更好地理解自己
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在展示给外界的躯壳之下，人们心中藏匿着另一个世界，但鲜少有人谈论它。在某种程度上，科学正在追赶人类的各种存在形式。无性恋（asexual）和无浪漫倾向（aromantic）群体使用的语言，让人们能够更精确地看待自己，而在以前，这种语言和思考方式并不存在。例如，“WTFsexual”代表不确定自己有没有感受到性吸引或不确定自己感到的是哪种吸引，这一表达就像拒绝参与必须从性吸引力的角度来进行自我认知一样。
根据美国加州大学洛杉矶分校（University of California, Los Angeles）法学院威廉姆斯研究所（Williams Institute）的数据，无性恋者，有时又称“ace”（“asexual”英文简化读音），也就是几乎没有或完全没有感受到性吸引的人，占成年性少数群体的 1.7% 左右。无性恋可见性与教育网（Asexuality Visibility and Education Network，AVEN）是目前最大的无性恋群体线上社区，情人节那天，AVEN 的一则新闻对网站会员进行了调查，问道：“你在这一天做什么？”和“作为一个无性恋者和/或无浪漫倾向者，你如何度过这一天？”其中一个回答写道，“我们相信爱情不一定非要有性元素或浪漫元素……我和我爱的人一起度过了这一天。”二十多年来，AVEN 一直在稳步发展，网站设有“会员提问”、“老年无性恋者”和“交叉性”（Intersectionality）等板块。根主页底部自动更新的统计数据，AVEN 拥有超过 15 万名会员。大多数会员将自己归类为“无性恋”，与“有性恋”（allosexual）相对，后者指的是那些不认为自己属于无性恋谱系的人。直到大约十年前，《精神健康障碍诊断和统计手册》第五版（DSM-5）才正式规定无性恋不是一种疾病——它不能被诊断、治疗或治愈。无性恋的定义随着时间的推移而演变。最初，人们认为无性恋是指终生对任何人都完全缺乏性吸引力感受的人，但随着时间的推移，通过大量研究后发现，无性恋者对性吸引力的体验存在差异。加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚大学（University of British Columbia）的心理学家洛里·布罗托（Lori Brotto）从 2006 年开始研究无性恋。就在同一年，美国心理学家安东尼·博盖尔特（Anthony Bogaert）发表了一篇具有里程碑意义的文章，发现大约 1% 的人主张自己“缺乏性吸引力体验、无法从任何人那里感受到性吸引力”。布罗托表示，曾有一位精神科医生对她说：“这怎么可能？性吸引力是人类与生俱来的——怎么会这样呢？”也许这只是性欲低下的一种极端表现，或者还有其他原因，比如存在创伤史等等。2013 年，布罗托所在的团队帮助澄清了一点：无性恋应被视为一种性行为，而不是 DSM-5 中需要治疗的疾病症状。布罗托团队与 AVEN 合作进行研究之后得出了这一结论。研究分为两个部分。第一部分是调查，询问 AVEN 成员关于欲望、性唤起、吸引力、性高潮、情绪等相关经历。第二部分则是后续采访，研究团队对定量阶段的一小部分参与者进行了深入采访。在这项研究之后，布罗托团队还进行了很多相关研究，他们得出的结论是无性恋与性欲低下有一些相似之处，但实际上又非常不同。最值得注意的是，无性恋者并没有感到痛苦，他们不想接受治疗，这是他们自我认同的一个方面。对于其中的许多人来说，他们确实会感到性唤起，他们会自慰，也会体验到性高潮，所以这实际上不是性反应系统的功能障碍。研究中，布罗托团队把无性恋者带进实验室，使用心理生理学设备来观察他们在看到性刺激时的身体反应。在大多数情况下，他们的身体反应与有性恋者完全一样，不同之处在于他们自我报告的性吸引力情况。也有很多人质疑和猜测，无性恋可能是未解决的创伤或抑郁的结果，或者可能是某种精神疾病的表现。布罗托团队在两项研究中都问过这个问题，没有证据表明无性恋样本中性侵犯或创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）或一般创伤的发生率高于有性恋样本。这并不代表残疾、疾病或创伤等生活经历不会影响无性恋特性。性认同很复杂，受各种因素的影响，没有哪个因素比其他因素更有效或更无效。近年来，通过 AVEN 等组织的倡导和研究，人们才有可能认识到这一点而不给它安上污名。美国伊利诺伊州立大学（Illinois State University）副教授埃拉·普日贝洛（Ela Przybyło）表示：“现在正是研究无性恋的好时候，因为有如此多的人参与其中。”普日贝洛研究无性恋已经十多年了，她的自我认知也是无性恋，“2008 年我刚开始研究这一领域时，很少有人关注。当时这一概念才刚刚出现，存在的许多叙述都令人非常不安。”近年来，有研究将无性恋视为一个光谱。性吸引力和浪漫倾向会根据人们的生命历程而发生变化，有些人几十年来的自我认知一直都是无性恋，而对有些人来说，它会不断转变。无性恋社区调查团队（Ace Community Survey Team）在 2021 年进行的一项调查发现：几乎五分之一的受访者将自己认定为“灰性恋”（graysexual），即……[查看全文]
Asexuality Research Has Reached New Heights. What Are We Learning?
