AVENues Issue #19
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Carolyn Lamb
Mar 28, 2009, 4:11:36 PM3/28/09
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AVENues Issue #19 - March 18, 2009 (text version posted to the AVENues Google group / RSS March 18, 2009)
The full PDF version of this newsletter can be found here: http://www.asexuality.org/avenues/2009_03_28.pdf
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Asexual: A person who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which is a choice, asexuality is a sexual orientation.
AVEN: The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an online community and resource archive striving to create open and honest discussion about asexuality among asexual and sexual people alike.
AVENues: A bimonthly publication available online, created by members of the AVEN community in order to further showcase our thoughts and promote discussion by and about asexuals.
For more information, visit http://www.asexuality.org.
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CONTENTS:
1. Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder and the Asexual Community: A History
2. News
3. From the Forum
4. "About a Boy"
5. The Fun of Telling Someone
6. Featured AVENite: "Fosco"
7. "Rome"
8. Meetup Listings
The PDF version of this newsletter also contains art and comics not available in text-only format.
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Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder and the Asexual Community: A History
by MANDERWLITER
Since last June, there have been a few of us in the asexual community working on a project concerning asexuality and a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) saying, roughly, that not being interested in sex is a mental disorder. We’ve been keeping a low profile during the course of this project, but now that the project is over, we wanted to explain the situation more fully, because it is a complex matter with no clear answers. First, I’ll give a bit of history that I’ve slowly been piecing together. I’ll start with some general background and then the history of the diagnosis. Then I’ll backtrack to look more closely at the context in which the diagnosis was created, then move ahead to the considerable controversy surrounding it over the past decade or so. This should help us to understand where we fit into this larger picture, which should shed light on the form that our project took.
The first version of the DSM was published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, not to be confused with the American Psychological Association, also called the APA) in 1952. Since then, there have been DSM-II (1968), DSM-III (1980), DSM-III-R (1987, R=Revision), DSM-IV (1994), and DSM-IV-TR (2000, TR=Text Revision). DSM-V is scheduled to be published in 2012. The DSM is widely used by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers.
William Masters and Virginia E. Johnson’s book Human Sexual Response was published in 1966. Focusing largely on sexual physiology, they emphasized the (physiological) similarities between male and female sexuality. A hallmark of that book was a four stage (linear) model of human sexual response: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. In 1970, their book Human Sexual Inadequacy was published, which was a book on sexual problems and how to treat them. This book became fundamental to much subsequent sex-therapy. Their model did not focus on sexual desire, but rather on how and whether the genitalia functioned. In 1977, two sex therapists, independently of each other, proposed a diagnosis for lack of interest in sex. Helen Singer Kaplan called it “Hypoactive Sexual Desire” (HSD) and Harold Leif called it “Inhibited Sexual Desire” (ISD). Kaplan has written much more extensively on the subject, and to incorporate this “problem” into the existing sexual model, she proposed the “triphasic” model, based on Masters and Johnson: desire, excitement, and orgasm. (Sometimes resolution was added as well, but it is typically ignored because not a lot of “dysfunctions” happen there.) Kaplan first became aware of this “problem” in studying cases where sex therapy failed: failure was especially common in situations not where the genitalia did not function “properly” but when one of the partners simply wasn’t interested in sex. To announce this shocking news—some people aren’t interested in sex!—to the world of sex therapy, these two therapists invented this new “disorder”.
Before the DSM-III was published in 1980, there was no standardized way of categorizing “sexual dysfunctions,” though Masters and Johnson’s work was influential. In DSM-III, various “sexual dysfunctions” were added, largely based on Kaplan and Leif’s modifications of Masters and Johnson’s work. Not coincidentally, Kaplan and Leif were both members of the committee responsible for writing this part of DSM-III. Very little empirical work had been done on “sexual dysfunctions” when these were added to the DSM, so the system there was created with minimal scientific foundation. “Inhibited Sexual Desire” officially became a mental disorder and asexuality did as a consequence, even though not mentioned by name. In the DSM-III, ISD is described as “Persistent and pervasive inhibition of sexual desire.”
In DSM-III-R (1987) ISD’s name was changed to Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) because “Inhibited” suggested psychodynamic etiology (think Freud, his followers and psychoanalysis), and the DSM-III-R aimed to be atheoretical. Also, the diagnosis was subdivided into HSDD and “Sexual Aversion Disorder” (SAD – this diagnosis is controversial and rarely used). There were a few other changes as well. A subtyping was added for all the sexual dysfunctions. Diagnoses could be lifelong or acquired. (For HSDD, “lifelong” is where the person has never been interested in sex, and “acquired” is where they used to be but aren’t anymore.) They could be generalized or situational (“generalized” is where the person has no interest in any sexual activity with anyone or alone, and “situational” is where they lack sexual desire towards their current partner but may masturbate and/or have desire for people other than their current partner.) Also, diagnoses could be psychogenic or biogenic (psychologically or biologically caused; the latter is not a mental disorder.) Also added to the definition of HSDD was a lack of fantasy. This is bizarre and self-contradictory because people with the “situational” subtype often do have sexual fantasies, so technically, “situational” HSDD isn’t HSDD, but you’re supposed to ignore that fact. All the authors on the subject do. The new diagnosis read: “Persistently or recurrently deficient or absent sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity.”
In 1994, the DSM-IV was published. In that version, the committee working on the sexual dysfunctions was told that they could make no changes without research to support them. Since they only found seven studies on HSDD and two on SAD, this prevented them from making any changes. Ironically, a requirement that changes must be supported empirically seems as though it would help root the diagnosis scientifically, but in this case, it forced them to leave the diagnosis as scientifically unfounded as when they started. Additionally, the criterion that a person must experience “marked distress or interpersonal difficulty” in order to be diagnosed with HSDD was added to all of the diagnoses in the “Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders.” This reflected a change made throughout the DSM—these criteria (the clinical significance criteria) took different forms in other parts of the DSM. Their inclusion in the “Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders” was done quickly and with little thought of consequences. Some members of the sexual dysfunction committee don’t even remember discussing the issue. Interestingly, the introduction of this criterion led to a self-contradiction in the diagnosis: in lifelong cases, the DSM says that the time of onset should be regarded as puberty (this is what Leif recommended in his ’77 piece). This means that someone who has never been interested in sex and is not distressed about it does not have HSDD, but if they later do become distressed about, it means that they have had HSDD since puberty, even when they didn’t have HSDD. What is interesting about this is that to date, the whole substance of the asexual community’s argument that DSM does not call asexuality a disorder consists of emphasizing the clinical significance criterion.
The DSM-IV-TR was published in 2000, with no changes in HSDD. This brings us up to the present version of the diagnosis. Now I want to backtrack and look more carefully at the historical context in which it was created.
Perhaps the most insightful commentary on the historical background of the creation ISD/HSDD comes from two highly respected sex therapists, Sandra Leiblum and Raymond Rosen, in their introduction to a book called Sexual Desire Disorders. They observe that sexual desire is rarely viewed neutrally and that drives either to suppress or excite it are commonly seen, often changing from one generation to the next. In Western cultures, the 1970s was a time for the latter. Enthusiasm for all things sexual abounded with the social message about sex being “Sex is good for you, and the more the better.” They write,
“Sexual enthusiasts were championed by the media, and those individuals for whom sex was a source of neither great interest nor great pleasure felt alienated and abandoned in this new sexual climate. It is, therefore, not surprising that complaints involving insufficient sexual desire (but rarely the reverse!) first became recognized as a discrete clinical entity.”
The asexual community cites the fact that homosexuality used to be regarded as a mental disorder to challenge the APA’s authority to regard asexuality as a mental disorder. Homosexuality was removed from DSM-II in 1973 (actually, it was replaced with a diagnosis that said homosexuality was only a disorder if the person was distressed about it). One scholar argued that the creation of ISD can be seen in psychiatry’s long history of giving itself the right to decide what is and is not “normal” sexuality. What I found through my research into the history of ISD/HSDD is that the relationship between the pathologization of a lack of interest in sex is far closer to the pathologization of homosexuality and other non-standard sexual practices than I had expected.
Kaplan and Leif both had psychoanalytic backgrounds, and, it seems, they operated with a psychodynamic theory of etiology for HSDD/ISD (etiology is a term meaning the cause of something, especially in medicine). From what I can gather, Kaplan’s view was that desiring (fairly vanilla) sex in loving heterosexual relationship was natural. Anyone who did not want this must be inhibiting their natural heterosexuality. As such, she saw all of the following as instances of HSD because of lack of desire for the right kind of sex: the fetishist, the pedophiliac, the exhibitionist, the masochist, the homosexual (These are the terms she uses. I will forgo playing “Which of these things are not like the others?”). Kaplan actually thought that all instances of not wanting (the right kind of) sex, along with not wanting any sex at all, were basically caused by the same thing: anxiety. In a later work, she ascribed it to people “turning themselves off.”
