Anthony Bogaert - Understanding Asexuality

Another explanation relates to the flexibility in women’s sexuality (Baumeister, 2000). Women’s relatively flexible sexuality may make them, compared to men, more affected by social and cultural influences. Thus, if social or cultural influences are extreme, or at least atypical, women’s sexuality may vary from the norm, including in the development of asexuality. Underscoring this point is the fact that women can adopt celibate lifestyles, sometimes construed as a behavioral “asexuality,” for political purposes—for instance, as a protest against male-dominated society (Fahs, 2010).

Our conception of sexual orientation, or at least how it is traditionally measured, also may be relevant to gender differences in asexuality (Bogaert, 2004; Bogaert, 2006b; Bogaert, in press-a). Most sexual orientation measures imply that one’s orientation is always “targeted” toward others, either males or females (or both, if bisexual). For example, a sexual orientation question may be posed as follows: “Who are you sexually attracted to?” The phrase “attracted to ” implies an object or a “target” for our sexual interests. Thus, in this target-oriented view, usually members of one group (e.g., females) are the objects of desire, drawing our attention and fancies, and impelling us to approach members of this group for sexual activity. Yet this view of sexual orientation is, arguably, based on a male model of sexuality and thus may not capture many women’s subjective experience of sexuality. This view may also affect how some women report being sexually attracted (or not being sexually attracted) to others.

At least three lines of theory and research support this target-oriented view of sexual orientation. First, there is evidence that proceptive desire—the urge to seek out and initiate sexual activity—may be more common in men than in women, whereas receptive desire—the capacity to become aroused upon encountering certain sexual circumstances—may characterize women’s sexuality more so than that of men (Baumeister, 2000; Diamond, 2003b). Proceptive desire relative to receptive desire may be more conducive to a target-oriented view of sexual arousal and thus may capture the traditional (and hence more male-oriented) conceptions of sexual attraction.

Second, Meredith Chivers’s recent work on men and women’s arousal patterns (e.g., genital responses to erotic pictures or films) suggests that men are more target oriented in their sexuality. Her research has found that men’s sexual arousal is usually directed toward one sex or another: women if they are heterosexual, men if they are gay. Women’s sexual arousal is much more diffuse, and not specific to a category of sex/gender. Overall, women will respond genitally somewhat less than men to various types of erotic imagery, and usually to both men and women actors in the stimuli, even when the women report being exclusively heterosexual or lesbian. In other words, men’s sexuality seems to have a specific category of gender as its target—a bull’s eye in their sights. This is less so for women’s sexuality—or at least women have multiple targets or bull’s eyes in their sights (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, 2004; Chivers, Seto, & Blanchard, 2007).

Related to Meredith Chivers’s work is a third line of research supporting this target-oriented view of sexual orientation: Julia Heiman’s research, which shows that women are sometimes not aware of their genital responses (Heiman, 1977). Thus women may not know how their bodies are responding sexually, at least not to the same degree as men do. As a consequence, women may not associate sexual responses to a specific target (e.g., men) because they may not be aware that genital responses to a target are in fact occurring. This difference in genital response may be partially related to the way men and women’s bodies work: erections are obvious, whereas vaginal responses are often more subtle.

If women’s sexuality is less proceptive in nature, if their physical arousal is non-category-specific (i.e., no bull’s eye in the target), and, finally, if they are not as aware of their genital responses as men are, then when women are asked to respond to questions such “who are you sexually attracted to?,” perhaps it is not surprising that some women simply do not respond in a traditional (male-oriented) way: as being sexually attracted to either males or females (or even to both). Indeed, some may report or label themselves as having no sexual attraction to others (i.e., being asexual).

Let’s return to some issues related to women’s non-category-specific arousal. A basic question that emerges from this work is this: Why do women have such non-category-specific arousal, whereas men do not? One explanation that Chivers and colleagues favor is as follows: Nature may have designed the vagina, along with related arousal mechanisms, to prepare a woman for any kind of sexual activity that may occur, willing or otherwise. At times throughout human evolutionary history, women have been subjected to coerced sexual relations. Thus, to prevent injury, the adaptive response of the vagina, along with the brain and body mechanisms that support it, may have been to respond with expansion and lubrication at the suggestion of almost any sexual activity. Thus, the vagina is a pliably indiscriminate organ primed for any sexual contact that may arise. Indeed, Chivers and her colleagues have shown that women, unlike men, also respond genitally to chimpanzee sexual activity (Chivers, 2010). Talk about non-category-specific arousal!

If non-category-specific responding in women is an injury-preventing mechanism, then one should expect that asexual women also have such mechanisms in place, and thus also have non-category-specific responding to sexual stimuli. However, shouldn’t asexual women have very different arousal patterns than sexual women? After all, if asexual women are truly “asexual,” then shouldn’t they have, presumably, low or absent arousal? Not necessarily. Recall that asexuality, by my and others’ definitions, is a lack of sexual attraction, not a lack of physical arousal. Thus, although arousal and sexual attraction are often related, and arousal may give us information (e.g., feedback) about our sexual attractions, arousal and attraction are not the same thing. Indeed, it is clear that they are often “decoupled,” and even sexual women often do not use physical arousal as a gauge of their sexual attraction/orientation—and cannot, if they are not aware of this arousal.

Lori Brotto and Morag Yule recently examined arousal patterns in asexual women. They showed that asexual women, like sexual women, indeed show non-category-specific responding to sexual stimuli—that is, some level of genital arousal to both male- and female-oriented sexual stimuli—very similar to heterosexual women and lesbians. Although this is a small study (e.g., there was no sample of asexual men), it is also an intriguing one, as the authors argue that their results give support to the notion that asexuals do not have a “disorder” as currently defined. For example, asexual women do not show low arousal (i.e., abnormally low vaginal responses) to sexual activity, as some women with sexual dysfunction do (see also chapter 11). Relatedly, the authors argue that their study provides some evidence that asexuality should be understood as a true sexual orientation, because asexual women respond in similar ways as sexual orientation groups—in other words, (nondysfunctional) lesbians and heterosexual women. Finally, this study supports the notion that non-category-specific responding (at least in terms of physical arousal) is common among women, including asexual women, and may serve a common, ancient function: to prevent injury (Brotto & Yule, 2011).