Tanya Lewis: Today on the podcast menu, we’ve got: food. There is renewed interest in using food as preventive medicine: offering patients vegetables or entire meals to keep them healthier and more resistant to disease. But will prescribing produce really work? A lot of people think so, but it’s been a little hard to prove.Ela Przybyło: All the language that is coming from the asexual and aromantic community gives people precision for thinking of themselves in ways that it was impossible to think of ourselves before, because the language didn't exist. My favorite being, like, “WTFsexual,” which is like just refusing to engage with like, the whole spectrum of having to identify in terms of attraction.Kate Klein: There’s this, like, whole world underneath people’s clothing that no one talks about.Sari van Anders: Our science, in some ways..., is sort of, like, catching up with people's existences.Meghan McDonough: I’m Meghan McDonough, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. This is part four of a four-part Fascination on the science of pleasure. In this series, we’re asking what we can learn from those with marginalized experiences to redefine sexuality, get to the bottom of BDSM, and find the female orgasm. In this episode, we’ll look at how the way in which scientists think about asexuality has shifted.One person writes that they “believe that love doesn’t necessarily have to have a sexual or a romantic element to it ... and I spend the day with people I love.”Asexual, or “ace,” people typically experience little to no sexual attraction and comprise about 1.7 percent of adults in sexual minority groups, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.AVEN is the largest online community of ace people and has been steadily growing for more than two decades. It has forums such as “Members Questioning,” “Older Asexuals” and “Intersectionality.”At the time of my visit, there were 153,884 total members, according to an automatically updating tally at the bottom of AVEN’s homepage. Most of these members would classify their sexual orientation as “asexual,” as opposed to “allosexual,” which is a term for people who do not identify as part of the asexual spectrum.Lori Brotto: Asexuality is a definition that has evolved over time. Initially, it was thought to capture people with lifelong and complete lack of attraction to anyone and over time, and with a lot of research, we know that there are variations in how asexual people experience attraction.McDonough: This is Lori Brotto, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, who has studied asexuality for two decades.Brotto: So I started studying asexuality in 2006. And it was the same year that I think a really important landmark publication came out by [psychologist] Anthony Bogaert that found that about 1 percent of the population endorses, “I lack sexual attraction. I’m not attracted to anyone.”And it was actually in my clinical setting—I had a psychiatrist approach me and say, you know, “How can this be possible? Sexual attraction is an innate aspect of being human—how can this be?” Maybe this is just an extreme version of low desire, or there’s something else going on—history of trauma, etcetera. So we set out to really empirically test that.McDonough: In 2013 Lori was part of a team that helped clarify that asexuality should be seen as a sexuality rather than a symptom of a disorder that requires treatment in DSM-5. This was after research she and her team conducted in partnership with AVEN.Brotto: And we had two parts. One was a survey that asked them about their experiences of desire and arousal and attraction and orgasm and mood and other things like that. And then we followed it up with interviews, in-depth interviews with a smaller subset of the participants from the quantitative phase.And we concluded in that study, which, again, was a long time ago now; there’s been a lot more research since then—but we concluded that asexuality has some similarities with low desire, but it’s really quite distinct.Most notably, asexual people aren’t distressed. They don’t want treatment. This is an aspect of their identity and who they are. They’ve always felt this way—and that for a lot of them, they did feel arousal. They would masturbate. They would experience orgasm, so it really wasn’t a dysfunction of the sexual response system.McDonough: Lori’s team set out to test this.Brotto: We’ve brought ace people into the lab where we would use psychophysiological equipment to look at how the body responds when they’re viewing sexual stimuli.And, you know, pretty much for the most part, the body completely responds in the same way that allosexual, or sexual, people do. But it’s really the kind of self-reported attractions that are quite different.There has also been a lot of question and speculation that maybe asexuality is a result of unresolved trauma or depression, or, you know, “Is this kind of a manifestation of a mental illness of some sorts?”We asked that, I think, in two of our studies, and there was no evidence of higher rates of sexual assault or PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] or kind of trauma in general in the ace samples, compared to the allosexual sample.McDonough: That’s not to say that life experiences such as disability, illness or trauma can’t inform asexual identity. Sexual identity is complex and shaped by a variety of factors, none of which is more or less valid than the others.Recognizing this without attaching stigma to it has only been possible in recent years via the advocacy and research of grassroots groups like AVEN.Ela Przybyło: Now it’s a really exciting moment to do work on asexuality because there’s so, so many people engaging with it.My name is Ela Przybyło, I'm an associate professor at Illinois State University….I've been working on asexuality for well over a decade now.McDonough: Ela also self-identifies as ace.Przybyło: When I started [in] 2008..., very few people cared. It was kind of just coming into existence. And a lot of the narratives that existed at the time were very troubling.McDonough: Ela says that some of the most interesting research she’s seen in recent years has to do with conceiving of asexuality as a spectrum.Przybyło: If you think about coming into something like a queer identity, usually there’s many kind of steps along the way, and it doesn’t just finish at a particular place. So maybe someone starts exploring sexuality, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m definitely a lesbian,” but they’re like, “Wait a sec, but there’s, like, something with gender here as well. Okay, maybe I’m not a lesbian. Maybe I’m trans. But then wait a second—now I’m also experiencing attraction differently.”And it’s the same for thinking about sexual attraction, for romantic attraction, you know; it can change depending on where you are in your life course. And some people are very consistently asexual and asexual-identified for decades. And for some people, it shifts in and out.McDonough: A 2021 survey by the Ace Community Survey Team found that almost one in five respondents self-identified as “graysexual,” or...[full transcript]
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