I now want to move ahead to 1998, the year Viagra was approved by the FDA to treat “erectile dysfunction.” The pharmaceutical companies quickly realized that this drug was very profitable. If only they could create the Viagra for women, just think how much more money they could make! But there’s a problem. What exactly is the “pink pill” supposed to fix? What is the female equivalent of not being able to get an erection? So they had to invent a new disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). The same year, the Sexual Function Health Council of the American Foundation of Urologic Disease convened the first “Consensus Development Panel on Female Sexual Dysfunction” to create a way to classify FDD.
In a standard disease-mongering practice—giving inflated estimates of prevalence—the consensus document declares, “[FDS] is age-related and highly prevalent, affecting 20-50% of women” (by age-related, they probably mean the fact that many women’s sexual interest declines after menopause and declare this a disorder, despite its being a normal part of life for many women). The supposed justification for this panel, according to their consensus statement, was that “A major barrier to the development of clinical research and practice has been the absence of a well defined, broadly accepted diagnostic framework and classification for female sexual dysfunction.” So what did this highly publicized consensus document created by leading researchers on female sexuality come up with? Various definitions were proposed and decided on by secret voting, and basically, they rehashed the sexual dysfunctions of the DSM-IV with a few slight modifications. By the way, the panel was funded by Eli Lilly/ICOS, Pharmaceuticals, Pentech Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Inc., Procter & Gamble, Schering-Plough, Solway Pharmaceuticals, TAP Pharmaceuticals, and Zonagen.
In response, a counter conference was organized by feminist scholar and clinical psychologist Leonore Tieffer. Meeting in summer 2000, a group of feminist clinicians and social scientists created a “manifesto” and planned a campaign to promote their “New View of Women’s Sexual Problems” (you can visit their webpage at http://newviewcampaign.org/). They state, “We believe that a fundamental barrier to understanding women's sexuality is the medical classification scheme in current use, developed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders.” This is a direct challenge to the Consensus Development Panel for FSD. They have three main criticisms of the current model: 1) Non-equivalence of male and female sexuality. Studies that have actually asked women what sexual difficulties (if any) they have have found that the things actual women complain of don’t really fit well into the DSM’s framework. 2) Erasing the relational context of sexuality. Many women’s sexual problems are, at root, relationship problems. The DSM’s approach to “sexual dysfunctions” focuses entirely on individuals. 3) Ignoring difference among women. To correct these, they propose a “New View of Women’s Sexual Problems,” a radically different way of understanding sexual problems (they use the word “problems” rather than “dysfunctions” because they feel that a medical model is inappropriate for many such problems).
In addition to the New View, there have been a few other lines of criticism. One criticism is that the linear model doesn’t fit the actual experiences of women very well, and a more cyclical model involving positive feedback loops is proposed. Also, it is claimed that there is a sizable minority of women who report never experiencing active desire for sex but can become sexually excited in the right context when a sexual encounter is initiated by a sexual partner; this is termed “responsive desire”. A lack of responsive desire was added to the definition of HSDD in the above mentioned consensus document. Another line of criticism is that some reasons for not being interested in sex should be seen as adaptive rather than maladaptive (Everyone has problems sometimes, and some ways of dealing with our problems are healthy and productive. These are adaptive responses. Some ways of dealing with problems only make things worse. These are maladaptive). Some major causes of loss of sexual interest include relationship problems, fatigue and stress. Feeling that loss of sexual desire in these contexts represents an adaptive response, some have argued that labeling it a disorder makes little sense. The third major criticism has to do with the clinical significance requirement: some people don’t like the fact that people have to be distressed to call something a sexual dysfunction, and serious proposals to remove this requirement have been made.
Now our story moves away from academic debates in journals and conferences and moves a little closer to home. There has only been an asexual community since about July 2001. AVEN’s forums have been up since May 2002, and the first reference to HSDD I can find is from September 2002. Responses to it have been negative. In media articles and university lectures, we have stressed the clinical significance criterion. Since we’re not distressed, asexuality is not a disorder according the DSM. A number of us have been itching to challenge the APA on this for quite some time but felt that we were too small, too little researched, too powerless to do anything. Before convincing people that our sexual orientation isn’t a disorder, we have to convince them that it exists.
This mindset changed in June 2008 when David Jay decided to visit some LGBT lobbying organizations, while in Washington DC for his job. In a story he explains in his blog, he had an unexpected meeting with Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. She asked him, "Are you all doing anything with the DSM?"
He responded, "I'd love to, but I don't think we have the capacity to target someone like the APA right now."
"You'd be surprised.” Indeed we have been.
After blogging about this conversation, he made a post on AVEN trying to get volunteers for a project aimed at generating discussion around the subject. I was the only person to volunteer in response to it. After first learning about asexuality, I had tried to learn everything I possibly could about the subject. I had thought that perhaps there could be something to be learned from the literature on lifelong HSDD, so I had looked into that literature, only to find out that acquired HSDD is much more studied, and I could find nothing on lifelong HSDD except for a few case studies here and there. However, I did find Kaplan’s work, which convinced me that the diagnosis had no scientific foundation whatsoever. Once the project got underway, I did some reading to get myself up to speed on the literature. One of the first things to come from this project was a complete rewrite of the Wikipedia article on HSDD.
The first problem that we had to deal with was that none of us is an expert in human sexuality, a psychiatrist, or a clinical psychologist. There isn’t much research on asexuality, and we couldn’t come up with any good reason why the DSM people would actually care what we have to say. The other big difficulty is that a lot of people see therapists complaining of low sexual desire. In the U.S., being diagnosed with something is an important part of getting insurance reimbursement, so simply advocating that the diagnosis be deleted did not seem a viable option. Our initial plan was to interview people who were experts and post interviews on a blog. Maybe one of the DSM people might care enough to read our blog? Or maybe one of our interviewees might be able to make our case to the DSM people for us? David recruited two AVENites to help with logistics: one to manage our blog and one to keep everyone on task.
In a meeting on Skype, we decided that it would be helpful if we had a few more people to help with interviews. So DJ made another post on AVEN (this one was in July) trying to recruit psychology students to help out. Three people volunteered. Two couldn’t figure out why we wanted to get asexuality into the DSM (facepalm) and ended up not joining our team, so we only got one additional member.
Some of you may recall a paper on asexuality by people at the Kinsey Institute—Nicole Prause and Cynthia Graham. The paper was mostly written by Prause, then a grad student. We were happily surprised to discover that Graham was one of the members of the sexual dysfunctions workgroup. Also, Lori Brotto, who has been involved in studying asexuality and has said nice things about us in the media, was added to the sexual dysfunctions workgroup several months after the rest of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders group was put together. So we were very excited about her addition because we knew she liked us.
DJ contacted Dr. Graham (and mentioned our project to Dr. Brotto before we knew about her addition to the committee), and discussed our interest in one of their meetings, and it was suggested (in a very passive voice kind of way) that we discuss the matter over the phone with the chair of the sexual dysfunction workgroup. So DJ and I eventually set up a time to talk to him, and we had a fifteen minute conversation back in September.
We gave him our spiel: we mentioned places were asexuality has been brought up in the literature; we pointed out that questions were asked but answers were scare. Our interest was in generating dialogue with experts to try to generate ideas around these questions. He said that the workgroup would be interested in this. Whether this was genuine interest on his part or only reflected interest on the part of one or more committee members, I have no idea.
This made our original idea of a blog unnecessary because the workgroup was already interested in what we had to say, much to our surprise. A very pleasant surprise. The project was based on our self-presentation as very nice asexual activists who had no interest in telling them how to do their jobs (or trying to use political pressure to make them do what we wanted). We weren’t those kinds of activists at all (subtext: we’re very different from the trans-activists, even though we secretly like them. It was, after all, a trans-activist who encouraged us to do this thing in the first place). This part of our strategy was the reason that the project was discussed very little in the asexual community.
At that point, we needed to start doing interviews. DJ recruited another member of the asexual community, who had a master’s degree in psychology, and we had to start putting together a list of questions to ask in interviews. Conducting interviews proved to be a slow process, and we ended up getting a grand total of seven, after contacting over a hundred people. Around late January early February, we needed to decide what exactly we would send the committee. What we eventually sent was a report with a cover page, an abstract, a table of contents, an introduction, a literature review, a list of questions with commentary and motivation, interview methods, interview analysis, three personal statements, and a conclusion. Also, interview transcripts were included as an appendix, as was a piece on “personal distress” I wrote and a paper published by an interviewee who requested it be included. Because interviewees were told that we would send interviews to the chair of the sexual dysfunctions workgroup, we felt that we had consent to share them in that venue but not in any other. As such, we are not making these available to members of the asexual community (or anyone else other than the chair of the sexual dysfunctions committee, and we’re not really sure what he’s going to do with them).
