Exploring The Purported Link Between Ejaculation and Prostate Cancer

“Ejaculation prevents prostate cancer!”

So claims the breathlessly excited article that pops up in your news feed.  The article talks glowingly about a study that found that the more someone ejaculates, the less likely they are to get prostate cancer.  And OBVIOUSLY, the inverse is true, that the less someone ejaculates, the more their prostate rebels against them.  “So get to it!”, the article implies, “Start fighting that cancer today!”

That’s the story everyone reads, anyway.

I have seen a number of aces use this as their primary reason for masturbating.  In a lot of these cases, the rationale is “I have heard that ejaculation helps prevent prostate cancer, so I masturbate because I have to, not because I want to.”  I wanted to explore these studies, see what they’re really saying, and see if there really is a good reason for aces to masturbate in order to prevent prostate cancer.

And what I found…?  Well, there’s going to be a lot of numbers and sciencey talk in the post ahead, so if you just want the quick TL;DR, here it is:

If you masturbate solely on the basis that you’ve heard it prevents prostate cancer, you probably shouldn’t waste your time.  The studies don’t actually say that it does, the results are a bit mixed, there are a number of significant concerns about the makeup of the study, and even if all of the findings are accurate and true, the true benefit is fairly minimal.  I think allowing this myth to stand unchallenged is doing harm to many aces who frequently subject themselves to something they do not inherently want to do based on its advice.

First, a few disclaimers…

I am not a doctor. I have no urology training.  For this post, I read the two main papers on the subject, but did not do an exhaustive search of the literature for all the papers on the topic.  I freely admit to the possibility that my conclusions here are completely off-base, and will happily correct what I’ve said, should more concrete evidence come to light.

Also, I personally quite like to masturbate.  This should in no way be taken as saying that aces shouldn’t masturbate at all.  All I want to say here is that the purported reduction in risk of prostate cancer that is supposedly linked to more frequent ejaculations should not be a reason that someone masturbates, particularly if they would not want to masturbate otherwise.

About Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer, as its name implies, is cancer of the prostate.  The prostate is a small organ that typically comes as a package deal with a penis and testicles.  That means that only about half of the population has a prostate.  The other half does not have one, and therefore cannot get prostate cancer. (A similar organ, called the Skene’s Gland is what comes as part of the vagina/clitoris package deal.  Skene’s Gland cancer is apparently very rare, much rarer than prostate cancer.)  It sits just below the bladder, surrounding the urethra before it heads towards the penis.  The ejaculatory ducts coming from the testicles intersect the urethra within the prostate.  The prostate’s main purpose is to supply prostate fluid during ejaculation.  Prostate fluid helps sperm get around and is a clear to milky white fluid that makes up about 30% of the volume of semen.  The prostate is a critical part of the process of ejaculation, hence the interest in a possible link between prostate cancer and ejaculation.

According to the American Cancer Society, about 1 in 9 people with a prostate will eventually be diagnosed with prostate cancer.  (Note that this says diagnosed with prostate cancer.  Some people who get prostate cancer have no symptoms and will die of other causes without ever being diagnosed.)  The majority of those cases are in people over 65 years old.  However, only about 1 in 41 will die from prostate cancer.  [1]

To look at it a different way, if you have a room with 1000 prostate-owning people in it, 111 of them will be diagnosed with prostate cancer within their lifetimes, but 889 will not.  [Figure 1]  24 of them will die of prostate cancer, while 976 will not.  [Figure 2]  And if you combine those two, it means that 87 of the 111 people who are diagnosed with prostate cancer will die of some other cause. [Figure 3]  So even if you are diagnosed with prostate cancer, there is an almost 80% chance that something else will be what kills you.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Prostate cancer is one of the most survivable cancers.  It has a five year relative survivability rate of 99%. [2] Relative survival is a slightly complicated measure that indicates how likely someone with a disease will survive for a period of time (typically 5 years) compared to the number of similar people who don’t have that disease.  A lower number is worse because it means a person is less likely to survive.  It’s not really saying that someone with prostate cancer has a 99% chance of surviving for five years, because there’s always a chance they’ll die from something else during that time, like heart disease, a car accident, or hippopotamus attack at the local zoo.  It’s saying that if a comparable “healthy” population has 100 people who don’t have heart attacks and survive trips to the zoo, etc. for five years, that you would expect 99 people who have prostate cancer to also be alive at the end of that, even after accounting for all the heart/hippo attacks that killed people who had prostate cancer, too.  For comparison, breast cancer has a 90% five year relative survival rate, and lung cancer has an 18% rate. [3]  The 10 year rate for prostate cancer is 98% and the 15 year rate is 96%.  Because prostate cancer’s survivability is so high, and because prostate cancer is typically found in people older than 65, the majority of people who are diagnosed with prostate cancer die of something else first.

Furthermore, the National Cancer Institute has a breakdown of five year survivability, based on the stage of the prostate cancer.  The stage is basically a measure of how bad the cancer is or how much it has spread.  The types they report are “localized”, “regional”, or “distant”.  Localized means that the cancer remains within only the prostate.  Regional means that the cancer has spread to parts of the body right near the prostate, such as the seminal vesicles.  Distant means that the cancer has spread well beyond the immediate neighborhood of the prostate.  79% of prostate cancer cases are localized, 12% are regional, 5% are distant, and 4% are of unknown severity.  According to the NCI, local and regional cases have a 100% five-year survivability, which essentially means that people do not die from prostate cancer as long as it remains local or regional.  If the cancer reaches the distant stage, five-year survivability drops dramatically to only 29.8%.  But again, that’s only around 5% of cases.  [4]

On top of this already high survivability rate, cancer in general is becoming more survivable.  New treatments are being developed, meaning that for someone diagnosed today, their 15 year survival rate will likely be better than someone diagnosed in the past.  Over time, there may even be a cure or a vaccine developed, which can completely eradicate prostate cancer.  Someone who is 20 today might not even have to worry about getting prostate cancer by the time they’re over 65.  (Of course, there’s also the flip side, which is that as medical science gets better, more effective treatments are developed for other diseases and health problems, too, and people live longer in general.  So someone who survives a heart attack at 70 that would have killed them just ten years ago now may live until prostate cancer can kill them at 102.)

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Cancer is an awful, horrible thing in all its forms, including prostate cancer.  Dying from prostate cancer leaves someone just as dead as dying from lung cancer.  These statistics and survivability rates don’t change it’s ability to destroy a life.

The American Cancer Society does not recommend routine screening for people with an average risk of prostate cancer.  This is because finding the cancer early does not significantly improve survivability, and because treating the cancer can cause issues (like incontinence and impotence) which can actually be worse than the cancer.  As one doctor put it, “Evidence of harm from prostate cancer screening is stronger than evidence of benefit.” [5]

It should be noted that prostate cancer rates vary notably by race.  Black people are twice as likely to get prostate cancer and twice as likely to die from it than white or Hispanic people.  White or Hispanic people are about 50% more likely to get prostate cancer than Asian/Pacific Islanders or Native Americans. [6]

Nobody knows what causes prostate cancer.  Some cancers have a clear causal link to a risk factor.  For instance, smoking is responsible for 80% of lung cancer deaths.  If you avoid smoke (and asbestos and radon, to lesser extents), you’re far, far less likely to develop lung cancer.  There’s nothing like that for prostate cancer.  Doctors can’t say “don’t do X and you won’t get prostate cancer”. There are many theories, from hormonal interactions, to STIs, to a vitamin D deficiency, to the “prostate stagnation hypothesis” which basically says that prostate fluid goes bad over time and that it won’t go bad if the system is regularly flushed.   Neither of the papers I read are explicitly looking for the cause, instead, they are looking for an association between the frequency of ejaculation and the incidence of prostate cancer, which can then be used to guide further exploration into the causes.

The Studies

The two papers I read were “Ejaculation Frequency and Subsequent Risk of Prostate Cancer” by Leitzmann, et al (JAMA, 2004) [7], and “Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Updated Results with an Additional Decade of Follow-up” by Rider, et al (European Urology, 2016) [8].  These seem to be the source of the idea that frequent ejaculation prevents prostate cancer.  Both of these papers use data from a long term cohort study called the “Health Professionals Follow-up Study” [9], which I’ll talk about more in a moment.  Rider 2016 is a similar analysis to Leitzmann 2004, but it looks at an additional decade of data from the cohort study.

The overall conclusion of Leitzmann 2004 is “Our results suggest that ejaculation frequency is not related to increased risk of prostate cancer.”  Notice that this only says that increased ejaculation frequency doesn’t have anything to do with increased risk.  They’re not saying that it decreases the risk, only that it doesn’t make it worse.

The overall conclusion of Rider 2016 is “These findings provide additional evidence of a beneficial role of more frequent ejaculation throughout adult life in the etiology of PCa, particularly for low-risk disease.”  The “low-risk disease” part is important.  As I’ll get into more in a bit, their results around advanced or lethal forms of prostate cancer are mixed.

Both papers use data gathered from the “Health Professionals Follow-up Study”.  This study is a long term, recurring survey, following a cohort of male doctors aged 40-75 that were selected for the study in 1986.  (There is a similar study including women, called the “Nurses’ Health Study”.)  The goal of this study is to track the long-term health of these participants.  No one can be added to this study, it will be the same group of people until there are no more people who respond.  If a participant dies, they are not replaced in the study.  In fact, that death is a valuable data point.  Every two years, participants are sent a follow-up survey, and that information is compiled and can provide a long term view of the health and lifestyle of a particular individual.

The makeup of the cohort is important.  The study designers selected health professionals, because they believed that people working in that field would be more likely to recognize the importance of such a study and be more compelled to diligently follow up and provide accurate information.  However, it needs to be recognized that such a selection will introduce a huge bias in the population sample.  Health professionals are likely to have a higher than average income.  They’re probably less likely live next a chemical factory or breathe the air in a mine for long periods of time.  They’re probably more likely to take better care of their health overall.  And since nearly 20% of this cohort were veterinarians, they are probably far more likely to be attacked by a hippopotamus at the zoo than you are.

The cohort is also overwhelmingly white.  Like greater than 91% white.  When you’re talking about a disease that strikes black people twice as often as white people, your results are questionable when only about 1% of your sample is black.  In fact, Leitzmann 2004 acknowledges this:  “Our results are generalizable to white US men aged 46 years or older.”

