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Producing facts: Empirical asexuality and the scientific study of sex

Ela Przybylo Feminism & Psychology published online 20 April 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0959353512443668 The online version of this article can be found at: http://fap.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/04/20/0959353512443668 A more recent version of this article was published on - Apr 25, 2013
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Producing facts: Empirical asexuality and the scientific study of sex

Ela Przybylo
York University, Canada
Abstract Asexuality, quickly becoming a burgeoning sexual identity category and subject of academic inquiry, relies at this budding moment of identity demarcation on a series of scientific studies that seek to discover the truth of asexuality in and on the body. This article considers the existing scientific research on asexuality, including both older and more obscure mentions of asexuality as well as contemporary studies, through two twin claims: (1) that asexuality, as a sexual identity, is entirely specific to our current cultural moment that it is in this sense culturally contingent, and (2) that scientific research on asexuality, while providing asexuality with a sense of credibility, is also shaping the possibilities and impossibilities of what counts as asexuality and how it operates. In the first section, I consider how older scientific research on asexuality, spanning from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, is characterized by a disinterest in asexuality. Next, turning to recent work on asexuality, the beginning of which is marked by Anthony Bogaerts 2004 study, I demonstrate how asexuality becomes discovered, mapped, and pursued by science, making it culturally intelligible even while often naturalizing, in the process, what I argue are harmful sexual differences. Keywords Asexuality, cartography, sexology, sexuality, (a)sexual identity
Nowhere, perhaps, do the interests of ction and those of science meet and mingle more intimately than in the body of knowledge we have come to call sexuality. (Potts, 2002: 15)
The goal of this article is to question the existing scientic knowledge on asexuality. Such work is especially necessary at this moment when predictions are being made
Corresponding author: Ela Przybylo, Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Womens Studies, York University, PO Box GA2300, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, M3J 1P3, Canada Email: przybylo@yorku.ca
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about asexualitys vibrant academic career for instance, Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks (2010) recently predicted it will blossom into an asexuality studies (pp. 654655). Amidst the foretelling of this future for asexuality, I would like this article to serve as a critical reection on the ways in which scientic writings are edifying cultural understandings and denitions of an identity and sexual concept that is necessarily cultural. Two simple reminders are crucial for future considerations of asexuality to gain in adroitness and depth. First, asexuality, like all sexualities, is culturally and historically contingent. Asexuality has not existed at any other time in Western history, not as asexuality per se. It has not always existed underneath all that sex. That it is here today is necessarily a crystallization of our specic here and now. Second, asexuality, like most sexualities, is in signicant and intricate ways carved into existence by science. This is not to say that science alone is inventing asexuality but that science, in collusion with other social forces, is dening what asexuality is and how it functions. In other words, scientic writing on asexuality is an important contributor to the formation and popularization of asexuality. I will note here, though, that science is not alone; both asexually identied individuals (most pronouncedly those organizing around the AVEN Asexual Visibility and Education Network banner) and various media are equal contributors to the asexuality of today, though my focus in this article is on the scientic mapping of asexuality.1 This article is divided into two sections, both of which provide an overview of the existing research on asexuality, tracing asexualitys appearance (and disappearance) in scientic sex writing. The literature I am referring to as the scientic study of asexuality is comprised of a set of mostly articles, from the late 1970s to the present decade, published in academic journals that self-describe as scientic in focus, such as Archives of Sexual Behavior and The Journal of Sex Research. They are scientic not only in their self designation, but also in the way they strive to mimic the methods, processes, taxonomies, and language of the more hard sciences. They are invested in a particular type of knowledge-production which gains credibility, neutrality, and truth-value from its scientic label. Leonore Tiefer (2000) provides a list of 10 tenets that run through the sexological model of sexuality including the notion that sex is a natural force, that desire is mostly a result of biology, the naturalization of dierences between women and men, the normality of heterosexuality, and the belief that every person has a categorical sexual and gender identity (for the whole list see pp. 8283). A critical feminist analysis of these texts is necessary because it interrupts readings of empirical research as absolute and neutral truth, encouraging us to remember the story-telling aspect of scientic fact-production and that science too is a series of representations allied to specic cultural discourses. Also, such an analysis is urgent at this budding moment of asexuality studies because far too often, these empirical accounts of asexuality are taken up as sheer facts documenting the unveiling of a longneglected sexual orientation. But there is also a certain irony to the scientic study of sex. As Gayle Rubin (1984: 284) noted, empirical sex research is the one eld that does incorporate a positive concept of sexual variation. Even as it is potentially damaging in its, say,
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naturalization of sexual dierence or its binding of sex to the body, such research is also transformative in that it allows marginalized sexual identities to become articulated, to appear in the world in a recognizable way. So my analysis of these texts is not ultimately intended to erase them they are meaningful documents that enable certain understandings of the (a)sexual self but to disarm them of their neutrality. The rst section of my analysis explores the older and more outdated literature on asexuality, which spans the period between the late 1970s and early 1990s. This research, as I will demonstrate, is characterized by a lackadaisical inclusion of asexuality into sexual models. The authors of this early work, such as Michael Storms (1979, 1980) and Paula Nurius (1983), included asexuality in their models and writing not in order to interrogate it, but in order to advance their other sexual projects; thus they discussed asexuality in very limited terms. Next, I turn to the more contemporary and oft-cited research, which both opens up the academic study of asexuality and enables asexuality to be popularized and thus rendered culturally visible, the advent of which is heralded by Anthony Bogaert in 2004. Signicantly, this later work evinces a tangible claiming of asexual territory, and signals the modern discovery of asexuality by science, fueled by the creation of the online asexual community, AVEN, by David Jay in 2001 (available at: http:// www.asexuality.org). In particular, I will here argue, in line with Tiefers (2000) argument, that current scientic articulations of asexuality bind (a)sexuality indiscriminately to the biological body while reproducing and naturalizing harmful sexual dierences.