We emailed the final project to the chair of the sexual dysfunctions workgroup on March 19. So the question is, what will the sexual dysfunctions look like in DSM-V? I haven’t a clue. Perhaps we will have to wait until 2012 to find out.
A fully cited version of this article can be found on mandrewliter's website at http://asexystuff.blogspot.com/2009/03/hypoactive-sexual-desire-disorder-and.html.
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News
It's election season on AVEN, and Fosco has been chosen as a new moderator for the Welcome Area. Elections for a new Project Team moderator are still ongoing.
The British television channel BBC3 released a documentary as part of the Natalie Cassidy's Real Britain series that featured the lives of several asexuals as part of an investigation into “our last sexual taboos”.
Also, the independent movie group Issey Ronaldo Films has released a short film entitled The Cold Shoulder, depicting the experiences of an asexual person and a sexual person in a romantic relationship with each other. It has been largely well-received by the asexual community.
Other than that, asexuality has been mentioned on the human sexuality website Carnal Nation, the Philadelphia Sex and Relationships Examiner, the news website NewsWire.co.nz, the Alternatives to Marriage Project website, the Gay and Lesbian Times, the Kinsey Institute Sexuality Information Service, two Finnish magazines, the Independent newspaper in the UK, the website reddit.com, and the LGBTQ handbook at Oxford University in England. And even more people are looking to speak to asexuals, including a PhD student in sociology at the University of Warwick in England, two psychologists at the National University of Ireland, a writer in London, a journalist in Chicago, a freelance journalist in the UK, a film student at New York University, a national Spanish television station, a journalism student at Arizona State University, and the documentary production company Pink Sneaker Productions.
There's also a new asexuality zine out – Weird Terrain, produced by an AVENite. And there's a new website for asexuals from Slovenia, as well as one called Asexual Explorations (based on the blog previously featured in our Internet Spotlight) for the promotion of the academic study of asexuality. Meanwhile, Apositive.org went through a software upgrade and is now back up and running.
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From the Forum
A selection of posts from the discussion boards on the AVEN website
Frankly, I have issues with your claim that a romantic relationship automatically means spending more time together than with anyone else. That's a degree of "seriousness" in a relationship, not a part of the structure of a romantic relationship inherently. When it hits the degree of seriousness where it can seriously be called "monopolizing" the other person's time, it gets labeled "co-dependence" and it's not healthy.
I know couples who don't sit next to each other at group meals, and "best friends" who call each other to meet up for every single meal. Two of my friends at college had each other's schedules in their rooms, and went on the same abroad program at the same time, even though they're in different majors. I went on long weekend getaway vacations with my best friend in high school, but I often didn't have the faintest idea whether or not my last boyfriend was ever in town, and "defaulted" to calling my best friend and seeing what she was up to when Friday night rolled around.
Instead of inventing "new" terms or structures for relationships, I think we'd be better off challenging the assumptions we make about the old ones.
- thecynicalromantic, March 1, in Asexual Relationships
As much as I love visibility and education, I've been frustrated lately by the number of people who jump up at the smallest sign of a person who is less than thrilled about sex and shout, "They must be asexual!" While it's certainly possible that some of these people (including fictional and historical characters) are indeed ace, I think many of us are getting overzealous in the application of the label. I can't help but feel that it's only perpetuating the stereotype that sexual people want all sex, all the time. What some of us (myself included, as well as many sexual people, I'm sure) forget is that it's entirely possible to be disinterested in or even disgusted by certain aspects of sex, and still be entirely sexual.
- Raisin, March 6, in Asexual Musings and Rantings
One of the things I love so much about AVEN is that we're not separatist. We don't box all the "similar" people together and give them their own space to ignore everyone else from. Some badly managed forums have spaces for, say, lesbians and spaces for gays and spaces for trans etc. and it just reinforces the idea that all these kinds of people are so vastly different from each other as to be barely going through the same problems at all... (sorry, the divisions in the Queer/LGBTQIA community is one of my concerns at the moment). Whereas here on AVEN sexual, ace, demi, grey-A, hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan- and a-romantic, repulsed and indifferent, male, female, trans, intersex, all kinds of people from all over the world can use the same forums. Nobody here is getting upset at other people just because of what they define as.
Which is actually, I think, why so many of us are willing to discuss gender. We know we won't be shouted down.
- Elliott Ford, March 19, in Mod Forum
From the Forum posts belong to their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the official viewpoint of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. If you've seen a posting on AVEN that you like, send it to us at newsl...@asexuality.org.
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About A Boy
by BLUE ICE-TEA
About A Boy
Starring: Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult
Written by: Peter Hedges, Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz
Directed by: Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz
U.K.; 2002; 101 min.
About A Boy is a movie about relationships - how we build them and why they matter. A single middle-aged man and a lonely twelve-year-old boy develop a friendship that becomes the hub of a broader community. It's a storyline with a lot of relevance to asexuals, but the relevance goes beyond the asexual community to a broader group of people: those who value friendship and seek to make it the organising principle of their lives.
Will is an unemployed straight man who funds his hedonistic lifestyle with the royalties from a song his father wrote. Marcus is a working-class kid who is bullied at school and whose single-mother, Fiona, suffers from chronic depression. One is basically a kid who refuses to grow up; the other is being forced to grow up too fast. The story follows these two "boys" as they try to figure out life and relationships together.
Both characters start off leading lonely, isolated lives. Will's isolation is self-imposed. Declaring defiantly that "all men are islands,” he shuns relationships and the responsibility that comes with them. Marcus shares a close relationship with his mother, but her attacks of depression leave him feeling alone and helpless. He becomes convinced that it isn't enough for them to rely on each other; they need at least one more person to make their family unit complete.
Following conventional reasoning, Marcus decides his mum needs a boyfriend, and fixates on Will. There's just one problem: Will and Fiona aren't the least bit interested in each other. In another movie, that might be the end of it, but Will still holds a fascination for Marcus, who starts hanging out at his house every day after school. The two friendless "boys" spend their afternoons sitting in front of the television together and gradually bond. Marcus begins to depend on Will, and Will, in spite of himself, grows attached to Marcus.
Valuable as it is in itself, the friendship is only a starting point. As Will says, once you open the door to one person, anyone can come in. So Will develops a crush on Rachel, and Marcus develops a crush on Ellie. Marcus wants to do something special for his mum, and Will gets sucked into helping him. Without intending to, Will and Marcus find themselves building their own little community.
Their community-building project stands in contrast to the logic of the conventional nuclear family. For Will and Marcus the community becomes like a family that revolves not around a sexual relationship, but around their friendship. The characters find themselves at a loss to explain this friendship, but it is deeply important to both of them. This kind of community-building has relevance to many people, and especially to asexuals. Without sex as a basis for socialising or making a family, asexuals must find other ways to integrate people into their lives. The film demonstrates one way in which that can be done.
The fact that the movie can tell a story like this makes it very asexual-friendly. There is even one conversation that I think a lot of aces could relate to: Marcus is talking to Will about Ellie and asks him what the difference is between a girl-friend and a girlfriend. Will thinks the answer should be obvious. "Do you wanna touch her?" he asks, and is taken aback by Marcus's reply: "Is that so important?" It's not that Marcus doesn't know about sex; he just doesn't get what the big deal is, as he says, "I wanna be with her all the time. And I wanna tell her things I don't even tell you or mum. And I don't want her to have another boyfriend. I suppose if I could have all those things, I wouldn't really mind if I touched her or not." Marcus is probably speaking from a pre-sexual rather than an a-sexual perspective (does that make a difference…?), but what he describes is essentially a kind of asexual romantic relationship, the kind many asexuals would love to have. Though decidedly sexual, Will comes to see the appeal of this perspective and ends up not only understanding Marcus's feelings, but realising that they are not so different from his own feelings for Rachel.
The final scene of the movie shows the boys sitting down to Christmas dinner with Fiona, Rachel, her son, and others. In the end, both characters learn a lesson about relationships. Will learns that men are not, in fact, islands, but need other people in their lives. Marcus learns that there is more than one way to build a community. Romantic relationships may be part of that, but friendship and family are just as important.
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The Fun of Telling Someone
Stories of coming out from AVEN's discussion forums
I was dreading telling my hard-living, bike riding, beer drinking mate Mick that I am ace and took absolutely ages to work myself up to it, pacing the floor, wringing my hands, the whole shebang... I finally sat down in front of him, looked him in the eyes and said 'Mick, there's something I need to tell you... I'm asexual'. Without a blink of his eye, he blew out his cigarette smoke and said, 'So, what, you wanna sleep with me ?'
