I suck at updating this blog regularly. My second post about attitudes to asexuality was supposed to come a few days after the first, not several weeks after it… but sometimes real life has an annoying habit of getting in the way of my blogging!

Anyway… onwards with my responses to people’s common reactions to finding out someone’s asexual.

“You must have been abused as a child”

Firstly, I wasn’t. This, of course, is the point at which some people jump in and say “Ah, you probably were, but you don’t remember it!”. I’m no psychologist so I’m not going to get into a discussion about repressed memories – all I can say is that I had a happy childhood, I was a cheerful and contented child and there are no bad feelings or episodes of acting out that need to be accounted for. Therefore, I rest pretty secure in the knowledge that I was never abused.

Secondly, yes, there are some asexual people who were abused as children. But I think you’ll find there are also many sexual people who were abused. Abuse, tragically, happens to a lot of people and while it causes issues around sex for many of them, the majority go on to become sexual people who want sexual relationships.

I don’t have any statistics to hand, but based on anecdotal evidence I believe that the majority of asexual people were NOT abused in childhood… just like the majority of sexual people. Sexual abuse no doubt causes people to have issues related to sex, and it may play a part for a minority of people who identify as asexual, but I certainly don’t accept that every asexual person “must have been abused”, whether they remember it or not. That’s just plain wrong, and kind of insulting.

“There must be something wrong with you – you should see a doctor”

There are various mental and physical disorders that can cause loss of sexual desire and if someone was previously sexual and has lost their sexual urges, or feels that their lack of sexual interest is part of a larger disorder with other symptoms, then of course I would urge that person to see a doctor.

But I don’t believe asexuality itself should be treated as a disorder. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a natural variant of human sexuality. Most human attributes can be plotted on a bell curve – that is, the majority of people will be in the middle but a few will be at the extreme ends of any scale. If there are some people who experience excessive sexual attraction and a powerful desire to have sex frequently – and we know that such people exist – then science predicts there must be people at the other end of the scale who experience little or no sexual attraction or desire. To me, that just seems normal.

And if someone is content with their lack of sexual desire, why would you treat that as a disease? It doesn’t cause harm to them or anyone else and they don’t feel that something is wrong with them, so what is there to “cure”?

Personally, I know that I don’t have any hormonal imbalance, and although I’ve suffered periods of depression throughout my life, I’ve also experienced long periods free from it, without it having much of an impact on my feelings about sex. If anything, I was more interested in the idea of sex and relationships when I was depressed, because I was looking for ways to “fix” myself and thought maybe a sexual relationship would be something that might work (it didn’t). When I feel happy and contented with my life, it never occurs to me to think about having sex or being in a relationship. I therefore don’t see asexuality as a disease, disorder or symptom, simply as a natural part of myself, which is part of the spectrum of human sexuality.

“You’re just repressing your sexuality”

I really have no idea what repressed sexuality feels like, so this one is a little hard to answer. If I am repressing it, I’m doing it very well! I’m certainly not fighting down any urges and on the few occasions when I’ve been physically intimate with someone, I had to push myself to appear enthusiastic, rather than struggling with any inner desire to let myself go.

I think a lot of people assume that if you don’t want to have sex you must be really prudish, with guilty thoughts about sex being dirty and wrong. I’m actually one of the least prudish people you could meet, I’m very open-minded and knowledgeable about what goes on between consenting adults and I’m happy for people to do whatever floats their boat, assuming no-one’s getting unwillingly hurt or taken advantage of. In that sense I’m far more liberated about sex than a lot of people I know. I just don’t have any interest in doing it myself.

“How can you know if you like it if you’ve hardly tried it?”

It’s true that my sexual experience is extremely limited, but I don’t think that’s really relevant. To my mind, sex is something that requires desire and/or love to make it enjoyable. Without that, it’s just a rather uncomfortable and pointless rubbing together of body parts. Without desire, I think that sex is like stuffing down food you don’t like, when you’re not even hungry – it doesn’t satisfy and you don’t get any thrill out of it.

My brief forays into physical intimacy have taught me that any small spark of desire I feel is extinguished after a bit of kissing and touching. Within a couple of minutes I’m bored and ready to do something more interesting. I lack the desire or need for sex, and also the desire or need for a romantic relationship, and without those, it seems entirely useless to engage in it, not to mention unfair and misleading to the person I engaged in it with.

“You’re just frigid”

One of the dictionary definitions of frigid is: “unresponsive to sexual advances or stimuli”. So yes, I guess I am. How about that?