Asexuals and the Bush Era

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I have been taken in by the tractor beam known as Tumblr, where one doesn't have to construct coherent, well-reasoned posts, or use grammar, but can engage in pointless pissing matches with obnoxious modern identity politic groups.

Like asexuals!  But fear not, I am not here to shit on asexuals.  At least, not exactly.  But during a Tumblr-inspired discussion between the boy and I the other night, two things occurred to us.

a) Asexuality, as an identity, is a relatively new phenomenon, and
b) The vast majority of people who identify as asexual or as part of asexual culture are young - under 25.  I'd say anecdotally they bulk tend to skew even younger, teens through early twenties.

I'm not pulling this shit out of my ass.  The asexual community has done (non-scientific) surveys.  The results are actually quite fascinating, particularly if you're a research nerd like me.  A 2008 survey, for instance,  showed the mean birth year of aces as 1981 and the mode (largest grouping in respondents) was 1987, with a standard deviation of about 10 years.  The population was only 288, so for that small a population those slightly wonky results are expected, but it did tend to show that aces were generally young-ish, with some very far outliers on the older side of things, which makes the mean not a particularly useful descriptor of the actual ages of most respondents.

This year's survey creates an even more interesting picture.  Within 3 years, the number of respondents has increased by more than a factor of ten.  So the asexual community is clearly growing at an incredible rate.  Even more fascinating, it's getting much younger.  76.2% of the respondents are currently between the ages of 16 and 25.  That is an incredibly young group.

(Speaking of, the compilers of this "research" used fucking pie charts to represent questions that were marked "check all that apply."  That is pretty much the worst thing anyone has ever done.)

I go through this boring data to make just one point: the vast majority of asexuals are not of my generation, but what is loosely called "Generation Y" or "Echo boomers."  These are people who were in elementary school and middle school during the Bush years, as opposed to the boy and myself, who were teenagers and young adults in the 90's.  The 1990's were a halcyon time of riot grrrls, zines, interesting pop music, and of course, sex-positivity.  I may have a bit of the rose-colored glow about this era that most people do when speaking of when they came of age, obviously.  But the 1990s were obviously very different from the 2000s politically, pop-culturally, and sexually.

It made me wonder if a lot of my disconnect with the asexual movement has to do with not understanding what it would be like to grow up and come of age sexually when the government in control in the U.S. had an extremely sex-negative, homophobic agenda.  Abortion rights were being stripped away left and right.  Abstinence education became the only kind of sex education in many public schools.  The administration was openly hostile to GLBT people, and DOMA passed.  I grew up with Madonna letting her freak flag fly, but Gen Y kids grew up with Brittney Spears yammering on about waiting til marriage.

In the 2000's, the overall political media landscape with regard to sex shifted.  While AIDS was a big deal in the '90's, no doubt, the focus was on teaching young people how to protect themselves and still enjoy sex.  In the 2000's a major cultural backlash occurred, with the safety message turning into blatant fear-mongering.  And with public health services for STI testing and abortion being eradicated, being sexually active suddenly had a lot more consequences for many teens.  It's not hard to see how sex might have seemed, well, scary.

Now I know many asexuals will say their asexuality is an inborn trait and that they aren't scared of sex, but simply lack sexual attraction.  And I'm sure that is true for many.  But societal messages also have a huge impact on how people interact with and define their sexuality.  The standard liberal view now is that sexual orientation is something you're "born with" yet a far greater percentage of the population identifies as GLB now than in, say, the 1950's.  And it's not because humans went through some micro-evolutionary process where there's just more gayness.

So you take the reality of growing up in a very sex-negative culture where sex has a lot of risks and couple that with the popularization of the Internet, which has created thousands of sub-groups and identities that barely existed before but can now connect and communicate, and it's not at all surprising that asexuals suddenly seem to be everywhere.

If the U.S. suddenly took a turn towards utopia and sex-negativity in culture was eradicated, I am sure there would still be plenty of people who identify as ace.  But I don't think that we can discount the ways in which the Bush-era may have affected Generation Y and how they view sex as a result, either.