So, basically, the HPFS is skewed heavily towards healthy high-middle to upper class white people.  It’s possible that this bias has no material impact on the results, and it’s also possible that the bias can be controlled away, but it is important to note that this is skew is present as it has the possibility that it will render the findings invalid for a general population.  Both papers recognized this bias and attempted to control for it.

In 1992, the HPFS asked study participants about their frequency of ejaculation for three time periods in their life:  Between ages 20-29, ages 40-49, and in the year before the survey regardless of age (which would have been 1991).  Here is the question asked by the HPFS, as seen on the survey form [10]:

Figure 4

There were several possible issues noted with asking this question.  First, it’s a bit of a sensitive question.  The researchers believe that the anonymous nature of the responses should help with the accuracy of the results.  Furthermore, the section of the survey was preceded by an acknowledgement of the sensitivity of the questions and an explicit invitation to skip any questions the participants did not wish to answer.  While this likely further enhances the truthfulness of the responses, there is no way to know who did not answer and whether or not that alters the results of any analysis of this data.  Was it the crowd who would have answered “None”, but were so put off by the questions that they skipped the section?  Or was it people too embarrassed to admit their two-to-three times a day habit?  Or was it a more even distribution that proportionally left out people in all categories?  There is also a concern regarding “recall bias”, in other words, that people were remembering things wrong, largely because time had passed.  In 1991, the participants were age 45-80, meaning that “20-29” was a long time ago for most of them, and they might not have a clear memory of the number of times they ejaculated in a given month.  Also, some of the participants were still in their forties when this question was asked, so their Ages 40-49 may be inaccurate, and the “Past Year” answer would overlap with that time frame.

For reference, the following table summarizes the percentage of the study population that falls within each “Ejaculations Per Month” (EPM) range, based on the “Lifetime Average” calculated in Leitzmann 2004, for a total of 29342 people.

0-3 EPM 4-7 EPM 8-12 EPM 13-20 EPM 21+ EPM
n 1327 6523 9107 10362 2023
Percent 4.5 22.2 31.0 35.3 6.9

A couple of things to notice here.  First, the percentages don’t add up to 100 because of rounding.  Second, 13-20 had the highest number of people, while 0-3 was the lowest.  21+ wasn’t that much higher than 0-3.

Also, notice that these numbers group 0-3 together into a single bucket, despite the original question having separate options for “None” and “1-3”.  Why?  Because they claim that there weren’t enough people who reported “None” to be able to analyze them as a separate group.  While I can understand that decision from a mathematical point of view, I am frustrated by it, because I’d like to know what percentage of people actually reported “None” and also because the “None” category is of very critical importance to aces who are attempting to use these findings to decide whether or not to masturbate.  Neither paper examines the None group.  In fact, both papers tend to brush aside the 0-3 category entirely.  (More on that in a bit…)

The papers attempt to calculate the relative risk or the hazard ratio of each group.  “Relative Risk” (RR) or “Hazard Ratio” (HR) are a way to compare two groups that are similar except for the variable you’re interested in comparing.  This lets you see whether that variable has an impact on what you’re interested in.  An HR or RR of 1.0 means that there is no difference between the baseline and the comparison group.  An HR or RR of 0.5 means that the comparison group is half as likely to be impacted than the baseline group, while an HR or RR of 2.0 means the comparison is twice as likely to be impacted.  In this case, lower is better, higher is worse.

That last paragraph probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense to anyone who didn’t get at least a math minor in college, so let’s look at an example.  Leitzmann 2004 reports that the RR for the 21+ EPM (Ejaculations Per Month) group is 0.89 when compared to the 4-7 EPM group.  What this means is that people who ejaculated 21 or more times per month on average are only 89% as likely to get prostate cancer than people who only ejaculated 4-7 times per month, or that they’re 11% less likely to get prostate cancer.

11% less likely!  That sounds pretty good, right?  Case closed, let’s tell everyone with a penis to get cranking!  Y’all got some work to do!

This is what mainstream coverage of these studies ends up reporting.  But this isn’t the end of the story.  Not by a long shot.  Let’s look at the rest of the numbers.

It’s not saying that the overall risk of getting prostate cancer is cut by 11 percentage points.  Since the overall risk is about 11.1%, cutting it by 11 points would leave only a 0.1% chance behind.  That would be a huge, very substantial difference!  But that’s not what it means.  It actually means that it drops the risk by 11% of that 11.1%, which means the overall risk of getting prostate cancer would go down by about 1.2%.  That would still mean someone has a 9.9% chance of getting prostate cancer.

The following table gives the HR or RR from both studies for each group and for each age range.  (For simplification, I am using the “Multivariate RR” values from Leitzmann 2004 and the “Multi-variate non-Erectile Dysfunction HR” values from Rider 2016 for this table.)

Study 0-3 EPM 4-7 EPM 8-12 EPM 13-20 EPM 21+ EPM
Leitzmann, Age 20-29 1.09 1 1.06 0.95 0.89
Rider, Age 20-29 0.91 1 0.99 0.90 0.80
Leitzmann, Age 40-49 0.83 1 0.96 0.98 0.68
Rider, Age 40-49 0.91 1 0.93 0.81 0.82

You may have already noticed the column that’s full of 1s, and thought “That’s weird”.  That is because of how those HRs and RRs are calculated.  You have to pick one of the groups as the reference baseline, and compare all of the other groups to it.  Both papers picked the 4-7 EPM group as the baseline, so when you compare the people in 4-7 EPM to themselves, you get a 100% match, therefore you get an HR or RR of 1.  The numbers for all of the other groups are comparing the likelihood that someone in that group will get prostate cancer compared to the likelihood that someone in the 4-7 group will get prostate cancer.

But…  Hang on a second here.  They chose 4-7 EPM as the baseline?  If you’re trying to determine whether or not more frequent ejaculations changes the risk of getting prostate cancer, shouldn’t you start with the lowest value, and go up from there?  Why would you pick a group in the middle to compare everyone against?

Leitzmann 2004:  “We used the category of 4 to 7 ejaculations per month as the common reference group to achieve meaningful comparisons between increasingly extreme ejaculation frequencies and to ensure stability of the RR estimates.”

Rider 2016: “As in the 2004 report, 4–7 EPM was selected as the reference category as relatively few men reported an average of 0–3 EPM.”

In other words, Leitzmann 2004 picked 4-7 because it made their numbers better, while Rider 2016 picked 4-7 because Leitzmann did and also because they felt there weren’t enough people in the 0-3 category.

Making better numbers is also what leads to the “multivariate” and “non-ED” classifications.  The researchers consider additional data and adjust for it or completely remove those data points from the calculations.  For example, the “non-ED” category in Rider 2016 excludes participants who had reported having erectile difficulties.  The paper explains that this group was excluded because ED is likely to cause lower ejaculation frequency and tends to be associated with other conditions that can lead to early death.  Since prostate cancer is typically found in older people, if someone dies early, they’re less likely to get prostate cancer and have it diagnosed.  So that exclusion could be considered a legitimate way to filter out bad data that will muddle your findings.

Or…  It can be seen as an arbitrary way to make your findings appear more conclusive.  If you get rid of people with ED, It could also be argued that perhaps you should eliminate smokers with a vasectomy because, hey, they got that vasectomy for a reason (wink-wink) and they’re probably going to die of lung cancer.  Splitting up your data in a way to make your numbers look better (Whether deliberately or unconsciously) is called “p-hacking”.  P-hacking happens because people like clear conclusions.  In particular, journal editors like clear conclusions.  If you write a paper where you say “I looked at all this data and didn’t find anything”, that’s a valid scientific result, but it’s not as interesting as writing a paper that says “You’re less likely to get prostate cancer if you ejaculate more”.  Rider 2016 was accused of p-hacking [11], although they did provide a rebuttal to these claims.

You may also be wondering why the Leitzmann and Rider numbers are so different.  The Rider paper was looking at the same people as the Leitzmann paper, so shouldn’t they be the same?  Remember that the Rider paper used an additional ten years of followup data to consider.  In those additional ten years, the number of study participants who were diagnosed with prostate cancer had roughly doubled.  And remember that this is a cohort that doesn’t change, so the number of cases will never decrease.  Once someone gets prostate cancer, they will never “un-get” prostate cancer for the purposes of this study, even if they undergo treatment that leaves them cancer-free.  At the same time, since much of the cohort is still alive, there are quite a few of them who will be diagnosed at some point in the future.  Rider 2016 looked at the HPFS data from 2014, when the youngest members of the cohort were 68.  Recall that most cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed after age 65.  So these numbers are a work in progress.  They will continue to change until the entire cohort is deceased.

Anyway, enough about the methods…  What do those numbers even mean?

It’s quite a ways back up the page now, so I’ve repeated the table of interest here, so you don’t have to keep scrolling around.

Study 0-3 EPM 4-7 EPM 8-12 EPM 13-20 EPM 21+ EPM
Leitzmann, Age 20-29 1.09 1 1.06 0.95 0.89
Rider, Age 20-29 0.91 1 0.99 0.90 0.80
Leitzmann, Age 40-49 0.83 1 0.96 0.98 0.68
Rider, Age 40-49 0.91 1 0.93 0.81 0.82

Recall that lower is better and higher is worse, and a value of 1 means there’s no difference.  So yes, looking at that table, the data indicates that 21 or more ejaculations a month does have a lower risk than only ejaculating 4-7 times a month.  But 13-20 is also better.  8-12 is better in all but one of the categories.  But…  Hold on a minute.  0-3 is also better in most of the categories?  That doesn’t really fit with the theory that ejaculating more leads to less prostate cancer.  You’d expect 0-3 to be higher than 4-7 if that were clearly the case.  In fact, based on this table, the conclusion you should draw is that people should avoid ejaculating 4-7 times per month, and instead go for more or less, because 4-7 is clearly the worst for your health.

Or…  Not.

You see, all of these numbers also come with a “Confidence Interval”.  You can think of the confidence interval (or “CI”) as being similar to the “margin of error” of a survey.  You’ve probably heard of a survey where they’ve said a political candidate is polling at 51% of the vote, with a margin of error of +/- 3%.  That means that the actual support for that candidate is probably somewhere between 48% and 54%.  That 48%-54% range is the confidence interval.  In most cases, including in these papers, the CI used is the “95% Confidence Interval”, which means that the correct value of an estimated number is between the high and low numbers 95% of the time.  In other words, when the Leitzmann paper reports a value like 0.89, with a CI of 0.73-1.10, what that means is “I’m 95% sure that the real value is between 0.73 and 1.10, and I think it’s probably somewhere close to 0.89.”

