Month: April 2012

Food Analogies to Explain Asexual Attitudes Toward Sex

 

The Sex-Indifferent Asexual (Who Has Sex Any Number of Times): 

So let’s say you go to a restaurant with your friends. Everybody orders: appetizer, soup or salad, entree. When the entrees have been eaten, your friends look at the dessert menu. You’re totally full and have no interest in dessert, so you don’t order it. Your friends do, and the dessert shows up. The person sitting next to you ordered double chocolate cheesecake, eats half or three-quarters of the piece, then says, “I’m full, and this is too rich. Here, you finish it.”

So there you are with this piece of double chocolate cheesecake. You aren’t hungry, you’re not particularly a fan of it, nor do you hate it. It looks like it probably tastes decent, if not good. So you decide, what the hell, I’ll try it. You eat the remaining chunk. It’s all right. You like it but you don’t love it. You ate it for the taste and because it was put in front of you, despite your total lack of hunger. You probably won’t order it in the future, of your own volition. If you never eat it again, you won’t give a shit. But it’s not the worst thing you’ve ever eaten. It actually wasn’t bad. You just aren’t enthusiastic about it enough to want it for its own sake. If you come back to this restaurant with your friends in the future and somebody orders the cheesecake and then offers you some again, you might eat it just because it’s offered to you or you might decline. Whatever.

Repulsed Asexual:

You go to a restaurant with friends. Somebody orders pork. You HATE pork. You can’t stand it. You absolutely refuse to touch it. Thinking about eating pork can sometimes make you nauseous. It doesn’t matter to you that your friend’s at the table eating it, you just can’t really understand how she likes it because you hate it so intensely. But as long as no one shoves it in your mouth against your will, you’re fine. You order what you like.

The Asexual Who Isn’t Quite Repulsed But Still Refuses to Have Sex for Other Reasons:

You decide to become a vegetarian because you feel strongly about animal rights, and eating meat doesn’t feel good to you, even though it tastes good. (Though it never tasted so good that you have a hard time cutting it out of your diet.) You don’t really care if your friends continue to eat meat, you don’t have any strong reaction to meat when you’re around it, you don’t hate it, you just feel better as a vegetarian. You feel better physically and emotionally. You know that it’s more difficult eating out as a vegetarian than it is as an omnivore, but you’re willing to deal with that because vegetarianism feels best to you.

Or maybe you’ve always been vegetarian. You grew up in a vegetarian home or you rejected meat as a kid for no apparent reason. You don’t know what meat even tastes like and you don’t care. You’re happy as a vegetarian. You feel no desire or curiosity to eat meat, though people tell you that it’s awesome. You figure it probably does taste awesome but you’re accustomed to your lifestyle as a vegetarian and the way you feel in your body and mind and heart based on that lifestyle choice. Being a vegetarian feels comfortable. So you stick to it.

Gray-Asexual (Who Either Occasionally Experiences Sexual Attraction or Sometimes Has a Libido):

You go to a restaurant with friends in June. On the menu, you see they have a seared tuna steak entree. You went through a phase a few years ago where you absolutely fucking loved seared tuna steak. You ate it all the time. Then you got over it and moved onto a different food. The menu description of this tuna steak sounds pretty awesome but you pick something else instead because you’re just not in the mood.

You come back to the same restaurant with friends in October. There’s that tuna steak again, and you sort of feel like eating it tonight. So you order it. It’s delicious. You enjoy it. You leave the restaurant satisfied but you don’t feel the need to eat that dish again anytime soon. You know it tastes good, but it isn’t your favorite thing. And you have to really be in the mood for it now. Doesn’t happen that often anymore but when it does, you’ll act on it if you happen to have access to a restaurant that serves seared tuna steak. If you don’t have access? Eh, no big deal. It’s not all that important to you.

Demisexual:

So you happen to really love cheeseburgers. But you’re sort of picky about it. You won’t eat them just anywhere. In fact, you have a favorite place that serves them, a place where you have a lot of cool memories because you’re a regular. You don’t want to eat burgers anywhere else, even if they taste just as good, because you really, really like the burgers at your place. And part of the reason why you like those burgers so much is because of the place itself. There’s a whole sort of personal mystique you’ve built around this restaurant. Maybe you could get a burger elsewhere that’s just as good or better, maybe there are awesome burgers out there that you don’t even know about, but it doesn’t matter to you. You’re attached to your place, so that’s where you go. You like the way you feel when you go to your place, and that’s part of what makes the experience good for you. And if you can’t go there, then you don’t feel particularly enthusiastic about eating burgers.

