Salon Culture: Network of Ideas - A Conversation with Andrian Kreye

In 2001, the LA Times wrote about the emergence of a new salon culture in Los Angeles, frequented by writers, filmmakers, and actors. This phenomenon is the re-emergence of a salon culture, which began originally in the 16the century in Italy, but is most often associated with the 17th and 18th century literary culture of France.

In 2011, both Alternet (US) and The Telegraph (UK) did articles on salon culture. This is a bit of the history of American salons from the Alternet article:

The modern salon formally emerged in New York during the early 20th century. Edith Wharton, who loathed the American literary scene and resettled in Paris in 1907, likely attended the intellectual gatherings hosted by her sister-in-law, Mary Cadwalader Jones, on East 11th Street. In 1900, Jones gained national prominence championing the role of nurses in public health, fiercely arguing for the professionalization of a traditionally female vocation. She enjoyed intellectual life and hosted "Mary Cadwal's parlor” at which many leading intellectual lights of the day were regulars, including the writers Henry James, Henry Adams and F. Marion Crawford, the painters John LaFarge and John Singer Sargent, and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

However, it was Mabel Dodge’s famous “Evenings,” hosted at her townhouse at 23 Fifth Avenue during the 1910s, that made salons part of the city’s social life. Dodge was a classic Gilded Age “poor little rich girl,” a spoiled dilettante and libertine who, until she found her calling, attached herself to the latest fad and male celebrity. In 1913 she helped organize the controversial International Show of Modern Art, popularly known as the Armory Show, which launched modern art in America. That same year, she joined John Reed, “Big Bill” Hayward and Emma Goldman in support of the IWW-backed silk workers strike in Paterson, NJ, playing a leading role organizing the controversial, “Pageant of the Paterson Strike,” held at Madison Square Garden.

Dodge’s salons were organized along the lines of the traditional discussion-group format known as the General Conversation. An appointed leader, normally a specialist in an artistic, academic or political subject, offered a brief introductory commentary focusing the discussion and then invited those in attendance to jump into the discussion. Salon leaders ranged from A. A. Brill on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, Reed on Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution, Margaret Sanger on birth control and women’s rights and even African-American entertainers from Harlem.

As the scholar Andrea Barnet reminds us, “Dodge’s salon was where black Harlem first met Greenwich Village bohemia and, conversely, where white bohemia got its first taste of a parallel black culture that it would soon not only glorify but actively try to emulate.”

I wish there were something like this in Tucson today. It would be awesome to meet up with a group of intelligent and educated people to exchange ideas, explore new topics, and generally hear new ideas or new perspectives.

I said this out loud the other night, so my girlfriend immediately mentioned to a friend on Facebook, and he and his wife like the idea, so maybe it will happen. And as tradition holds, the salon is often hosted by a female, the Salonnière.

The article below is about one of the major ongoing salons in the 20th-21st century - the Edge Salons hosted by John Brockman.

Salon Culture: Network of Ideas

A Conversation with Andrian Kreye [10.2.14]

Despite their intense scientific depth, John Brockman runs these gatherings with the cool of an old school bohemian. A lot of these meetings indeed mark the beginning of a new phase in science history. One such example was a few years back, when he brought together the luminaries on behavioral economics, just before the financial crisis plunged mainstream economics into a massive identity crisis. Or the meeting of researchers on the new science of morality, when it was noted that the widening political divides were signs of the disintegration of American society. Organizing these gatherings over summer weekends at his country farm he assumes a role that actually dates from the 17th and 18th century, when the ladies of the big salons held morning and evening meetings in their living rooms under the guise of sociability, while they were actually fostering the convergence of the key ideas of the Enlightenment.

Salon Culture
NETWORK OF IDEAS

The Salon was the engine of enlightenment. Now it's coming back. In the digital era the question might be different from the ones in the European cities of the 17th century. The rules are the same. Why is there such a great desire to spend some hours with likeminded peers in this age of the internet?

by Andrian Kreye, Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts & Essays), Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich.

The salon, which marked a entire era: Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar with her guests, including Goethe (third from left) and Herder (far right).

