Understanding Asexuality

Here are the four sexual connections that came to mind relatively quickly: First, food intake and its control are major life concerns for many people—particularly young women—in their attempts to achieve a maximally attractive body. Achieving an ideal or optimal object-of-desire level through a beautiful/sexy body allows a woman to have great advantages in choosing the man (or the men) with whom she mates. This is because men place a greater value on women’s physical attractiveness than women place on men’s, so women’s bodies are of greater value and demand a higher price in the sexual marketplace. But women are not necessarily trying to satisfy only their current partner (if they have one); they are also trying to satisfy an “ideal,” which, from an evolutionary perspective, allows them much greater opportunities to mate successfully, even beyond their current mate. The current ideals are often influenced by the images shown in modern media of (arguably distorted) extremely attractive people, the likes of whom would have been rarely seen for most of our evolutionary history; however, they are readily seen now and have been taken on as modern “ideals” nevertheless. Unfortunately, these “ideals” are so high (and often so unrealistic) (Wolf, 1991) that they are unlikely to be met by the vast majority of women, even if women implicitly perceive them as a way to reproductive success. As a consequence, women are more prone to body dissatisfaction than men, and this is a relatively consistent trend across time (Cash, Morrow, Hrabosky, & Perry, 2004; Mazur, 1986). Women compare their bodies to these “ideal” object-of-desire forms, as represented by supermodels and movie stars, even if the images of bodies portrayed are unrealistically thin or beautiful. But the vast majority of women cannot live up to these ideals. They ultimately put pressure on many women to make themselves beautiful and sexy—to become an ideal object of desire (see also chapter 6 on gender). Controlling food intake—through dieting—is a method women use to live up to this ideal and be maximally attractive to potential mates.

Somewhat in contrast, consider a second food/sex connection: Freud and other psychodynamically minded theorists have argued that overeating can result from defensive processes, including sublimation, or channeling ungratified sexual energy into another activity (in this particular case, eating).{There is some evidence that defensive processes can be involved with eating habits and disorders (Poikolainen, Kanerva, Marttunen, & Lönnqvist, 2001).} If this is true, one might wonder whether the current obesity epidemic is partly the result of such a process. Is there something about the modern Western world that is creating a slew of sexually unsatisfied humans channeling their hunger for sex into an appetite for potato chips and candy bars? I also have wondered whether the “middle-aged spread” of so many male suburbanites results from sublimation, when the harem-like pursuits of their teenage and twenty-something years are replaced by a thirty-something domestication: a less sexually stimulating, but more calming certainty of a one-woman marriage. However, one might argue that this reasoning is off base and that one should expect the exact opposite, as our sexual desires are presumably being met more in the modern Western world than they ever have been before (e.g., compare today with, say, the presumed innocence of the 1950s). Actually, I don’t think so. I think—again, perhaps in line with a quasi-Freudian interpretation—that our sexual desires are being met less than they ever have been. This is in part because the modern Western media are raising our sexual expectations, which seems to suggest that hyper-sexed athletes are the societal norm. Thus, even though the reality of people’s sex lives is staying the same, relative to our raised expectations, we are coming up short, sexually speaking.