Asexualitys prehistory2
Asexualitys prehistory, or its articulations before its more recent widespread dispersal, is rather humble. Indeed, before 2000 there were only very rare and random mentions of asexuality by scientic sources, and scarcely any interrogations of it in its own right. Prior to the 21st century, only a few scientic studies outright registered or named asexuality: those by Michael Storms (1979, 1980), Paula Nurius (1983), William Masters et al. (1986), and Braden Berkey et al. (1990). This nearly absolute lack of interest in asexuality this prehistory when understood as a counterpoint to contemporary asexual identity and community formation, evinces the contingency of cultural understandings of sexuality. That asexuality mattered so very little prior to this last decade, and then suddenly rapidly acquired an abundance of signication, demonstrates, rst, that it has become culturally relevant and intelligible and, second, that this intelligibility is reliant on a particular cultural nexus. Yet unlike contemporary studies on asexuality by researchers such as Anthony Bogaert (2004, 2006, 2008) and Lori Brotto and colleagues (Brotto et al., 2010; Brotto and Yule, 2011), which demonstrate a tangible claiming of new, unexplored sexual territory, these sparse early scientic mentions of asexuality seem to have accepted it as an obvious and integral, if often neglected, component of the
sexuality spectrum. The holistic models of sexual orientations, described by Storms (1979, 1980), Nurius (1983), and others, from the late 1970s through to the 1990s, took for granted that a category such as asexuality must exist, alongside other sexual orientations such as homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, and ambisexuality. In their scales, spectrums, models, diagrams, and typologies, asexuality was simply another hue of human sexuality. However, while asexuality had its place in some of these sexual models, early writing on asexuality was also characterized by a disinterest in exploring its denitions, parameters, and implications. This rather lackadaisical inclusion of asexuality into models of sexual orientation, in light of todays more avid scientic interest in asexuality, provides a living trace of sexualitys constructedness. The rst depictions of asexuality in a scientic source concerned with the study of human sex3 occurred in psychologist Michael Storms 1979 chapter Sexual Orientation and Self-Perception, and his 1980 article Theories of Sexual Orientation, where he engaged in a remodeling of Kinseys sexuality scale, producing as a byproduct the sexual orientation of asexuality. Alfred Kinseys breakthrough model of sexual orientation (Kinsey et al., 1948, 1953), while highly innovative in the 1950s, was, Storms argued, unidimensional (Storms, 1980) and insucient for sexuality studies of the late 1970s. Kinseys seven-point scale, while uid in its insistence that the heterosexuality or homosexuality of many individuals is not an all-or-none proposition (Kinsey et al., 1948: 638) and that reality is a continuum, (p. 647) was nevertheless hinged on one sole axis of sexuality the heterosexualhomosexual continuum on which each person must fall. Because of this, Kinseys continuum model did not provide asexuality with any real territory; indeed, individuals who Kinsey identied as having no socio-sexual contacts or reactions (1948: 656), and who [did] not respond erotically to either heterosexual or homosexual stimuli, and [did] not have overt physical contacts with individuals of either sex in which there is evidence of any response (1953: 472), were labeled simply as X and were in want of a home on the erotic graph. While Kinsey did provide textual, if not graphic, space for a group X, indicating that after the age of 25 for men about two percent are characterized by a paucity of sexual response (Kinsey et al., 1948), and that a goodly number of females belong in this category in every age group (1953: 472), he neither investigated this nor actually employed the term asexuality. Indeed, because his project was so implicitly focused on disrupting conservative views of human sexuality, he probably was not compelled to investigate the absence of sexual response. As Janice Irvine (1990[2005]) argued, Kinsey conveys his belief, cloaked in the rationale that what is natural is right, that sex is good and more is better (p. 20). For instance, Kinsey did not think to include priests or nuns, or otherwise celibate groups in his data sample, likely because this would aect his overall results (nor did he, for that matter, include many other groups for other reasons, including most problematically non-whites) (Irvine, 1990[2005]: 24). As Vern Bullough (1998) indicated, Kinseys 1953 book on the human female was intent on challenging the assumed asexuality of women (p. 130). Thus, womens high rate of X-ness (or potentially, their asexuality) was explained by Kinsey as in need of further analysis,
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since these individuals might show that they do sometimes respond to socio-sexual stimuli (Kinsey et al., 1953: 472). To recapitulate then, Kinseys gathered data, which ushered in the scientic study of sex, suggested the presence of some category which might serve as a precedent for the contemporary designation of asexuality; however, this was neither accommodated in his seven-point scale, nor did Kinsey explore it in any great depth. In Storms remodeling, we see a slight possibility of a space for asexuality. Although not investigating asexuality in any great depth, Storms did create space for it on the scientic page, recording it as the fourth quadrant of his map of erotic orientation (Storms, 1980: 784785) of which the three other quadrants were homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality, or in his earlier chapter heteroerotic, homoerotic, ambierotic, and anerotic (Storms, 1979, 1980). Storms subtle cartographic move, a remodeling of Kinseys model into a twodimensional map, did allow for asexuality to make its mark, but Storms was not concerned with