For more than a century now the salon as a gathering to exchange ideas has been a footnote of the history of ideas. With the advent of truly mass media this exchange had first been democratized, then in rapid and parallel changes diluted, radicalized, toned down, turned up, upside and down again. It has only been recently that a longing emerged for those afternoons in the grand suites of the socialites in the Paris, Vienna, Berlin or Weimar of centuries past, where streams of thought turned into tides of history, where refined social gatherings of the cultured elites became the engine of the Enlightenment.

Just like back then, today's new salons are mostly exclusive if not closed circles. If you do happen to be invited though you will swiftly notice the intellectual force of those gatherings. On a summer's day on Eastover Farm in Connecticut for example, in the middle of green rolling hills with horse paddocks and orchards under the sunny skies of New England. This is where New York literary agent John Brockman spends his weekends. Once a year, he invites a small group of scientists, artists and intellectuals who form the backbone of what is called the Third Culture. Which is less of a new culture, but a new form of debate across all disciplines traditionally divided into the humanities and the natural sciences, i.e.,  the first and second culture.

On that weekend, for example, he had invited a half-dozen men. Each of whom had a large footprint in their respective disciplines: the gene researcher Craig Venter, who was the first to sequence the human genome; his colleague George Church, Robert Shapiro, who explored the chemistry of DNA, the astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, quantum physicist Seth Lloyd, and the physicist Freeman Dyson, who sees in his his role as scientist the need to continually question universally accepted truths. A few science writers were also present, along with Deborah Triesman, literary editor at the New Yorker.

At some of his other meetings, the number of Nobel Laureates might have been higher, but the question under discussion in the warm summer wind among rustling tops of maple trees with jugs full of freshly made lemonade, carried utmost weight: "What is life?" Seth Lloyd formulated the problem right at the start: science knows everything about the origin of the universe, but almost nothing about the origin of life. Without this knowledge, the sciences, on the threshold of the biological age, are groping in the dark.

Brockman had deliberately chosen the invited scientists as representatives of different fields, who, for years, had understood the need to think across the scientific disciplines. But even then, you could feel like an outsider, as was the case when Robert Shapiro made a joke about ribonucleic acids, which was greeted with boisterous laughter by the scientists.

Despite their intense scientific depth, John Brockman runs these gatherings with the cool of an old school bohemian. A lot of these meetings indeed mark the beginning of a new phase in science history. One such example was a few years back, when he brought together the luminaries on behavioral economics, just before the financial crisis plunged mainstream economics into a massive identity crisis. Or the meeting of researchers on the new science of morality, when it was noted that the widening political divides were signs of the disintegration of American society.  Organizing these gatherings over summer weekends at his country farm he assumes a role that actually dates from the 17th and 18th century, when the ladies of the big salons held morning and evening meetings in their living rooms under the guise of sociability, while they were actually fostering the convergence of the key ideas of the Enlightenment.

Not all salonnières were content to play the host role—Johanna Schopenhauer (the mother of the philosopher Arthur, here with her daughter Adele) was a significant writer with an extensive oeuvre.

The salon is still regarded as a mysterious world of thoughts and ideas, a world in which the participants soon were consigned to the role of historical figures in history books. In the early days of the salon culture these meetings were incubators of new ideas as well as the first form an urban and bourgeois culture. The first salons were formed in Paris in the early 17th century, when the nobles left their estates and are gathered in the capital around the King. Initially, they cemented these early manifestations of bourgeois culture such as music and literature. But soon philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot appeared in the 18th century and prepared the intellectual ground for the French revolution.

In all major cities in Europe, it soon was common for ladies of high society to gather influential thinkers around them. Often, these were for their time radical gatherings, because those salons dissolved the rigid boundaries between social classes. With rational thinking of the Enlightenment, the reputation enjoyed by a person was measured in terms of intellect, not status or wealth. Berlin and Vienna were established, next to Paris, as cities of culture of the salon. But in small towns too, the intellectual life soon revolved around salons. The salons in Weimar were legendary, where Johanna Schopenhauer, the mother of the future philosopher, Arthur, and the Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, counted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller among their guests.

At the end of the 18th century, the revolutionary spirit was present in the salons of Caroline Schelling in Mainz. The Prussian military arrested Schelling in 1793 for her links to the Jacobins.