The Kinky Asexual Who Only Does Sexual Things in Connection to Their Kink:

You don’t like sushi except for this ONE roll, at this Japanese restaurant where you went with friends once and tried it because it looked interesting. You fucking love that roll. But just that roll. All other sushi doesn’t look very appetizing to you. So you’re not really a sushi eater, you’re someone who eats that special sushi roll when you can get it, and otherwise, you don’t give a shit about sushi.

Male Asexuality and Its Challenge to Masculinity

An asexual man, particularly a celibate and/or sex-averse asexual man, is a bit like a symbol of religion in a fiercely atheistic society: some will dismiss him as a fantastical impossibility, while others will react with varying levels of animosity, out of the sense that he is an intrusion threatening the validity of their own worldview. In one corner, we’ve got the anti-asexual haters who don’t acknowledge that asexual men even exist, which is necessary to their general dismissal of asexuality as not a real orientation but simply a new way to label an exclusively female tendency toward disinterest in sex or sexual inexperience or repression. In another corner, we’ve got the anti-asexual haters who accuse asexual men of: being too emasculated by exposure to feminism and feminist women to express their sexuality, being closeted homosexuals, being too socially inept or unattractive to obtain sex, etc. While many ignorant sexual people with little to no knowledge of asexuality often make the assumption that only women identify as asexual (which is in itself a roundabout  expression of buying into the misogynistic stereotyping of women as naturally less sexual beings than men), others are downright angry at the idea of men identifying as asexual, and they’re especially angry at the idea of men having an enthusiastic aversion to sexual participation. I’ve noticed that the sexual people who feel anger toward male asexuality are usually other men.

The reason? Male asexuality is a powerful challenge to mainstream masculinity, which hasn’t changed its attitudes toward male sexuality at all, even after three waves of feminism. No matter what else has changed about how we view men and women, masculinity and femininity, no matter how men have changed since the 1960s, one thing remains utterly the same: successful masculinity depends heavily upon the male’s active sexuality.

The role of sex in masculinity performance is connected to other important markers of successful masculinity: power, money, dominance, and the approval of other men. All one has to do is pay attention to mainstream media to see that we collectively associate sex with power and money, regardless of gender but especially for men. The more money a man has, the more powerful he is, the more sexually desirable he is. The more sex he has and the more sexual partners he has, the more masculine he is, which wins the approval not only of women but of other men. Sex is also a part of male dominance: over women, naturally, but also over other men, even when the man in question is heterosexual. In male society, men can have a sense of where they rank next to each other, based on these elements of masculinity. Sexual promiscuity is something to be proud of, if you’re a man, while sexual inactivity is shameful. Men respect other men for their sexual accomplishments and disrespect men who don’t measure up to a certain sexual standard. Men compete with each other sexually: who can rack up the higher number of sex partners, who can build the best reputation as a skilled lover, who’s had sex with the most desirable women (or men), etc. They dominate one another with their sexual performance according to these parameters.

21st century America views the male as a hypersexual being: he is supposed to value sex above almost everything, he is supposed to have sex at every given opportunity, and we sexualize all of his emotional attachments, regardless of the gender of the other person and the male’s own identity, with the exception of his love for his children. We cannot, as a culture, conceive of a man experiencing intense or passionate love for another person in a completely nonsexual manner. If a man loves someone with emotional intensity, romantic undertones or overtones, the only possible explanation the public sees is sexual desire for the loved one.

It’s worth contemplating the possibility that one reason for this modern view of men is that unconsciously, we are only comfortable with a man’s intense or tender emotion for others if sex coexists with that emotion as a buffer against the “femininity” of the emotion. A man who loves his friend too deeply or too passionately without wanting sex from that friend is being too emotional or sentimental, which is counter-masculine. But if a man loves someone deeply because he desires them sexually, now all of a sudden, we’re more comfortable with his emotion because his sexual desire is the dominant, masculine energy behind his pursuit and attachment to the beloved. (Of course, we as a society no longer conceive of passionate or intense love independent of sex, regardless of the gender of the people in question, but this inability to separate love from sex is particularly relevant to men because of the way it connects to masculinity. Women have always had a bit more room for intense nonsexual attachment, simply because women haven’t been construed as hypersexual beings in the same way as men, and their feminine image does not depend upon sexual performance. Women are perceived as more emotional than men anyway, which is an assumption unfair to both genders.)