the asexual category at all. While he did recognize that a twodimensional model will have as one advantage the possibility of an asexual category, his writing focused primarily on the second advantage of such a model, namely a dierent view of bisexual[ity] (Storms, 1979: 172), one that was not a compromise between heteroerotic and homoerotic fantasies but instead allowed for high degrees of both homosexuality and heterosexuality (Storms, 1980: 785). In other words, although asexuality was scientically named by Storms, he hardly acknowledged this act of naming. Psychologist Paula Nurius (1983) study also incidentally gave a name to the category of asexuality. Intent on disproving traditional assumptions that heterosexuals are more psychologically and sexually healthy than homosexuals, Nurius employed a four-group typology of sexual orientation (1983: 119), which included asexuality as one of its categories. While Nurius did not discuss asexuality in any great depth, we do learn that out of her 689 participants, 5 percent of men and 10 percent of women have a predominantly asexual orientation, based on their low scores on the Sexual Activity and Preference Scale (SAPS) test. She therefore classied asexuals as those who largely prefer not to be involved in any sexual activities (Nurius, 1983: 122). Like Storms, Nurius took up asexuality unselfconsciously, taking for granted its status as a sexual orientation. While her article exhibited a lack of interest towards asexuality, she did create a proximity to pathology for asexuality. While Nurius challenged notions of homosexual pathology, her research suggested a link between asexuality and pathology through associating it with a greater risk for clinical dysfunctions such as depression, lower self-esteem, and lower sexual satisfaction (p. 128). While we should rightly be suspicious of this early alliance between asexuality and clinical dysfunctions, Nurius did ask rhetorically: to what degree is the individuals problem rooted in their sexual preference per se and to what degree is he or she paying the price of norm-breaking via social sanctions? (p. 133). In Masters and Johnson on Sex and Human Loving (1986), sexologists William Masters, Virginia Johnson, and Robert Kolodny also linked asexuality with negative and pathological traits. Like the other authors considered here, they employed
asexuality as a component of a sexual typology, in their case a typology of homosexuals. Emphasizing that homosexuals, like heterosexuals, live their sexualities diversely, they identied asexual homosexuals as those low in sexual interest and activity and [. . .] not coupled (p. 365). Reviewing a study by Bell and Weinberg (1978), they deduced that 16 percent of male homosexuals and 11 percent of lesbians were asexual (p. 365). They linked this asexual homosexuality with negative traits such as being more secretive about their homosexuality, being the least happy of all homosexuals (along with dysfunctional homosexuals), as worse o psychologically, having considerable diculty coping with life, and being generally loners (p. 365). These descriptors are aectively charged and imbued with a fear of singlehood, equating asexuality with asociality an inability to network in the gay community, to bond through friendships, romantic partnerships, and sex. But, much like with Kinsey, this is perhaps not all that surprising since their ongoing project was broadly focused on the liberation of sex and the investigation of sexual arousal and orgasm, and any real, unbiased interrogation of asexuality might have been antithetical to such goals (Irvine, 1990[2005]: 59). Finally, another article which accommodated asexuality is The Multidimensional Scale of Sexuality (MSS; Berkey et al., 1990). Concerned, like Storms, with the expansion and denition of bisexuality, Braden Berkey et al. introduced the MSS to test for the accuracy of participants self-descriptions of their orientations. Their scale accommodated asexuality, with ve statements designed specically for its investigation (pp. 7377).4 Although inclusion of these statements was unprecedented, and demonstrated a multi-faceted conceptualization of asexuality, none of the 148 participants actually described themselves as asexual, and thus regrettably the article did not ultimately investigate asexuality, or the results of the MSS, in any further detail. The authors speculated that no subject categorized himself/herself as asexual [and that this was] not surprising because of its reported low frequency (p. 83). Thus asexuality, while suggested as a sexual orientation already from the late 1970s and early 1980s, was mentioned only sporadically and not explored in any great depth. Early ndings on the rates of asexuality varied from a high of 14 to 19 percent as suggested of unmarried women by Kinsey et al. (1953: 474), to the zero percent indicated by Berkey et al. (1990: 77). If anything, these varying rates, coupled with a paucity of any engaged explorations of asexuality, evince a relative disinterest in the asexual category. It seems instead that asexuality was plugged into models of sexuality for other purposes than its own categorical existence. That it was not taken up in any engaged or sustained way suggests also that it was not, at the time of these writings, a site of meaning-making, intellectual inquiry, or identity formation. This is of particular interest for contemporary considerations of asexuality because it serves to ag the very contingency and constructedness of sexuality as of sexual ideals and practices. In other words, these studies negligence towards asexuality reminds us that asexuality, like all sexualities, is not immutable and everpresent in a self-same form. Todays ourishing of asexual interest and meaningformation, as I will explore in the following section, puts into sharp relief the
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absence of such conversations in the past. While asexuality had made its appearance in these early scientic texts, it was with a certain apathy, disinterest, incidentalness, and lack of engagement.
