic and into what might look to an insider as a ‘normal’ relationship in the sense that they might have a partner of the same or different gender,” Doré says. “It’s not really up to anybody else what happens behind closed doors.”
Some asexual people have multiple romantic relationships, known as asexual poly. They’re just “not having sex in those relationships,” Cerankowski explains. “They still have deep intimacy. People might live together. They might choose to raise children together and do all the things that from the outside look like any other couple or family would do.”
How to tell if someone is asexual
There’s no way to know if someone’s asexual unless they share it. “Nobody knows whether you’re having sex at home,” Cerankowski explains.
Carroll stresses that others should not dub someone as asexual.
“(The community) encourages people to adopt that word for themselves if they find it useful, but the community is determined not to prescribe that label onto anyone,” she says. “People are very respectful about not projecting that label onto someone who says it’s not for them.”
Coming to own his asexuality has helping Huntington Derrick live “my best life,” she says. “I get to do things that make me feel fulfilled, and it was really an empowering moment, getting introduced to the community. One of the things I love about the community was, even when I wasn’t sure that this was who I was, they still welcomed me.”
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