One interesting observation I’ve made is the way that certain sex-positive feminists, who adopt their own feminism-disguised attitude of compulsory sexuality, actually (unintentionally) encourage and bolster the very patriarchal conceptualization of masculinity that includes compulsory sexuality and sexual performance among its defining features. Men don’t have the same shame attached to their sexuality that women have, thus compulsory sexuality means something different for men than it does for women. Sex-positive feminists who pursue the idea of women having a lot of sex as the ultimate expression of their empowerment, freedom, and rebellion against misogynistic control of female sexuality, without giving due respect to voluntary celibacy, fail to realize that not only are they creating a new, unhealthy paradigm of sexuality for women–one that ironically circles back around to feed into rape culture–but that they are also affirming mainstream masculinity’s compulsory sexuality tenet that plays a part in men’s misogynistic treatment of women. The kind of compulsory sexuality that feminists recognize as overtly anti-woman is the kind that demands women be sexually available to all men, at all times, for the sake of pleasing the men. The kind of compulsory sexuality sprouting from popular sex-positive feminism is actually more along the lines of masculinity’s compulsory sexuality: creating shame around not having sex, rather than having sex.

A man is never supposed to NOT be in the mood for sex. It doesn’t matter if he’s straight, gay, or bi. It also doesn’t necessarily matter who the potential sex partner is. If someone offers a man sex, he’s expected to enthusiastically want it. The idea of a man saying “no” to sex and meaning it is so unbelievable to us, as a society, that male rape victims are still often viewed as a myth. This is one of the more extreme consequences of the compulsory sexuality aspect of masculinity. A man can’t say no, without failing at masculinity in the moment. For women, the issue of saying “no” is tied into the misogyny, compulsory heterosexuality, and rape culture of our society; it is more an issue of a woman’s “no” not meaning anything or having power, when she says it. For a man, “no” isn’t even supposed to be in his vocabulary, when it comes to sex. We have men tied up in a situation where he’s supposed to want sex constantly, having sex makes him more of a man, and he’s also supposed to be incapable of emotional passion and intimacy outside of a sexual context. Saying “no” to sex, if you’re a man, is a rejection of masculinity, love, and intimacy–not just a “no” to the sex. Arguably, when women say “no” to sex, their femininity isn’t in jeopardy. We encourage women to say “no” more, because saying “no” and having that respected is something we’ve had to learn that women are entitled to do. But no one’s encouraging men to say “no” to sex when they aren’t truly enthusiastic about it, are they? No one’s even imagining that men want to say “no,” ever.

So along comes the asexual male. Maybe he’s bored by sex and apathetic. Maybe he’s repulsed by sex. He doesn’t care about it. He doesn’t need it. He doesn’t particularly want it. Maybe he really doesn’t want sex. Maybe he’s the sort of asexual that, if put into a sexual situation, he panics to some degree—repulsed. He’s a man that considers sex, this all-powerful entity that brings society to its knees, that gives men everywhere status and respect, that is both the cause and effect of successful masculinity in society’s eyes, and says, “No, thanks.”

Think of what a radical challenge to masculinity that is! If an asexual man is to have his masculinity considered valid, that forces us to recognize that masculinity is not innately dependent upon sexual performance. We remove the power of sex within masculinity, and we remove masculinity’s power to compel sex. Stripping sex of its role in masculinity would demand a truly major reconstruction, maybe even a permanent deconstruction, of masculinity as something distinct from femininity. That’s why male asexuality pisses some people off. Those people feel their own conceptualization of masculinity threatened, perhaps their own masculinity threatened. That’s also why others fail to even imagine that an asexual could be male, because not wanting sex is so anti-masculine to our sensibilities.

If the asexual man is romantic or if he’s an aromantic that still wants and likes emotional/physical intimacy, if he just wants to hold hands and cuddle and be life partners with someone (or many someones)…. what sort of image does that give him? Even the most ardent, progressively thinking feminist must admit that the idea of a man having hardcore, powerful sex compared to the idea of a man cuddling his partner fully clothed in a nonsexual situation evokes very different responses to each man’s masculinity. Who would you say is more masculine?