Asexual cartography: The discovery of asexuality

When, in the new millennium, asexuality is taken up as a subject of inquiry in its own right, by researchers such as Anthony Bogaert (2004, 2006, 2008), Nicole Prause and Cynthia Graham (2007), and Lori Brotto and colleagues (Brotto et al., 2010; Brotto and Yule, 2011), there is a shue for territory, for accurate mapping, for the production of science-knowledge. Here I draw on Jerey Weeks deployment of cartography in his discussions of the history of sexuality: sexuality as virgin eld (1981: 1), a continent of knowledge, with its own rules of exploration and its own expert geographers (p. 12), with sexologists as would-be-colonizers (2010: 13).5 Weeks also describes the pluralization of todays sexual identities by way of similar language: in this new erotic economy [. . .] we can now witness huge clusters of islands [. . .] each with its own unique vegetation and geography (2010: 88). Memorably, for Freud, womens sexuality was also a dark continent, an enigmatic unknown, a silence worth penetrating (1926, quoted in Weeks, 2010: 29). For Bogaert too, his rst study was an attempt to open up the eld and begin to explore factors associated with this relatively uncharted area of sexual variability (2004: 279, emphasis added). Emphasizing that this writing on asexuality is a form of map-making, I am suggesting that it is not neutral, value-free, and apolitical. In other words, the territory claiming and boundary drawing just beginning to take shape around asexuality is a form of sexual colonization which purports to identify and label whole sexual realities for groups of certain people. Asexuality becomes discovered (more decisively than it was before); it is drawn out of obscurity and silence and transformed into a site worthy of scientic interrogation. As Tiefer (2000) asserted, the scientic paradigm [leads] sexologists to assume that once general laws [are] established [. . .] sexuality [will] be thoroughly mapped (p. 92, emphasis added). Several themes reoccur within this new scientic work on asexuality. First, and most pronouncedly, there is a veritable binding of (a)sexuality to the body (as will be discussed, the proof of asexuality is sought in and on the body). This is hazardous because, as Rubin (1984) pointed out, sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology (p. 277). Second, asexuality becomes a site of struggle over understandings of so-called orientation and pathology, legitimacy and disorder. Third, in many cases asexuality becomes an occasion for shoring up naturalizations of sexual dierence. While I focus my analysis around the work of psychologist Anthony Bogaert in particular, many of the themes that appear in his work are also evident in the work of the other contemporary researchers. I have chosen to build my analysis around Bogaert because his was the rst outright study of asexuality, and what follows in many ways either expands on his work, clarifying details and uncovering new
aspects of asexuality, or is a direct response. Bogaerts research is often taken up as the very proof of asexuality, the eects of which, I will argue, are to both legitimize and depathologize asexuality. Obviously, both of these aspects are very meaningful and provide a good base for further explorations of asexuality, scientic and otherwise. But I wish to provide a more complicated reading of his short texts on asexuality. Bogaerts publications themselves (2004, 2006, 2008), as well as most other writing concerned with the scientic examination of sexuality, presents itself as value-free and neutral in its science. And yet this scientic work is often limiting and limited in its reliance on biological explanations for asexuality and a psychosocial rehearsal of conning sexual gender roles. In other words, it seems that the price paid for the legitimization and depathologization of asexuality is high the rehearsal of limiting and normative standards of gender, as well as a veritable binding of asexuality to the body. Bogaert, followed by others, essentially asked, is asexuality real? i.e. does it exist, and if it does, what is its existence? Does it qualify as an orientation? Does it (should it) have its own unique territory, with distinct borders, peculiar features, a subsystem of typologies? Or does asexuality overlap with those aspects of our sexuality that we already know to exist (i.e. for which we have scientic proof) with certain other orientations, with particular pathologies? This is all, of course, in line with the great tradition of scientic discovery.
Legitimization
Bogaerts (2004) inuential article Asexuality: Prevalence and Associated Factors in a National Probability Sample used the data from the UK National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, a national study of residents in Britain which had been published in 1994 (Johnson et al.) to investigate changes in sexual behaviour in the wake of AIDS. Fortuitously, one of the answer choices to a question designed to determine sexual orientation was I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all (Johnson et al., 1994: 185); Bogaert used these responses to assess that 1.05% of the participants were indeed asexual. Bogaerts article attracted media attention (e.g. Asexuality on 20/20. Available at: http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=CeKGOMUVU7g) and was also discussed online by the asexual community, such as on forums on The Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN). One of its major attractions, for asexually identied persons and the media alike, was that it gave credibility to this new sexual orientation. However, this 1.05 percentage is not particularly accurate or reliable, as many (DeLuzio Chasin, 2011; Hinderliter, 2009; Prause and Graham, 2007) have suggested. Prause and Graham (2007) pointed out that Bogaert only used one item to test for asexuality and that he drew on preexisting data not concerned specically with the study of asexuality. Likewise, asexually-identied DeLuzio Chasin (2011) argued that since the data were collected previous to the existence of the asexual community and asexual self-identication, the validity of Bogaerts one percent is uncertain. Hinderliter (2009) pointed out that the statement I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all, which Bogaert adopted to be the sine qua
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non of asexuality, assumed a permanence, absoluteness, and lack of exibility around the category of asexuality which is unrealistic and which may have deterred many people from choosing this response (Hinderliter, 2009: 620; Przybylo, 2011); it was also functionally problematic because people who have never felt sexual attraction do not know what sexual attraction feels like, and knowing whether or not they have ever felt it can be dicult (Hinderliter, 2009: 620). In other words, the percentage Bogaert identied is not likely very reliable, accurate, or representative and it certainly does not account for the diversity of lived styles of asexuality, ranging from a preference for hugging and kissing to aromanticism, as well as additional identication as gay, straight, and bi (Carrigan, 2011; DeLuzio Chasin, 2011; Scherrer, 2008). Yet, despite this, the one percentage introduced by Bogaert (2004) continues to be used as a reliable indication of widespread asexuality (e.g. Swash, 2012). But of most interest for my discussion is not the accuracy of the prevalence rates indicated by Bogaert so much as the suggestion of validation that they provided. Because it provided an analysis of empirical data, and because it was published in the highly regarded Journal of Sex Research, Bogaerts article became mobilized by various media sources, and by asexuals themselves, as proof of asexuality. It fueled the wider cultural imagination, suggesting that new uncharted sexual terrains lay in wake for sexuality researchers to uncover. Bogaerts exploration of asexuality was very dierent from the casual deployment of asexuality that appeared in prior research. It seemed that, at last, asexuality had come out of the shadows of indierence and entered the limelight of scientic and sexual concern.
