Understanding Asexuality

At least three lines of theory and research support this target-oriented view of sexual orientation. First, there is evidence that proceptive desire—the urge to seek out and initiate sexual activity—may be more common in men than in women, whereas receptive desire—the capacity to become aroused upon encountering certain sexual circumstances—may characterize women’s sexuality more so than that of men (Baumeister, 2000; Diamond, 2003b). Proceptive desire relative to receptive desire may be more conducive to a target-oriented view of sexual arousal and thus may capture the traditional (and hence more male-oriented) conceptions of sexual attraction.

Second, Meredith Chivers’s recent work on men and women’s arousal patterns (e.g., genital responses to erotic pictures or films) suggests that men are more target oriented in their sexuality. Her research has found that men’s sexual arousal is usually directed toward one sex or another: women if they are heterosexual, men if they are gay. Women’s sexual arousal is much more diffuse, and not specific to a category of sex/gender. Overall, women will respond genitally somewhat less than men to various types of erotic imagery, and usually to both men and women actors in the stimuli, even when the women report being exclusively heterosexual or lesbian. In other words, men’s sexuality seems to have a specific category of gender as its target—a bull’s eye in their sights. This is less so for women’s sexuality—or at least women have multiple targets or bull’s eyes in their sights (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004; Chivers, Seto, & Blanchard, 2007).

Related to Meredith Chivers’s work is a third line of research supporting this target-oriented view of sexual orientation: Julia Heiman’s research, which shows that women are sometimes not aware of their genital responses (Heiman, 1977). Thus women may not know how their bodies are responding sexually, at least not to the same degree as men do. As a consequence, women may not associate sexual responses to a specific target (e.g., men) because they may not be aware that genital responses to a target are in fact occurring. This difference in genital response may be partially related to the way men and women’s bodies work: erections are obvious, whereas vaginal responses are often more subtle.

If women’s sexuality is less proceptive in nature, if their physical arousal is non-category-specific (i.e., no bull’s eye in the target), and, finally, if they are not as aware of their genital responses as men are, then when women are asked to respond to questions such “who are you sexually attracted to?,” perhaps it is not surprising that some women simply do not respond in a traditional (male-oriented) way: as being sexually attracted to either males or females (or even to both). Indeed, some may report or label themselves as having no sexual attraction to others (i.e., being asexual).

Let’s return to some issues related to women’s non-category-specific arousal. A basic question that emerges from this work is this: Why do women have such non-category-specific arousal, whereas men do not? One explanation that Chivers and colleagues favor is as follows: Nature may have designed the vagina, along with related arousal mechanisms, to prepare a woman for any kind of sexual activity that may occur, willing or otherwise. At times throughout human evolutionary history, women have been subjected to coerced sexual relations. Thus, to prevent injury, the adaptive response of the vagina, along with the brain and body mechanisms that support it, may have been to respond with expansion and lubrication at the suggestion of almost any sexual activity. Thus, the vagina is a pliably indiscriminate organ primed for any sexual contact that may arise. Indeed, Chivers and her colleagues have shown that women, unlike men, also respond genitally to chimpanzee sexual activity (Chivers, 2010). Talk about non-category-specific arousal!

If non-category-specific responding in women is an injury-preventing mechanism, then one should expect that asexual women also have such mechanisms in place, and thus also have non-category-specific responding to sexual stimuli. However, shouldn’t asexual women have very different arousal patterns than sexual women? After all, if asexual women are truly “asexual,” then shouldn’t they have, presumably, low or absent arousal? Not necessarily. Recall that asexuality, by my and others’ definitions, is a lack of sexual attraction, not a lack of physical arousal. Thus, although arousal and sexual attraction are often related, and arousal may give us information (e.g., feedback) about our sexual attractions, arousal and attraction are not the same thing. Indeed, it is clear that they are often “decoupled,” and even sexual women often do not use physical arousal as a gauge of their sexual attraction/orientation—and cannot, if they are not aware of this arousal.