Understanding Asexuality

Traditionally, prevalence research in the sexual orientation field has centered on gays and lesbians, who constitute a more visible and well-known sexual minority than asexual people. Most early estimates of same-sex sexuality were loosely based on data collected by Alfred Kinsey, the pioneer sex researcher, who, along with his colleagues, interviewed thousands of Americans from the 1930s through the 1950s (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953). The most widely cited estimate of same-sex sexuality that was loosely based on this work was 10 percent (Marmor, 1980; Voeller, 1990). Note that this 10 percent figure was only “loosely based” on Kinsey’s work, because it actually only referred to the percentage of men (and not women) in his original sample who had reported predominantly same-sex activity, and Kinsey himself never claimed that 10 percent of Americans were gay.

Like 1 percent, a 10 percent figure is a memorably round number that draws people in. Thus, it also has “had legs.” Over the years, gay and lesbian people have used a somewhat cheeky and/or subversive code[14] to identify themselves (e.g., “queer,” “bent,” “friends of Dorothy”), and, not surprisingly, some have chosen to rally around this 10 percent figure. For example, some gay people claim proudly to be a member of the “Ten Percent” club or society (Hecox, n.d.). There are also postmodern, consumer riffs on this figure and its meaning for gay and lesbian people, in which, for example, shopping online in gay-friendly establishments allows one to snag a 10 percent discount (10percent.com, n.d.).

Yet Kinsey’s sample, although useful even today for a number of different purposes, was never a good one to use for estimating prevalence rates of sexual behavior (or the people who engage in it). It was not representative of the United States and skewed to include a high percentage of sexual minorities, in which Kinsey had a special interest. Thus, the 10 percent figure is questionable, because it is based on an unrepresentative, although very historically significant, sample of the U.S. population.

The AIDS era (i.e., post-1985) is not a high point in the history of human sexuality, because of its effects on sexual minorities, but it did usher in the age of good sampling methods to study sexuality. These new, modern samples usually recruit people nationwide and are generally representative of the populations they survey. One form of modern survey research utilizes national probability sampling. This procedure selects people randomly from the population but also tries to ensure that different subgroups of a nation’s population (e.g., regions, ethnicities) have an equal or a “known” probability of being chosen, even if they are harder to sample for some reason (e.g., a population that is more remote, or difficult to contact by phone). For example, if Asian women comprise 5 percent of a nation’s population, then 5 percent of the sample should contain Asian women. As we will see later, these modern, nationwide probability samples are not perfect, particularly as the reality of sampling is different than the theory of sampling, but they are much better than the majority of other samples used in research. The majority of research samples are called “convenience” samples, because the participants are recruited at the researcher’s convenience (people who happen to respond to a recruitment ad in a magazine, an undergraduate class that a professor recruits for a study she is conducting, etc.). These convenience samples are certainly useful at times, but they do not represent the broader population.

Using modern, nationwide probability samples, researchers have found that the prevalence of both male and female homosexuality is lower than the 10 percent figure. The estimate based on one of the best U.S. samples, the National Health and Social Life Survey, is that gay and lesbian people make up about 2–3 percent of the population (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). Other samples, including in other Western countries, have also suggested lower figures than 10 percent (Billy, Tanfer, Grady, & Klepinger, 1993; Sell, Wells, & Wypij, 1995; Joloza, Evans, & O’Brien, 2010). For example, using the Integrated Household Survey, researchers found that 1.5 percent of 238,206 British residents identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (Joloza et al., 2010). The author of a recent book on sexual orientation, biologist Simon LeVay, after reviewing the available data, suggests that approximately 2–5 percent of men and approximately 1–2 percent of women are predominantly or exclusively homosexual (LeVay, 2010).