Understanding Asexuality

Yet there is complexity here. Some asexual people may have an appreciation of faces and the body on an abstract level, having taken in our culture’s norms and standards of beauty. In addition, some asexual people may still have a deep recognition and lure for “romantic” beauty in others of their preferred sex if they are romantically inclined. Third, humans may have an innate recognition of beauty, independent of both romantic and sexual attraction to others. Indeed, innate “beauty” and “ugliness” sensors may exist in the human brain, and this may have to do with tendencies to approach or avoid others in the evolutionary past. For example, our ancestors may have avoided unattractive people because their unappealing features could have been a sign of a potentially contagious disease processes, and thus they would have been important to avoid. Interestingly, research has shown that infants prefer to gaze at beautiful faces more than average or unattractive faces (Langlois, Roggman, Casey, & Ritter, 1987). Thus, the mind’s beauty-recognition mechanisms may be partially decoupled from the mechanisms associated with both romantic and sexual attraction, and an asexual person may still retain some level of this appreciation for beauty.

Here is a quote suggesting that an aesthetic appreciation of others can occur in asexual people: “I could be attracted to someone. I can… you know, think they’re good looking and think they’re interesting and want to spend time with them and get to know them better. But to me it’s never, oh, yeah, I hope we end up in bed” (Brotto, Knudson, Inskip, Rhodes, & Erskine, 2010, p. 610).

Another asexual person felt similarly: “I love the human form and regard individuals as works of art… but I don’t ever want to come into sexual contact with even the most beautiful of people” (Scherrer, 2008, p. 626).

That having been said, much of the nudity and sex in popular culture and art must be a “disconnect” for many asexual people. A woman I know, when confronting the fact that she does not conform to many aspects of a traditional feminine gender role, utters the phrase, “I must have missed that day at girl school…” Painterly-minded asexual people wandering around galleries with a bevy of nudes at eye level might similarly utter the phrase, “I must have missed that day at art school…”

I must admit that I have cheated in my discussion of art and sexuality. Art is a relatively easy subject matter to deconstruct from a sex point of view, and indeed, I have thought about the sex/art connection for a number of years. As a more difficult challenge, I played a game—a kind of thought experiment—to see if I could find an aspect of modern life and culture untouched by human sexuality. One day at lunch over a bowl of soup, I thought I had, true to my task, thrown myself a curveball and succeeded. I said out loud, “Aha, food!”

On the surface, it seems that the world of food and the world of sex are far removed from one another. They are related to different desires and thus, presumably, occupy very different “psychological spaces” in people’s heads and exist in very different domains of our lifestyles and cultures.

However, I quickly realized that this was not true. It did not take long before the sexual connections to food started coming to mind—and I don’t just mean “cheesy” ones, such as the Food Network sexing up its shows with an attractive chef/host or two (no, I don’t mean replaying old episodes of Julia Child).