Asexuality: people who do not feel sexual desire

People without sexual attraction: Is it possible?

The last decades have given visibility to forms of sexual orientation that do not necessarily fit perfectly with heterosexuality and have allowed others that were already known, such as homosexuality, to become more socially normalized. and have allowed others that were already known, such as homosexuality, to become more socially normalized. In any case, some sexual options, such as pansexuality, are still quite unknown.

Asexuality, sexual non-orientation

However, it often seems that this openness to different sensitivities and experiences related to sexuality remains insufficient, because the possibility that some people do not feel sexual desires is not usually contemplated, and that some people do not feel sexual desires is not usually contemplated..

What happens when we are not talking about different sexual orientations, but about cases where there is no sexual orientation at all? When we refer to this, we are talking about a phenomenon that has been given the name of asexuality.

Neither ideology nor sexual orientation

An asexual person is, plain and simple, a person who does not experience sexual desire or attraction and therefore does not feel moved to have sexual relations of any kind. and therefore does not feel moved to have sexual relations of any kind. Asexuality, in short, is the persistent lack of sexual desire that is neither motivated nor fueled by religious or culturally rooted habits. The celibacy celibacy for religious reasons, therefore, is something else.

Asexuality cannot be considered a form of sexual orientation, because it consists precisely in the absence of such a preference, but neither is it an ideology that leads to more or less conscious sexual repression. However, this does not mean that there are no asexual collectives that have associated themselves for political purposes, as has happened with LGTB collectives.

Nowadays it is normal for men and women who identify themselves as asexuals to claim the need to build a world in which sexual desire is not something that is presupposed and in which it is not mandatory to have sex to receive social approval. To this end, there are communities such as AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) that are responsible for giving a voice to these people and to disseminate knowledge and experiences about asexuality. AVEN, by the way, has more than ten thousand members.

There is a lack of data!

Although asexual people tend to want to make themselves visible by joining efforts in a collective way, asexuality itself is a phenomenon about which very little is known.. There is very little research that deals with it directly or indirectly.

In fact, most studies are limited to surveys, such as the one that led to an article published in the Journal of Sex Research which states that about 1% of the British population may be asexual.. Given the lack of information, there is no well-established theory that explains the basis of asexuality, why it occurs and what kind of people are more likely to be asexual.

And there is also a lack of sensitivity

Part of the way in which this lack of information about asexuality is approached, rather than scientific, is profoundly ideological. For example, it is not uncommon to talk about asexuality as if it did not exist and was a fiction fed by repressed people.

It is also often taken as a symptom of disease. symptom of diseaseThe idea is to stigmatize people who do not experience sexuality as the rest (something that has also happened historically with all LGTB collectives), even if there is no evidence to support such a point of view.

Sexual orientation invisiblized

Other currents of opinion tend to exaggerate the characteristics by which asexual people differ from the rest, as if they were practically a separate civilization with very specific and stereotyped ways of living life and relating to others. Asexuals, however, tend to emphasize not the differences but everything that characterizes them as human beings.. They claim to be fully capable of relating normally to everyone and having intimate, though not necessarily sexual, relationships. It is easy to imagine why they are right: at the end of the day, believing that the simple fact of not feeling sexual desire means being socially isolated or has to be irremediably caused by a disease is a good example of why collectives like AVEN have a lot of work to do.

What is clear is that there is nothing wrong with the fact of not experiencing sexual desire per se and there is no reason to pretend to fight against asexuality as if it were a disease. In any case, it is society as a whole that must fight to make all sensibilities fit in it.