Beyond THE BODY

The asexual community urges people to understand that they are equally capable of giving and receiving love

- Abhik Bhattacharya

CAN marriage be consummated without sexual interaction? This question continues to bother Zainab (name changed on request) as she wipes the dust off Foucault’s History of Sexuality while cleaning her bookshelf. A scholar of gender history, she was unaware of her asexuality until she started finding out more about ‘relationships without sex’.

“I got into relationships with men but never felt sexually attracted to them. I thought it was due to my low sexual drive,” says Zainab, who is in her mid 30s. Some of her friends asked her to wait for the ‘right person’ who would ‘make her sexually active’. “But nothing worked and ultimately, I discovered myself. I am a heteroromantic asexual who may connect to men romantically, but not sexually,” she says.

Zainab is not the only one who struggled to discover her asexual identity. Reports of the Williams Institute, which conducts independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, suggest roughly one per cent of the world population is asexual— these people don’t get sexually attracted to others. However, it does not mean that asexual people cannot have sexual desires at all. There is a difference between sexual desire, libido and attraction.  

In the words of Raj Saxena, the founder of the social media page Indian Asexuals—Indian Aces: “All asexual people are not sex repulsed. Some of them are sex-positive. Sex libido and sexual desire are totally different than sexual attraction. Some asexual persons might indulge in sex as they would like to act on their libido or sex drive. They might do some adjustments with their partners as their partners are also adjusting.”