Depathologization
Another reason why Bogaerts work is so often and so widely taken up in relation to asexuality is because it argued against the pathologization of asexuality. For instance, in Toward a Conceptual Understanding of Asexuality (2006), the goal of which was the clarication of some basic conceptual and denitional issues of asexuality, Bogaert distinguished asexuality from sexual desire disorders such as hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), by the very fact that asexuals are not necessarily characterized by marked distress and interpersonal diculty (p. 241) both of which are necessary for currently diagnosing HSDD, as based on the DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000: 539541). Unlike in his earlier work, as will be discussed shortly, Bogaert argued not for the primacy of a biological proof of asexuality, but rather began to trust more in the validity of asexuals self-reporting, arguing against an approach where the physiological attraction/arousal supersedes [. . .] subjective sexual attraction in determining ones sexual orientation (2006: 244). In his assertion that asexuality is not a pathology he is not alone; Prause and Graham (2007) likewise asserted the damaging potential of assigning pathology status to a newly forming sexual identity. They even exceeded Bogaerts claims by complicating the very notion of distress through recognizing that it might result
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from social expectations rather than from an innate problem, and argued that if this was the case, then a psychiatric diagnosis implying abnormality may exacerbate concerns in an asexual individual (p. 353). They suggested, then, that to consider asexuality a pathology would be inaccurate and harmful to those who identify as asexual. More recently, psychologist Lori Brotto, who specializes in low desire problems among women, along with her colleagues, has buttressed asexualitys depathologization through qualitative, quantitative, and physiological methods in two recent studies on asexuality: Asexuality: A Mixed-Methods Approach (Brotto et al., 2010) and Physiological and Subjective Sexual Arousal in Self-Identied Asexual Women (Brotto and Yule, 2011). The rst of these concluded that while the border between HSDD and asexuality is unclear (Brotto et al., 2010: 614), nonetheless, similar to the proposition by Bogaert (2006), [. . .] asexuals are a mentally healthy group who continue to seek out and engage in rewarding, emotionally connected relationships (p. 615). Like Bogaerts work, it ultimately undermined claims that asexuality is a pathology on the basis that asexuals are not distressed. Brottos second study (Brotto and Yule, 2011), co-authored with Morag Yule, entrenched asexuality as a non-pathology by way of physiological testing which suggested that the sexual arousal response is intact in asexual women, advising sex therapy clinicians from a premature temptation [. . .] to seek pharmaceutical and/or hormonal treatments for asexuality (p. 700). This is signicant since it urged against hasty pharmaceutically-augmented medicalization of asexuals, in a context where a pill seems to be the answer of choice for every sexual ailment (Conrad, 2005; Tiefer, 2006). But despite this signicant depathologizing work, Brotto and colleagues, especially in the rst of these studies (Brotto et al., 2010), formed links between asexuality and disorders such as Schizoid Personality Disorder/social withdrawal links that might, problematically, become foundational to understandings of asexuality and perhaps even to asexuals self-concept. Similarly, Bogaert, despite his eorts to suggest that asexuality is not a pathology, in a short 2008 chapter pondered whether those asexuals who masturbate may not have sexual attraction to themselves, a paraphilia known as automonosexualism, or directional/target disorders [. . .] disruptions in mate recognition mechanisms (p. 12). Such suggestions function to pathologize masturbation and question, again, the extent to which asexuality is a healthy and valid sexual orientation.
Biology
Of 19th century sexology, Foucault (1978[1990]: 44) wrote: since sexuality was a medical and medicalizable object, one had to try and detect itas a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptomin the depths of the organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behavior (emphasis added). Rubin (1984) likewise criticized the search for sex in hormones or psyche, in the physiological or psychological, as a form of sexual essentialism. This search for the truth of sex, on and in the body, is evident throughout the scientic work on asexuality.