Sex is power, aggression, dominance, activity, energy, and sometimes even violence. We might say that sex is masculine, if we’re making our associations based on traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity. On the other hand, romantic gestures and nongenital physical affection (like hugging, cuddling, holding hands, etc) is sweet, soft, sentimental, passive, vulnerable, etc. In other words, feminine. Sexual men may do the latter without being seen as feminine but only because they’re doing it in correspondence with the more masculine act of sex. Asexual men who don’t have sex but engage in romance, romantic behavior, or physical affection are behaving in the “feminine” ways without the “masculine” act of sex to diminish the femininity of those other behaviors.

Another thing to think about is the challenge to our gendered view of rape that asexual men pose. As I said before, because we view men as hypersexed beings and view their masculinity through a lens of compulsory sexuality, we have a major tendency to dismiss or fail to notice that men can be raped and are raped. Asexual men, particularly sex-averse ace men, force us to acknowledge that men can be raped and can be raped by both men and women. That’s a thought that makes everybody uncomfortable, from the sexist men who support the hypersexualized view of their own gender to feminist women who believe that women can only be the victims of rape and men, the perpetrators.

The interdependence between sex and masculinity is an issue that must be dealt with as asexual visibility continues to rise, because men who are effectively asexual (or demisexual or gray-asexual) and especially men who fall somewhere on the sex-averse side of the spectrum can face a tremendous challenge with identifying as asexual. For a man to merely admit to himself that he doesn’t want to have sex is sort of a big deal. Simply accepting the fact that they can be asexual and that it’s a legitimate thing for them to be, will force them to confront this masculinity problem. Coming out as asexual is a whole other can of worms for men because then, they’ll be opening themselves up to the public’s criticism not just of asexuality as an orientation but of their masculinity. Furthermore, these men who, deep down, don’t really want to have sex, need to learn that they can still experience intimacy and love and romance and primary partnership while being celibate and that their desire for any or all of those things still makes sense, even though they’re asexual.

How do we conceive of an asexual man’s masculinity? Can he ever be as masculine as sexual males? How can broader society reconfigure our idea of masculinity to include asexuality and sex-aversion? What breakthroughs might result from masculinity becoming ace-friendly?

Sexual Dysfunction in the DSM-5 and Asexuality

First, I want to point everyone in the direction of the official DSM-5 website, where the various sexual dysfunctions are listed: go here. As you can see, listed there are Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder in Women, Male Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, and Other Specified Sexual Dysfunction. Those are the ones relevant to asexuals particularly. The others all have to do with more obviously physical/medical issues: erectile dysfunction, early/late ejaculation, genito-pelvic pain during penetration, substance-induced sexual dysfunction, sexual dysfunction related to a known medical issue, etc. I have read the descriptions of MHSDD and SIAD in Women and the “Other” and yes, one of the listed symptoms under each is, “causes clinically significant distress or impairment.”

But here’s the problem. First of all, the world is full of assholes, and some of those assholes are therapists. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard from asexuals, male and female and otherwise, who came out to a therapist only to have their identity dismissed, questioned, pathologized, etc. Having these new categories in the DSM? Isn’t going to make those situations any better. Those asshole, ignorant therapists who have never heard of asexuality or who simply don’t take it seriously do not need an official manual circulated throughout their professional community that they can point at and say, “Oh, look, it says right there that if you don’t want to fuck or if you don’t have a libido or if you don’t masturbate or if you don’t get aroused, there is something medically or psychologically wrong with you.” If homosexuality was still listed as a mental disorder or a medical disorder in any sort of major medical text, the queer community would be up in arms about that, and they’d have a right to be. I understand that there are legitimate cases where lack of interest in sex, loss of libido, lack of arousal response, etc are indeed problematic and can be treated and cured, but the asexual community doesn’t have the advantage of being a widely known, widely accepted (as real, not necessarily good) demographic, which means that our orientation and our experiences linked to that orientation can too easily get lost in the sexual majority’s treatment of sexual dysfunction. They’re already inclined to treat asexuality, willful celibacy, sex-aversion, lack of libido, lack of arousal responses, etc as innately pathological without actual medical support for that opinion, just because of our cultural consciousness about sex.