It was the perfect response for me! He'd known (as had most of my friends) that I just wasn't interested. Because of his 'macho' image I thought I had to make more of a pretense with him, but he just accepted that that's who I am. Because he loves me he teases me and is always pointing to people he sees as attractive and saying 'Nothing?' and shaking his head...But that's Mick.
- DiscoBison
When I was telling one of my best friends / romantic interests... somehow I wasn't so clear and my friend was trying to figure out where my attraction to models in swimsuits compared with friends in sweatsuits. I still don't know how that came about but it was so funny at the time. I remembered laughing at the thought of what I pictured as a police line filled with women in bikinis and my friends slouched to the sides.
- zoidberger
I don't fully remember the responses, because I was drunk and rambling about myself, very, VERY LOUDLY.
I recall: "But you have to bat for a team! Otherwise you lose the game!"
- Blueflare
"Well that's okay 'cause I'm A-Zsexual." I couldn't stop laughing at the guy.
- Juusan
Her: Maybe you just haven't met the right person.
Me: Maybe you're not into girls... (pause while I remember that she's bi...) Okay, maybe you're not into trees because you haven't found the right tree.
Her: Maybe indeed... *suggestive look*
Me: Changed the subject.
- alittle_iron
My mother and I in her bedroom going through her closet and finding clothes she doesn't want anymore...
Me: "I've learned that I'm asexual Mum."
My mother: (silent, then looking confused) "You mean you can have babies by yourself now?"
Me: "No Mum."
My mother: (looking even more confused) "Then what do you mean?"
Me: "I don't like or want sex."
My mother: (shakes her head then laughs) "So do you want this shirt?"
- starcat
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Featured AVENite: “Fosco”
Name: Lewys
Age: 20
Location: Currently Wales, UK
Preferred Label(s): Asexual
Bio: I love cake and actively drop hoards of the stuff every day. I speak English and French and am learning Amcanian... very hard. I have a brother, who's older, and am owned by a black and white cat called Minstrel, who's got a black spot on his nose. I went to a dance school and learnt ballet, although now I enjoy being far less active and my usual pastime is tea drinking.
How he found AVEN: If I remember correctly I think it was via Wikipedia, I'd heard the term 'asexual' used before, but didn't identify with it until I found and lurked at AVEN. I clicked a link at the bottom of the page and lurked for a few weeks, then signed up; and then posted the worst welcome post ever.
The most important thing about AVEN: I think it's the variety of users at AVEN that makes it special and important. Also the help it provides to everyone; it's important to have one place where everyone can understand and learn about asexuality. AVEN is fantastically friendly and addictive.
Advice for newcomers: You're not alone, especially on AVEN; be yourself, and more importantly, be happy with who you are. If you have any problems or want to discuss anything, you'll always be able to do so on AVEN!
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Rome
by ISAAC
The HBO show Rome is not an asexy show; in fact it is very sexual and shows hard sex pictures. Among the characters of Rome (some historical and some constructed) there are relationships of many kinds: biological or adoptive parent-child, marriage, lovers, loyalty to leader or master, friendship, comradeship... In contrast to the bulk of TV shows where couple love (with implicit or explicit sex) is portrayed as the source of happiness and the end of the problems, here love and sex are the source of the problems.
Servilia promotes the assassination of her lover Caesar. She uses information obtained from a lesbian affair with Octavia but rejects her and threatens to kill her after Caesar’s assassination. Octavia obtains this information by having sex with her brother. Cleopatra fakes her death and induces her lover Antony to commit suicide in order to get advantages from Octavian. Pullo frees his slave Eirene in order to marry her; when he discovers that she is in love with another slave, he kills him. When Eirene expects their first child, he become sexually involved with his servant Gaia, but he still loves his wife. In order to get exclusiveness, Gaia poisons Eirene. When Gaia is mortally injured, she confesses his crime to her husband and he throw her without a funeral. These are mere examples, but every relationship based upon sex does eventually fail.
Parent-child and master-slave and leader-follower relationships work better. Most of them are narrow and never betrayed. Those which are betrayed are by their second element. Brutus kills his almost-father Caesar. Vorenus defects a few times, but Antony accepts him again. Vorena tries to kill his father but he forgives her. These relationships, which are asymmetric and sexless, work better than sex-based relationships.
But there is another kind of relationship, friendship, which is symmetric and sexless. The story shows the narrow friendship between Pullo and Vorenus, two straight military men who befriend each other in the first episode. Although there are many historical inaccuracies in the story, the friendship between Pullo and Vorenus was real. We know their names because Caesar wrote a paragraph in honor of their friendship in his book Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
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Meetup Listings
More and more asexual people from around the world are meeting each other through AVEN – not only online, but in real life, too. Here's a look at some of the most recent meetups and some upcoming meetups. To see more meetups, or to organize your own meetup, hop on over to the Meetup Mart section of the AVEN forums.
February 7 - lunch in York, England
February 7 - meetup at the Sir John Oldcastle in London, England
February 7 - laser tag in Sydney, Australia
February 8 - afternoon meetup at Mississippi Pizza in Portland, Oregon
February 14 - Valentine's Day meet at Freed_Spirit's house in Vancouver, BC
February 21 - lunch at Santorini in Seattle, Washington
February 28 - meetup at Strada in London, England for Tanwen's birthday
March 1 - meetup at Mission Pie in San Francisco
March 14 - meetup to watch Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist in Boston, Massachusetts
March 15 - dinner at Moody's in Chicago, Illinois
March 21 - Sydney, Australia meetup at Darling Harbour
March 21 – Mini-meetup at Fritz's restaurant in St. Louis
March 21 - Dinner at All India Sweets & Restaurant in Vancouver, British Colombia
April 4 - London meetup at Kew Gardens and The Willow Walk
April 18 – Manchester, England meetup at Cornerhouse
April 25 – meetup at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, England
May 9 - Chinese buffet and Armory Museum in Leeds
May 9 – introductory meet & greet for the Asexuality Social Network in northern Virginia
June 6 - proposed London meetup
June 28 - San Francisco, California Pride Parade / Great US Meetup - AVEN's first entry into a pride parade in the US!
July 4 - meetup at Eden Project in Cornwall, England
July 11 - meetup at Alton Towers in England
August 8 - proposed London meetup
October 3 - proposed London meetup
Note: If you do meet people from the Internet, please remember to be safe and meet in a public place. Tell some friends where you are going and when you expect to be back, and make sure you have taxi fare in case of an emergency.
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Announcement: Asexy Dirty Weekend
It’s the meetup everyone’s talking about.
The asexy dirty weekend will be a spectacular landmark event; never has an AVEN meet promised so much excitement. It's packed with exciting activities which include paintball, sightseeing, barbeque, picnic and country walking. And a good frolic!
Paintball will take place at an established and reputable venue near Bath where the game zones include a disused military aircraft. After a day’s exertion, the following day we'll spend time in the historic city of Bath or Bradford-on-Avon. What better way to draw the weekend to a close by relaxing with a barbeque in the evening. There’s something to appeal to everyone, and you don't have to participate in all the activities - just join in on the ones that appeal to you and make merriment with other AVENites.
This event needs you - please see full details in the Meet-up Mart. You just can't shy away from this; it's too great to pass by. Look forward to seeing you there!
-Joshua
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Here's the deal:
AVENues is not written by high-faluting AVEN officials in a secret office somewhere. AVENues is written by you – by real live asexuals, demi-sexuals, not-sure-yet-sexuals, and their allies. That means that keeping things moving in here is up to you.
In every issue, we're going to need a ton of writing, and we're making it easy now by giving you a list of exactly what we want. Here is a list of what AVENues is made of:
News: If you were at (or know of) an event that had something to do with asexuality, we'd like to hear about it!
Opinion and theory: about asexuality. 300-1500 words is the best length.
Media: Have you spotted something asexual in a movie, book, song, or TV show? How are we being represented?
Poems and short stories with asexual themes.
The best of AVEN and beyond: If you're hanging out online and see a quote that deserves publishing or a hardworking asexy warrior who deserves recognition – no matter where from - then tell us about it!
Reader responses: We love getting letters, whether it's agreement with something, disagreement with something, questions, general comments, praise, curses, suggestions, or anything else you can throw at us! And it only takes a minute to answer the latest Food For Thought question.
Art and photography: Anything visual with an asexual or AVEN theme is well worth including, especially photos from AVEN meetups!
Fun: Comics, puzzles, recipes – give our inner child something to do!
Send it all to newsl...@asexuality.org, and remember, we'll write back to you within three business days.
Our next issue of AVENues comes out on Saturday, May 23, 2009. The deadline for submissions to Issue #20 is Wednesday, May 13, 2009.
