Understanding Asexuality

Three months after his bizarre car crash and a myriad of rumors, Tiger Woods[29] emerged on February 19, 2010, from his public hibernation to offer a mea culpa for his extramarital affairs and their impact on his family, friends, fellow players, fans, and sponsors. One of the more interesting elements of all this was the astonishing degree of interest in this story, relative to all the other issues of the day. One newspaper headline asserted boldly, “The world stops for 13 minutes” (Broad, 2010, February 28). Not literally true, of course, but almost: the New York Stock Exchange did stop trading for the thirteen minutes to watch the spectacle of Woods’s carefully crafted news conference. “Tiger Woods News Conference” was also the highest-rated Google search term by midday. The level of interest in this story, as with the scandals before and after it, was driven by sexual curiosity. This is not to say that there weren’t other angles that made people curious to watch or to hear or to read about it (e.g., the business/sponsorship impact), but the only angle that drove it to this level of fury was clearly the sexual one.

Also, consider this: the fact that a relatively conservative, business-oriented newspaper—Canada’s The Globe and Mail—would say that the “world stopped” (Broad, 2010, February 28) illustrates a main point of this book, that one’s view of the world—including the perception of whether it seems to stop or seems to run at a breakneck pace—is filtered through the different lenses that we have for seeing it. Most people see the world through sexual lenses, just as business-oriented people often see the world through business-oriented lenses; the lenses we wear—sexual or otherwise—are often no longer obvious to us, just as a long-worn set of spectacles over the years becomes imperceptible to the wearer and may even feel like part of his or her own face.

What much of the public and the media did not realize was that Woods’s apology was borne out of his need to complete a number of essential “steps” in his “sexual addiction” treatment, similar to the therapeutic steps required in Alcoholics Anonymous. These steps include an apology to all those whom his sexually addictive behavior (and its sequelae) has wronged in one way or another. It is perhaps fitting that it came in the form of a highly rated press conference, which was meant to reach not just family and friends but also fellow golfers, his fans, and sponsors, because the scandal and fallout probably affected—rightly or wrongly—many millions of people.[30]

One of the interesting elements of this episode, however, was the fact that part of the public and much of the press wanted Woods to have a public shaming. They seemed to want him to admit that his sense of entitlement led to arguably excessive sexual behavior—including, evidently, threesomes with prostitutes. But why was this sexual shaming necessary, or at least interesting to us? Is it because sex is embedded, even pathologically so, in our culture and in the way we think?

But let’s push the point further by turning it on its head. Why is it that Tiger Woods’s sense of entitlement should not have spurred a public apology, a shaming, over his other excesses, ones that are arguably much more harmful to the planet and humanity than his sexual ones? Why isn’t he apologizing for his egregious and excessive consumption of the world’s resources and pollution of the planet? Why isn’t he apologizing for his private jet, his gas-guzzling vehicles, and the energy consumption in his houses, which could otherwise run a small country? (That is also an interesting “threesome,” by the way.) More importantly, why aren’t we more interested in that apology, rather than the one we got? Why wouldn’t the world stop for thirteen minutes for that? I think you know the answer: Because it is not about sex, and people are mad about sex.[31]

Summary

Sex is the great story of life (see chapter 1), but it is also truly and utterly mad. Some might argue that, yes, it is mad, but it does not have to be so. It is our culture that makes it mad, and if we were to strip away the neuroticism and hypocrisy from it and “raise the children right,” it would not be so. Whether this is true or not, it is an interesting argument to consider. What definitely is true is that the current state of sex should make us cautious about assuming that the absence of sex in one form or another—asexuality—is pathological. I discuss this subject—whether asexuality is indeed a disorder—more fully in my next chapter.

CHAPTER 9 Do You Have Hypoactive Skydiving Disorder?