At the same time England developed the first coffee house culture. In 1650, the first English cafe, called Grand Café, opened in Oxford. The open structure of the cafés had a tremendous effect on the culture of debate, but so did coffee and tea, the new drinks from the colonies. In a country in which the entire population at any time of day was drinking alcohol, the stimulant of caffeine acted as fertilizer for the burgeoning idea cultures. But it was mostly the lounges and cafes in Europe (and later America) that gave birth to the fundamental principle of progress and innovation, namely the network. Indeed, it was rarely the sudden Eureka-moments in the solitude of the laboratory of the study, that scientists and thinkers brought humanity from the dark times of the pre-modern era into the light of reason.  It was the fierce debates held in the lounges and cafes that allowed the ideas behind these Eureka-moments to mature.

The salon of the Duchess Anna Amalia  was called "Garden of the Muses." In addition to her role as salonnière, the Duchess was also generous patron of Goethe and Schiller.

No wonder that the nostalgia for these meetings between big thinkers is so strong today. With his 2010 film "Midnight in Paris", Woody Allen, the greatest of the urban romantics, created a cinematic monument to this nostalgia. As the American author Gil Pender roams the nighttime streets and alleys of Paris, he accidentally falls into a time portal and lands in the Paris of the 1920s. There, in the rooms of the writer and collector Gertrude Stein with walls covered in works of art, he meets Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. This is a tribute to the small world of bohemians who gave birth to so many great things in the history of culture.

This nostalgia fits perfectly in an age when the mass media abandon models of publications and programs to turn into networks with an infinite number of nodes. Facebook, Twitter and countless blogs and forums perfectly simulate this exciting exchange of ideas for an audience of billions. In terms of today's digital Weltgeist, there is already talk about the global salon, and a universal brain. Could it be that nostalgic interest in the salons of the past is a desire for more clarity to face the complexity of the networked future?

In the digital era we might very well witness once again the phenomenon that Jürgen Habermas has called "structural transformation of the public sphere", the rise of a new bourgeoisie and mass society that began with the salons. There is no across-the-board answer to this question, that's impossible when the structural transformation of the digital age affects various spheres of the international community differently. In Europe and America, digital media always leads to new cul-de-sacs and roundabouts of communication. Social networks claim to be not only the successors of salons, they evoke the ominous metaphysical principle of the Weltgeist (global mind), while they actually reduce the principle of intellectual eruptions in salons to a de-intellectualized white noise.

Salon of the 21st century: the literary agent John Brockman (Center, with Hat) in the circle of the scientists of the Edge network during one of his legendary weekends at Eastover Farm in Connecticut.

In emerging and developing countries on the other hand, the use of digital media has indeed made Habermas's structural transformation of the public possible, in much the same way as in the Europe of the Enlightenment in terms of the salons and the early mass media. In countries like Iran, Egypt or the Ukraine, each change begins with dangerous ideas, because if ideas are to make a difference, they must be dangerous.

This was no different in the early salons. If the great intellectuals and artists of the time met in the literary salons, it was by no means solely to discuss questions of aesthetics or literary forms. In the late 18th century salons of the woman of letters Caroline Schelling, for example, in Mainz and Göttingen, were collecting revolutionary spirits who took a stand in Paris, at the dawn of a new era that brought the demise of the monarchy. Caroline Schelling was arrested, slandered, vilified, but it did not change the fact that, under her leadership, the Jacobins eventually formed in Germany as well as a force opposing the monarchy and empire.

This is the very reason that an autocracy such as China uses its power to promote the social concept of the individual, because a single individual cannot spread dangerous ideas. This fear of the power of networks also explains the unusually harsh persecution of religious communities. It's bad enough that faith calls into question the sovereignty of the party on thinking. However there is a danger for power is also lurking in the networks of churches and monasteries. Faith calls into questions the sovereignty of the party line of thinking and thoughts. Danger lurks for those in power in the networks of churches and monasteries.

In the birthplaces of the enlightenment, in America and Europe, the current struggle for sovereignty over interpretation is not a political fight though—this has dissolved since the end of ideologies in countless, often regional micro-conflicts. Similarly, the battle between religion and science has been in play for a long time. Yet it is science that challenges the certainties.

