Understanding Asexuality

In my talk—a bit shakily delivered, I have to admit—I unpacked many of the issues above, including various arguments against asexuality per se being viewed as a disorder, the contention that sex itself is a very odd activity that often causes mental lapses (see chapter 8 on the madness of sex), and the argument that, of course, passions differ among people. I also ended with the skydiving analogy mentioned above, complete with a picture of someone soaring through the air.

To my surprise (shock, in fact), there was hearty applause when I showed my skydiving picture and said my punch line: “If not interested in this activity, should you be diagnosed with hypoactive skydiving disorder?” Evidently, a significant number of clinicians, perhaps a majority of these modern therapists, recognized that sex is only one of many possible passions that people can have, and felt that we shouldn’t impose our valued passions on others. In this applause, there may also have been recognition that some of their colleagues have possibly been overdiagnosing sexual problems and imposing, perhaps if only implicitly, their own values on others.

So, is there only one right way to live a human life?

CHAPTER 10 A Monster in All of Our Lives

John Money, perhaps the most famous twentieth-century sexologist after Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson, was inspired once by a poem he read outside a cottage on Fire Island (an island retreat just outside of New York). The first line read, “There is a monster in all of our lives.” Money amended the line, adding the adjective “unspeakable” to the word “monster,” and used it to frame the main idea of one of his many books on sexology (Money, 1994). He believed that this phrase—unspeakable monster—was an apt description of the sexual and other secrets that often plague people. Thus, a monster is often lurking, although the person does not (or cannot) speak directly about it. However, an astute observer can discover it by some telltale signs, particularly irrational behaviors, as the person tries to cope with life’s challenges.

There is a famous painting by seventeenth-century artist Henry Fuseli called The Nightmare, in which a sleeping woman is seductively draped over her bed, and a monster—in this particular case, an incubus—sits on her belly. An incubus is a legendary demonic creature that has intercourse with sleeping women. From a psychological perspective, the male incubus and its female equivalent (succubus) are creations of the mind that symbolize humans’ powerful and uncontrollable sexual nature, along with, perhaps, our desire to abdicate to supernatural forces our personal responsibility for any disturbing sexual inclinations; hence, artful characters to represent Money’s notion of an unspeakable monster.

Unspeakable monsters are specific to the time and the culture in which one grows up and lives; thus, they are partially socially constructed. Average adolescent boys from a strict Catholic upbringing in the 1950s in the Western world probably had masturbation as their unspeakable monster, whereas the masturbation monster of today for average adolescent American boys, Catholic and otherwise, may be less ferocious than it once was.

It is probably true that, if you accept Money’s description, many sexual people have unspeakable (sexual) monsters. The chapter on the madness of sex attests to this fact: untold numbers of people have sexual secrets that plague them. But do some asexual people also have monsters, unspeakable and otherwise? Although not attracted to others in a traditional sense, asexual people may be sexual in other ways, and some may be reluctant to reveal this (Bogaert, 2008). For example, some asexual people may have odd paraphilias that they do not want to discuss with the world, and that perhaps they are even reluctant to admit to themselves. So, are some asexual people truly and utterly mad, just like the rest of the sexual planet?