Every Friday, we will share links to news, blogs, and anything else we find interesting. We can’t catch everything, so you are invited to self-promote in the comments!
Ace Blogging
Ozy talks about compulsory sexuality in altsex communities.
Coyote wrote about preemptive vs. concurrent + reflective consent, and discussed further responses.
Ace Community Activity
Creative Ace Publishing is expanding.
News & Outreach
There’s a new academic paper on psychological features and sexual beliefs characterizing self-labeled asexuals.
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About queenieofaces
QueenieOfAces is a graduate student in the U.S. studying Japanese religion. She is a queer asexual. She also blogs over at Concept Awesome and runs Resources for Ace Survivors. She is never quite sure what to write in these introduction things, but this one time she accidentally got a short story on asexuality published in an erotica magazine.
The Asexual Agenda 
Ugh. Just reading the abstract on that paper makes me want to scream… Has anyone read the full paper?
I have not. I can send you a copy if you don’t have access.
Uh… looking at that abstract makes me feel similarly. What??? I really question their methodology. It seems regardless of other certain issues, they had a pretty small sample size anyway. How can they draw such huge conclusions from so few people??
I skimmed the article. They recruited asexuals from AVEN in 2011, and non-asexuals through online mailing lists and academic institution websites. The latter group was selected carefully to match the demographics of the first group (ie similar education, age and relationship status).
They measure a mess of different things, although probably the most interesting is sexual conservatism, which is somewhat higher among asexuals. They suggest this has to do with higher religiosity, although they only find higher religiosity among women, not men. They refer to Bogaert’s results (which also found higher religiosity among asexuals), although based on their methodology it would be more appropriate to compare to community-run surveys (which find low religiosity). I think it’s either a sampling issue, or it’s because they’re comparing to a highly educated (and therefore not very religious) non-asexual group.
The questionnaire to assess sexual conservatism comes from this paper. Glancing through the questions, I have concluded that people with high sexual conservatism scores are terrible.
“People with high sexual conservatism scores” are, you conclude, terrible people based on the questions you glanced through? I’m just trying to understand that final paragraph since I don’t have access to look through the questions myself (I don’t think?). 😛
Interesting, thank you for explaining all of that.
Yeah that’s what I meant. Here are a few example statements (warning for sexual explicitness):
“The best gift woman could bring to marriage is her virginity”
“Reaching climax/orgasm is acceptable for men but not for women”
“A shorter duration of intercourse is a sign of man’s power”
“Foreplay is a waste of time”
Although actually I could see asexuals agreeing more with that last statement, lol
Uh… wow. LOL. Yeah I agree with your assessment. 😉 All sex/kissing/even non-physical romantic things might feel like a waste of time to a lot of aces though, that is very true lmao…
Well, I suppose that being a part of the scientific community myself, I should view this article objectively. But considering how the abstract gives me the distinct impression that the researchers themselves weren’t objective at all, and seemed to have stopped just short of equating asexuality with some form of personality disorder, I don’t think I’d read the article even if I did have access. Though I suppose it’s good to be aware of all the material that can be used against us.
Reading the article…. eh. I’m not really concerned with using it against my communities vs. for them; even if on average aces are more neurotic/etc. than allosexual people, I think there’s a pretty strong point to be made about the effects of asexual identity in a fairly unforgiving cultural environment leading to some mental health issues. (Which is to say: Either way, the data doesn’t legitimize my experience; my experience is already legitimate by virtue of my reality.) I’m more concerned with the article’s methodology and framework.
I am incredibly unimpressed with the article’s introduction, which takes the form of a meandering literature review that regurgitates previous findings without actually taking any direction or making an obvious hypothesis from existing data. It’s something I would seriously expect to find in a freshman year introduction to basic research methods term paper–and not one of the best I’ve seen, either. Normally, I wouldn’t criticize writing skills first when evaluating a paper, but this one appears to have multiple typos, poor paragraph structure, and more importantly, no coherent thesis. It does not bode well for the thoughtfulness of the actual research project.
I do find it interesting that their ‘control’ participants included a full 20 people, 14 women and 6 men, who had to be excluded from the data because they were too asexual! (Their sample sizes in the control group which they did use added up to only 81 people, so this is actually a pretty big chunk of the overall data set.) It makes me wonder about their sampling issues and the adequacy of their controls, as Siggy pointed out. I get that they’re trying to get an exploratory sample comparing asexual people to non-asexual controls without first priming anyone on their definition of asexuality, but it’s a seriously strange way to go about asking people to self-separate.