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In discussing the results of his research, Bogaert described physical development factors, such as adverse health, later menarche for women, shorter stature, and lower weight as predicting asexuality, arguing that these associations suggested that sexual attraction may be [not only] partly biologically based [but also] determined prior to birth (2004: 284). In his later article, he underlined again his ndings that asexuality might be determined prenatally: asexuality ha[s] certain biological correlates that suggest a prenatal origin (e.g. potential alteration of the hypothalamus) (2006: 245246). He argued that asexuality is made visible on the surface of the body by such characteristics as shorter stature and lower weight, exemplifying the detective work that goes into uncovering the truth of our sexualities. Fixing asexuality onto the body, Bogaert eectively limited the mobility of cultural understandings, encouraging us to make sense of asexuality not through interpersonal or social analyses, but rather in terms of the reading of the body in isolation. The scientic study of sex thus decrees the body a map of a persons sexuality, promoting at the same time the normalcy of certain body types and characteristics (such as, for Bogaert, those of normal height and average weight). Earlier in the 2004 article, Bogaert set the stage for his consideration of asexuality by hypothesizing biological factors that might predicate asexuality, such as illness, disease, disability [. . .] unusual physical development characteristics for example, short stature, obesity or extremely low weight, or late puberty onset (p. 280, emphasis added). The bodys appearance is here at once diagnostic of asexuality, and its raison de tre, since these characteristics may be markers of poor health and development, which may alter sexual functioning and thus lead to the perception by others and themselves that they have little or no attraction for a partner of a particular sex (p. 280). Bogaert continued on in his discussion arguing for the necessity of psychophysical research that would evaluate the physiological arousal and attraction patterns of asexual people (2004: 286) with the intention of discriminating between those asexuals who only perceive or report their asexuality, versus those who are true asexuals. Presumably, true asexuals would demonstrate a true lack of physiological attraction to a partner of either sex and would show no physiological response to stimuli, whereas perceived asexuals would show typical attraction and arousal patterns and yet report, label, or perceive themselves as being asexual for various reasons (e.g. not aware of own arousal, deny arousal) (p. 286). Again, ultimately and paradoxically, Bogaert seemed unable to consider asexuality as anything other than the truth of the body. Yet, in this instance, this truth is not readily perceived in the bodys exteriority, but is concealed, embedded within the hidden mechanisms of the body, and in want of psychophysical research to be uncovered. Interestingly, however, Bogaert did somewhat soften his views of perceived versus true asexuality with his second article, recognizing that physiological attraction/arousal should not supersede subjective sexual attraction in determining ones sexual orientation (2006: 244). Others have also studied the body for signs of asexuality. Brotto et al. (2010) commented on the possibility of a faulty maturation of adrenals during adrenarche (the period of adrenal gland maturation that is understood to occur prior to
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adolescence), which would then aect the release or uptake of certain hormones and thus alter sexual development, leading perhaps to asexuality. Prause and Graham (2007) recommended that future research on asexuality should undertake physiological and psychophysiological testing, listing o suggested items to test for, including responses to sexual stimuli, neurological testing, and hormone proles. But interestingly they followed this up with admitting that physiological mechanisms appear unlikely to completely explain asexuality (p. 353). Brotto and Yule (2011) nally undertook physiological research to map womens asexuality by way of measuring vaginal pulse amplitude (VPA). Participants viewed an erotic lm while having their VPA tested through vaginal photoplethysmography which involves [inserting] a tampon-shaped, usually acrylic, probe, which emits infrared light and provides an index of absorbed light corresponding to the degree of genital congestion (Brotto and Yule, 2011: 701) a technology Irvine (1990[2005]) described as a represent[ation] [of] the continuing evolution of medicines ability to explore and conquer the inner body in the quest for knowledge, scientic truth, and clinical intervention (p. 161). Rebecca Jordan-Young (2010), discussing physiological measures of subjective attraction, is likewise skeptical, arguing that such measures do not eectively account for the ways that context and subjectivity matter to sexuality (p. 155, emphasis in original). This view that sexuality, and asexuality in particular, might be discovered somewhere within the body is not however endemic to scientic studies on asexuality but operates as part of broader scientic and popular discourses which identify sex and sexuality as a biological imperative. Within the biological imperative, sexuality is manifest in the body and sex is an expression of ones most innermost self (Foucault, 1978[1990]; Potts, 2002; Rubin, 1984). Indeed, one asexually-identied participant from Prause and Grahams (2007: 345) study recycled just this logic: I think people are probably biologically programmed to be interested, to have interest in sex, and it just comes naturally, while other asexually-identied participants similarly articulated asexuality as rooted in the body as something wrong genetically or a hormone problem (p. 353). This locating of asexuality on and in the body allows for asexuality to be irrevocable, perhaps providing a certain legitimacy to the participants sexual identity status. But it also ambivalently solidies asexuality as beyond ones control, rendering asexuals victims to their own biology, and obviating cultural and relational understandings of asexuality.
Gender
Bogaerts analysis also engaged in a naturalization of gender dierence based on female sexual submission and male sexual dominance. In order to explain why more women than men reported asexuality (he identied 138 women and 57 men, from a sample of 18,876 participants), he proered several explanations, including that since current denitions of sexual arousal and response are target-oriented, they may not adequately capture the nature of some womens sexuality (2004: 285). Bogaert suggested the possibility that sexual desire may be
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categorized as proceptive, the urge to seek out and initiate sexual activity, or receptive, the capacity to become aroused upon encountering certain sexual circumstances and that, perhaps unsurprisingly, women more often demonstrate receptive desire (p. 285). Not only does this recall the sleeping beauty model of womens sexuality (Gerhard, 2000: 455; Tyler, 2009: 44), it also suggests that women are in a sense incapable of being asexual. Bogaerts suggestion thus evoked the active nature of mens sexuality and the passive, coy, receptive nature of womens sexuality in order to argue that women are often not at all aware of their own sexual impulses, and thus might perceive themselves to be asexual. In other words, Bogaert suggested a correlation between higher rates of asexuality in women with both their unawareness of their own sexual bodies they [(women)] may not be aware of their own sexual arousal as men are, even under conditions when genital responses are occurring (p. 284) and with their submissive, or receptive, sexual nature. This establishes men as simultaneously more knowledgeable observers of their own bodies (s)experts (Potts, 2002: 60) and more trustworthy in their asexuality (and perhaps more likely to be true asexuals).6 By not exploring what cultural causes may enhance womens rates of asexuality, Bogaert explained dierences in sexual expression with inherent dierences in women and mens sexual biopsychology. Similarly, in the work of Brotto and colleagues (Brotto et al., 2010; Brotto and Yule, 2011), two twin themes surface which suggest sexual gender dierences as inherent, and as scientically proven and provable facts. First, one theme that arises is