 

Jesus Christ, some sexual people watched that episode of House, for fuck’s sake, and took it seriously! “Oh, a medical doctor on a TV show said that asexuality is bullshit, so that means it is!” People are idiots. And they’re idiots who are narrow-minded about sex and sexuality and relationships and love and intimacy right out of the gate. Medical doctors and psychologists and psychiatrists who believe that asexuality is bullshit and celibacy is wrong, etc—of which there are many because being a medical professional does not make you infallible or open-minded or anything other than a medical professional, really—only serve to confirm the public’s attitudes about sex and intimacy, etc.

 

Second of all, being an asexual in this world is fucking hard. And for many, if not most of us, we will inevitably go through a stage or periodic phases, where we DO feel distress about being asexual. Especially those of us who are celibate, sex-aversive, etc. We feel distress because we’re invisible, misunderstood, rejected, isolated from a physical community, have no media representation validating our identities and experiences, and because many of us want to have intimate, loving relationships with other people but can’t or don’t because we’re surrounded by sexual people who have no concept of how to relate to other humans beings in the ways we want to relate. Many of us suffer a lot of emotional pain over the possibility that we will always be alone and unloved and unattached, unless we agree to fuck, and those of us who are sex-aversive or repulsed either don’t want to do that or can’t do that. And that relationship fuckery is a legitimate reason for emotional and psychic pain! Human beings are social creatures. We have built-in intimacy needs. Without love and care and affection, we literally die.

 

So let’s say you’re a celibate asexual who never wants to have sex and you go to your therapist and you say, “I’m really depressed because I want to be loved but I’m an asexual and I can’t get romantically involved with sexual people, without fucking them, and I can’t form a primary platonic relationship with any of them either because they don’t even understand that concept or accept it and I don’t know any other asexuals and I don’t know how to meet other asexuals in real life, so I feel intensely alone and lonely and I’m afraid I’ll spend the rest of my life this way.”

 

And your therapist, who’s ignorant or an asshole, says, “Let’s explore why sex is a problem for you because if you can get over that, then you can be normal and have normal romantic-sexual primary relationships and live happily ever after just like the rest of us. Oh, look, the DSM says this is your problem.”

 

How many therapists are going to question the entire cultural/sociological system of sex supremacy and compulsory sexuality and romance supremacy and the view that sex and romance are innately linked? How many therapists are going to see that the problem isn’t the asexual person’s orientation but the rest of the world’s treatment of everything that orientation implies?

 

A queer person goes to a therapist and expresses deep psychological suffering over their queer identity, the therapist is quite likely to recognize that the reason this person’s in pain is not because being queer is an innately painful thing but because being queer in a homophobic, heterosexist society is a painful thing. If society were  totally cool with queerness on every level—socially, legally, culturally, religiously, etc—how many queer people would you have in therapy, being depressed and suicidal over their sexuality? Probably not that many. And all of that is immediately clear to us. We know homosexuality and bisexuality and transgender identity are not mental illnesses. (Yeah, a lot of homophobic/transphobic people in America would say otherwise, but that’s the point: it’s their own prejudices, not the identities themselves, that are the problem).

 

But with asexuality? With celibacy? With the idea that romance can be nonsexual and nonromantic love can be primary? How many sexual people get that? How many sexual people have even HEARD of those concepts? A fucking negligible percentage.

 

This culture is so intensely sex supremacist (and romance supremacist) that no matter where you go and no matter who you talk to, no matter what their backgrounds are—conservative, liberal, gay, straight, male, female, religious, atheist, whatever—the likeliest reaction an asexual (especially a sex-aversive asexual who wants primary nonsexual love and intimacy) will get is something along the lines of, “That’s not normal, that’s not right, that’s unnatural, that’s caused by some separate issue, sex is the greatest and most important thing in the history of existence, why don’t you see that, what’s wrong with you?”

 

Who wouldn’t feel like shit if that’s what they constantly had to hear about themselves?