The Internet has the possibility to enlarge the circle of great minds that exchange ideas ad infinitum. To not get lost in the vastness of cyberspace, thinkers and creators have started to meet again on a regular basis for various new forms of salons like DLD; the Aspen Ideas Forum or the TED Conference. What started as an elite gathering of Silicon Valley pioneers thirty years ago has turned into a global forum of ideas, which are spread via internet videos of lectures and talks. Twice a year about a thousand scientists, artists, activist and entrepreneur come together in one place like Monterey, Vancouver, Oxford or Rio, to learn about new ideas "worth spreading" to quote the motto of the conference. In a lot of cases, such ideas will have an impact on the world for years on end.

At this point, the memory of that summer day in Connecticut comes into focus, and the moment when the scientists asking questions about the origin of life talked about their research and projects. Craig Venter told of his plans to develop bacteria that could supplant fossil fuels as an energy source. George Church described the sequencing of the genome of the Mammoth. Dimitar Sasselov reported by his search for Earth-like planets. Seth Lloyd explained the unprecedented opportunities of the quantum computer.  What, for the onlookers under the maple trees only a few years ago sounded like science fiction, is today, to a large extent, scientific reality.

In the New York of the 1960s, hardly anyone understood the network of eccentric artist Andy Warhol, as seen here with John Brockman (left) and Bob Dylan (right) in the "Factory", a hybrid of salon, studio, and party room.

Of course, John Brockman long ago put his salon online. Leading scientists, artists, prominent intellectuals, regularly meet on his edge.org website to have a conversation about the issues of our time. Annually, there is a concerted action in which he asks the entire network a big question. Eight years ago, the following was central issue for this salon culture: "What is your most dangerous idea?" More than a hundred responses were submitted and published. It reads like intellectual fireworks. In your own head, you quickly feel for yourself how ideas clash, release energy and generate new ideas. It is then that you experience the intellectual thrill that has always inspired the salons.

In the meantime, Brockman's arena of ideas has sparked countless likeminded gatherings of all scales and fields. Conferences have been established as a distinct independent form of communication, because the network tends to be significantly more effective and fruitful beyond the Internet. Other than the observable external format, events such as the TED Conferences, the Aspen Ideas Festival, PopTech, or the Digital Life Design (DLD), have little in common with the congresses and meetings of old. They have long since become the new crucibles in the history of ideas. Especially the American TED Conference has shown in recent years the way in the salon of the 21st century can evolve. What started in 1984 as a meeting of Silicon Valley elites under the banner "Technology, Entertainment, Design", is now a global network that utilizes all channels of communication—conferences, online videos, books, TV, radio, blogs to make ideas blossom and develop on a global scale. Twice a year, a small circle from this large network meets in a cosmopolitan city ... in the spirit of the salons of yesteryear.

 

A decade ago, this topic seemed relatively fringe and unlikely to appeal to very many people. Now, it seems this is almost becoming a movement. More and more people are identifying as asexual.

This is an interview from Salon with the author of a new book on the topic, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality (September 2, 2014).

You’re about as sexually attractive to me as a turtle: Coming out as asexual in a hypersexual culture

The author of a new book on asexuality talks about growing up without desire and dating without physical intimacy

Tracy Clark-Flory 
Tuesday, Sep 16, 2014 

Julie Sondra Decker

At age 14, Julie Sondra Decker found herself delivering the cliché line “It’s not you, it’s me.” Only, really, she meant it. She wasn’t attracted to her first boyfriend but kissed him anyway “because I was expected to,” she says. People told her, “One day you’ll like it” — and she believed them.

But by age 16, nothing had changed. “I simply had a complete lack of interest in sex and anything related,” she writes. “I’d just never been sexually attracted to another person. Not my boyfriend, not the hottest people in school, not the heartthrob movies stars. I wasn’t interested. Period.” Her high school boyfriend nicknamed her “Miss Non-Hormone” and she began referring to herself as “nonsexual.” That’s when people started offering their opinions — things like, “That’s not normal. You need to get checked out,” “You’re going to die alone with a houseful of cats” and “Shut up and admit you’re gay.”

Shortly after Decker graduated from college, David Jay founded the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network in 2001 and media attention soon followed. “I started describing myself as ‘asexual’ instead of ‘nonsexual’ to connect myself with the awareness efforts,” explains Decker, a 36-year-old author living in Tampa, Florida. Now she’s taken it a step further, writing a book, The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, to demystify the overlooked orientation. She spoke with Salon about our hypersexualized culture, masturbation and what non-asexuals have to learn from asexuals about love and relationships.

