What You Need to Know About People Who Never Want to Have Sex

source: Viralitytoday

For a non-trivial number of people, abstinence is not only the best policy, it's the only one.

Do asexuals read romance novels? Watch pornography? Read stories with oversexualized, click-bait headlines? These are the kinds of mysteries that even a devoted fan of the famously sexless Sherlock Holmes would love to have investigated. 

And though it may not be elementary, dear Reader, thanks to a decade’s worth of new research into asexuality, we no longer need a Sherlock Holmes to deduce the answers.

1% of the general population is asexual.

In a new review article and in his recent book Understanding Asexuality, Anthony Bogaert, a psychology professor at Brock University and a leading authority on asexuality, goes over some of the key insights scientists recently have learned on the subject, including why asexuality is so important for understanding the broader spectrum of human sexual behavior.

Humans are hardly alone in the animal kingdom when it comes to sexual variability.

Researchers, for example, often classify lab rodents as being “studs” or “duds” according to their levels of sexual interest.

“Duds,” however, is a serious misnomer when it comes to asexuals.

Their equipment works just as well as anyone else’s does. 

They do, however, demonstrate lower levels of sexual desire. “As one might expect,” Bogaert tells OZY, “asexual people fantasize at a lower rate than sexual people. Indeed, a significant percentage have never fantasized.”

More research on masturbating asexuals is required. Those poor souls.

Another somewhat unexpected finding is that many asexuals do want romantic relationships. “They want many of the nonsexual aspects of a relationship,” says Lori Brotto, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of British Columbia, “which often includes physical activity like cuddling and intimacy, but it is not connected at all to feelings of wanting sex.” Indeed, next to the romantic comedy, asexuality research has probably done the most for decoupling romance and sex, which some neuroscience studies now suggest are the product of different processes in the brain.
And in a realm of science focused largely on couplings, it is such decouplings that make research on asexuality so important.