 

And therapy isn’t going to fix that. There is no immediate solution to that. There’s no way to magically snap our fingers and make a loving, compatible partner appear, there’s no way to snap our fingers and change the way our entire society functions and thinks, there’s also not a way to instantly transform ourselves into romantic-sexual people with normative ideas about relationships. So basically, there is justification for a celibate asexual person to feel hopeless and depressed. Our pain is not an overreaction. We are not exaggerating the seriousness of our circumstances. Our pain does not come from chemical imbalances in the brain or an inability to self-soothe or whatever. It comes from being in a really shitty situation, much of which we have no control over.

 

It’s not a matter of a therapist or anyone else “helping” to make the situation better, to actually change the circumstances or suggest ways for the asexual to change them. All anyone can do is help the celibate asexual make as much peace with the way things are as they can and instill some sense of hope that maybe one day, that individual will find at least one other person who can relate to them in a satisfying way. And they can’t make promises.

 

And like I said, therapists are people too. They have normative upbringings and normative friends and normative families and normative sexual experiences. They go see mainstream movies and watch mainstream TV and read mainstream books and listen to mainstream music, all of which is saturated with sex and sexual romance and the supremacy of those things. Are they supposed to be professional and impersonal in session with a patient? Yes. But they aren’t infallible. They can’t just leave all of their personal opinions and experiences of humanity at the door of their office and approach each patient with total neutrality and a blank mind.

 

I haven’t had extensive experience with psychotherapy, but what I’ve had…. I once spoke to the head of health services at my college, when I was a freshman and deeply depressed and suicidal, and tried to explain being asexual and why I was in so much pain over the future of my friendships and my own future in terms of relationships, and I guess she thought she was being nice and sweet but in retrospect, she absolutely did not get it and was totally condescending to me. Following that, I had a therapist I saw on campus for a while who I really liked and who knew about my identity and who I talked to as I was going through relationship angst and bullshit, and he never once made a negative comment about my asexuality or my celibacy or my views of relationships….. But do I know for sure that he was as accepting as he seemed? No. I don’t know. Maybe he was sitting there the whole time thinking, “What the hell is wrong with this girl?” or “She’s just 18, she’ll have sex eventually and find out it’s great and live happily ever after in Normative Relationship Land.” I can never know what he was really thinking. If he was thinking dismissive thoughts, I appreciate that he kept them to himself, but…. My point is, I would never see a therapist again even if I was having psychological distress because I don’t trust them—they being sexual—and I don’t need my therapist of all people making me feel as if there’s something wrong with me and my relationship desires. No, thanks. If I have shit to deal with, I’ll deal with it on my own.

 

Men, Masculinity, Asexuality, and Rape

[written in Fall 2011]

I recently wrote a story that dealt with the attempted corrective rape of an asexual male by a female. I’ve never done that before—but I’m definitely writing about it again at some point in my career because it raises several significant issues. I wasn’t thinking of those issues consciously when I wrote that story but since writing it, I’ve been thinking about it as it applies to real life. I don’t want to make this a post that focuses primarily on the problem; I strive to be solution-oriented in all aspects of my life, including my personal activism.

All asexuals currently experience erasure in society, whether it be in every day life or in (the lack of) media portrayals, etc. But I’m going to suggest that if you were to subdivide asexuals, asexual males experience a particularly strong level of erasure because of their maleness. Or, if not stronger than erasure experienced by female asexuals, it is an erasure much more intertwined with their gender.

In Western Civilization, to be human is to be sexual. Furthermore, to be male is to be sexual. Femininity has undergone radical evolution throughout the 20th century and now into the 21st. Masculinity has been evolving too but not anywhere near as emphatically; sexual prowess and promiscuity remains two of the qualifying factors of successful masculinity regardless of orientation. As far as mainstream America is concerned, if you’re a male virgin, you’re a loser. You’re not good enough to get any. You’ve failed at masculinity.

If you take a gander at what very few portrayals of sexually inactive males have appeared in American media within the last 10 years, you’ll notice that the stereotype is rather specific: the virgin male is socially inept or awkward, physically unattractive, often stupid or oblivious, the story’s comic relief, and generally unsuccessful or at least unremarkable in all areas of his life. More importantly, he is often not a virgin because he WANTS to be; he’s a virgin or sexually inexperienced because he’s too much of a loser for anyone to feel attracted to him. If there were openly asexual male characters on TV or in movies, I reckon they would be painted in much the same way (although to be asexual and to be a virgin are not the same thing and do not always correspond). This male character only reaches salvation when he has sex and is subsequently reborn into a new, improved man.