Now, imagine if I said “I’m 95% sure that my wallet has between $7.30 and $11, and I think I have around $8.90”.  That’s almost a $4 difference between my high and low estimates.  You’d be rightfully worried about my ability to pay my $8.50 share of the cab fare, because maybe I really only have $7.30.  And if the cable company told you that they were 95% sure that the repair tech would be at your place between 7:30 AM and 11 AM, but probably around 8:50 AM, you’d be awake and dressed by 7 and you’d clear your calendar until noon.  But if these confidence intervals were narrower, like if I said I had somewhere between $8.85 and $8.95, or that your cable is getting fixed between 8:40 and 9:00 AM, you’d feel a lot better about those estimates.

So let’s include the confidence intervals in that table, then see what it says.

Study 0-3 EPM 4-7 EPM 8-12 EPM 13-20 EPM 21+ EPM
Leitzmann, Age 20-29 1.09 (0.80-1.47) 1 1.06 (0.88-1.29) 0.95 (0.78-1.16) 0.89 (0.73-1.10)
Rider, Age 20-29 0.91 (0.71-1.17) 1 0.99 (0.86-1.13) 0.90 (0.78-1.02) 0.80 (0.69-0.92)
Leitzmann, Age 40-49 0.83 (0.64-1.09) 1 0.96 (0.80-1.16) 0.98 (0.79-1.13) 0.68 (0.53-0.86)
Rider, Age 40-49 0.91 (0.75-1.11) 1 0.93 (0.84-1.02) 0.81 (0.72-0.90) 0.82 (0.70-0.96)

What it says now is “That’s a hell of a lot of numbers”.  If you turn your head and squint just right, maybe you can start to see a lot of the numbers are now bigger than 1.  But it’s all still largely a jumble.  So let’s make it easier to see what’s going on.

Figure 5

Okay, yeah, so it’s still a bit of a jumble, but now it’s one with pretty boxes and lines and things.

The boxes indicate the extent of the confidence intervals for each group and the dash in the middle of each box is the estimated HR/RR.  The actual value is probably somewhat close to the dash, but not guaranteed to be.  There is a 95% chance that the actual value is within the extent of the box, and a 5% chance that the actual value is outside the box entirely.  The red line at 1 represents the 4-7 EPM reference category that everything else is compared against.  If a box or a data point is above the red line, that indicates that the HR/RR is greater than the reference and that the likelihood of prostate cancer may be higher for that group than it is for people who ejaculate 4-7 times per month.  If a box or a data point is below the red line, that indicates that the HR/RR is less than the reference and that the likelihood of prostate cancer may be lower for that group than it is for people who ejaculate 4-7 times per month.  If the box straddles the line, that means that the risk could be higher, could be lower, and you can’t say with statistical confidence that which side it’s actually on.

As you can see, almost all of those boxes straddle the line.  In other words, most of those boxes tell you very little about whether or not the risk of prostate cancer is truly higher or lower for those groups.  What once looked like a clear sign that you should avoid ejaculating between 4-7 times a month has turned into a bit of a mathematical ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

There are a few of the confidence interval boxes that are completely below the red line.  That means that the data analysis is at least 95% sure that there is actually a reduction in the risk of prostate cancer for those groups.  The only group that’s below the red line in both studies is the group that ejaculated more than 21 times per month at age 40-49.

So…  The conclusion that’s drawn from this is that it doesn’t matter what you do the rest of the time, but you’d better get busy in your 40s?  As I noted earlier: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Recall that the two studies are the same group of people, just with ten additional years of data included in the Rider paper.  The confidence intervals are getting narrower, which is what you’d expect as you get a larger sample size.  But outside of that, some of the numbers vary wildly between Leitzmann and Rider.  Comparing the Age 40-49 data between the two papers, it appears that the RRs for the 8-13 and 13-20 groups get much better, while 21+ takes a sharp turn for the worse.  The surface level implication there is that if someone ejaculates between 8 and 20 times per month, then they either get it earlier than someone with 21+ EPM or they don’t get it at all, and that the 21+ EPM group might delay the onset of prostate cancer for a few years, but eventually catches up?

But that doesn’t really make much sense…  So also recall that the data from the cohort is a work in progress.  Maybe it really is just random and the numbers look kinda weird because there’s absolutely no correlation between ejaculation and prostate cancer.  Surely, these aren’t the only two papers that explore this potential link.  Unfortunately, I don’t have time to explore the literature and see what they all have to say.

Fortunately, Leitzmann and Rider already did that for us!  Leitzmann, take it away!

Previous investigations on reported ejaculation frequencies or sexual intercourse and prostate cancer are limited to studies of retrospective design and results are mixed. Nine studies observed a statistically significant or nonsignificant positive association; 3 studies reported no association; 7 studies found a statistically significant or nonsignificant inverse relationship; and 1 study found a U-shaped relationship.

That’s all sciencey talk, but the key phrase is “results are mixed”.  Leitzmann 2004 reviewed 20 different studies that look at a possible link between ejaculation or intercourse (which implies likely ejaculation) and prostate cancer and they all said different things.

Also, that paper is from 2004, so it’s missing 14 years (as of this writing) of additional research that has likely been conducted in the meantime.  Rider 2016 looks at a handful of additional studies, and is more to the point:

The literature exploring the role of sexual activity in the etiology of PCa is inconsistent.

“Inconsistent.”  “Results are mixed.” That is hardly wide-ranging compelling evidence in favor of the theory that more frequent ejaculations will decrease the risk of prostate cancer.  Or that prostate cancer risk has anything to do with ejaculation at all.

But okay, let’s set all those questions and doubts aside for the moment and assume that Leitzmann and Rider are correct, that there is a statistically significant correlation here, that as ejaculations per month go up, prostate cancer goes down.  But does that actually make a difference in how bad the disease is?  Remember back when I was talking about the survivability of prostate cancer, how I mentioned the different stages, local, regional, and distant?  And how local and regional had a 100% five-year survivability rate, according to the National Cancer Institute?  So, does more frequent ejaculation decrease the risk of the more lethal distant stage of prostate cancer?

No.

Sorry, got ahead of myself there.  But no, no it doesn’t.  At least not according to these papers.

I present Rider 2016’s numbers here because that paper has an additional 10 years of data over Leitzmann 2004.  (Some of Leitzmann’s numbers are just plain wacky due to lack of data.  For instance, one of the categories has an RR CI of 0.49-6.60, which is like saying “The risk could be cut in half or it could be 6.5 times worse.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”  Leitzmann’s numbers are generally similar to Rider’s, however.)  Rider breaks down the numbers by risk category and stage.  I have included only the data for only the 13+ EPM group (Rider combines the 13-20 and 21+ groups for this analysis because there were not enough cases in the 21+ group in some of these categories for the data to be meaningful).

Figure 6

Figure 7

There are three main conclusions that can be drawn from these tables.

  1. A person who ejaculates more than 13 times per month has a lower chance of low risk or organ confined prostate cancer.
  2. A person who ejaculates more than 13 times per month has a potentially greater chance of higher risk or advanced/lethal prostate cancer.
  3. OMG, 1991 is gonna kill everyone!

If 1 and 2 are true, think about what that means for a moment.  Someone who ejaculates more frequently is less likely to have the lower risk, less fatal types of prostate cancer, but they’re more likely to get the type that will kill them.  That, on its own, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Prostate cancer is not a “Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200” sort of thing.  You don’t just skip to the advanced/distant stage of the disease.  If there’s an increased risk of the more deadly types of cancer, then those deadly cancers had to progress through the earlier stages, so there should be an increase in the earlier stages, as well.

There are a couple of possible explanations for this.  First, the p-values for these findings that suggest an increase are fairly high.  A “p-value” is a measurement of how likely it is that the results you got are simply due to random chance.  The higher a p-value is, the more likely a result is random, while the lower it is, the more likely your result is valid.  You can think of a p-value as sort of how confident you are in your confidence.  It’s generally accepted that a p-value < 0.05 means your results are statistically significant, because it means that there’s only a 5% chance that your results are random.  (Side note:  The p-value is the same p in the “p-hacking” that I mentioned earlier.  p-hacking is the process of trying to manipulate your data and analysis to find something that yields p < 0.05.  The problem is that in order to do so, you may have manipulated your data into meaninglessness.)

Another possible explanation is that people who ejaculate 13+ times per month really like doing it.  Also, everyone in this study is a health professional, so they’re likely to know that treatment for prostate cancer often leads to impotence.  So, perhaps they intentionally skip prostate cancer screening or treatment to avoid a diagnosis and the possible consequences.  But if this is true, this actually would invalidate the other findings, too, specifically that a higher EPM rate is associated with a decreased risk of prostate cancer.  The risk might not actually be lower, instead, those people just might not know that they have it.

As for 1991 killing everybody, that is actually a legitimate finding.  The p-value for that set is 0.05, so it’s statistically significant.  In fact, that’s a point of consternation for Rider 2016, which apparently makes up a symptom for prostate cancer that somehow encourages more frequent ejaculation to explain it.  I mean, I’m all for hypothesizing on possible causes when your data doesn’t match reality, but…  If you have to immediately say “While we are not aware of any literature supporting [this]” after your proposal, you probably shouldn’t be saying it.  Especially when it seems like it’s something that should be easy for a urology researcher to verify one way or the other.  Walk into the break room and say, “Hey, any of you all ever hear of people wanting to get off more when they have prostate cancer?”  If the answer’s “yes”, then add a line about how there’s unverified anecdotal evidence in support of the idea and you’ve got the topic of your next paper.  If the answer’s “no”, drop the idea and admit you don’t have an explanation.

Look at what they’re saying there, though.  They’re speculating that the development of prostate cancer might influence the frequency of ejaculation, when all this time, the focus has been on whether frequency of ejaculation might influence the development of prostate cancer.  I want to return to something I said earlier, that no one really knows what causes prostate cancer.  So even if there is a statistical correlation between ejaculation frequency and prostate cancer, that’s not necessarily an indication that it’s a causal relationship.  If it’s “prostate stagnation” that causes prostate cancer, then yes, there’s a causal relationship, where ejaculation flushes the toxins out which prevents cancer.  But if it’s a lack of vitamin D, then no, there’s not a causal relationship, because it’s just vitamin D making people more horny AND preventing cancer.  And if that’s the case, you can just take vitamin D supplements and get the cancer reduction benefits, and however much you ejaculate doesn’t matter.  Neither paper is attempting to prove a cause of prostate cancer, and neither paper claims a causal link.  They are only looking to see if there is a relationship.