The full PDF version of this newsletter can be found here: http://www.asexuality.org/avenues/2009_03_28.pdf
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Asexual: A person who does not experience sexual attraction. Unlike celibacy, which is a choice, asexuality is a sexual orientation.
AVEN: The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an online community and resource archive striving to create open and honest discussion about asexuality among asexual and sexual people alike.
AVENues: A bimonthly publication available online, created by members of the AVEN community in order to further showcase our thoughts and promote discussion by and about asexuals.
For more information, visit http://www.asexuality.org.
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CONTENTS:
1. Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder and the Asexual Community: A History
2. News
3. From the Forum
4. "About a Boy"
5. The Fun of Telling Someone
6. Featured AVENite: "Fosco"
7. "Rome"
8. Meetup Listings
The PDF version of this newsletter also contains art and comics not available in text-only format.
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Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder and the Asexual Community: A History
by MANDERWLITER
Since last June, there have been a few of us in the asexual community working on a project concerning asexuality and a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) saying, roughly, that not being interested in sex is a mental disorder. We’ve been keeping a low profile during the course of this project, but now that the project is over, we wanted to explain the situation more fully, because it is a complex matter with no clear answers. First, I’ll give a bit of history that I’ve slowly been piecing together. I’ll start with some general background and then the history of the diagnosis. Then I’ll backtrack to look more closely at the context in which the diagnosis was created, then move ahead to the considerable controversy surrounding it over the past decade or so. This should help us to understand where we fit into this larger picture, which should shed light on the form that our project took.
The first version of the DSM was published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA, not to be confused with the American Psychological Association, also called the APA) in 1952. Since then, there have been DSM-II (1968), DSM-III (1980), DSM-III-R (1987, R=Revision), DSM-IV (1994), and DSM-IV-TR (2000, TR=Text Revision). DSM-V is scheduled to be published in 2012. The DSM is widely used by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers.
William Masters and Virginia E. Johnson’s book Human Sexual Response was published in 1966. Focusing largely on sexual physiology, they emphasized the (physiological) similarities between male and female sexuality. A hallmark of that book was a four stage (linear) model of human sexual response: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. In 1970, their book Human Sexual Inadequacy was published, which was a book on sexual problems and how to treat them. This book became fundamental to much subsequent sex-therapy. Their model did not focus on sexual desire, but rather on how and whether the genitalia functioned. In 1977, two sex therapists, independently of each other, proposed a diagnosis for lack of interest in sex. Helen Singer Kaplan called it “Hypoactive Sexual Desire” (HSD) and Harold Leif called it “Inhibited Sexual Desire” (ISD). Kaplan has written much more extensively on the subject, and to incorporate this “problem” into the existing sexual model, she proposed the “triphasic” model, based on Masters and Johnson: desire, excitement, and orgasm. (Sometimes resolution was added as well, but it is typically ignored because not a lot of “dysfunctions” happen there.) Kaplan first became aware of this “problem” in studying cases where sex therapy failed: failure was especially common in situations not where the genitalia did not function “properly” but when one of the partners simply wasn’t interested in sex. To announce this shocking news—some people aren’t interested in sex!—to the world of sex therapy, these two therapists invented this new “disorder”.
Before the DSM-III was published in 1980, there was no standardized way of categorizing “sexual dysfunctions,” though Masters and Johnson’s work was influential. In DSM-III, various “sexual dysfunctions” were added, largely based on Kaplan and Leif’s modifications of Masters and Johnson’s work. Not coincidentally, Kaplan and Leif were both members of the committee responsible for writing this part of DSM-III. Very little empirical work had been done on “sexual dysfunctions” when these were added to the DSM, so the system there was created with minimal scientific foundation. “Inhibited Sexual Desire” officially became a mental disorder and asexuality did as a consequence, even though not mentioned by name. In the DSM-III, ISD is described as “Persistent and pervasive inhibition of sexual desire.”
In DSM-III-R (1987) ISD’s name was changed to Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) because “Inhibited” suggested psychodynamic etiology (think Freud, his followers and psychoanalysis), and the DSM-III-R aimed to be atheoretical. Also, the diagnosis was subdivided into HSDD and “Sexual Aversion Disorder” (SAD – this diagnosis is controversial and rarely used). There were a few other changes as well. A subtyping was added for all the sexual dysfunctions. Diagnoses could be lifelong or acquired. (For HSDD, “lifelong” is where the person has never been interested in sex, and “acquired” is where they used to be but aren’t anymore.) They could be generalized or situational (“generalized” is where the person has no interest in any sexual activity with anyone or alone, and “situational” is where they lack sexual desire towards their current partner but may masturbate and/or have desire for people other than their current partner.) Also, diagnoses could be psychogenic or biogenic (psychologically or biologically caused; the latter is not a mental disorder.) Also added to the definition of HSDD was a lack of fantasy. This is bizarre and self-contradictory because people with the “situational” subtype often do have sexual fantasies, so technically, “situational” HSDD isn’t HSDD, but you’re supposed to ignore that fact. All the authors on the subject do. The new diagnosis read: “Persistently or recurrently deficient or absent sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity.”
In 1994, the DSM-IV was published. In that version, the committee working on the sexual dysfunctions was told that they could make no changes without research to support them. Since they only found seven studies on HSDD and two on SAD, this prevented them from making any changes. Ironically, a requirement that changes must be supported empirically seems as though it would help root the diagnosis scientifically, but in this case, it forced them to leave the diagnosis as scientifically unfounded as when they started. Additionally, the criterion that a person must experience “marked distress or interpersonal difficulty” in order to be diagnosed with HSDD was added to all of the diagnoses in the “Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders.” This reflected a change made throughout the DSM—these criteria (the clinical significance criteria) took different forms in other parts of the DSM. Their inclusion in the “Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders” was done quickly and with little thought of consequences. Some members of the sexual dysfunction committee don’t even remember discussing the issue. Interestingly, the introduction of this criterion led to a self-contradiction in the diagnosis: in lifelong cases, the DSM says that the time of onset should be regarded as puberty (this is what Leif recommended in his ’77 piece). This means that someone who has never been interested in sex and is not distressed about it does not have HSDD, but if they later do become distressed about, it means that they have had HSDD since puberty, even when they didn’t have HSDD. What is interesting about this is that to date, the whole substance of the asexual community’s argument that DSM does not call asexuality a disorder consists of emphasizing the clinical significance criterion.
The DSM-IV-TR was published in 2000, with no changes in HSDD. This brings us up to the present version of the diagnosis. Now I want to backtrack and look more carefully at the historical context in which it was created.
Perhaps the most insightful commentary on the historical background of the creation ISD/HSDD comes from two highly respected sex therapists, Sandra Leiblum and Raymond Rosen, in their introduction to a book called Sexual Desire Disorders. They observe that sexual desire is rarely viewed neutrally and that drives either to suppress or excite it are commonly seen, often changing from one generation to the next. In Western cultures, the 1970s was a time for the latter. Enthusiasm for all things sexual abounded with the social message about sex being “Sex is good for you, and the more the better.” They write,
“Sexual enthusiasts were championed by the media, and those individuals for whom sex was a source of neither great interest nor great pleasure felt alienated and abandoned in this new sexual climate. It is, therefore, not surprising that complaints involving insufficient sexual desire (but rarely the reverse!) first became recognized as a discrete clinical entity.”
The asexual community cites the fact that homosexuality used to be regarded as a mental disorder to challenge the APA’s authority to regard asexuality as a mental disorder. Homosexuality was removed from DSM-II in 1973 (actually, it was replaced with a diagnosis that said homosexuality was only a disorder if the person was distressed about it). One scholar argued that the creation of ISD can be seen in psychiatry’s long history of giving itself the right to decide what is and is not “normal” sexuality. What I found through my research into the history of ISD/HSDD is that the relationship between the pathologization of a lack of interest in sex is far closer to the pathologization of homosexuality and other non-standard sexual practices than I had expected.
Kaplan and Leif both had psychoanalytic backgrounds, and, it seems, they operated with a psychodynamic theory of etiology for HSDD/ISD (etiology is a term meaning the cause of something, especially in medicine). From what I can gather, Kaplan’s view was that desiring (fairly vanilla) sex in loving heterosexual relationship was natural. Anyone who did not want this must be inhibiting their natural heterosexuality. As such, she saw all of the following as instances of HSD because of lack of desire for the right kind of sex: the fetishist, the pedophiliac, the exhibitionist, the masochist, the homosexual (These are the terms she uses. I will forgo playing “Which of these things are not like the others?”). Kaplan actually thought that all instances of not wanting (the right kind of) sex, along with not wanting any sex at all, were basically caused by the same thing: anxiety. In a later work, she ascribed it to people “turning themselves off.”