This is one of the primary reasons why asexual men appear to be in hiding, so to speak. There has been an ongoing discussion over at AVEN about whether there are less asexual males than females and the general consensus seems to be that the numbers are most likely within range of each other…. but there are fewer males openly identifying themselves as asexual and discussing it online and in real life too. Why? Because there is far more pressure on males—thousands and thousands of years worth of cross-cultural pressure—to be highly sexed beings, to demonstrate, earn, and prove their masculinity through sexual performance. Traditional patriarchal masculinity may be considered outdated by Western civilization and yet the “New Man” is no less required to be highly sexual than his rejected patriarchal predecessor.

I think what’s important to remember is that if a man is asexual, he is no less obliged or unconcerned with the rules of masculinity his culture has set for him than sexual men are. An asexual man is not magically insensitive to society’s judgment of his masculinity and manhood just because he is asexual. Therefore, if and when a man comes to the conclusion that he is an asexual, he has far more reason to hide that identity than to reveal it. Asexual women deal with various forms of rejection and denial of their identity when they come out, and they don’t have to worry about their womanhood being attacked for it with nearly the same aggression or motivation as men face. A man is subject to humiliation and rejection by his male friends, his family members, his co-workers, and any potential romantic partners he might seek out if those romantic partners happen to be sexual people. No one will ever tell me—a female-bodied person who allows the world to see me as female—that I’m not “a real woman” for being disinterested and unwilling to participate in sex. But if I were a man? You can be sure that the whole world would jump on the chance to make fun of me, criticize me, pathologize me, etc…. not just in the context of being an asexual PERSON but more specifically, in the context of being an asexual MAN.

Recently, with this heated fight going on over the appropriateness of asexuals identifying as queer, the realities of real-world asexual oppression have been brought up over and over and that did have something to do with me writing my story. Corrective rape is a subject that has been only a little discussed in asexual online circles and I would actually rather avoid reading about it or getting too involved because it’s an uncomfortable thought for me. But it happens. That must be acknowledged. It happens and it is no less unacceptable when it happens to an asexual person than when it happens to an LGBTQ person.

I have not yet heard testimony from an asexual man who has been victimized this way—I hope I never do, although I won’t be surprised if eventually some of them come out of the woodwork—but now that I’ve written that story, I realize it is more than possible for this crime to happen to a man. Are women more likely to experience it? General rape statistics say yes. But I happen to have an amateur history of studying and following men’s issues and rape was one thing I opened my eyes to back in high school. I believe that the current stat we have on record in America is 1 million male victims of sexual assault a year. That may or may not be accurate, based on the fact that men are even less likely than women to report being sexually victimized, once again because of issues connected with masculinity.

I acknowledge that most men who are raped have a male assailant, based on the information we have. However, it IS possible for a man to be raped by a woman, regardless of his sexual orientation. In my story, the asexual male character is attacked by a woman and that, I felt, was a creative choice I had to make because when you begin to add the element of asexuality into your consideration of sexual assault, a victim being male rather than female becomes more plausible.

I was once in love with an asexual man. We were in a long-distance romantic relationship. He was a virgin when we started talking, happily a virgin, and to make a long story short, he ended up being coerced into sex by a close female friend of his multiple times. The first time may have been rape. He never used that word when telling me about it, but the way he described it sure sounds like rape to me, regardless of the fact that he didn’t physically push her away. The way he described it, the woman initiated the sexual contact and he was in so much shock, he couldn’t do much of anything except sit there and let her have her way. The times after that were not rape, per se, but they could probably qualify as being situations of dubious consent, certainly coercion. He allowed it to happen because he cared about the woman and valued her friendship and feared that rejecting her sexual advances would mean losing her as a friend. They never had a conversation where they agreed to have sex. She assumed he was heterosexual because he hadn’t come out to her and because they were close at the time and he demonstrated affection for her. (/consequences of asexual erasure) Eventually, he sat his friend down and explained to her that he did not want to have sex with her (because he’s an asexual and also, at the time, he was in a romantic relationship with me). She was offended, predictably, and ultimately the friendship faded.

I remember once, I mentioned this whole story—my relationship with the man and this sexual scenario he found himself in—to another male. The boy I told this to is heterosexual and when I described it to him, he basically said to me: “Are you SURE your friend didn’t want it? Are you SURE he’s asexual?”

