Asexuality: people who do not feel sexual desire
The last decades have given visibility to forms of sexual orientation that do not have to match perfectly with heterosexuality and have allowed others who already knew each other, such as homosexuality, to have normalized more socially. Anyway, some sexual options, such as pansexuality, is still quite unknown.
Asexuality, sexual non-orientation
However, it often seems that this openness to different sensitivities and experiences related to sexuality is still insufficient, because the possibility that certain people do not feel sexual desires is not usually contemplated .
What happens when we speak not of different sexual orientations, but of cases in which there is no sexual orientation at all? When we refer to this we are talking about a phenomenon that has received the name of asexuality .
Neither ideology nor sexual orientation
An asexual person is, plain and simple, a person who does not experience desire or sexual attraction and that therefore does not feel moved to have sex of any kind. Asexuality, in short, is the persistent lack of sexual desire that is not motivated or nourished by religious or cultural root habits. The celibacy moved for religious reasons, therefore, it is something else.
Asexuality can not be considered a form of sexual orientation, because it consists precisely in the absence of a preference of this kind, but neither is it an ideology that leads to sexual repression in a more or less conscious way. However, this does not mean that there are no groups of asexual people who have been associated with political ends, as has happened with LGBT groups.
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 sex is not obligatory to receive social approval. To this end, there are communities like AVEN (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) that are responsible for giving voice to these people and to disseminate knowledge and experiences about asexuality. AVEN, by the way, has more than ten thousand registered.
Missing data!
Although asexual people tend to want to visualize themselves by joining efforts collectively, asexuality itself is a phenomenon of which very little is known . There are very few investigations that address it directly or indirectly.
In fact, most studies are limited to being based on surveys, such as the one that led to an article published in the Journal of Sex Research in which it is stated that around 1% of the British could 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 also lack sensitivity
Part of the way in which this lack of information about asexuality is focused, rather than scientific, is deeply 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 common for it to be taken as a symptom of disease , although there is no evidence to support such a point of view, and stigmatization of some kind is sought for people who do not experience sexuality like the rest (something that has also happened historically with all LGTB collectives).
Invisible sexual orientation
Other currents of opinion tend to exaggerate the characteristics by which asexual people differentiate themselves from the rest, as if it were practically a separate civilization with very specific and stereotyped ways of living life and relating to others. The asexuals, however, tend to put emphasis not on differences but on everything that characterizes them as human . They claim to be fully capable of relating normally to everyone and having intimate relationships, although not necessarily sexual ones. It is easy to imagine why they are right: in the end, to believe that the mere fact of not feeling sexual desire means being socially isolated or has to be caused irremediably by an illness is a good example of why collectives like AVEN have a lot work to do
What is clear is that there is nothing wrong with the fact itself of not experiencing sexual desire and there is no reason to pretend to fight against asexuality as if it were an illness. In any case, it is society as a whole that must strive to make all sensibilities fit in it.
