The Primary Exploration Of Asexuality: The Pattern Of Sexual Behavior, Identity And Psychological Health

The original meaning of the word “Asexuality” is vegetative propagation in biology,but as a sexual orientation like heterosexuality and homosexuality,it means lack of sexual attraction.This definition emphasizes the lack of sexual attraction toward others,which is a kind of enduring trait or psychological state and orientation.Now,researchers focus mainly on the definition of asexuality and state that the sexual attraction is the core index when defining asexuality.To further define asexuality,scholars point out that asexuality is not sexual desire disorder,and whether someone feels distress because of the lack of sexual attraction is the most important indicator when researchers distinguish the asexuality and HSDD(Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder).Researchers also point out that asexuals lack of sexual orientation,but not the romantic orientation,and many asexuals reported in a long-term relationship in previous studies.Meanwhile,lack of sexual attraction does not have to mean the lack of sexual desire and sexual activities.Many studies stated that some asexuals couldn't feel the sexual attraction from others,but they also masturbate and had sexual desire at a relatively low level.Individuals often identify with one or more groups,such as racial,ethnic,religious,or sexual.The LGB identity is the identity of sexual minorities in sexual,which include positive and negative,intrapersonal and interpersonal,and experiential variables,in other words,the LGB identity is multidimensional and complex.And the sexual identity development of LGB can simply conceptualized as the process by which a person comes to recognize his or her same-sex attractions and incorporates this awareness into his or her self-identity.Researchers had put forward a number of theoretical models to describe the development of LGB identity,including the one-dimensional stage model in early time and the multidimensional nonlinear model in recent time.The connotation of the related theories has also been gradually expanding.In early time,theories focused on the gay or lesbian identity only,but up to now,theories stated concept LGB identity including the identity of lesbian,gay and bisexuals.So in this paper,we try to explore the sexual identity of asexuals and integrate the asexual identity with LGB identity to a more integrated concept,sexual minority identity.Previous studies found that compared with heterosexuals,the LGB had a more poor mental health status,and they had a higher proportion of anxiety,mood disorders and substance abuse,and also more suicidal thoughts and plans.Similar with the status of the LGB in western society,the Chinese LGB's psychological well-being is not optimistic,also.The studies of LGB mental health in China concentrated mainly on the gay men,found that compared with the heterosexual men,there were more depression,coercion and social thoughts among gay men,and the scores of them on the SCL-90 were also higher than the national norm.Previous studies indicated that there are more researches concerning to the definition and the pattern of sexual behavior,but less studies of mental health of asexuals.However,most of the existing researches showed that the mental health status of the asexual was worse than heterosexuals.Compared to the heterosexual participants,asexuals had higher levels of neuroticism,depression,panic,anxiety and interpersonal sensitivity.Researches also indicated that asexuals usually didn't feel distress about their lack of sexual attraction,which may mean there may be less difficulty when they explored their sexual identity,thus the mental health status of the asexuals may be better than LGB's,but up to now,no studies compared the mental health between asexuals and LGB.Previous studies explored the definition and the patterns of the sexual behaviors of asexuals and made a lot of breakthroughs,and there were also a few studies focus on the mental health of asexuals but no research studied the sexual identity development of asexuals.Meanwhile,most of the existing empirical researches based on the sample of western societies but the eastern societies,especially China,and whether there were cross-cultural consistency of the definition,patterns of sexual behaviors and mental health status of asexuals was unclear.So in this paper,we try to conduct a preliminary exploration of Chinese asexuals through 3 studies.Study 1 verified whether the definition of asexuality apply in China or not.And the sexual attraction,romantic attraction,sexual desire and activities(such as masturbation)of asexuals were also been measured.Study 2 explored the sexual minority identity of asexuals in dimensions of internalized homophobia,identity concealment,acceptance concern,identity confusion and difficult process,and compared these dimensions with LGB.Study 3 measured the depression,anxiety,and stress of asexuals and compared with the LGB and heterosexuals.The main results and conclusions were summarized as follows:(1)We found that asexual participants reported masturbating less,had fewer sexual experiences,and lower levels of sexual and romantic attraction compared to heterosexual participants,indicating that the current definition of asexuality as having little or lacking sexual attraction applies to the Chinese asexual population.The findings implied the potential similar mechanisms underlie the etiology of asexuality across cultures.(2)Further,asexual participants reported having significantly lower DSD and slightly lower SSD compared to heterosexual participants,indicating a non-partnerorientated sexual desire.(3)The differences in the sexual activities and sexual desire among romantic categories suggested heterogeneity among the asexual population.(4)There were significantly differences among different sexual orientation on dimensions of sexual minority identity.Asexual and bisexual participants reported more identity confusion compared with homosexual participants,indicated that there may be more confusion when asexuals explored their sexual identity.And in difficult progress,asexuals scored significantly lower than homosexual and bisexual participants,indicated that asexuals may experience less pain in their sexual identity development.There were no significantly differences among asexual,homosexual and bisexual participants in internalized homophobia,identity concealment,acceptance concern.(5)There were significantly differences in mental health status among participants with different sexual orientations.Asexual participants scored lower than homosexual and bisexual participants in anxiety and stress,and scored lower than homosexual participants in depression;uncertain asexual participants scored lower than homosexual participants in stress and scored lower than homosexual and bisexual participants in anxiety.These indicated the better mental health status of asexuals than LGB.However,asexual participants scored higher than heterosexual participants in depression,which indicated asexuals still had poorer mental health status than heterosexuals,as part of the sexual minorities.