Let’s start with the most basic thing here: How do you personally define asexuality?



Asexuality, most broadly, is a lack of sexual attraction. However, it’s a pretty diverse spectrum, and some people prefer to say they aren’t interested in sex, don’t like sex or feel that sex isn’t intrinsically rewarding. Many asexual people, including me, will describe it as nobody seeming sexy to them or nothing happening in reaction to someone being sexy.

When did you discover that you were asexual?



I was about 15 years old when I first started calling myself “nonsexual.” That was in the mid-1990s, before there were Internet-based asexual communities — well, really before there was much of an Internet. For me it was almost a joke term at first; everybody else I knew found sex intriguing and had their own complicated relationship with it, but to me it seemed like a complete non-issue. I could tell if people were physically attractive in a normative way, but that didn’t inspire any reaction for me or any desire to be closer to them, possess them somehow or touch them. I had no fantasies that involved sex or physical intimacy, no dreams that I could recall on the subject, and certainly didn’t enjoy the overtures others made toward me in that regard. So I used the “nonsexual” term with the full understanding that I was fairly young and with an expectation that I would grow and change. I did grow and change. But that part of me didn’t.

Have you had romantic relationships?



Just a couple, both in high school. I dated two boys —one in ninth grade, one in 11th. The first boy was basically an experiment, I guess, because I’d never been asked out before and I figured I’d see what it was like, but all I found out was that we didn’t have much in common and I didn’t like French kissing. The second boy, who was older, pursued me relentlessly for a year or so before I finally agreed to date him — my naive little 16-year-old heart thought letting him date me might boost the poor guy’s self-esteem — but he turned out to be the type who thought he could change me and believed it was his own failure when he couldn’t. Dating him involved some unpleasant experiments that he more or less pressured me into, and I went through with more physical intimacy than I was comfortable with, though we did not have sex. I — again, naively — thought “keeping an open mind” would only require trying something once and then he’d have to leave me alone since I’d given it a shot.

I learned through that experience that no amount of entertaining others’ expectations is actually enough unless I change. They’ll always say I didn’t give it a chance, or ruined it by expecting to hate it, or didn’t try with the right person, or with the right gender, or at the right time. I decided since then to trust myself as the arbiter of what’s “enough” and have turned down plenty of offers since, and because I have yet to feel any sexual attraction to anyone, I have never allowed anyone else to talk me into anything I know I don’t desire. I think I’d recognize it if it happened to me. Most other people find it unmistakable. If a food smells delicious to everyone else but bland or bad to me, I don’t owe anyone the demonstration of actually eating it before I’m “allowed” to say I don’t want to eat the dish.

Was there a coming out process?



Not really. I tell people I’m asexual all the time, so I suppose each of those has been a mini coming-out, and sometimes people have a slew of questions that I’m usually happy to answer if they’re presented in an appropriate context. But everybody who knew me when I was dating in high school knew I wasn’t into it, and everybody who’s known me since has seen me demonstrating my happiness with my situation even when I didn’t have anything to call it, so there was never any kind of official “coming out” to close people in my family and friend groups. I know plenty of asexual people who have had coming-out experiences, though.

I know many asexuals masturbate, correct? How do you differentiate between sexual desire and the desire for physical release? 



Some asexual people masturbate and some don’t. It’s about the same as in non-asexual populations. Because we don’t always have the same experiences as other orientations even when we date and have sex, we tend to pick things apart so we can analyze what we’re experiencing and what we’re not. In this case, we describe a difference between sexual arousal, sex drive and sexual attraction. Sexual arousal suggests a physiological response, sex drive suggests a desire to respond to arousal or a desire to pursue sex, and sexual attraction suggests an experience of finding someone sexually appealing. An asexual person might have a libido and be able to get aroused, but not have those experiences directed at anyone. 

It’s fairly common knowledge that very young children often masturbate, and they are not “thinking about sex” just because they’re enjoying touching their genitals. They don’t even know what sex is, they just know it feels good. A maturing or mature asexual person will have a more complicated understanding of masturbation if they’re engaging in it — so this is not to imply that they necessarily masturbate the same way an infant might — but I’m saying it because it’s one very obvious example of how masturbation can be “not about sex.”

