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Asexualities: Socio-Cultural Perspectives
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Introduction
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Myth 8: Religious are asexual Question: What do you call a person who is asexual? Answer: Not a person. Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity. Those who repress their sexuality are not living as God created them to be: fully alive and well. As such, they’re most likely unhappy
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Not everyone who uses the term asexual seems to be aware that asexuals do exist. Jesuit priests David Nantais and Scott Opperman (2002), trying to debunk myths about religious life, asserted on a website:
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by two men who were unaware of the existence of people who are indeed asexual? Or was this statement an uncritical recitation of a culturally normative fixation on sexuality and the central position that sexuality holds in United States society? Imagine being in a world where your lived experience is denied because it is contrary to cultural norms, where the desire for sex and/or
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sexual activity is a foreign concept, where friends and family members tell you there is something wrong with you, where doctors try to fix you, a world where your innermost self needs to remain hidden, a world that you are in but not of. This may seem like the beginning of a fairytale or the story of a space creature who crash-lands on earth. But it may be telling the story of your asexual neighbor, close friend, sibling or child. Historically the term asexual has been used by scientists to refer to plants and animals that den 2004, p. 16). More recently, especially since the first more contemporary social scientific study of asexuality in humans was published, researchers and the public have been introduced to the term as it may apply to humans. There is a possibly small and growing community of individuals who identify as asexual (though numbers are not fully known) and who profess to have little or no sexual desire or attraction for another person of any sex or gender (Bogaert 2004; Brotto et al. 2010; Scherrer 2008). The study of asexuality is important because the very concept calls into question what we as a society take to 2007) put it: “examination of… formerly unquestioned, socially institutionalized norms and systems may provide a startling new view of a previously invisible,
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C. Haefner ( ) Psychology Department, Sofia University, Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA e-mail:
[email protected] R. F. Plante Sociology Department, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
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perhaps even unsettle forever our idea of norm 55 56
important to recognize and value the experience 57 of asexuals not only because they can teach us 58
J. DeLamater, R.F. Plante (eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Sexualities, Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17341-2_16, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
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