Anthony Bogaert - Understanding Asexuality

Is there only one right way to live a human life? Must people have certain experiences to make their lives worthwhile and healthy? Most of us grapple with these kinds of questions, as they help us to understand our goals, setbacks, and achievements in life. I’ve also grappled with these questions from an academic perspective, because I was (and still am) trying to understand whether asexuality should be considered a disorder (Bogaert, 2006b). This is the subject of the present chapter. I examine whether asexuality should be seen as unhealthy, and I do so from a number of different perspectives; in other words, I try to put on a number of different lenses and see what I can see.

From one perspective, we might argue that asexuality is a disorder because it goes against life’s natural order of things; after all, sex is a natural process, and the desire to “do it” with others is what all (sexual) life strives to do in one form or another. This view of asexuality as disorder uses a lens crafted by evolutionary biology. Thus, asexuality (i.e., a lack of sexual attraction) may seem to contradict an important biological imperative: sex is the means by which humans reproduce, and thus to eschew this aspect of life may seem to fail at a basic goal of life—to reproduce.

When an organism reproduces, its genes are passed on to future generations. The “winners,” or the best-adapted organisms, are the ones that pass on the most genes to future generations. The most maladapted are the ones that don’t pass on genes (or that pass on the fewest genes) to future generations. Most human beings do the replication game, or attempt to do this, through sexual reproduction. Thus a sexual interest in the opposite sex—as the means of reproduction—should be considered a normal and healthy preoccupation. So, for instance, let’s consider a fictional person—we’ll call her “Sally”—who lived between 1920 and 2000. She married and had three children, two of whom also had children. Thus, her genes have been passed on to future generations through her children (and grandchildren), conceived through a traditional heterosexual relationship. The psychological mechanisms that allowed her to accomplish this were fairly traditional: she was sexually and romantically attracted to men, and had a desire and ability to nurture children. Thus, her tendencies to adopt a traditional heterosexual relationship, along with her nurturance and intelligence as a parent, allowed her to conceive, give birth to, and ultimately raise three vehicles to her genetic posterity (i.e., three kids). Way to go, Sally! Or, perhaps more accurately, way to go, Sally’s genes!

From this perspective, individuals having these tendencies to replicate their genes through sexual reproduction are perhaps “healthy,” the reasoning goes, because they conform to a natural process that all successful (sexual) life forms follow.

But let’s consider some complications with this perspective. First, many sexual people (even a few heterosexual biologists I know) do not have children—including many who do not forgo the mechanism of reproduction itself, sex—and thus fail miserably on this ultimate of biological imperatives. So, do they have a disorder or are they unhealthy ?

Second, there is more than one way to skin a cat, evolutionarily speaking. As suggested in chapter 3, the replication of DNA does occur via asexual reproduction in a host of organisms. So, sexual reproduction is not the only natural process of reproduction. Moreover, aside from asexual reproduction occurring in simpler or phylogenetically older species, sexual reproduction is not the only game in town in other, more complex or recently evolved species—even in human beings! Individuals can potentially replicate their genes through other means than sexual reproduction—in particular, via kin-selection processes. In these processes, the replication of one’s genes occurs through kin or closely related relatives. Our relatives share our genes, and the closer the blood relation (e.g., brother or sister as compared to third cousin), the more genes in common. Thus, if our relatives replicate their genes (through, for example, sexual reproduction), we replicate ours, because a portion of their genes is, in fact, a portion of our genes. Kin-selection mechanisms are also adaptive (“healthy,” if you will) alternative strategies to replicate genes. So, even though sexual reproduction is probably the primary method by which human beings replicate their genes, it is not the only way gene replication can occur.

This kin-selection model of gene replication may provide an important answer to why homosexuality exists in humans. On the surface, homosexuality is a challenge to evolutionary types (e.g., biologists, evolutionary psychologists): Gay people don’t do sexual reproduction—or at least not to the extent that heterosexual people do—yet homosexuality has existed over time and across cultures and seems to have, at least partially, a genetic basis (Bailey, Dunne, & Martin, 2000; Hamer, Hu, Magnuson, Hu, & Pattatucci, 1993). So, how could “gay genes” ever compete with “straight genes,” if the latter find themselves in a group (i.e., breeders) that engages in sexual reproduction, whereas the former find themselves in a group that, on average, doesn’t? [32] My language here (e.g., gay genes compete ) is teleological; it suggests that genes have intentions, motives, or a purpose. Evolutionary types would be mad at me, as genes don’t have these characteristics; that is, genes themselves don’t “compete” for anything. So, to all you evolutionary types, please excuse my loose language, as I am using it in this way to help illustrate a point.

The answer may have to do with the kin of gay people. If a gay gene confers some kind of reproductive advantage when expressed in the relatives of gay people, then the gay gene could survive, even flourish, throughout evolutionary history. Recently, researchers have found evidence that gay men have female relatives who are especially fecund, tending to have a lot of children (Iemmola & Camperio-Ciani, 2009). Aha! So, even though gay men don’t breed like their heterosexual male counterparts do, their sisters may do so, and at a high rate relative to the sisters of heterosexual men, thus compensating for any loss to the gene pool from gay men. This suggests that there is indeed a gay gene (or genes) conferring some type of reproductive advantage in the female relatives of gay men. Some researchers have speculated that it may be a “man-loving” gene, which, when found in men, makes them gay, but which, when found in women, makes them particularly likely to be attracted to (and thus form heterosexual relationships with) men, leading to lots of offspring and hence lots of gay (or “man-loving”) genes. Even if there is a no “man-loving” gene making sisters reproduce more, a “gay” gene may still be of some advantage to an individual who carries this gene if it is associated with helping relatives’ children survive and reproduce. So, for example, a gay man may help raise his sister’s or brother’s children, and thus his genes are replicated through helping kin, even if his genes aren’t replicated sexually. Interestingly, there is some evidence for this mechanism in Samoan men with same-sex attraction, a group called the Fa’afafine (Vasey & VanderLaan, 2010). Samoan society is of some importance because it is likely closer than modern Western societies to the social and family relations that would have occurred when humans evolved.

As these examples attest, nature has myriad ways of creating and sustaining diversity, and what may seem like a genetic dead end, and thus biologically “unhealthy,” may not be. So, that someone simply does not reproduce through a traditional heterosexual process does not mean that they are maladapted from an evolutionary perspective. It may just mean that there is another evolutionary mechanism at work beyond sexual reproduction that replicates the individual’s genes.