I now want to move ahead to 1998, the year Viagra was approved by the FDA to treat “erectile dysfunction.” The pharmaceutical companies quickly realized that this drug was very profitable. If only they could create the Viagra for women, just think how much more money they could make! But there’s a problem. What exactly is the “pink pill” supposed to fix? What is the female equivalent of not being able to get an erection? So they had to invent a new disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). The same year, the Sexual Function Health Council of the American Foundation of Urologic Disease convened the first “Consensus Development Panel on Female Sexual Dysfunction” to create a way to classify FDD.
In a standard disease-mongering practice—giving inflated estimates of prevalence—the consensus document declares, “[FDS] is age-related and highly prevalent, affecting 20-50% of women” (by age-related, they probably mean the fact that many women’s sexual interest declines after menopause and declare this a disorder, despite its being a normal part of life for many women). The supposed justification for this panel, according to their consensus statement, was that “A major barrier to the development of clinical research and practice has been the absence of a well defined, broadly accepted diagnostic framework and classification for female sexual dysfunction.” So what did this highly publicized consensus document created by leading researchers on female sexuality come up with? Various definitions were proposed and decided on by secret voting, and basically, they rehashed the sexual dysfunctions of the DSM-IV with a few slight modifications. By the way, the panel was funded by Eli Lilly/ICOS, Pharmaceuticals, Pentech Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Inc., Procter & Gamble, Schering-Plough, Solway Pharmaceuticals, TAP Pharmaceuticals, and Zonagen.
In response, a counter conference was organized by feminist scholar and clinical psychologist Leonore Tieffer. Meeting in summer 2000, a group of feminist clinicians and social scientists created a “manifesto” and planned a campaign to promote their “New View of Women’s Sexual Problems” (you can visit their webpage at http://newviewcampaign.org/). They state, “We believe that a fundamental barrier to understanding women's sexuality is the medical classification scheme in current use, developed by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders.” This is a direct challenge to the Consensus Development Panel for FSD. They have three main criticisms of the current model: 1) Non-equivalence of male and female sexuality. Studies that have actually asked women what sexual difficulties (if any) they have have found that the things actual women complain of don’t really fit well into the DSM’s framework. 2) Erasing the relational context of sexuality. Many women’s sexual problems are, at root, relationship problems. The DSM’s approach to “sexual dysfunctions” focuses entirely on individuals. 3) Ignoring difference among women. To correct these, they propose a “New View of Women’s Sexual Problems,” a radically different way of understanding sexual problems (they use the word “problems” rather than “dysfunctions” because they feel that a medical model is inappropriate for many such problems).
In addition to the New View, there have been a few other lines of criticism. One criticism is that the linear model doesn’t fit the actual experiences of women very well, and a more cyclical model involving positive feedback loops is proposed. Also, it is claimed that there is a sizable minority of women who report never experiencing active desire for sex but can become sexually excited in the right context when a sexual encounter is initiated by a sexual partner; this is termed “responsive desire”. A lack of responsive desire was added to the definition of HSDD in the above mentioned consensus document. Another line of criticism is that some reasons for not being interested in sex should be seen as adaptive rather than maladaptive (Everyone has problems sometimes, and some ways of dealing with our problems are healthy and productive. These are adaptive responses. Some ways of dealing with problems only make things worse. These are maladaptive). Some major causes of loss of sexual interest include relationship problems, fatigue and stress. Feeling that loss of sexual desire in these contexts represents an adaptive response, some have argued that labeling it a disorder makes little sense. The third major criticism has to do with the clinical significance requirement: some people don’t like the fact that people have to be distressed to call something a sexual dysfunction, and serious proposals to remove this requirement have been made.
Now our story moves away from academic debates in journals and conferences and moves a little closer to home. There has only been an asexual community since about July 2001. AVEN’s forums have been up since May 2002, and the first reference to HSDD I can find is from September 2002. Responses to it have been negative. In media articles and university lectures, we have stressed the clinical significance criterion. Since we’re not distressed, asexuality is not a disorder according the DSM. A number of us have been itching to challenge the APA on this for quite some time but felt that we were too small, too little researched, too powerless to do anything. Before convincing people that our sexual orientation isn’t a disorder, we have to convince them that it exists.
This mindset changed in June 2008 when David Jay decided to visit some LGBT lobbying organizations, while in Washington DC for his job. In a story he explains in his blog, he had an unexpected meeting with Mara Keisling, Executive Director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. She asked him, "Are you all doing anything with the DSM?"
He responded, "I'd love to, but I don't think we have the capacity to target someone like the APA right now."
"You'd be surprised.” Indeed we have been.
After blogging about this conversation, he made a post on AVEN trying to get volunteers for a project aimed at generating discussion around the subject. I was the only person to volunteer in response to it. After first learning about asexuality, I had tried to learn everything I possibly could about the subject. I had thought that perhaps there could be something to be learned from the literature on lifelong HSDD, so I had looked into that literature, only to find out that acquired HSDD is much more studied, and I could find nothing on lifelong HSDD except for a few case studies here and there. However, I did find Kaplan’s work, which convinced me that the diagnosis had no scientific foundation whatsoever. Once the project got underway, I did some reading to get myself up to speed on the literature. One of the first things to come from this project was a complete rewrite of the Wikipedia article on HSDD.
The first problem that we had to deal with was that none of us is an expert in human sexuality, a psychiatrist, or a clinical psychologist. There isn’t much research on asexuality, and we couldn’t come up with any good reason why the DSM people would actually care what we have to say. The other big difficulty is that a lot of people see therapists complaining of low sexual desire. In the U.S., being diagnosed with something is an important part of getting insurance reimbursement, so simply advocating that the diagnosis be deleted did not seem a viable option. Our initial plan was to interview people who were experts and post interviews on a blog. Maybe one of the DSM people might care enough to read our blog? Or maybe one of our interviewees might be able to make our case to the DSM people for us? David recruited two AVENites to help with logistics: one to manage our blog and one to keep everyone on task.
In a meeting on Skype, we decided that it would be helpful if we had a few more people to help with interviews. So DJ made another post on AVEN (this one was in July) trying to recruit psychology students to help out. Three people volunteered. Two couldn’t figure out why we wanted to get asexuality into the DSM (facepalm) and ended up not joining our team, so we only got one additional member.
Some of you may recall a paper on asexuality by people at the Kinsey Institute—Nicole Prause and Cynthia Graham. The paper was mostly written by Prause, then a grad student. We were happily surprised to discover that Graham was one of the members of the sexual dysfunctions workgroup. Also, Lori Brotto, who has been involved in studying asexuality and has said nice things about us in the media, was added to the sexual dysfunctions workgroup several months after the rest of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders group was put together. So we were very excited about her addition because we knew she liked us.
DJ contacted Dr. Graham (and mentioned our project to Dr. Brotto before we knew about her addition to the committee), and discussed our interest in one of their meetings, and it was suggested (in a very passive voice kind of way) that we discuss the matter over the phone with the chair of the sexual dysfunction workgroup. So DJ and I eventually set up a time to talk to him, and we had a fifteen minute conversation back in September.
We gave him our spiel: we mentioned places were asexuality has been brought up in the literature; we pointed out that questions were asked but answers were scare. Our interest was in generating dialogue with experts to try to generate ideas around these questions. He said that the workgroup would be interested in this. Whether this was genuine interest on his part or only reflected interest on the part of one or more committee members, I have no idea.
This made our original idea of a blog unnecessary because the workgroup was already interested in what we had to say, much to our surprise. A very pleasant surprise. The project was based on our self-presentation as very nice asexual activists who had no interest in telling them how to do their jobs (or trying to use political pressure to make them do what we wanted). We weren’t those kinds of activists at all (subtext: we’re very different from the trans-activists, even though we secretly like them. It was, after all, a trans-activist who encouraged us to do this thing in the first place). This part of our strategy was the reason that the project was discussed very little in the asexual community.
At that point, we needed to start doing interviews. DJ recruited another member of the asexual community, who had a master’s degree in psychology, and we had to start putting together a list of questions to ask in interviews. Conducting interviews proved to be a slow process, and we ended up getting a grand total of seven, after contacting over a hundred people. Around late January early February, we needed to decide what exactly we would send the committee. What we eventually sent was a report with a cover page, an abstract, a table of contents, an introduction, a literature review, a list of questions with commentary and motivation, interview methods, interview analysis, three personal statements, and a conclusion. Also, interview transcripts were included as an appendix, as was a piece on “personal distress” I wrote and a paper published by an interviewee who requested it be included. Because interviewees were told that we would send interviews to the chair of the sexual dysfunctions workgroup, we felt that we had consent to share them in that venue but not in any other. As such, we are not making these available to members of the asexual community (or anyone else other than the chair of the sexual dysfunctions committee, and we’re not really sure what he’s going to do with them).