Okay, okay, okay.  Let’s take a step back and refocus on what we’re actually interested in.  Let’s assume that there actually is a causal relation between more ejaculations and less prostate cancer, and let’s ignore the suggestion of a possible increase in the higher risk types of cancer associated with more ejaculations.  Going on the pure optimistic, best case scenario here, what I want to know is this:  How much does the risk of prostate cancer actually go down if I ejaculate more frequently?

I have no idea.

None at all.  The papers don’t actually say.  None of these RRs and HRs and confidence intervals and other things being thrown around actually give that number.  What they all say is that the risk may be lower for the 21+ EPM group when compared to the 4-7 EPM group.  But what’s the risk for the 4-7 EPM group?  Are they higher than the average risk?  My mathematical sense about how averages and populations samples work says that yes, they are higher risk than average.  If the 4-7 group is considered the baseline reference of 1, and if all the other groups are less than 1, then the 4-7 group has to have an above average risk in order for the lower relative risks of the other groups to balance out.

There may be enough data available in the papers to try to come up with some sort of rough estimate, though.  I’ll warn you now that the following is speculation and likely mathematically unsound, but at this point, we’re already ignoring so many red flags and possible issues, so what’s one more thing to overlook, eh?

For this, I’m going to look at the overall risk of prostate cancer, compared to the incidence in the overall study population, and for each of the EPM groups as reported in Rider’s Age 40-49 category.

Overall Population Study Sample 0-3 EPM 4-7 EPM 8-13 EPM 14-20 EPM 21+ EPM
11.1% 12.0% 11.2% 13.3% 12.4% 10.8% 10.3%

The first thing that jumps out at me is that the study sample has a higher reported overall rate of prostate cancer than the general population.  And remember, this is an on-going study tracking the same group of people, so that number can only go up over time.  So is that difference an artifact of better health care and more detection of prostate cancer among the study population?  Are dentists and veterinarians more prone to prostate cancer than other people?  Or is it just ordinary sampling error?  In any case, it’s notable.

Second, the 4-7 EPM group does have highest cancer rate in the study, at 1.3 points higher than the study sample rate.  And 21+ does have the lowest rate, at 1.7 points lower than the sample rate.  (It’s worth pointing out that the 0-3 group is also lower than the overall study rate.)  What that means is that if there is a reduction in cancer risk for 21+ EPM over 4-7 EPM, you lose about half of the effective value of that reduction, just to get back to the study rate.

Another way to think of this is to imagine a store advertising a 30% off sale.  30% off, that sounds great!  But if their original prices are 13% higher than the store next door, then you’re not actually getting a 30% discount, you’re really only saving 17%.  And if all the stores in that city already have a 9% higher sales tax than the rest of the state, that eats into that 30% discount even more.  At the end of the day, maybe you’re only getting an 8% discount.  Still a discount, sure, but hardly what was advertised, and it’s now low enough to make you think twice about going out of your way to shop there.

However, an 8% discount is still a discount, so let’s look at what kind of discount you might actually get.  Let’s go back to that room of a thousand prostate-owning people for one final batch of comparisons.  (We’ve left them sitting in there for so long, it would be rude to keep them waiting any longer.)  For this, I’m going to compare the absolute difference between the national prostate cancer rate compared to the raw 0-3 and 21+ study group rates, as well the deltas for those groups compared to the study rate normalized to the national rate.

(And have I mentioned that what I’m doing here isn’t sound.  Because what I’m doing here isn’t sound.  If you try to quote anything that I’m about to report in this section as some sort of legitimate finding, then you’ve completely missed my point and should start over at the beginning.)

Overall Population Study Sample Raw 0-3 EPM Raw 21+ EPM Normalized 0-3 EPM Normalized 21+ EPM
11.1% 12.0% 11.2% 10.3% 10.4% 9.5%

Figure 8

Figure 9

Figure 10

Figure 12

Figure 13

Figure 14

In Figures 9-14, I’ve highlighted the difference from the national rate.  Filled boxes with red borders are an increase over the national rate.  Empty boxes with green borders are a decrease compared to the national rate.  I have one final observation to make:

The “Normalized 21+ EPM Rate” represents pretty much the best of the best of the best case scenario.  [Figure 14]  Getting there required ignoring pretty much every concern we’ve come across, deliberately selecting the best data set, and probably ended up making statisticians scream “What are you doing?!” at their screens.  And even with all that, the difference is only 16 boxes with green borders.  That means that even if the papers were accurate AND there really is a causal link between ejaculation frequency and reduced risk of prostate cancer AND all the leaps of mathematical faith we took are correct AND medical science doesn’t change at all in the next couple of decades AND no one else in the study cohort gets prostate cancer AND you dedicate yourself to jacking off at least 5 times per week for the rest of your life, the best result is a 1.6% chance that something in your life will turn out different.

I’m not gonna drive across town for that sale.

Conclusion

First off, thanks for sticking with me through thousands of words of math and science and graphs and stuff.  Or thanks for scrolling past all of that and skipping directly here.  Whichever.

Let’s review the key points that we’ve learned.

  • You’re probably not going to get prostate cancer, no matter how much you ejaculate.  There’s an 89% chance you won’t.
  • Even if you get prostate cancer, it’s probably not going to kill you.  If you get prostate cancer, there’s an 80% chance that you’ll die of something else, and its 15-year survivability rate is 96%, so even if it does kill you, it’s probably going to take its time.
  • Because medical science is continually improving, prostate cancer gets less likely to kill you all the time.
  • Studies involving sexual activity/ejaculation and risk of prostate cancer are “mixed” and “inconsistent”.
  • There is no proof that ejaculation itself decreases the risk of prostate cancer.  At best, these papers may have found a correlation, but correlation is not causation.  At worst, some other papers have reported that there may be an increased risk of cancer associated with more frequent ejaculation.
  • The papers do not report an absolute reduction in risk for more frequent ejaculation, only a relative reduction when compared to the 4-7 ejaculations per month group.  The overall potential benefit is unclear.
  • My best-case, super-optimistic, ignoring-all-problems-and-red-flags, everything-is-perfect, don’t-quote-me-on-this analysis indicates that there might be at best a 1.6% chance that you’ll avoid getting prostate cancer by masturbating at least 21 times a month.
  • Both papers basically ignore the 0-3 EPM group, which happens to be a group of interest to asexual people, especially those who only masturbate because they’ve heard it can decrease the risk of prostate cancer.  They don’t even consider the risk of prostate cancer in people who never ejaculate.
  • The study the papers are based on is biased, and that bias potentially contaminates the results.  The Leitzmann paper even admits that the results are only useful for white guys over the age of 40 in the US.
  • The findings suggest that all levels of ejaculation frequency other than 4-7 EPM (including 0-3) may have a lower risk of cancer than those in the 4-7 EPM group.
  • There is only a statistically significant decrease in the risk of prostate cancer in both papers for the group who ejaculated 21+ times per month at age 40-49.
  • 21+ ejaculations per month is around at least 5 times per week, which is probably waaaay more than someone who’s not a fan of the process would want to go through with it. (An informal, totally unscientific poll of aces who say they masturbate mainly to reduce the risk of prostate cancer found that most of them only do it 0-3 times per month.)
  • There is a chance that ejaculating more is actually associated with a higher risk of the worst kinds of prostate cancer.
  • There is a chance that the apparent lower risk of prostate cancer overall in people who ejaculate more is an artifact of a reluctance to be screened by the higher EPM groups.
  • 1991 is going to kill us all.  No, seriously.  It was mathematically proven.  See what you miss when you skip to the conclusion?

Or, to tl;dr my tl;dr:

If you’re asexual and you don’t like masturbating, but you do it anyway, only because you’ve heard that ejaculation can prevent prostate cancer:  Stop.  Don’t bother.  You’re far more likely to die of heart disease than prostate cancer, so take that time that you would have spent masturbating, and use it doing something that’s good for your heart.  (In fact, the stress of constantly doing something that you dislike is probably bad for your heart.)

And, well, if you don’t believe me that there’s essentially zero evidence that you should masturbate as a way to lower your risk of prostate cancer, take it from the authors of Rider 2016 (emphasis mine):

We wish to emphasize that until the biological mechanisms underlying this association are convincingly elucidated, interpreting ejaculation as an established means of preventing prostate cancer is premature. [12]

 


Sources:

[1] Key Statistics For Prostate Cancer, American Cancer Society

[2] Survival Rates for Prostate Cancer, American Cancer Society

[3] Cancer Statistics Center, American Cancer Society

[4] Prostate Cancer – Cancer Stats Facts, National Cancer Institute

[5] Prostate Cancer Screen And Detection Decline, American Cancer Society

[6] Prostate Cancer Rates by Race and Ethnicity, CDC

[7] Ejaculation Frequency and Subsequent Risk of Prostate Cancer, Leitzmann MF, Platz EA, Stampfer MJ, Willett WC, Giovannucci E., JAMA. 2004;291(13):1578–1586. doi:10.1001/jama.291.13.1578

[8] Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Updated Results with an Additional Decade of Follow-up, Rider, Jennifer R. et al., European Urology , Volume 70 , Issue 6 , 974 – 982

[9] Health Professionals Follow-up Study, Harvard School of Public Health

[10] Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 1992 Long Form Survey, Harvard School of Public Health

[11] Looking Deeper: P-hacking and Some Other Bias, García-Perdomo, Herney Andrés et al., European Urology , Volume 70 , Issue 6 , e155 

[12] Reply to Herney Andrés García-Perdomo and Ramiro Manzano Nunez’s Letter to the Editor Re: Jennifer R. Rider, Kathryn M. Wilson, Jennifer M. Sinnott, Rachel S. Kelly, Lorelei A. Mucci, Edward L. Giovannucci. Ejaculation Frequency and Risk of Prostate Cancer: Updated Results with an Additional Decade of Follow-up. Eur Urol 2016;70:974–82

Missing a Permission Slip

[Content Warning: Discussion of masturbation and sex and stuff.]