that women cannot correlate their physiological arousal with their subjective arousal (their minds do not know when their bodies are aroused). In line with the point Bogaert made when he asserted that [(women)] may not be aware of their own sexual arousal (2004: 284), Brotto et al. (2010) noted, women [are] more likely to show desynchrony between mental and physiologic arousal than men (p. 615). Brotto and Yule (2011) expanded on this, quoting studies which suggested that women might be more incapable than men of coordinating their subjective (self-reported) and physiological (genital) arousal because they lack interoceptive awareness (p. 709). Brotto and Yule also speculated based on their physiological study that asexual women might be unlike other women and more like men in that they might be capable of interoceptive awareness (dened by them as awareness of sensations originating from within the body) (2011: 709) and have more concordance between their subjective and their physiological arousal responses than other women. Second, and related to womens inability to synchronize their physiological arousal with their subjective arousal, is the notion that women are more sexually plastic, pliable, and their sexualities more easily shaped by cultural inuences and life circumstances [that] are atypical (Bogaert, 2004: 284) than are men. For instance, Brotto et al. (2010) argued that women have been described as having greater sexual plasticity in sexual response and sexual orientation (p. 615; also see Brotto and Yule, 2011). Similarly, Bogaert also wrote that womens sexuality (or at least their sex drive) is more plastic than mens sexuality [. . .] Thus, cultural inuences may have a more profound eect on womens sexuality than on mens; as
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a result more women than men may become asexual if life circumstances are atypical (Bogaert, 2004: 284).7 These ideas of womens sexualities as plastic, along with the perceived lack of synchronicity between womens physiological and subjective arousal, combine to form a sense of women as uncertain, ckle, and uncoordinated in their sexual expression and identity. Two series of questions thus arise: (1) Why is the contemporary scientic study of sex, including the work of Bogaert and Brotto and colleagues, now concerned with establishing the dierences between mens and womens sexual response? Is this the general trend of todays sexology (perhaps in opposition to Masters and Johnson who had as one of their major ideological tenets: the similarity between women and men; Irvine, 1990[2005]: 60)? What might a focus on biological differences between women and mens sexual responses suggest about contemporary sexology and sexual politics more broadly? (2) Also, why is it that this dierence is based on classifying women as less aware of their bodies, less capable of coordinating their bodies with their minds, and as being more sexually receptive and pliable? Proven and provable by science, as these claims of sexual dierence appear to be, and embedded within an exploration of asexuality, these discoveries about womens sexualities are key to understanding current patterns within scientic sexological discourse, as well as what these patterns and trends reect about our contemporary sexual politics. Meagan Tyler (2009) likewise identied this relatively recent move within scientic studies of sex towards emphasizing womens receptivity. As she pointed out, although the recent receptivity model demonstrates an eort to more accurately represent womens experiences of desire and to challenge a model of womens desire that is based on mens desire (following Masters and Johnson), it ultimately inhibits the possibility of womens sexual autonomy, [. . .] reinforces the sexual demands of men in heterosexual relationships, undermines womens ability to refuse unwanted sexual contact, and may even promote harmful rape myths (p. 43).8 It positions womens receptivity as binarically opposite to mens spontaneity, and oers an ultimately disadvantageous and potentially harmful naturalization of sexual dierence. Crucially, this new model rehearses the sleeping beauty ideal of womens sexuality (p. 44), making it dicult for women to viably refuse unwanted (hetero)sex since receptivity becomes the new standard for women (p. 46). In other words, in eorts to rework one faulty model of desire (namely Masters and Johnsons), another dierently faulty model has appeared, marking a shift from sexual sameness to sexual dierence (Tyler, 2009). Evincing a renewed investment in discourses of sexual dierence, polarization of the sexes, and gender complementarity, this new model detrimentally essentializes women as sexually passive and receptive. In the context of this new receptivity model for women, a worrying aspect that arose within Brotto and Yules (2011) research concerns the suggestion that asexual women, while not experiencing a desire for sex, are nonetheless expected under certain conditions to undertake sex with a partner. Brotto, who is a psychologist and sexual therapist, advised along with Yule that the (sexual/asexual) couple might be the focus of relationship therapy aimed at how to negotiate her
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lack of sexual attraction and what agreements can be reached about sexual activity that suciently appease both partners (e.g. agreeing that sexual activity may take place consensually but without interest for it on her part) (2011: 710). Brotto and Yule are suggesting that unwanted sex is acceptable within a certain scenario; the unwanted sex discussed in this statement is between an asexual woman and a sexual man, it is within the specic couple context in which sex is taken for granted as integral to the health of the relationship, and it is arrived at with the aid or under the guidance of a sexual therapist. Agreed upon, but unwanted sex, while perhaps consensual, is potentially harmful for asexual women, especially when emphasized within such a narrow scenario, because it pressures women into feeling that they are obliged to present their partners with sex. Nicola Gavey (2005: 136), discussing unwanted sex, dierentiated between sex that is unwanted only in the sense that it takes place in the absence of desire and sex in which women [do not] feel like they [have] a choice; when the sense of obligation and pressure is too strong, focusing in her discussion on the latter. While Gaveys discussion makes eective use of this distinction, drawing attention to various limits women have on sexual choice in given contexts, I would argue that the unwanted sex Brotto and Yule (2011) suggested as acceptable also creates for women situations when they may feel they have no choice. Thus, perhaps the distinction Gavey identied between undesired yet agreed to sex and sex where there is no choice is not necessarily simple and obvious but rather more ambiguous and less certain. One participant from Brotto et al.s (2010) study provided an example of how undesired but negotiated sex can be not only unwanted but also perhaps absent of choice:
You know, the only reason I do it (intercourse) is to make the other person happy. And so, we were in a relationship and you know, he wanted to do it and we had been dating for a while and you know, I was in love or whatever and I thought well be together forever. So um . . . yeah, so we kind of planned it and thats . . . yeah . . . I mean it wasnt . . . I mean the way he was talking about it, oh its so great and youre going to love it, blah, blah, blah, and then okay . . . you know, I believed him . . . (Participant 14). (Brotto et al., 2010: 612)
This participant, while involved in planning or negotiating sex with her9 boyfriend, seemed to have been avidly and aggressively convinced of its value through a powerful sex-is-great rhetoric. Thus, the participant was in a certain sense pressured to have sex through the operations of the same androcentric discourses which Gavey (2005: 136) suggested makes women [. . .] feel like they [do not have] a choice. In other words, it is not altogether clear whether the unwanted sex that is negotiated within the context of sex therapy between a sexual man and an asexual woman is not in fact coercive, unpleasant, and perhaps harmful to asexual womens sense of their (a)sexual selves. That Brotto and Yule (2011: 710) advised that this sort of sex might be the focus of relationship therapy and suciently appease both partners raises questions about sex therapy, consent, and the centrality of sex within romantic relationships (Gavey, 2005: 139).
