Bi? Asexual? Gay? Who cares?

Brian Alexander • E-mail

Sex and politics have become the peanut butter and jelly of our overheated, hate-filled culture wars. But they’re not always teamed up in the ways you might think, with humorless Christian zealots in beehive hairdos duking it out with men dressed as nuns.

I was reminded of this recently when Sexploration received some reader mail asking what it meant to be bisexual and asexual. “Does this make me bisexual?” one asked of an experience he had. “Is there such a thing as asexual? Could I be asexual?” asked another who had seemingly lost all interest in sex.

The thing is, nobody knows for sure just what it means to be bisexual or asexual.

“There is no definitive definition [of asexuality] yet,” psychologist Tony Bogaert of Brock University of St. Catherines in Canada told me, noting that there isn’t even a firm definition of sexual orientation, period.

But the letters, and others like them, display the strange habit we have inherited from medicine, social science and George Gallup of labeling ourselves.

'Gay, straight or lying'
About a year ago, Bogaert released a study that analyzed data from a survey done in the United Kingdom. He concluded that about 1 percent of all the people in the survey were asexual. They had no sexual attraction for members of either gender, men or women. This may or may not translate to other countries or other surveys, but there was a lot of media coverage, much of it trying to figure out what asexual meant, exactly.

Then, last summer, another research project by Gerulf Rieger, a doctoral student at Northwestern University in Chicago, studied the reactions of people, including self-described bisexual men, to erotic movies. Seems the bisexual men did not react equally to the films. They said they did, but their penises told another story. Most bisexual men had a stronger response to gay porn than to heterosexual porn. “It remains to be shown that male bisexuality exists,” concluded the study.

J. Michael Bailey, a research psychologist at Northwestern, and the author of the book "The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender Bending and Transexualism," put it bluntly by quoting an old saying among homosexuals: “You’re either gay, straight or lying.”

Both these papers, especially the bisexual paper, raised a very big ruckus. Bailey, who was a senior author of Rieger’s paper, was already the subject of a hysterical hate campaign by a small number of male-to-female transsexuals who have compared him to the Nazi organizers of the Holocaust for his past writings and research. His part in questioning the existence of male bisexuality was a big load of new ammo. Meanwhile, Bogaert’s research spurred the popularity of a so-called “asexual movement.”

Why? When was the last time the army denied entry to an asexual? Has the Southern Baptist Convention preached against the idea?

But judging from a Web site set up by asexuals, called the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, asexuals have beefs.

Don't box me in
One item, written by somebody named “Bard” complains that asexuals are often asked questions like “Do you masturbate?" and “Have you ever had sex?” That’s nobody’s business, Bard says.

Umm, OK, but what’s with the name of the organization? “Visibility”? “Education”? Kinda tough to be visible and educate anybody about your sexuality without answering a few basic sex questions. 

The site’s operators argue that questioning “the validity of their asexuality” is verboten: “We are here to figure ourselves out, not to put each other in boxes.”

Actually, until you brought it up, I didn’t much care what you called yourself. But now that you’ve created your own glass box, and asked me to look inside, you’re saying I can’t question what I’m seeing? Sorry. I asked Bogaert.

“It’s possible that some, many, ‘asexuals’ do indeed have medical issues that contribute to their lack of attraction," he says. "So one perspective might be that this group of ‘asexuals’ do not have a ‘unique’ sexual orientation distinct from the traditional categories of homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual.” On the other hand, he says, if, for whatever reason, a person has never had “subjective” attraction for people, “then an asexual orientation designation is reasonable from my perspective.”

When it comes to sexual orientation, Bogaert says, what you do is less important than what you feel. “A person may be ‘bisexual’ from a sexual ‘behavior’ perspective, but I, and others, would argue that he/she is less ‘bisexual’ from a sexual orientation perspective because the attraction component may be missing.”

This is the sort of thing that got Rieger and Bailey in such hot water. They argued that a pattern of arousal response rather than self-identification is a better way to detect orientation.

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