Not too long ago, over on Asexual Activities, there was a discussion about aces having trouble masturbating in one way or another.  So I started writing about the problems I encountered learning how to do it.  Along the way, I realized that there was something else getting in the way that I’d never really thought about too much.  It’s always been there and the strength of it comes and goes, but it touches pretty much every interaction I have with sexuality.

I don’t feel like I have permission to have sexuality.  It doesn’t feel like it’s mine.  It’s like I stole it from someone else and I’m going to get in trouble if someone finds out that I have it.  And I’ve never read the instructions, so I have no idea how to use the thing anyway.

I know that sort of sounds like guilt or shame, but it doesn’t really feel like that’s what it is.  Guilt or shame implies that I think I’m doing something shameful or that I’m guilty of doing something wrong.  I know it’s not anything that’s wrong and I know it’s not anything that’s shameful.  It’s like one day I discovered that there was a mysterious $1000 deposit in my bank account.  It’s not mine, I don’t know where it came from.  I should tell the bank that they made a mistake, but everyone else says that they got the same mysterious deposit, and they’re going around spending it, with the bank’s blessing.  But I don’t know what to spend it on and it doesn’t really belong to me, so I keep it in the account.  I check on it once in a while, and it’s always still there.

Let’s start by getting some terminology out of the way.  I’m not using “sexuality” as a synonym for sexual orientation.  I am asexual, and that’s not in doubt.  It’s likely even a large contributor to why I feel this way.  I’m using “sexuality” to refer to my feelings, thoughts, interactions, reactions related to sex and other stuff in that general neighborhood.

Now, some statements of fact which feel relevant to what I’m going to talk about:  I own a penis.  I experience physical arousal.  There are external factors which sometimes cause physical arousal.  I masturbate.  I enjoy it.  I have sex toys.  I look at porn.  I have had sex twice.  Fifteen years ago.  I live alone.  I am asexual.


When I hit puberty and first learned how to masturbate, it was something beyond top secret and fraught with peril.  Messages from all over were telling me how terrible it was.  You’ll go blind!  You’ll grow hair on your hands!  You’ll go sterile!  It’s a sin!  It was something only losers did.  My ultra-Christian neighbor from an American Taliban household even gave me a mixtape that had a Christian Punk song about how “Masturbation is artificial sex” that probably detailed the eternal fiery horrors that awaited those who went downtown.  (Fun fact:  The pervy neighbor kid mentioned in the other post?  Same guy.)  Of course, none of those messages were coming from my parents.  They never talked to me about it, but I suspect their thoughts would have been “Lock the door and clean up after”.  But those messages were so pervasive from other places that they absolutely tainted how I felt, even though I didn’t believe most of them.

And it tainted what I did.  No one could ever find out.  I would take precautions worthy of an undercover agent.  Only in the shower, where the evidence will be washed away and if someone walks in, I can say I’m just cleaning it, nothing else going on.  Eventually, that expanded to being willing to do it while sitting on the toilet, but in that case, I had to use toilet paper to wrap myself and catch every drop.  (Not sure how I was going to explain that if someone walked in…)

Either way, securely locked in the bathroom was the only place I was willing to do it for years.  On extremely rare occasions, I would grab a bit of hand lotion from the front room, but that felt like a mission behind enemy lines.  The house had to be vacant and expected to remain that way for hours if not days, all the doors were locked and checked, all the rooms were cleared, and then I’d make my move, grabbing a bit of lotion and running to the safety of the locked bathroom.  I was terrified that every milliliter of lotion was being tracked and that I’d be discovered, so I did not do this often.

Eventually, I worked up the courage to try it in my bedroom.  I think my parents were going to be gone for the weekend, and I was home alone.  I triple checked the house to make sure it was empty, closed all the curtains in the house, checked the garage to make sure their car was gone, locked all the doors, then went into my bedroom and locked that door, too.  I didn’t strip naked and get comfortable on my bed in order to have the most relaxed and pleasant experience possible.  Instead, I was kneeling in front of my bedroom window, watching the driveway through a crack in the blinds, just in case.  I kept my clothes on and did the deed through my fly.  Not only was it all wrapped up in toilet paper, I added a layer of paper towel, to be extra special sure that everything would be contained.  That happened maybe twice, total.  Too risky.

Masturbation was something I did, but not something I felt I was allowed to do.  It felt good, but it really wasn’t something I was able to enjoy, because I constantly had to be on guard or taking steps to hide the evidence.

I mention all of this, not to tell funny/embarrassing stories of my youth, but to detail how secret and forbidden I felt the whole thing was, and the lengths I felt I had to go to to conceal it.  And certainly, I’m sure that other teenagers went through the same sorts of cloak-and-dagger routine to hide what they were doing.  But some of that never left me.


Fast forward, years later.  I have my own place.  I knew by then that masturbation was common and that it didn’t cause random hair growth, etc.  It had, by then, largely turned into something I was able to enjoy.  But there were still limits.  It was still done in the shower most of the time.  I was able to occasionally work up the nerve to do it naked and relaxed in bed, but that was rare.  I lived alone.  No one would catch me, no one would know, but still, it somehow felt like the locked bathroom was the only truly private, safe place I had.

I had moved beyond using toilet paper and had discovered that various lubricants worked much better.  But those had to be purchased.  At a store.  Where I had to get them off a shelf.  Where I had to walk around the store with the item in my cart.  Where a checkout clerk had to scan them.  They are going to know.  They are going to know why I’m buying hand lotion.  They are going to know and they are going to report me.

Buying sex toys was a multi-faceted operation.  First, finding the toy involved a lot of false starts and cleared search history.  When I finally found something, it was probably a couple of weeks before I actually made the purchase.  I used a second browser and completely cleared out the history when I was done.  No one else ever used my computer, but you could never be too careful.  (Not to mention the fear that the computer would somehow glitch out and start forwarding the order receipt to everyone I knew, or that it would set a picture of the item as my wallpaper and not let me change it.)  Then, when the item arrived, it was dropped off at the leasing office, so I had to go in to pick it up.  They have x-ray eyes or the box broke open so they know somehow.  They know.  They’re all going to laugh at me and I’m going to get evicted now.  I even remember thinking that my new job would find out about it somehow and fire me.

Who did I think was going to find out my dark secret?  Why did I think it was a dark secret?  I knew there was nothing wrong with it, but why did it feel wrong?

But no, not wrong.  Not bad.  Not in itself.  It wasn’t about someone discovering that I masturbate, it was about someone discovering that I was in possession of something that didn’t belong to me.  That act, those feelings, that glimmer of sexuality, I wasn’t supposed to have that.  I could pretend that it was mine, I had learned how enough of it worked to get by, but in the end, it wasn’t mine.  And any time I tried to embrace a part of it or expand on what I knew, that put me at risk of the whole thing falling apart.  Changing routine is what gets you caught.


I’ve been talking about masturbation a lot, because that’s my primary interaction with the world of sexuality, it’s not just that I feel like this about.  Anything remotely sexual seems to set off the same alert buzzers in my head.  I remember agonizing for a month about whether or not I should stop by the Student Health Center at college to pick up a free condom, because it seemed like a good idea to know how they worked.  Even when I went to the health center a couple of times for something unrelated, I couldn’t bring myself to grab a few, because someone might see me.  For years, any sort of undressing had to be done within the protection of the locked bathroom.  I couldn’t change at the closet where all the clothes were.  If I didn’t have a towel after a shower, I would have to dart to the hall closet to get one, after carefully peeking my head out the door to make sure no one was around. Sleeping in the nude was right out.  Hell, sleeping in anything less than full clothes on even the hottest nights wasn’t something I felt I could do.  (And this is all when I lived alone in my own apartment and there was no reasonable expectation that anyone would be there.)  Whenever coworkers or friends talk about sex, I tend to shut off and pull back into my shell.  Certain types of sex scenes in movies make me uncomfortable to watch.  Beaches in Hawaii were unpleasant because of the amount of skin present.


While things have changed and gotten better over the years, this still comes up even today.  I rarely go downstairs in my house unless I’m fully dressed.  I still think that the mail carrier and neighbors will know what’s in certain packages I get, or that some package thief will grab one and blackmail me over what’s inside.  Any book that’s remotely sex related (Even a general anatomy reference guide) doesn’t get put on the bookshelf, it gets hidden.  So does any movie with “too much sex” in it.  I’ll clear my clipboard if I ever copy/paste something remotely sexual.  I’ll hide the hand lotion whenever someone comes over.  Sex toys are removed from the closed cabinet in the headboard (that no visitor would ever open) and hidden in the closet.  I even feel weird about having a box of tissues near my bed, because of the potential association it might have, even though I really do only use them to blow my nose.  And I’ll censor what I talk about or feel weird about posting on Asexual Activities, even though that was deliberately designed to be an uncensored place to talk about those sorts of things.

And it’s not a general “Sex is bad, run away” reaction, either.  When I’m in a scenario where I have permission, where sexuality is expected, it’s fine.  When I had a girlfriend, we did sexual things.  I was awkward and I had no idea what I was doing really, but I didn’t feel like I shouldn’t be doing any of it.  At work, I had to test the adult filter settings on a service we ran, which basically meant searching for porn all day and making sure that the nudie pics showed up in the results or were blocked, depending on the settings.  That was just doing my job.  And I can dive in and research all sorts of random things for people who have questions on Asexual Activities, without any issues at all.  But if I want to know about those things personally, I get a bit nervous.

So, what’s going on?  Why do I feel this way?  Why do I have so many blocks and caution signs put up around so many expressions of sexuality, even when they’re completely private?  Well, the two broad areas that I think are coming into play here are society’s views on masturbation (specifically male masturbation) and the fact that I’m asexual, and the way those two things interact.


Society basically requires men to masturbate.  If you don’t, you’ll be a two pump chump, your balls will fill up and explode, you’ll become a slobbering ball of horniness, and you’ll get cancer.  But masturbation is only permitted in very specific scenarios.  It must only be done when there isn’t a suitable partner available, and when it is done, it must be done while fantasizing about an acceptable person.  And regardless, you’ll be mocked and ridiculed for doing it.  You’re a pervy loser who can’t get laid.

Masturbation is seen as a replacement for “real” sex.  You’re not supposed to do it if real sex is available.  If you are forced to do it, due to a lack of real sex, you must be imagining having real sex with someone while you do it.  It is not to be done within the context of a relationship, unless it somehow involves your partner, because the involvement of your partner allows you to claim that you’re doing it for them.  It’s never permitted to be pursued in its own right, it must always be a substitute, never the main event, and any pleasure you take from it must be surrogate pleasure that’s being provided on behalf of your fantasy.