Now, you have to admit: if my asexual friend were female, that kind of reaction would’ve been a lot less likely. Why? Because if a woman says she was raped, regardless of her orientation, she is far more likely to be believed because our society accepts that the rape of women is real, that women can say “no” to sex and MEAN it.

But the concept of a MAN not wanting sex—furthermore, the concept of a man not wanting sex with a WOMAN—is something that many people out there are unwilling to buy. Our cultural views of men are so skewed that we unconsciously believe them to be so hyper-sexed that they’ll say yes to anyone, at any time, regardless of the circumstances. And if they say “no,” they don’t mean it. If they say “no” to a woman, they must be gay. If they say “no,” they’re losers.

Furthermore, male rape victims pose some kind of a twisted threat to institutionalized masculinity. I’m not clear on how or why that is, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with for why a male rape victim would experience ridicule, denial, or aggression when coming forward with his story, rather than compassion.

If a man says he was raped by a woman, we laugh it off and say it’s impossible because how could a real man NOT want to have sex with a woman? And if he REALLY didn’t want to do it, why didn’t he just physically stop her or walk away? We’re really supposed to believe that a full-grown man let a WOMAN physically overpower him? He must be one weak, pathetic “man,” then.

If a man says he was raped by another man, we’ll believe him but that doesn’t make it any better, considering how taboo it is. A male raped by another male has been emasculated in the eyes of his society twice over: first for succumbing to the physical force of another man, second for being forced into the homosexual act of bottoming.

No matter the gender of his rapist, there is this disgusting misconception out there that if a man gets an erection, that means he wants the sex. Let me make myself real fucking clear right now: an erection can sometimes happen as an involuntary physical response to physical stimulation and NOT have anything to do with a man’s sexual desire or attraction to the other person. Some male rape victims had erections during their assaults. Some even had orgasms. That does not mean they consented to the sex. That does not magically make that assault something other than rape. It isn’t the male victim’s fault if he had an erection or an orgasm; he cannot control the physical responses of his body, no matter if his mental responses are contradictory.

I look back on the reaction of that straight guy and marvel at how his mind-blowing insensitivity and fucked up point of view somehow escaped me at the time. It’s real damn clear now—and that’s why I wanted to share it with you.

Having sex doesn’t make you less asexual. Getting raped sure as hell doesn’t change your asexuality. And if a MAN says he doesn’t want to have sex, then I think it fucking means he doesn’t want to have sex. He isn’t bluffing or teasing or flirting or being coy or joking—and if you force yourself on him, you’re a rapist. Male or female, you’re a rapist. If the man if straight, gay, bi, pan, or asexual, you’re a rapist. Period.

As for masculinity: asexual men exist and they are not less masculine because of their asexuality and/or their virginity. They’re also not all the Hollywood image of a sexually inexperienced/disinterested man: they’re just as likely to be intelligent, successful, attractive, and socially graceful individuals as their sexual fellows are. They don’t need to be pitied or guided into sexual salvation. They haven’t failed at masculinity. And they aren’t going to be magically converted into Western civilization’s ideal Hyper-Sexed Man by having consensual sex or getting raped.

Being a man and successful at masculinity has nothing to do with your sex life. You’re a man because you say you are one. You don’t have anything to prove. Whether you’re a good one or a bad one is a different matter. But ultimately, your masculinity is not a thing to be won or lost. It just is. No matter what kind of a man you are and certainly regardless of your sex life.

So what do we need?

We need positive portrayals of asexual men and virgin men and celibate men in mainstream media.

We need to accept that masculinity is completely and totally separate from a male’s sexuality.

We need to acknowledge that all males, sexual or asexual, have the right and the capability to say “No” to sex at any time.

We need to show men respect regardless of their sexuality and their sex lives, in real life AND in the media.

We need to acknowledge that men can be victims of sexual assault and we need to take it seriously.

We need to accept asexual men as being the equals of sexual men.

We need, as a society, to acknowledge and accept that men deserve love/respect/companionship regardless of their sexuality and their sexual activity. Asexual men deserve love just as much as sexual men do.

We need to respect virginity, celibacy, and abstinence as valid choices that men can make for whatever reasons they see fit and know that those choices have no impact whatsoever on their masculinity.