Acceptance of Asexuality
Isaac Newton. Florence Nightingale. Nikola Tesla. What do all these people have in common? They are all believed to have been asexual. Defined by the lack of sexual attraction to anyone, asexuality is a the disputed fourth sexual orientation that affects at least 1% of the human population. Still recently new to the mainstream, asexuality didn’t become a real topic of conversation until the internet age, and it wasn’t even until 2001 when the term asexual was coined. Now seeking recognition from being most invisible, the aseuxal community is facing strifes from both the straight and queer communities, both of which struggles to validate asexuality as a sexual orientation, despite scientific studies telling them to
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Asexuality does not mean “I hate sex” or “I can’t have sex,” it’s a sexual orientation based on attraction not action. Due to hormones and natural body reactions, asexuals can enjoy and orgasim from sexual encounters, but they do not not originally desire the sexual encounter. Some asexuals will engage in sex, and find it completely boring and unarousing, and some asexuals find sex completely repulsive and choose not to have any sexual interaction. Just like being a virgin doesn’t mean you’re not heterosexual or homosexual, having sex or even enjoying sex does not make you less of an …show more content…
Of course, the internet is a luxury that asexuals twenty years ago didn’t have, but asexuality shouldn’t be a thing somebody has to go out of their way to look for to better understand themselves. Everyone should know that sometimes boys like girls, and boys like boys, and girls like girls, and sometimes a person doesn’t like either-- at least in a sexual sense, and that’s
In Ruth Gilbert’s At the Border’s of the Human, she discusses society’s interest in hermaphrodites in terms of “people’s desire to examine, scrutinize, and display objects which are alien, strange and other” (6). The anomalous and bizarre spectacle of the hermaphroditic body has drawn the focus of scientists since the early sixteenth century. Hermaphrodites have long evoked a “mixture of disgust and desire, and fear and fascination”(Gilbert 150) that has led to their position as objects of scientific scrutiny. As defined by Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, a hermaphrodite is “an individual in which reproductive organs of both sexes are present”. Besides hermaphrodites challenging society’s physical norms, they challenge and have recently changed its cultural norms as well.
When I was looking at the first sexual autobiography, Initially, I thought I had very little input in regards to sexuality. However, as a result of learning about sexuality through Sexing Shakespeare, I have learned that this is not the case. By learnings about Butler, Foucault, Bataile, and Freud, I have learned that my expression of sexuality is present in my being. An example of my sexuality being portrayed would be through the teachings of Judith Butler. Judith Butler states that an individual performs certain actions, then that person takes on a certain identity. Therefore, even though I have performed zero physical activity, as a result of not performing such an activity, I constitute the category of either a romantic or an asexual. Which category I belong to I am not sure of yet, and Judith Butler fails to clarify as to which category
Because humans are inherently sexual, it would be funny (tragically funny, maybe, but funny nonetheless) if institutionalized celibacy was the result of a minor transcription error, rather than, say, the will of God. Of course, the question immediately arises: are humans inherently sexual? And is a life without sex inherently undesirable? I take it that most people would answer “yes”—this because sexuality is presupposed by prevailing conceptions of normalcy, e.g., conceptions of the normal family, of the normal body, of normal desires, and so on. This joke is, therefore, an artifact of “compulsory sexuality.”
While many historical figures are known or are speculated to have had romantic or sexual relationships with people of the same sex, scholars avoid applying terms such as gay or lesbian to them because the use of modern terminology falsely projects modern concepts of sexuality onto historical figures (Gibson, Alexander, and Meem xxi). When discussing the problems with labeling historical figures as autistic, Straus says "... to the extent that autism is a social and cultural phenomenon rather than (or in addition to) a medical diagnosis- the central contention of this essay- it simply did not exist, or at best, existed in an entirely different form" (464). Both scholars discussing sexual orientation and Straus assert that care should be taken to avoid implying false equivalencies between historical and modern identities. It is usually considered acceptable to refer to historical figures as homosexual, bisexual, or transgender and to discuss their same sex relations as related to modern lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identities, whereas Straus suggests that in the case of autism "... the search for ancestors must either be abandoned or pursued in an appropriately tentative way"
Halperin, David. "Is There a History of Sexuality?." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry
Milstein, Susan A. Taking Sides Clashing Views in Human Sexuality. Ed. William J. Taverner and Ryan W. McKee. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.
Despite the large collection of literature of sexuality that has been accumulating, human asexuality has been largely ignored. Asexuality is controversially considered to be a sexual orientation and people who identify as asexual are people who typically do not experience sexual attraction (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, 2013). Though research on sex and sexual orientations has been done for centuries, the first real suggestion that there might be people who fall outside of the heterosexual – homosexual orientation spectrum came from Kinsey and colleagues in 1948. These individuals were put into a separate category and were identified as having no erotic response to hetero- or homosexual stimuli, but otherwise they were largely ignored by the researchers (Kinsey, 1953). Later, researchers linked asexuality with negative traits and pathologies, including depression and lower self-esteem (Masters, Johnson, & Kolodny, 1986; Nuius, 1983). An issue with these studies, however, is that the researchers defined asexuality in a way that most current asexuals do not agree with. For example, in a study done by Bell and Weinberg (1978), there were references made to asexual homosexuals who simply hid their homosexuality. Many asexuals, otherwise known as Aces, would struggle with this definition because homosexuality implies a type of sexual attraction: attraction to your same sex. Because Aces typically do not feel sexual attraction to anyone or anything, they should not be classified under the same label as a closeted homosexual. Another issue is that none of these studies actually focused on asexuality. Instead, they were added on the side and generally ignored.
Sexuality gained a connection to the truth. This results into the idea that sexuality is a part of identity and a key aspect in understating who we are individual. And all of this is only possible due to the discourse of sexuality, which is determined by social culture and time. However, the idea that sexuality objectively defines who you are is false, because the idea where this is based on, the “repressive hypothesis” also is
Osmundson, Joseph. "'I Was Born This Way': Is Sexuality Innate, and Should It Matter?" Harvard Kennedy School. N.p., 2011. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. .
Each individual is inevitably born as one or the other; male or female, but that does not mean that they have discover their sexuality yet. Gender and sexuality are two different entities. Gender is what people use to identify themselves as while filling out an application, while sexuality is what sex and gender are desire to like or love. Human sexuality is constructed socially, and their desire is influenced by a person’s individual childhood or exposure to familial or religious contacts. People have become open minded about their sexuality. Society judges and discriminates in different ways against a person’s sexuality.
Somerville, Siobhan. "Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body." Gender, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University, 2009. 284-99. Print.
Davis, M., Hart, G., Bolding, G., Sherr, L., & Elford, J. (2006). Sex and the Internet: Gay men,
Stein, Edward. The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. 20 Oct. 2011
The sexual orientation of a person has been a critical debate over the past several centuries. For several...
What is sex and sexuality, and how would I define it? Sex seems to be a subject that society is becoming a little less shy to talk about. It should be an openly topic we could talk about, yes it is a personal act, but many young people have questions and wonders about sex. Sex is the act of two people engaging in sexual intercourse. That is my definition of sex, but sex has different definitions and meanings depending on who the person is. Sexuality as I stated above, is the discovering your identity, figuring out who you are. Sexuality consist of procreation, love, pleasure, and indentity. (Laack 1) Sex and sexuality are closley realated to each other, you get one with the other. Sexuality is a state of confusion for many teenagers they not sure about what is going on with their emotion, their hormones are flying in every direction possible. Another thing we should discuss about things that are common among teenagers, is masturbati...