You can use porn to help, but not too much of it or the wrong kind of it.  Oh, and by the way, any amount is too much and any kind is the wrong kind.  Possession of nudity in all forms makes you a pervy loser worthy of mocking and ridicule.  (Unless it’s an oil painting, a sculpture, or soft-focus photograph, then that’s art and therefore perfectly acceptable.  But you’re not permitted to be aroused by that in any way.)

Sex toys are an absolute no when you’re alone.  If you’re a pervy loser for masturbating, you’re an especially pervy loser if you use a toy.  If you’re using a toy, you’ve given up hope of ever getting “real sex”, so you’re trying to find a second-rate simulation with a sleazy blow up doll.  You’re so perverted that you’d rather fuck a rubber pussy than use your hand.  And if the toy gets you off, you must have the hots for an inanimate object.  It doesn’t help that sex toys for men have a stigma of being creepy and weird (likely because so many of them actually are creepy and weird).

And finally, look at how it’s portrayed and discussed.  If it’s ever brought up in a movie or a TV show, it’s a punchline.  When it’s mentioned in the news, it’s universally negative.  It’s a peeper at a window, a creeper in the bushes at the park, or a movie executive abusing his position.  It’s never a positive sexual health piece about how it’s normal and safe and fun and here’s these awesome toys to try.  There are dozens of examples of where masturbation for women is held up as an empowering act, an important skill to learn.  Hell, there’s one movie where it literally brings color to a dull black and white town, with so much energy that it sets a tree on fire.  But when it’s a man involved, he’s invariably a dirty, pervy overly horny creep who can’t control himself.

 

That sort of constant stream of negative messages will really mess you up.


Being asexual adds a number of complicating layers on top of an already complicated situation.

I mentioned earlier that I felt like I didn’t have permission to have sexuality.  Well, a huge part of that is that it feels like my own body never gave me permission.  It physically responds when prompted, yes, but that’s all mechanical.  It seems like other people will start to become interested in sexual things, and think “Am I allowed to do this?  Do I have permission?”, and their body will respond with a resounding, hormone charged “YES”.  Yes, you have permission to think you’d like to have sex with that person, in fact, why don’t you think about that when you touch yourself and it’ll make the whole thing better.  My body doesn’t do that.  My body’s all “What are you on about?  I don’t understand what’s going on here.  Do you need something?”

Sexuality in our culture is supposed to be directed at someone.  You can only wear “sexy” clothes when you’re trying to attract someone, not because you like how they look or because they’re comfortable on a hot day.  You can only masturbate if you’re fantasizing about someone and you’re treating it as practice for the “real sex” you’d rather have, not because you just want to get off.  You can only have sex because you find someone attractive and want to share a moment with them, not because you just like the way orgasms feel when they’re provided by someone else.   Your sexuality is never really yours.  Even when it’s entirely in your imagination and private, there’s a part of it that’s directed outward, and it’s that part that makes it acceptable.  But I can never do that.  I can’t include anyone else.  My sexuality isn’t directed at anyone, my asexuality won’t let that happen.  My sexuality can never be acceptable.

And when an expression of sexuality isn’t directed outward, it’s treated as if there’s something being hidden.   Touching yourself while imagining being with your partner, that’s fine.  Jacking off to nudie pics, that’s fine.  Pleasuring yourself to a fantasy about the person that was in front of you at the coffee shop that morning, that’s fine.   Using a toy supposedly modeled on a porn star, that’s fine.  But masturbating to nothing?  Well, come on now, you just can’t do that.  What are you thinking about?  If you can’t say, then just what kind of dark, depraved secrets are you hiding?

I can’t even look at porn right.  Porn is supposed to be fantasy fuel.  I’m supposed to want to be there, I’m supposed to put myself in the scene, I’m supposed to imagine what I’d do with the person featured.  Everything is supposed to be a stand-in for my penis.  The cock on that guy is supposed to be mine.  That toy is supposed to be my disembodied penis.  Those fingers, are they supposed to be my fingers or my penis?  I can never tell.  And if there isn’t a surrogate penis in the scene, then I’m supposed to mentally introduce my own into the picture.  Every shot, every angle, every position, they’re all designed to indicate that the surrogate cock or imaginary penis is being worked on.  That seems to be how everyone looks at porn.  That’s why that sort of porn is so prevalent, that’s how everyone describes their reaction to it, that’s even how people frame their objections to pornography, that it encourages lustful thoughts, because you’re imagining committing adultery and/or fornication.

But that’s not what it does for me.  I never picture myself in the scene.  I never teleport my penis onto another body or into the plastic shell of a toy.  That doesn’t work for me.  That sort of emphasis is dull and boring and leaves me confused, wondering whether people really like that sort of thing.  This is supposed to be a turn on?  That’s supposed to be hot?  Doesn’t that chafe?  Isn’t that tiring?  I’m pretty sure I can’t bend that way.  For most people, porn is a way for them to explore their sexuality, to let their fantasies wander.  But for me, it’s a big wall.  My body and my mind are just standing there saying “Nope, you don’t belong here.”  I don’t have permission.

(And honestly, even when it’s a video I’ve taken of myself, I can’t put myself in the scene…)

That’s not to say porn never works at all.  It does.  Sometimes.  Rarely.  It’s best when the performers seem to genuinely be having a good time, doing things they actually want to be doing, instead of trudging through a script for the camera.  My response feels more empathetic than sexual.  They seem to be having a good time, doing things that feel good, so I can have a good time, doing things that feel good.  But a lot of pictures and videos have to be clicked past to get to that sort of thing, and all that clicking and clicking feels like a chore, especially when I know that almost all of what I’m clicking past is going to be more than adequate for other people.

And I seem to be repulsed by the stereotypical “porn star” look.  I don’t know if it’s the glossy fakeness of it all, or the overt, deliberate sexuality of it all, but something about it is a quick ticket to the land of “nope”.  It’s not appealing and I don’t even remotely understand what is supposed to be appealing about it.

There are some people who I find pleasant to look at, but pretty much none of them would be considered “sexy” by a jury of my peers.  And while it’s pleasant to look at them, it’s not a sexual pleasantness.  Sex isn’t in the picture.  If I try to fantasize about doing things with them, it all falls apart.  In the rare event that there’s someone in porn that I find pleasant to look at, that certainly helps things, but I don’t understand why.  I don’t think it’s anything about the pleasantness that’s subconsciously sexually enticing to me, because if that were the case, I’d be able to get the same enhancement by thinking about someone I find pleasant to look at that’s not in a pornographic context, but that doesn’t work at all.  Maybe it’s that because it’s pleasant to look at them, I’m able to look at the images for a longer period of time without getting bored?  Maybe I feel more comfortable?  I don’t know, but the whole thing feels like there’s some sort of neuron in my brain that would normally be responsible for sexual attraction, but it’s confused and not wired up correctly, so it just spends its time taunting me.  It’s arousing, but why?

The world of sex toys was not made for asexuals in mind.  So much of it is driven by fantasy and an attempt to convince someone that it’s fine to use sex toys.  It’s not a rubber tube that’s getting you off, it’s an anthropomorphized rubber replica of some porn star’s anatomy of choice, and so therefore, it’s really her that’s getting you off.   Here are some direct quotes from the marketing of a few sex toys:

“Ever wondered what it would be like to bone me? Now you can screw me in the nastiest ways!”

“Let her love tunnel’s ribbed Cyberskin grip you so good as you slide home.”

“Flip this cheerbabe over and dive under her skirt for some steamy anal play!”

“Stop dreaming about your hot neighbor… and start doing everything you’ve fantasized about with her!”

To be clear, these were talking about 4-6 inch long rubber tubes.  It wasn’t hard to find marketing copy like this.  Pretty much every toy has something like it.  That sort of thing does not enhance the experience for me at all.  It just feels creepy and sleazy and misogynistic and makes me less interested in the product.  Does that sort of thing even work for non-ace people, or are they just as skeeved out by it?

Most toys have some sort of anatomical features.  Most common are labia, to resemble a vulva.  But there’s also mouths and butts and breasts and feet.  There’s even some that have mouth-breasts and foot-vulvas.  Some toys claim to have a G-Spot or a cervix, neither of which ever resembles those actual structures.  (Anatomy lesson for sex-toy makers:  The cervix does not get penetrated during sex and it would likely be excruciatingly painful if that happened.)  And for the more adventurous, there’s double-clitted aliens, zombie mouths, dragon cocks and mare vulvas.  But whatever features they have, they all have a few things in common:  They can’t be seen when the toy is in use, they have little to no effect on the sensations of the toy, and they usually drive up the price of the toy for no reason.

And even non-anatomical toys aren’t very ace friendly.  One toy mentions that it’s great for use with a partner, another that its open ended design allows “added oral thrills” with a partner, another has product photos where it’s placed on a naked woman.  And pretty much any toy that doesn’t look like a vulva is sold as a “blow job simulator”.  When you try to buy a toy, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see some sort of genital depiction somewhere in the storefront.  If you look up lists of the best sex toys of men or look at male sex toy review sites, it’s pretty much guaranteed that cock rings and vibrators will be on the list, and it’s always about how “you’ll drive her wild” when you use them.  All of that is useless to me.  There’s never anything about the softness or stretchiness of the toy.  Dimensions are rarely mentioned.  There’s never anything about how a ring changes sensations or how to effectively use a Magic Wand style vibrator on a penis.  (I’m still trying to figure that last one out…  Nothing I’ve tried is reliable.)

I masturbate because I like the way it feels.  I use sex toys because I like the way they feel.  It’s all about the physical feelings.  It’s not about cleaning the pipes or about practicing for the Real Thing™.  It feels good.  Almost everyone else does it because it feels good, too, but no one’s allowed to admit it.  So they pile up a wall of excuses and rationalizations made up of desires and fantasies and imaginary health concerns to justify it and protect themselves from having to admit that they do it because it feels good, because that would be wrong.  And I don’t have any of those desires and fantasies, I don’t have anything besides the way it feels, so I’m all I’m left with is the feeling that it’s wrong.