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Conclusions
As I have demonstrated, while the scientic research on asexuality is instrumental in legitimizing asexuality, it does so through the reproduction of normative, essentialist, and harmful notions about (a)sexuality and sexual dierence. Women are rendered as more receptive, pliable, and less sexually coordinated than men and asexuality becomes mapped on and in the biological body. Not only are naturalized views of sexual dierence rehearsed, but they are also framed in what may seem at rst glance a progressive and generous analysis of asexuality. Signicantly, Bogaert and Brotto and colleagues ultimately assigned the status of nonpathology to asexuality, enabling it to be understood as a viable sexual orientation. At the same time, however, they did so by simultaneously rehearsing harmful and myopic ideas of sexuality and sexual-gendered dierence. While this work may certainly be deployed strategically to aid in further explorations of asexuality, these texts are certainly not as they may seem at rst instance single-mindedly empowering tracts. Although sexual science is playing a central role in the formation of contemporary asexuality, this is certainly not a simple role. Instead, the scientic study of sex provides opportunities for asexual formation, identication, and action, but also functions to limit and restrict the shape that contemporary asexuality will acquire. In this article I have ultimately argued that the discourses that are woven, in part by sexology, need to be carefully considered and relentlessly scrutinized. Acknowledgments
This article was realized with the support, encouragement, and critical input of Michelle Meagher. I would like to thank Michelle Meagher, Heather Zwicker, Lise Gotell, and Robyn Braun for critical engagements with my work and for valuable comments on earlier versions of the article. My thanks also to CJ DeLuzio Chasin, Virginia Braun, Meg Barker, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and pithy feedback.
Notes
1. In addition to scientific research on asexuality, the genealogy of which this article traces, there is a growing body of literature exploring asexuality from feminist and sociological perspectives. This work includes the Boston Marriages (Rothblum and Brehony, 1993) anthology, Kristin Scherrers qualitative work (2008, 2010a, 2010b), Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks (2010) piece, Eunjung Kims (2010) feminist exploration of asexuality in relation to the health paradigm and in relation to the desexualization (2011) of disabled people, Mark Carrigans (2011) look at the terms and concepts in use by the asexual community, and Breanne Fahs (2010) feminist politicization of asexuality. 2. As described by one asexuality blogger on Apositive.org (The Storms Model. Available at: http://apositive.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=43). 3. Feminists such as Myra Johnson (1977) and Valerie Solanas (1967[2000]) had written about asexuality before Storms, though not as a sexual orientation (see Fahs, 2010).
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4. The statements pertaining to asexuality, to which participants answered true or false, were: I have never been aroused by erotic material which features members of either my same or opposite sex, I have never felt in love with members of either my same or opposite sex, I have never sexually fantasized or dreamed about members of either my same or opposite sex, I am not sexually attracted to members of either my same or opposite sex, I have never engaged in sexual activity with members of my same or opposite sex (Berkey et al., 1990: 7377). 5. The first of these virgin field is Vern Bulloughs phrase (1972), but Weeks avidly deploys it. 6. Later studies call into question Bogaerts report that more women than men are asexual (Prause and Graham, 2007). In general, it is unclear whether more women than men identify as asexual or experience their sexualities as asexual, however Brotto et al. (2010) also found that a significantly greater proportion of their asexual participants were women (133 of 187). Of interest is that when Brotto et al. (2010) made efforts to classify their participants into two genders, 27 of 214 participants refused to provide this information and were subsequently not included in the study (p. 601; also see DeLuzio Chasin, 2011; Hinderliter, 2009). 7. Brotto and Yule (2011), Brotto et al. (2010), and Bogaert (2004, 2006) cite the work of Meredith L. Chivers et al. (for instance, 2004). 8. A key sexologist active in the ongoing efforts to develop and secure this receptivity model is Rosemary Basson (2000). This model is intended to be an improvement on Masters and Johnsons model, which assumes that men and women experience sexual desire in the same way and have the same sexual response cycle (consisting of four phases: excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution). Feminists have critiqued the Masters and Johnson model on the grounds that it provides [a] false notion of sexual equivalency between men and women and that it overstates the genital and physiological similarities between men and women (New View Manifesto. Available at: http://www.newviewcampaign.org/manifesto.asp). 9. It was not in fact specified whether this participant was a woman or man.
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Ela Przybylo is a PhD student of Womens Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her work on asexuality has been published in Sexualities and is forthcoming in Psychology & Sexuality and in the edited collection Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives.

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Producing facts: Empirical asexuality and the scientific study of sex

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