Understanding Asexuality

My hunch is that asexual people are less conforming to traditional gender roles, on average, than heterosexual people. One of the reasons is because traditional sexual development often may make females more feminine and males more masculine. For example, asexual women may be less feminine in attire, manner, and language because they lack what Lori Brotto and I call object-of-desire self-consciousness (Bogaert & Brotto, in progress). We argue that heterosexual women’s sexuality is often strongly linked to perceiving themselves as an object of desire in another’s eyes. We also believe that women have a high likelihood to develop sexual scripts—learned sequences of sexual behavior (see also chapter 5 on masturbation)—with object-of-desire themes. Indeed, my students and I found evidence for this in a study examining heterosexual women and men’s sexual fantasies with, for example, women being more likely than men to be turned on by having others see them as attractive, rather than seeing someone else (i.e., their partner) as attractive. Even women’s language reflects these themes, as one might expect if sexual scripts permeate our cognitions; after all, language and cognition (i.e., our thoughts) are intimately linked (Bogaert, Visser, Pozzebon, & Wanless, 2011).

But what does this research on women and object-of-desire self-consciousness have to do with asexuality, and with asexual women in particular? To be sexual (and romantic) for women often emerges out of their sense of themselves as objects of desire. So, if asexual women are not interested in being objects of desire (and have not had socializing forces acting on them in the same way, because of a lack of interest in sex), then all those elements of femininity typically linked to sexuality in sexual women will be different in asexual women. I expect, using language as an example, that words and phrases describing beauty, attractiveness, and body image, particularly regarding areas normally related to sexuality (such as their curves, hair, breasts, and vulva), would be different in asexual versus sexual women. But more than language, I expect that asexual women’s manner and attire would be different from that of average sexual women. For example, relative to sexual women, asexual women may dress in a less sexualized manner (e.g., not showing cleavage). This expected difference between sexual and asexual women in manner, attire, and language partly reflects the idea that gender (i.e., femininity) is often driven by sex and sexuality.

Related to gender roles is gender identity, the very basic sense of oneself as male or female. Of course, most people take their gender identity for granted, breezily checking off either “male” or “female” on surveys that ask about one’s gender. However, as mentioned above, this is not so for a small group of people. Transgendered and intersex people, for example, often believe that their sexual anatomy is inconsistent with their gender identity; a simple “male” or “female” label may thus be inadequate.

But what about asexual people? Interestingly, although the majority of asexual people seem to identify as male or female, there is evidence that a surprisingly high percentage do not want to categorize themselves in this way. In fact, Brotto and colleagues found that approximately 13 percent did not want to identify as male or female (Brotto et al., 2010). This may not seem like an overly large percentage, but consider what proportion of the general population would not want to identify as either male or female: a small percentage (i.e., 1–2 percent or less) (Veale, 2008; Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Thus, a nontraditional gender identity is likely significantly related to asexuality. At this point, however, we do not know whether transgendered or intersex individuals make up a large proportion of asexual people.

Does the fact that gender roles and identities relate to asexuality give clues to its origin? It may. First, let’s consider the potential role of biological factors—in particular, the systems involved with sexual differentiation. Sexual differentiation is the biological process whereby males become males and females become females. It occurs primarily prenatally (before birth) and then secondarily at puberty.

In sexual differentiation, some components are involved with producing female features (feminization) and male features (masculinization), but there are also processes that prevent or remove female features (de-feminization) in male fetuses and prevent or remove male features (de-masculinization) in female fetuses.