And because I’m ace, I feel like I can’t talk about these things.  In a non-ace context, everything about sexuality is foreign to me.  I don’t understand the feelings, motivations, or goals that are in play.  If I try to read about masturbation techniques or look at sex toy reviews, it usually ends up with someone talking about how they just thought about “the girl from the bar I fucked last week” or that the toy “feels just like a blow job”, neither of which is remotely useful for me.  Every once in a while there’s something I understand, but it’s buried under an overwhelming mountain of stuff that just fundamentally does not make sense to me.  And in an ace context, these things just don’t get discussed.  All of these things are “sexual”, therefore they can’t be associated with an asexual person.  Some aces are reluctant to talk about it because they think it makes them “less asexual” to do it.  Some aces are reluctant to talk about it because they’re not comfortable talking in a semi-public arena about such things.  Some aces are reluctant to talk about it because they don’t want to offend or alienate other aces.  When I talk about it, and there’s little response, I can’t tell if no one’s paying attention, no one understands what I’m saying, no one feels comfortable talking about it themselves, or if what I’m talking about or the way I’m talking about it is dirty, pervy, and creepy, so it drives people away.  So I feel like I’m not allowed to talk about any of it, even in the place that I created to talk about it.

 

There’s no place where the way I feel is allowed to exist.


What if I’m not averse to sex, but averse to sexuality?  And not because it’s gross or disgusting, but because I can’t understand it.  Maybe I feel like I don’t have permission because none of it makes sense, so it’s obviously not something I’m supposed to be a part of.  It’s like I snuck into the field trip for the wrong class and we’re all at the planetarium of naked people, but asstronomy was never covered in my class.  And it’s frustrating that I don’t understand it, because everyone else knows what’s going on.  And so I play along because maybe there’s something out there which will unlock my sexuality, that somehow I’ll find my permission slip.

 


ETA:

On deeper reflection, it feels like a large part of it is that my sexuality is not typically desire-linked, yet the general cultural conception of sexuality is.  So all these desire-linked concepts are being layered on my experiences by external forces, and I’m not comfortable with that.  I’m supposed to be feeling sexual desire for someone, I’m supposed to be able to connect that desire to my actions, I’m supposed to be able to kindle that desire through surrogate objects.  But that’s not what’s going on, don’t assume that’s what’s going on, don’t make me feel like I have to correct the record, don’t make me feel like I have to play along.

This outside overlay of desire-linked sexuality on top of what I’m feeling is alien, unwanted, invasive.  I don’t really see masturbation as sexual in the way other people mean it.  And so there’s a fundamental disconnect there which I keep trying to reconcile.  It’s just something I do that feels good, but other people/society/whatever keeps trying to layer meaning on it, interject their own analysis and inferences and innuendo or whatever.

It’s not so much that I don’t have permission, it’s that in a fundamental way I don’t recognize the concept of sexuality as it exists for most other people.  They’re using a different file format for sexuality, and I’m incompatible with it.  I don’t know what to do with the data being passed to me and just end up throwing a bunch of internal exceptions.

Asexual Intercourse

The following post is an auto-biographical stream-of-consciousness account of what was going through my mind the first time I had sex.  I did not know I was asexual at the time, I did not discover asexuality until years later.  It’s clear to me now that most of what I felt was because I’m asexual.

I’ve never read an account like this.  We rarely talk about it, and when we do, we hardly go into this level of detail.  It’s too personal, too private, too embarrassing, too conflicting, too confusing.  And so we stay silent.  And in that silence, we’re alone.

I’m presenting this for multiple reasons.  First, I believe that sharing stories can help us find what we have in common, and let us know that we’re not alone.  The only story we hear is that consensual sex is wonderful and amazing, when it’s not always wonderful and amazing for everyone, even in the best of circumstances.   Second, there seems to be a common narrative out there that having sex will cure asexuality, somehow.  That’s often not the case and I wanted to give an example that people can use as a counterpoint.  And finally, I wanted to provide an example that can be used to potentially help non-asexual people understand what it’s like for an asexual person to have sex.  In particular, some people can’t understand how sex is possible without attraction, or think that there can be no pleasure without attraction.

The story below is my experience .  It is not meant to be representative of how every asexual person experiences sex.  Everyone is different.  Everyone’s story is different.

The following contains descriptions of sexual activity and may not be suitable for all audiences.


I’m lying in bed.  Waiting.  Shivering.

It’s not cold.  I’m not afraid.  I’m not even nervous, really.  I’m just shivering.  I guess it’s the unknown.  This is supposed to be a big deal, right?

She’s in the bathroom, getting ready.  This was her idea.  Do girls actually want sex?  I guess so.

Should I be naked?  I think I should be naked for this.  But what if she wants to undress me as foreplay?  Would that make me seem too eager?  Because I’m not eager.  I mean, I’m not reluctant.  I guess I’m just curious.  I think I’ll keep my clothes on.

Now I’ve gotten hard.  I guess that’s a good sign.

Do I want to do this?  She said I could back out at any time.  That was the agreement.  She’s not forcing me.  Of course I want to do this.  But why don’t I WANT to?  Like really really WANT to?  Wasn’t there supposed to be some sort of uncontrollable urge right about now?  Some kind of irresistible force taking control?  I feel…  I don’t know what I feel.  I don’t need to do this.  No, I don’t WANT to do this.  I’m willing to do this.  Willingness isn’t wantingness.

Okay, am I ready?  We bought condoms and lube earlier today, so +1 for responsibility there.  I’m still hard, so that’s another point.  I read up on what I’m supposed to do.  Is that normal?  Do people generally read up on what to do, or do they just know?  I mean, I already knew WHAT to do, tab A slot B, all that stuff.  I mean the rest of it.  Do people prepare a mental gameplan for this, or do they just go for it and figure it out on the way?  Not like fantasize about it.  I tried that, I couldn’t.  I mean like actually come up with stage directions for what I’m going to do and backup plans in case things go wrong.

What if it just doesn’t work?  She’s mentioned that she’s worried about being too small, too dry.  She said it hurt the other times with the other person.  I don’t want to hurt her.  How would I know if I’m hurting her?  The lube should help.  How deep is too deep?  How do I know how deep I am?  What if I’m too big?  She said I might be.  Or was that some sort of ego-boosting ploy?  Was that supposed to turn me on or something?  I don’t know.  I don’t care.  Should I care?  Do other people actually care about their size, or is that all just an act?

Is it all just an act?  It feels like an act.  At least it feels like I’m acting.  Is she acting?  Why would she be acting?  Why would she push so hard for this, if this isn’t something she really wanted?  Because she thinks I WANT it-want it?  It should have been clear that I didn’t.

So why am I doing this, anyway?  If I don’t WANT it.  Um, because she offered, I guess?  Because she wants it?  But that’s not all.  I do want to know what it’s all about.  It’s supposed to be amazing, why wouldn’t I?  It’s supposed to feel good.  Really really good.  Better than my hand, better than her hand.  It’s supposed to be a big deal.  It’s supposed to-… I’M supposed to.  I’m doing this because I’m supposed to.  I’m supposed to WANT it.  Maybe if I do it, I will.  Maybe there’s a slipped gear in my head and doing this will jostle it back into place and I’ll start WANTING it.  Like I’m supposed to.

There’d better not be any babies out of this.  That would suck.  But that’s why we got the condoms.  We practiced putting one on earlier.  So we should be good there.  And I read all about their effectiveness when used properly.  So hopefully no babies.

But about earlier…  When we practiced putting on the condom.  When we were completely naked around each other for the first time.  When she took me in her hand and put me inside her.  “To see if it fits”, I think she said.  I don’t know what that was about.  I guess that means I’m technically not a virgin anymore already, even if it was just for a few seconds.  Was I supposed to do something?  Was I supposed to react?  Was I supposed to get started?  That wasn’t the plan, the plan was to wait until night, just before bed.  Was that a test?  Did she want me to make a move?  It wasn’t the plan.  Why didn’t I make a move?  That could hardly be considered a subtle sign of interest.  I should have made a move.  Any other guy would have, wouldn’t they?

Of course they would.  No other guy would have waited this long to make a move.  Any other guy would have made a move that first night at her place.  Who cares that her parents were upstairs?  That didn’t stop us from doing other things.  But we couldn’t then, no condoms.  But nothing stopped me from picking up a pack on my way up.  Why didn’t I?  And why didn’t it bother me that we couldn’t?

Even this tonight isn’t my move.  It’s her move.  If she waited for me to make a move, it would never happen.  I’m just along for the ride.

The bathroom light clicks off.  The door opens.  It’s time.

She walks out in her pajamas, hair back, a faint minty scent surrounds her.  She climbs into bed.  She climbs on top of me and starts kissing me.

I don’t understand kissing.  I don’t see the appeal.  A peck on the lips is fine, and there’s that spot on my neck that gets things going, but deep mouth kissing?  That does nothing.  “Deep” being the important word here.  It feels like she’s trying to eat my face.  I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with my tongue.  It’s somewhat unpleasant.  It hurts my jaw.  She pushes harder, trying to force my mouth open wider.  I feel like a CPR dummy.  People like this?

I pull back and kiss across her cheek and down her neck.  I know I like that feeling.  Does she?

I move my hands up and down her back.  She’s not wearing a bra now.  That’s somewhat disappointing.  I kinda wanted to take it off.  Like that’s an important moment or something.

She moves to unbutton my shirt and I reach for her breasts.  The curve.  The nipple.  I caress them through her pajama top for several moments before reaching underneath it.  Shouldn’t I feel something now?  Shouldn’t I WANT this?  I don’t know what I’m doing.  I hope she likes it, because it’s doing nothing for me.

I roll her onto her back and lift up her shirt slightly.  I kiss my way up her stomach, then put my head under her shirt and begin kissing a breast.  She quickly takes off her top.  That’s the cue to take off mine, too.  I resume kissing one breast while fondling the other.  We’ve done this before.  I remember her instructions of “more pressure” when I get to the nipple.  I push with my tongue.  Is that enough?  Is this too much?  Should the pressure be constant or varied?  Is that even what she meant?

Do other guys like this?  I mean really like this?  They seem to be interested in breasts.  It seems like I should be enjoying this more than I am.  They’re kinda round, kinda squishy.  They’re okay, I guess, but I just don’t see the excitement.

Her hands are around my back.

I move up and begin kissing her on the face and neck.  I press my erection against her vulva, and she gently grinds through our pajamas.

