New paper addresses theoretical problems in Asexuality research, ignores other issues

Details: Category: Cake Recipes; Published on Thursday, 19 May 2011 13:47; Written by Lara Tacita; Hits: 869

Asexual activists support research into Asexuality, but even though there needs to be more research, caution is a good thing to exercise. A recent paper about the theoretical issues dealing with Asexuality brings up several interesting points. While the paper gets bogged down in Academic language, that causes it to make its points much more slowly than a blog post or a newspaper article would. The point is not to critique the “Theoretical Issues in the Study of Asexuality.” The paper is by an academic and written for academics. Even a simple commentary on the issues, such as this one, raise far more questions than answers.

The first issue brought up is the fact that these recipients are recruiting self-identified Asexuals from the AVEN website. Recruiting Asexuals from AVEN makes sense. It is the largest online Asexual community. Reaching out to other forums or even this site would not reach as large of an audience as a post on AVEN would. However, by reaching out only to one website, they do not get all Asexuals. Not every self-identified Asexual uses AVEN, although almost all of them are aware of it.

The second issue brought up is one of language. Asexuals have created their own language and terminology. Creating new words can help expand ideas and if nothing else, Asexuals will have added new words to the language. Heteroromantic, homormantic and biromantic. Even a person who has little schooling understands on a basic level that the language used shapes the way people think. Expanding the language people use when it comes to describing human sexuality might be one of the most enduring and useful legacies of the relatively young movement.

Chasin suggests that Asexuals separating romantic and sexual attraction has solved one problem facing researchers, but he ignores the primary issue with the Asexual movement and scientific research.

So far, there has been little directed research from the Asexual community. What are the suicide rates? Are Asexuals, like other sexual minorities, more likely to live in poverty? Asexual people are starting to coming forward in different fields to address these needs but the number of people working in various fields right now are small.