If you find it odd that some people are deeply concerned about what others do in bed, here’s an odder thing: they worry at least as much about what others don’t do there. A new study carried out by Michael Sanders, Vanessa Hirneis and Yasmin Benoit at King’s College London (KCL) has found that asexual people face shocking rates of prejudice, with one in ten people unwilling to accept that they even exist.
“Acephobia – that is, discrimination, prejudice and negative attitudes towards those who identify as asexual – is not something that most people recognise or take seriously”, said Benoit. “There’s a huge lack of research into the phenomenon.”
Asexuality is still not taken seriously
Traditionally, funding for research into the experiences of people with minority sexual orientations has been thin on the ground. Although the new study found that most members of the public know what the term ‘asexual’ means – somebody who experiences no, or very little, sexual attraction – many do not understand it in the same way as they might understand someone being straight, gay, or bisexual.
In fact, the study found that 26% think it’s a mental health problem, even though there’s no clinical evidence to support that. A further 31% believe it can be cured by therapy, a worrying statistic at a time when there is fraught debate over whether it’s acceptable to try to change someone’s orientation.
These attitudes are especially problematic for asexual people because they’re combined with poor public visibility and strong social pressures to engage in sexual relationships. This means that many young people who grow up asexual get into sexual relationships anyway because it’s expected of them. Some choose to have sex because they enjoy making their partners happy, even if they feel no desire of their own, but for others, this is a nightmare scenario. It can lead to broken relationships and broken families if there comes a point when they can no longer cope.
Despite this, 41% of the 400 people surveyed thought that it wasn’t possible for somebody who had had sex to be asexual. It seems highly unlikely that the same proportion would believe a man who had had sex with a woman couldn’t possibly be gay. Again, this kind of thinking adds to the pressure on asexual people to deny who they really are, with a quarter of survey respondents believing that they just can’t have met the right people yet. It makes it more difficult for them to explore other ways of finding fulfilment in life.
No shame attached to acephobia
The survey used two different kinds of methodology to explore participants’ feelings, and by contrasting them, it was able to establish that their answers were much the same regardless of whether the survey organisers would know what they thought. Where other types of prejudice are concerned, people tend to downplay it when asked directly. In this case, people said what they thought regardless, which suggests they have no sense that their opinions might be offensive or socially problematic.
“Our study is the first that we’re aware of that makes use of these methods to assess people’s attitudes towards asexuality”, said Sanders. “The findings are troubling, both in that many people hold misconceptions about asexuality, and that they are happy voicing discriminatory views – at a greater rate than for other groups.”
Because it defines sexual orientation as attraction to men, women or both, asexual people are not covered by the terms of the Equality Act (2010), and in fact have no specific legal protection from discrimination. Some 71% of the survey respondents think that this should change, and there’s a significant chance that it will do when the act comes under review – if the issue is high enough on the political agenda.
Asexual invisibility
Asexual invisibility in wider society does extend to politicians, though there is a little more awareness of asexual people’s existence, at least since mid-2023, when some campaigners against allowing trans children access to puberty blockers asserted that the medicine caused asexuality – a claim for which there is no supporting evidence. Nobody knows why asexuality exists, but it is evenly distributed across the population and appears to be simply a natural aspect of human variation.
The final question in the survey looked at how people felt about the idea of their children turning out to be asexual. While most respondents said they would be comfortable with that, a worrying 27% said that they would not. Asexual people often report family breakdown, partly due to pressure to get married and partly because of an assumption that they won’t produce grandchildren.
Due to the shortage of research in the area, it is unknown whether or not other factors play a significant role. The KCL researchers emphasised the need for more studies, and for more public education on the subject, with a little under a million people in England believed to be asexual.
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