http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/publications/PDF/PrauseGrahamPDF.pdf See table 2. It's on a 7 point scale from 1 (never masturbated) to 7 (4 times/week or more). Frequency of masturbation for asexuals: 3.7 +/- 2 For non-asexuals: 4.5 +/- 1.9 Mind you, this is just a proxy for sex drive, which may no...

various activists in the gay, transgendered and feminist communities who have hijacked AVEN and turned it into a vehicle for promoting their particular ideology rather than for discussing asexual issues. AFAIK the people here are not friendly to the notion of asexuality becoming a vermiform appendi...

I have a friend who is trans and she tells me a lot about various problematic segments of the trans community. For example, she says there's a group of transsexual women who don't identify as transgender. Instead they claim to have Harry Benjamin Syndrome, an intersex condition (which my friend impl...

I just thought of a new minority: conspiracy theorists!

Feminists are a varied group, and there are parts that I don't like. I don't like the feminists that are a-phobic or transphobic. When a feminist thinks that FTMs are "traitors", that's how you know that they are really anti-men.

But clearly Feministe is on the more positive side.

Then there are the very vocal minorities that have turned AVEN into the Autism Visibility Network, the Transgendered Visibility Network, the Gay and Bi Visibility Network, the Feminism Perpetuation Network, and, in short, everything except what the organization's name purports it to be. If you hang...

Siggy, I'll accept your statistics, but if that's the case, then the cis-gendered are largely a silent majority. I still think that our voices tend to get drowned out. I had some very ugly run-ins with a hypercombative and fight-loving autistic person on Knights of the Shaded Triangle and am theref...

Actually, it was there, in the comments. In cases where a person is chromosomally entirely male or female, I am opposed to sex change operations (though I would never vote to forbid them). I believe that identity is a mental and emotional matter, which is not determined by our physical appearance. O...

All of the contributors, AFAIK, are AVEN members. The spotlight interview is with an AVEN member, when there are 30 million unaffiliated asexuals in the world who could have been interviewed. The essay about Dr. Who is based on an AVEN thread that was active when I was last there. Oh yeah, I can se...

My understanding of trans issues is that every single mainstream media portrayal is problematic in some way. Unfortunately, I'm not able to catch this sort of thing myself. It doesn't look too bad to me. But I sort of sense an underlying message that somehow it's more okay for people to transition i...

Cis-gendered people make about 80% of AVEN, and numbers for the larger asexual community are probably similar.

Disabled people, especially those with autism spectrum disorder, have had problems in the community.

To be honest, I simply cannot figure out how something that is mostly fictional stories can be construed as AVEN-centric. And even if that were the case I don't see why it would be a problem, since it is AVENues. Also I don't know where you get the idea that I have some sort of privileged position o...

Michael, The criticism you just wrote does not exist to help the AVENues editors. It just exists to slam them. Why you cannot give any useful criticism, I have no idea. I thought this issue was very heavy on fiction. Is it a new direction, or are those just the kinds of things that got submitted? TB...

This story is closely related to a subculture in Japan known as "herbivorous men". They're like metrosexual men who prefer simplistic single lives. I suspect this article hides a huge swirling vortex of issues, and that most of us non-Japanese are poorly equipped to understand it. Ditto to...

There is a significant difference between visibility efforts and political action. Visibility efforts involve trying to inform people about something they are not aware of. Political action nearly always involves trying to acquire personal power under the guise of fighting social injustice on behal...

Maybe I am completely off base, but I am painfully aware of how much the medical community wants to discredit asexuality and to portray it as nothing more than some sort of sexual disfunction or personality disorder. My thought is that the best way to fight this attitude is to first analyze it and ...

Unofficially, and with no scientific basis or proof whatsoever, I have been privately thinking of asexuals as either innate asexuals or functional asexuals. An innate asexual would be someone who is apparently normal in every other way; they simply lack the ability to feel sexual attraction to othe...

During my travels around the online asexual community, I've encountered of a number of instances of asexuality being turned into the vermiform appendix of other movements, most notably autism and LGBTQ. I've encountered a number of fundamentally hostile and confrontational people who seem to see be...

FYI, I wrote a blog post summarizing some of the history I learned in this thread.

Nat, quick question: What's your preferred gender pronoun?

What made me realize I may find sex enjoyable was actually pornography. I spent many years trying to figure out why some were exciting and others not, and eventually I realized the factor was the excitement in the actresses. I was excited by those that genuinely seemed to be enjoying the experience...

Gray-A is meant to cover the gray region between asexual and sexual. There's not much point in being more specific than that, because there are a lot of ways to be gray-A. The AVENwiki lists a few examples. I generally don't use the term outside the community, I just say I'm gay/asexual/between. Yes...

I am a gray-A who likes sex. I won't answer every question though, for privacy reasons. 1) I mostly like cuddling and making out. Cuddling makes me realize how much I like being physically close to the person. I know that many asexuals think of this as separate from sex, but I experience them as con...

Cool! Someone here should edit the AVENwiki's article on Apositive too! I had a question about something in the wiki: The [LiveJournal] community was created independently of AVEN and as such initially used descriptions such as 'little or no sex drive' and 'living without sexuality' as often as the ...

Well it looks like he's taken your criticism on board and it's no longer a triangle but a complex network of different relationships. Your critique's also reminded me of 2002 and the sexuality triangle diagram ;) But the 101 talk is from 2006, and the talk I saw was a few months ago. It's more like...

I saw David Jay make a presentation about nonsexual intimacy, and he talked about this sort of thing. He drew a triangle on the board. The three corners of the triangle represent three different sources of intimacy: partners, self, and community. It's a spectrum, he says. I think it's a little silly...

I'm really happy I started this thread now. I'm kind of in awe of some of the longer-time members and their knowledge of community history. And they seem to be quite in awe of you, paranoidgynandroid. I know it's not as if you single-handedly did it all by yourself, but I'm very grateful that the as...

Dargon, thanks! :) Was the Sexual Friends and Allies created while you were there? Roy, "nonlibidoist" typically means lacking a sex drive. More concretely, it means no masturbation. However, the definition relevant to this discussion is the definition used by the Official Nonlibidoism Soc...

I'm curious about some history of the asexual community, and in particular, the part of history where there was a split between nonlibidoists and asexuals. I know there used to be the Official Nonlibidoism Society (formerly known as the Official Asexual Society). I've read the historical account on ...

This debate has only come up recently in Ace circles. You're wrong there. This has existed pretty much since the beginning of the asexual community. It's even mentioned in the AVEN FAQs, which I think date back to 2004. I think there are actually two issues here. First, are LGBT spaces inclusive of...