In short, enjoying a physical sensation is not the same thing as finding other people sexually attractive, and it’s attraction, not behavior, that defines this orientation.

 We hear “But masturbation by definition is sexual!” all the time from detractors, usually followed by some pseudo-scientific twaddle about why we can’t be asexual if we “are sexual” through masturbation, but the very simple fact is that we don’t care if some of us “count as sexual” by some incredibly broad definition. It doesn’t change anything about what we’re describing as our experience.

What’s the worst thing about being asexual?

For me, the worst thing about being asexual is other people trying to fix me all the time. They develop this completely inappropriate obsession with my sexual and romantic life, which can manifest as anything from aggressively propositioning me for sex to searching for what’s “really” wrong with me through invasive questions. Some of them maintain that these attempted interventions are about my health and happiness, apparently unaware that they’re compromising both by refusing to respect my identity.

What’s the best thing?

For me, the best thing about being asexual is getting to meet other people on the asexual spectrum and offering them support while learning about how they navigate their lives.

What’s it like being asexual in such a hypersexualized culture?

Sometimes being left out of an experience that’s considered by so many to be central to life is isolating and a little lonely, but only in a sort of distant sense, because I honestly do not wish I was like everyone else. Sometimes sexually motivated advertising seems ridiculous to me — though I understand a lot of people think so too despite not being asexual — and if a movie or television show relies on the sexual attractiveness of its actors to magnify its audience’s appreciation, that will be lost on me. 

It really only gets to me when people fixate on changing me and pressure me to “try” to be something — anything! — else. I’ve had wannabe partners condescendingly mutter about what a waste I am or whine unattractively about how unfair it is that I won’t give them a shot — how close-minded I must be to deny myself the supposed pleasures of sexual relations with someone who’s literally as sexually attractive to me as a turtle. This preoccupation others sometimes have with “converting” me — and their belief that it would be for my own good, not their own benefit — is a symptom of a hypersexualized culture in which they literally cannot imagine a sexless or unpartnered life being fulfilling. I wish they’d just stop projecting once in a while.

Do you ever feel left out of pop culture? Do you wish to see asexuals better represented?



Asexual people are not commonly featured in media. It would definitely be nice if more celebrities frankly acknowledged their asexuality — though you see it once in a while with folks like Janeane Garofalo or Paula Poundstone — and it would be great if more mainstream media included asexual characters. The fact that we never see ourselves represented in the wider world is a contributing factor to our isolation and difficulty coming to terms with our identity. We need both stories that blatantly feature asexuality and its discovery — like a subplot of the New Zealand soap opera “Shortland Street,” in which a biromantic asexual man found his label on the Internet and explored what it meant — as well as stories that feature asexuality incidentally, like a one-off mention of asexuality spoken by a minor character on the American drama “Huge,” in which a camp counselor casually identified as asexual while watching a movie and described her aromanticism. We need “issue books” as well as asexual best friend characters and incidentally asexual romantic partners and specific but normalized inclusion of asexuality in all venues where sexual diversity would normally be discussed.

Often enough, I think people feel helplessly at the whim of their sexual desire. When you don’t have sexual desires driving you in that way, is there some other force that replaces it?

I can only speak for myself here, but I don’t see my passions as driving me “instead of” sexual desire. I think everyone chases their passions. I’m an artist, a singer, a reader and a passionate writer, but I don’t feel I do those things as a substitute for sex any more than an Olympic skier attacks those slopes “instead of” playing basketball. I’m happy to say that I’m a fulfilled and productive person, but there are plenty of asexual people with no so-called extraordinary passions or achievements, and it’s also true that non-asexual people are responsible for most of the world’s innovations and accomplishments even though they also have sexual passions that drive them. It’s really not a tradeoff.

Does the asexual community have any particular political causes — like recognition of non-traditional families or something along those lines?

Absolutely! Sorry, but this is going to get long.

