Understanding Asexuality

My reasoning on asexuality and sexual humor in this chapter has been very speculative. The relationship between asexuality and sexual humor might be best described as an “empirical question”—that is, something that is unknown and needs to be studied.

Finally, I think a broad conclusion that should be drawn from this chapter is that sexuality is a pervasive part of most people’s lives and is associated with considerable tensions and odd, even twisted, social rules, so much so that sexual content pervades one of the most important tools we use to negotiate social life: humor. Interestingly, if it turns out that asexual people do appreciate, even laugh at, sexual jokes (and I expect that many do), this may say more about our sexualized society and how everyone—sexual or not—is caught in its web of influence than it does about any hidden sexual motives of (self-identified) asexual people. Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier in this chapter—if a person who identifies as asexual laughs at a sexual joke, does this mean that he or she is sexual?—is not necessarily. It may just mean that he or she is also part of a sociocultural experience partially driven by sex. To end with, let me pose a related thought question that I took on and tried to answer in the context of art in chapter 11: What would our humor be like if we were an asexual species? With a domain of life so fraught with tension and social rules—sex—eliminated, would we be less funny?

CHAPTER 13 Just Because

Have you been patiently reading along, but also wondering when I was going to address directly what you perceive to be the heart of the matter: the cause(s) of asexuality? If certain chapters touching on causes (e.g., chapter 6) only whetted your appetite for a more direct discussion of etiology, I can’t blame you. Causes are important to people. They are not merely the preserve of adults—children are also fascinated by them. Sometimes children are so obsessed and unsatisfied when an adult answers their “why” question that it sets off a spiraling series of additional “but why” queries. So, finding out about the “cause” of an event merely prompts their curiosity about the cause behind this cause, and the cause behind that cause, and so on. After being beaten into submission by the barrage of questions, realizing that the child has a point and that the mysteries of the universe are often unknowable to children and adults alike, a parent may resort to the ambiguous, end-all answer: “Well, just because, dear….”

Subdisciplines of philosophy and psychology are devoted to how we determine causes—how we know what we know in epistemology (philosophy), and how we attribute causes, including laying blame, in attribution theory (psychology). Indeed, social psychologists suggest that we are not only obsessed with causes but also prone to bias in our thinking about them. I raise this issue because even we scientists may forward a cause that reflects bias. Keep that in mind as you read along!

What is a cause? We may think of a cause as something that gives rise to an event or phenomenon. In other words, causes deal with the hows and whys of events. But causes are complicated, and not just because, as social psychologists suggest, humans have bias in the way they make attributions. Often phenomena have multiple causes. So, for example, asexuality may be caused by both a biological event (e.g., prenatal hormones permanently organizing a site in the lower brain) and an environmental one (e.g., no exposure to sexualizing social forces, such as randy peers).{Of course, when a phenomenon has multiple causes—say, two, for this example—they could be two discrete biological causes, or two discrete environmental ones, and not necessarily one of each.} Sometimes causes are interactive or conditional; that is, they only occur in one circumstance but not others. So, perhaps a lack of sexualizing social forces has a profound effect on one individual because he or she is predisposed to these forces, but a lack of sexualizing social forces in another individual has no impact, because he or she does not have a susceptible predisposition; in the latter case, the individual would be sexual regardless of these sexualizing social forces or the lack of them.