Asexuality: prevalence and associated factors in a national probability sample

Journal of Sex Research, August, 2004 by Anthony F. Bogaert

Another possibility is that our conception of sexual orientation as an attraction to another person does not adequately address some women's subjective experience of sexual arousal and attraction. Traditional sexual orientation questions have an inherent "target-oriented" view of sexual response and arousal; that is, they imply that sexual response and arousal must be directed toward or targeted to someone or to a particular sex. These questions may not adequately capture the nature of some women's sexuality. The distinction between proceptive and receptive sexual desire may be relevant in this regard (Beach, 1976; Wallen, 1995). Proceptive desire--the urge to seek out and initiate sexual activity--may be more common in men than in women, whereas receptive desire--the capacity to become aroused upon encountering certain sexual circumstances--may characterize women's sexuality more than men's (e.g., Baumeister, 2000; Diamond, 2003). Proceptive desire relative to receptive desire may be more conducive to a target-oriented view of sexual arousal and thus may capture the traditional and hence more male-oriented conceptions of sexual attraction. It is also interesting that recent data using psychophysical measures of genital response are challenging the assumption that women's sexual arousal patterns are like men's (Chivers, Rieger, Latty, & Bailey, in press). Chivers et al. (in press) have found that, unlike those of men, women's sexual arousal patterns are not primarily targeted toward the other sex (i.e., sex-specific). Instead, women have a bisexual arousal pattern to sexual stimuli, being physiologically aroused to both male and female stimuli. How these findings relate to the present gender difference in asexuality is unknown, but they do underscore the fact that sexual arousal and attraction processes may play fundamentally different roles in men's and women's sexuality.

Contrary to prediction, a younger age was not related to asexuality. In fact, asexual people were slightly older than sexual people. This result does not give support to the idea that many asexual individuals are "presexual" or in an early developmental stage prior to adult-oriented sexual attraction. Thus, although adolescents and some young adults probably vary in their awareness or experience of first sexual attraction (with a variety of social and psychological circumstances and biological aspects contributing to such awareness or experience), it would seem that most of the asexual individuals in this sample probably had had enough time to encounter the necessary circumstances to initiate sexual attraction experiences. Either they did not want to enter into such circumstances because of their asexual natures, or they had passed a critical age window beyond which these social and psychological circumstances were no longer sufficient to initiate sexual attraction to others.

The present study attempted to begin to explore factors associated with asexuality, a relatively uncharted area of sexual variability. A first limitation of this type of exploratory investigation is that the results are preliminary and in need of replication. Second, although the size and nature (national probability) of the sample make these data the best currently available to test ideas relevant to this investigation, there are a number of sample and survey limitations that need to be addressed. For example, the interview and questionnaire protocol were designed as a general survey on sexuality and STDs (i.e., HIV/AIDS). As a result, the questions were not specifically designed to test issues related to the development of asexuality, and thus a number of questions relevant to the developmental history of sexual and asexual people (e.g., early sexual life, fantasy, masturbation) were not included.