We emailed the final project to the chair of the sexual dysfunctions workgroup on March 19. So the question is, what will the sexual dysfunctions look like in DSM-V? I haven’t a clue. Perhaps we will have to wait until 2012 to find out.
A fully cited version of this article can be found on mandrewliter's website at http://asexystuff.blogspot.com/2009/03/hypoactive-sexual-desire-disorder-and.html.
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News
It's election season on AVEN, and Fosco has been chosen as a new moderator for the Welcome Area. Elections for a new Project Team moderator are still ongoing.
The British television channel BBC3 released a documentary as part of the Natalie Cassidy's Real Britain series that featured the lives of several asexuals as part of an investigation into “our last sexual taboos”.
Also, the independent movie group Issey Ronaldo Films has released a short film entitled The Cold Shoulder, depicting the experiences of an asexual person and a sexual person in a romantic relationship with each other. It has been largely well-received by the asexual community.
Other than that, asexuality has been mentioned on the human sexuality website Carnal Nation, the Philadelphia Sex and Relationships Examiner, the news website NewsWire.co.nz, the Alternatives to Marriage Project website, the Gay and Lesbian Times, the Kinsey Institute Sexuality Information Service, two Finnish magazines, the Independent newspaper in the UK, the website reddit.com, and the LGBTQ handbook at Oxford University in England. And even more people are looking to speak to asexuals, including a PhD student in sociology at the University of Warwick in England, two psychologists at the National University of Ireland, a writer in London, a journalist in Chicago, a freelance journalist in the UK, a film student at New York University, a national Spanish television station, a journalism student at Arizona State University, and the documentary production company Pink Sneaker Productions.
There's also a new asexuality zine out – Weird Terrain, produced by an AVENite. And there's a new website for asexuals from Slovenia, as well as one called Asexual Explorations (based on the blog previously featured in our Internet Spotlight) for the promotion of the academic study of asexuality. Meanwhile, Apositive.org went through a software upgrade and is now back up and running.
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From the Forum
A selection of posts from the discussion boards on the AVEN website
Frankly, I have issues with your claim that a romantic relationship automatically means spending more time together than with anyone else. That's a degree of "seriousness" in a relationship, not a part of the structure of a romantic relationship inherently. When it hits the degree of seriousness where it can seriously be called "monopolizing" the other person's time, it gets labeled "co-dependence" and it's not healthy.
I know couples who don't sit next to each other at group meals, and "best friends" who call each other to meet up for every single meal. Two of my friends at college had each other's schedules in their rooms, and went on the same abroad program at the same time, even though they're in different majors. I went on long weekend getaway vacations with my best friend in high school, but I often didn't have the faintest idea whether or not my last boyfriend was ever in town, and "defaulted" to calling my best friend and seeing what she was up to when Friday night rolled around.
Instead of inventing "new" terms or structures for relationships, I think we'd be better off challenging the assumptions we make about the old ones.
- thecynicalromantic, March 1, in Asexual Relationships
As much as I love visibility and education, I've been frustrated lately by the number of people who jump up at the smallest sign of a person who is less than thrilled about sex and shout, "They must be asexual!" While it's certainly possible that some of these people (including fictional and historical characters) are indeed ace, I think many of us are getting overzealous in the application of the label. I can't help but feel that it's only perpetuating the stereotype that sexual people want all sex, all the time. What some of us (myself included, as well as many sexual people, I'm sure) forget is that it's entirely possible to be disinterested in or even disgusted by certain aspects of sex, and still be entirely sexual.
- Raisin, March 6, in Asexual Musings and Rantings
One of the things I love so much about AVEN is that we're not separatist. We don't box all the "similar" people together and give them their own space to ignore everyone else from. Some badly managed forums have spaces for, say, lesbians and spaces for gays and spaces for trans etc. and it just reinforces the idea that all these kinds of people are so vastly different from each other as to be barely going through the same problems at all... (sorry, the divisions in the Queer/LGBTQIA community is one of my concerns at the moment). Whereas here on AVEN sexual, ace, demi, grey-A, hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan- and a-romantic, repulsed and indifferent, male, female, trans, intersex, all kinds of people from all over the world can use the same forums. Nobody here is getting upset at other people just because of what they define as.
Which is actually, I think, why so many of us are willing to discuss gender. We know we won't be shouted down.
- Elliott Ford, March 19, in Mod Forum
From the Forum posts belong to their respective authors and do not necessarily represent the official viewpoint of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network. If you've seen a posting on AVEN that you like, send it to us at newsl...@asexuality.org.
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About A Boy
by BLUE ICE-TEA
About A Boy
Starring: Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult
Written by: Peter Hedges, Chris Weitz, Paul Weitz
Directed by: Chris Weitz & Paul Weitz
U.K.; 2002; 101 min.
About A Boy is a movie about relationships - how we build them and why they matter. A single middle-aged man and a lonely twelve-year-old boy develop a friendship that becomes the hub of a broader community. It's a storyline with a lot of relevance to asexuals, but the relevance goes beyond the asexual community to a broader group of people: those who value friendship and seek to make it the organising principle of their lives.
Will is an unemployed straight man who funds his hedonistic lifestyle with the royalties from a song his father wrote. Marcus is a working-class kid who is bullied at school and whose single-mother, Fiona, suffers from chronic depression. One is basically a kid who refuses to grow up; the other is being forced to grow up too fast. The story follows these two "boys" as they try to figure out life and relationships together.
Both characters start off leading lonely, isolated lives. Will's isolation is self-imposed. Declaring defiantly that "all men are islands,” he shuns relationships and the responsibility that comes with them. Marcus shares a close relationship with his mother, but her attacks of depression leave him feeling alone and helpless. He becomes convinced that it isn't enough for them to rely on each other; they need at least one more person to make their family unit complete.
Following conventional reasoning, Marcus decides his mum needs a boyfriend, and fixates on Will. There's just one problem: Will and Fiona aren't the least bit interested in each other. In another movie, that might be the end of it, but Will still holds a fascination for Marcus, who starts hanging out at his house every day after school. The two friendless "boys" spend their afternoons sitting in front of the television together and gradually bond. Marcus begins to depend on Will, and Will, in spite of himself, grows attached to Marcus.
Valuable as it is in itself, the friendship is only a starting point. As Will says, once you open the door to one person, anyone can come in. So Will develops a crush on Rachel, and Marcus develops a crush on Ellie. Marcus wants to do something special for his mum, and Will gets sucked into helping him. Without intending to, Will and Marcus find themselves building their own little community.
Their community-building project stands in contrast to the logic of the conventional nuclear family. For Will and Marcus the community becomes like a family that revolves not around a sexual relationship, but around their friendship. The characters find themselves at a loss to explain this friendship, but it is deeply important to both of them. This kind of community-building has relevance to many people, and especially to asexuals. Without sex as a basis for socialising or making a family, asexuals must find other ways to integrate people into their lives. The film demonstrates one way in which that can be done.
The fact that the movie can tell a story like this makes it very asexual-friendly. There is even one conversation that I think a lot of aces could relate to: Marcus is talking to Will about Ellie and asks him what the difference is between a girl-friend and a girlfriend. Will thinks the answer should be obvious. "Do you wanna touch her?" he asks, and is taken aback by Marcus's reply: "Is that so important?" It's not that Marcus doesn't know about sex; he just doesn't get what the big deal is, as he says, "I wanna be with her all the time. And I wanna tell her things I don't even tell you or mum. And I don't want her to have another boyfriend. I suppose if I could have all those things, I wouldn't really mind if I touched her or not." Marcus is probably speaking from a pre-sexual rather than an a-sexual perspective (does that make a difference…?), but what he describes is essentially a kind of asexual romantic relationship, the kind many asexuals would love to have. Though decidedly sexual, Will comes to see the appeal of this perspective and ends up not only understanding Marcus's feelings, but realising that they are not so different from his own feelings for Rachel.
The final scene of the movie shows the boys sitting down to Christmas dinner with Fiona, Rachel, her son, and others. In the end, both characters learn a lesson about relationships. Will learns that men are not, in fact, islands, but need other people in their lives. Marcus learns that there is more than one way to build a community. Romantic relationships may be part of that, but friendship and family are just as important.
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The Fun of Telling Someone
Stories of coming out from AVEN's discussion forums
I was dreading telling my hard-living, bike riding, beer drinking mate Mick that I am ace and took absolutely ages to work myself up to it, pacing the floor, wringing my hands, the whole shebang... I finally sat down in front of him, looked him in the eyes and said 'Mick, there's something I need to tell you... I'm asexual'. Without a blink of his eye, he blew out his cigarette smoke and said, 'So, what, you wanna sleep with me ?'