 Some of our political causes are along the same lines as any typical LGBTQ group, since a huge percentage of asexual people are also LGB+ and/or trans or non-binary, we of course would benefit from marriage equality and broader gender recognition and protection. And even those who are cisgender and heteroromantic or aromantic may be affected negatively by heteronormative expectations. For instance, there are still some places that have consummation laws. In these places, a partner who desires sex can legally annul a marriage if the expected intercourse is not allowed or not possible, and this affects sex-repulsed and sex-reluctant asexual people, among others.

Similarly, since sex is expected for a marriage to count as “real,” it can cause problems for international couples. Invasive questions about a couple’s sex life are sometimes brought up in interviews to help determine whether a marriage is falsified to let one person stay in the country. And since some people insist that marriage must always include sex, this prejudice has even gotten in the way of adoption attempts by asexual people. In one anecdotal case, an asexual couple reported that they were adopting partly because they did not want to have sex to conceive a child themselves, and they were told they were not eligible to adopt because “if you’re asexual, you’re not fit to be married.”

Asexuality is explicitly listed as a protected orientation in New York State — we’re protected from hate crimes, discrimination, et cetera, through this mention, and supposedly if we were wrongly fired or discriminated against because of our orientation, we could invoke this law. We would like to get asexuality listed as a protected orientation anywhere that lists sexual orientations, and we have taken steps to make this happen through our interaction with the lawmakers of ENDA — the Employee Non-Discrimination Act — which is federal legislation.

We’d also like to see better anti-rape legislation. Especially in spousal rape cases, asexual people are at a much higher risk for being coerced or forced into sex by a partner only to be told that being in a relationship or being married renders them in a constant state of consent and that they, not the assaulting partner, are “abusing” their mate if they withhold sex. Because societal expectations will often back up the more sexual partner’s desires and insist that they are deserving of sex, asexual people often feel no power to report or win cases involving their rape.

And finally, we experience discrimination from mental health professionals. This is changing somewhat since recent lobbying from our community and championing by some asexuality researchers managed to get us somewhat legitimized in the DSM-5. But mental health and even physical health practitioners are prone to assuming that asexuality is only understandable as a disorder, and vulnerable asexual people who do not have their own terms and knowledge for it yet have often been subjected to medical treatments — testosterone supplements, for instance — and psych professionals urging them to experiment with, embrace or tolerate sexual encounters under the mistaken assumption that no one is healthy unless they are sexually active.

Do you think there’s anything non-asexuals could stand to learn from asexuals? About sex, relationships or anything else, for that matter?



Because asexual people may feel some types of attractions but not others, we’ve created or adopted existing terminology to better describe what we are experiencing. For instance, some of us are romantically attracted to people even if we’re not sexually attracted to them, and some of us may experience sensual or aesthetic attraction, among others. We’re not the only ones who experience these things; non-asexual people generally have a romantic orientation too, but since their sexual attractions so often correspond to their romantic ones, they can just say “attracted to” and expect that phrase to stand for a whole host of feelings. We don’t have that shorthand. The result has been discussion and language that can certainly be used outside asexual circles. For instance, there have been straight people who feel very confused about the fact that they may be sexually and romantically attracted to different-gender partners but seem to also be experiencing a romantic attraction to someone of their own gender. Wondering if that means they’re therefore gay or bi, they don’t know what to call it, but with terms like heterosexual biromantic, they can have words for their feelings.

Asexual people are also more likely than non-asexual people to have what’s called a queerplatonic partner; people of any sexual orientation might have someone in their lives to whom they feel committed and close but wouldn’t call that relationship either “romantic” or “friendship.” Our distinction between sexual arousal, sex drive and sexual attraction has been useful to some, and we’ve even had some great discussions about decoupling BDSM and kink from necessarily “sexual” associations; there are kinky asexual people whose satisfaction does not depend on sexual attraction to partners, and sometimes through use of the vocabulary popularized in our communities, non-asexual people can further understand and guide their less typical fetish experiences.

And of course, if any non-asexual person would like to have a romantic relationship with an asexual person, they will learn more about compromise — notably, that compromise isn’t entirely about whether and to what extent they can get their asexual partner to tolerate or engage in sex. Along with negotiating sexual activity, some “mixed” partnerships have adopted non-monogamous lifestyles, as well as focused more on other intimate activities that make a romantic relationship the exclusive and beautiful partnership it is.

Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter and Facebook.