It was the perfect response for me! He'd known (as had most of my friends) that I just wasn't interested. Because of his 'macho' image I thought I had to make more of a pretense with him, but he just accepted that that's who I am. Because he loves me he teases me and is always pointing to people he sees as attractive and saying 'Nothing?' and shaking his head...But that's Mick.
- DiscoBison
When I was telling one of my best friends / romantic interests... somehow I wasn't so clear and my friend was trying to figure out where my attraction to models in swimsuits compared with friends in sweatsuits. I still don't know how that came about but it was so funny at the time. I remembered laughing at the thought of what I pictured as a police line filled with women in bikinis and my friends slouched to the sides.
- zoidberger
I don't fully remember the responses, because I was drunk and rambling about myself, very, VERY LOUDLY.
I recall: "But you have to bat for a team! Otherwise you lose the game!"
- Blueflare
"Well that's okay 'cause I'm A-Zsexual." I couldn't stop laughing at the guy.
- Juusan
Her: Maybe you just haven't met the right person.
Me: Maybe you're not into girls... (pause while I remember that she's bi...) Okay, maybe you're not into trees because you haven't found the right tree.
Her: Maybe indeed... *suggestive look*
Me: Changed the subject.
- alittle_iron
My mother and I in her bedroom going through her closet and finding clothes she doesn't want anymore...
Me: "I've learned that I'm asexual Mum."
My mother: (silent, then looking confused) "You mean you can have babies by yourself now?"
Me: "No Mum."
My mother: (looking even more confused) "Then what do you mean?"
Me: "I don't like or want sex."
My mother: (shakes her head then laughs) "So do you want this shirt?"
- starcat
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Featured AVENite: “Fosco”
Name: Lewys
Age: 20
Location: Currently Wales, UK
Preferred Label(s): Asexual
Bio: I love cake and actively drop hoards of the stuff every day. I speak English and French and am learning Amcanian... very hard. I have a brother, who's older, and am owned by a black and white cat called Minstrel, who's got a black spot on his nose. I went to a dance school and learnt ballet, although now I enjoy being far less active and my usual pastime is tea drinking.
How he found AVEN: If I remember correctly I think it was via Wikipedia, I'd heard the term 'asexual' used before, but didn't identify with it until I found and lurked at AVEN. I clicked a link at the bottom of the page and lurked for a few weeks, then signed up; and then posted the worst welcome post ever.
The most important thing about AVEN: I think it's the variety of users at AVEN that makes it special and important. Also the help it provides to everyone; it's important to have one place where everyone can understand and learn about asexuality. AVEN is fantastically friendly and addictive.
Advice for newcomers: You're not alone, especially on AVEN; be yourself, and more importantly, be happy with who you are. If you have any problems or want to discuss anything, you'll always be able to do so on AVEN!
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Rome
by ISAAC
The HBO show Rome is not an asexy show; in fact it is very sexual and shows hard sex pictures. Among the characters of Rome (some historical and some constructed) there are relationships of many kinds: biological or adoptive parent-child, marriage, lovers, loyalty to leader or master, friendship, comradeship... In contrast to the bulk of TV shows where couple love (with implicit or explicit sex) is portrayed as the source of happiness and the end of the problems, here love and sex are the source of the problems.
Servilia promotes the assassination of her lover Caesar. She uses information obtained from a lesbian affair with Octavia but rejects her and threatens to kill her after Caesar’s assassination. Octavia obtains this information by having sex with her brother. Cleopatra fakes her death and induces her lover Antony to commit suicide in order to get advantages from Octavian. Pullo frees his slave Eirene in order to marry her; when he discovers that she is in love with another slave, he kills him. When Eirene expects their first child, he become sexually involved with his servant Gaia, but he still loves his wife. In order to get exclusiveness, Gaia poisons Eirene. When Gaia is mortally injured, she confesses his crime to her husband and he throw her without a funeral. These are mere examples, but every relationship based upon sex does eventually fail.
Parent-child and master-slave and leader-follower relationships work better. Most of them are narrow and never betrayed. Those which are betrayed are by their second element. Brutus kills his almost-father Caesar. Vorenus defects a few times, but Antony accepts him again. Vorena tries to kill his father but he forgives her. These relationships, which are asymmetric and sexless, work better than sex-based relationships.
But there is another kind of relationship, friendship, which is symmetric and sexless. The story shows the narrow friendship between Pullo and Vorenus, two straight military men who befriend each other in the first episode. Although there are many historical inaccuracies in the story, the friendship between Pullo and Vorenus was real. We know their names because Caesar wrote a paragraph in honor of their friendship in his book Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
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Meetup Listings
More and more asexual people from around the world are meeting each other through AVEN – not only online, but in real life, too. Here's a look at some of the most recent meetups and some upcoming meetups. To see more meetups, or to organize your own meetup, hop on over to the Meetup Mart section of the AVEN forums.
February 7 - lunch in York, England
February 7 - meetup at the Sir John Oldcastle in London, England
February 7 - laser tag in Sydney, Australia
February 8 - afternoon meetup at Mississippi Pizza in Portland, Oregon
February 14 - Valentine's Day meet at Freed_Spirit's house in Vancouver, BC
February 21 - lunch at Santorini in Seattle, Washington
February 28 - meetup at Strada in London, England for Tanwen's birthday
March 1 - meetup at Mission Pie in San Francisco
March 14 - meetup to watch Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist in Boston, Massachusetts
March 15 - dinner at Moody's in Chicago, Illinois
March 21 - Sydney, Australia meetup at Darling Harbour
March 21 – Mini-meetup at Fritz's restaurant in St. Louis
March 21 - Dinner at All India Sweets & Restaurant in Vancouver, British Colombia
April 4 - London meetup at Kew Gardens and The Willow Walk
April 18 – Manchester, England meetup at Cornerhouse
April 25 – meetup at Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, England
May 9 - Chinese buffet and Armory Museum in Leeds
May 9 – introductory meet & greet for the Asexuality Social Network in northern Virginia
June 6 - proposed London meetup
June 28 - San Francisco, California Pride Parade / Great US Meetup - AVEN's first entry into a pride parade in the US!
July 4 - meetup at Eden Project in Cornwall, England
July 11 - meetup at Alton Towers in England
August 8 - proposed London meetup
October 3 - proposed London meetup
Note: If you do meet people from the Internet, please remember to be safe and meet in a public place. Tell some friends where you are going and when you expect to be back, and make sure you have taxi fare in case of an emergency.
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Announcement: Asexy Dirty Weekend
It’s the meetup everyone’s talking about.
The asexy dirty weekend will be a spectacular landmark event; never has an AVEN meet promised so much excitement. It's packed with exciting activities which include paintball, sightseeing, barbeque, picnic and country walking. And a good frolic!
Paintball will take place at an established and reputable venue near Bath where the game zones include a disused military aircraft. After a day’s exertion, the following day we'll spend time in the historic city of Bath or Bradford-on-Avon. What better way to draw the weekend to a close by relaxing with a barbeque in the evening. There’s something to appeal to everyone, and you don't have to participate in all the activities - just join in on the ones that appeal to you and make merriment with other AVENites.
This event needs you - please see full details in the Meet-up Mart. You just can't shy away from this; it's too great to pass by. Look forward to seeing you there!
-Joshua
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Here's the deal:
AVENues is not written by high-faluting AVEN officials in a secret office somewhere. AVENues is written by you – by real live asexuals, demi-sexuals, not-sure-yet-sexuals, and their allies. That means that keeping things moving in here is up to you.
In every issue, we're going to need a ton of writing, and we're making it easy now by giving you a list of exactly what we want. Here is a list of what AVENues is made of:
News: If you were at (or know of) an event that had something to do with asexuality, we'd like to hear about it!
Opinion and theory: about asexuality. 300-1500 words is the best length.
Media: Have you spotted something asexual in a movie, book, song, or TV show? How are we being represented?
Poems and short stories with asexual themes.
The best of AVEN and beyond: If you're hanging out online and see a quote that deserves publishing or a hardworking asexy warrior who deserves recognition – no matter where from - then tell us about it!
Reader responses: We love getting letters, whether it's agreement with something, disagreement with something, questions, general comments, praise, curses, suggestions, or anything else you can throw at us! And it only takes a minute to answer the latest Food For Thought question.
Art and photography: Anything visual with an asexual or AVEN theme is well worth including, especially photos from AVEN meetups!
Fun: Comics, puzzles, recipes – give our inner child something to do!
Send it all to newsl...@asexuality.org, and remember, we'll write back to you within three business days.
Our next issue of AVENues comes out on Saturday, May 23, 2009. The deadline for submissions to Issue #20 is Wednesday, May 13, 2009.
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