I take my hand off her breast and begin moving southward with it.  I slowly cross her stomach, and run my hand down the outside of her leg.  I cross to the inside of the leg and work my way back up.  I cup my hand around the curve and press as I rub.

Am I supposed to talk dirty to her here?  What does that even mean?  I’d mess it up.  Anything I’d say would be ridiculous.  I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

She reaches into my pants and wraps her fingers around me.  She gently tugs.  Her hand feels numb and foreign.  I’m used to my hand, I’m used to the feedback loop.  She’s squeezing harder than I would.  She’s pressing on places I don’t press.  This feels strange.  It’s okay, but it’s not good.  Definitely not bad, just not good.  Neutral.

I reposition my hand, moving it under the elastic waistband of her pants.  I run it through her hair.  I like that she has hair down there.  I don’t know why.  I find the soft, warm flaps of skin.  I gently part them with my finger, and slide up toward the front, looking for the little nub of skin that I know is there.  We’ve been here before, too.  I’d like to get her off, but she doesn’t help me out.  I press as I trace a circle.  I don’t know if what I’m doing is working.  I’m not even sure I’m in the right place.  I guess she’ll tell me to stop if she wants me to stop.  I press a finger inside, slowly.  Soft.  Smooth.  Wet.  Warm.

She stops what she’s doing to me.  I return to spinning circles for a few moments.

She softly runs her hand across my balls, then moves to take off her pants.  I take off mine in return.

We’re naked again, for the second time that day.  She stops and looks me over.  She focuses on the area that was just uncovered.  There’s a look in her eyes.  Hunger, maybe?  She wants it.  I look her over.  It feels like an in-person anatomy lesson.  All the parts I’ve heard about are there, and I run over them in my mind.  Her breasts, her legs, her pubic hair, the little hint of labia…  But the most fascinating thing is that look in her eyes.  What is that look?  What is she feeling?

What am I supposed to be feeling?  Anticipation?  Sure.  Nervousness?  A little.  Lust?  Desire?  Where are they?  What are they?  Seeing her body is interesting, but it’s interesting in the way looking at a map of a national park is interesting.  I’ve heard about all these places, now I know how they all fit together.  It’s academic, not erotic.

She’s cute.  Her face is cute.  Her breasts are cute.  Her pale skin is cute.  The round tuft of hair is cute.  But not hot.  I don’t know what “hot” is.  She should be hot.  Other people call her hot, and they haven’t seen her like this.  She’s not supposed to be cute.  She’s supposed to be hot.  Cute is something you want to play with and pet.  Hot is something you want to have your way with.  She’s cute.  She doesn’t like that I think she’s cute.  It’s not enough for her.  But it’s all I have.

I don’t belong here.  Something’s just not right.  How long can I keep up this act?  Can she tell?  Maybe everyone feels this way their first time.

I move down and begin kissing her left thigh.  I gradually move my way up, toward the inside.

“Don’t,” she stops me.  I’m somewhat curious to try, because maybe that will make a difference, somehow.  But I move on at her direction, and kiss her stomach, breasts, face.  Was that a test?  Was I supposed to make a move there, too?  I don’t think so.  She talked about it before.  She said it felt good, but that it seemed tiring for the guy.  So maybe that wasn’t a test.

She rolls me over.  She climbs on top of me and presses her body against me as she kisses me.  Soft.  Warm.  I like the feeling as her nipples brush against mine.  My nipples are sensitive now.  I wish she’d pay more attention to them.  I try to guide her hand there, she doesn’t catch on.

She kisses down my neck, and rests her head on my chest.  I run my hands down her back and grab her ass.  My erection presses against her stomach, slightly wet at the tip.

That’s dangerous now.  Fluids and all.  I read about that.  Although unlikely, there could be sperm in that, especially after what we did earlier.  Better make sure that stays far away, until the condom is on.

She pauses as I reach between her legs to rub her.

She makes a move.  I know where she’s going.  I stop her.  Those two areas don’t touch without protection.

She rolls over to grab the condoms and lube.  We take out a condom and open the wrapper.  She takes the lube and rubs some on herself.

My erection is gone.  That’s a bit of a problem.  I know it’s just a temporary setback.  But still…  Moments away, and this happens.  I know it “happens to everybody”, but does it really?

She moves down and puts her hand around me.  She moves her face between my legs, and there’s a warm wetness of an exhale on my scrotum.  Problem solved.

I put on the condom as directed, and she applies a little bit of lube to the outside.  She wipes off her hand as she puts her head back on the pillow.

I move into position.

This is it.  This is the moment.  So why is it so hollow?  So empty?  Other people dream of this exact second for years.  They scheme and beg for it.  It’s nothing to me.

She’s lying on the bed in front of me.  Her hair falls on the pillow.  A faint smile on her lips.  Her eyes close.  Her breasts flatten and flow to the side.

I should WANT this.  I should NEED this.  I should have an uncontrollable urge to go on.  I shouldn’t be able to stop myself now.  But…  I could walk away right now and not feel any different.  Not feel like I missed out, not feel deprived.  Other guys would kill to be here right now.  But I could just go about my business and think nothing of it.

I part the lips with my fingers and guide myself in.

It’s so warm.  And enveloping.  It squeezes every part of me evenly.  It’s so different than my hand.  Better?  I don’t know.  Different.

Don’t go too far.  How will I know how far too far is?

I slowly push in as far as I think I should go.  Then slowly pull back out.  I don’t want to hurt her.  Go slow at first.  That’s what I read.

Pulling back out…  Wow.  That’s better than pushing in.  That’s definitely not something I can do with my hand.

I repeat a few times to get the hang of the motion.  I’d practiced using pillows and a plastic bag full of baby oil, but it wasn’t like this.

This alone won’t be enough for her.  That’s what I read.  I should make sure that I rub her as I go.  That’s supposed to help.  It’s awkward to twist my hand that direction.  I try to encourage her to do it, but she doesn’t take the hint.  She said tonight was about me, but I don’t want her to be left out.

Am I supposed to kiss her?  I think I’m supposed to kiss her.  But am I supposed to kiss her face or her breasts or what? Kissing her breasts seems like it’d require some uncomfortable contortions.  So I’ll kiss her face.  Hand goes to a breast.

There she goes again with the deep kiss.  How does her jaw open like that?  Should I tell her that it hurts right now?  No, that would be a bad idea.  Keep going.

In, out, in, out, in out…

I like the feeling pulling out almost all the way.  The way it softly wraps around the head and squeezes the tip.  The warmth, the pressure.  Yes, I like that.  And I like the feeling of my nipples pressed against her body.  The way they float across her skin as I move.

How long is this supposed to take?  I always hear stories of the first time ending almost right away.  Is that because they were more excited than I am?  I still have a ways to go.

How fast am I supposed to be going?  It seems like I’m going too slow, but it seems like going faster would just wear me out.

She wraps her legs and arms around me.

In, out, in, out, in, out…

I’m getting closer.

I look at her face in the dim light.  Her eyes are closed, her mouth is slightly open.  She’s lost in the moment.

In, out…  Definitely closer.

Should I be making some kind of noise?  I think I’m supposed to?  You always see that in movies.  But what kind of noise?  Aren’t those sounds natural?  Don’t they just come out in a situation like this?  Or are those sounds just faked?  I never make noise when I’m alone.

I’m on the edge now, and still nothing.  Where is the magical spark that’s supposed to wash over me?  Where’s the flame of passion?  Is this really all it is?

In, out, in, out, in, out.  Slow.  Stop.  Oh.  Right there.

My movement changes.  I feel the pressure building.  I push in.  My body goes rigid as a surge of pleasure paralyzes my body.  The automatic pulsing rhythm is the only part of me that moves.

I pause for a moment, still inside her.  I let my muscles relax, still inside her.  She whispers an “I love you”.  I respond, still inside her.

I slowly pull out, careful to hold the base of the condom as I’d read to do.  I roll onto my side and hold her.

Did that change my life?  Was that the best thing that’s ever happened to me?  Did that light a fire an awaken me sexually?  Was that earthquakes and fireworks and rocketships?  …  No.  None of that.

The warmth.  The softness.  The exquisite embrace on the head.  The brushing of the nipples.  The warm exhale.  The kiss on my neck.  The ending.  Good.  All of that.  But all physical.  All mechanical.  Emotionless.  Nerve endings doing their thing.  Felt good, yes.

I should probably take this thing off.  I have to pee, too.

Not mind-blowing.  Not amazing.  Not earth-shattering.  Not far above any other experience.  Wasn’t even the best orgasm I’ve ever had.  Far above average, but not the best.

My body liked it.  My mind?  What about my mind?  Acting in a play without a script.  Does everyone else have a voice in their head, feeding them the lines?  Or do they just improvise?  Why would they improvise?  Why would they make it up?  Why would they all play along?  Why not just give commands to kiss here, caress there, and get exactly what you want?  Why would there be a play at all if no one has the script?  Other people know the lines.  She knew the lines.  Why don’t I?

I don’t belong there.  I don’t know how to be there.

Is that all it is?  Is that what everyone raves about?  I don’t get it.

Maybe next time will be different.

Possible Signs of Asexuality – Part 2: About Sex

This is the second post in a three part series on the possible signs of asexuality.  The items discussed here aren’t meant to be any kind of “Am I Ace?” checklist, so it’s okay if you don’t identify or agree with any of them.  They’re just experiences that I’ve seen pop up over and over when asexuals talk about their lives.

The first part in this series focused mostly inward, on thoughts you may have had about yourself and your identity.  Today is all about sex and sexual activity.  If that’s not your thing, you might want to skip today and come back for the conclusion tomorrow.

Links to the posts in this series:

You’d much rather do X than do sex.

When you think about sex, you realize that there are dozens of things you’d much rather do.  I’d rather read a book, I’d rather watch TV, I’d rather play a video game, I’d rather go to a movie, I’d rather stargaze, I’d rather walk the dog, I’d rather go shopping, I’d rather organize the books on the bookshelf by date of author’s birth, I’d rather go bird watching, I’d rather build a Lego tribute to the Prime Ministers of Canada, I’d rather work on the car, I’d rather mow the lawn, I’d rather learn Esperanto, I’d rather fly a kite, I’d rather eat cake…

Your sex dreams don’t really have sex.

I had a dream with a warning for “adult content and mature themes”.  It was about mortgage payments.  I’ve had dreams where naked women throw themselves on me, and I tell them that I’m really busy and I’m supposed to be somewhere.  I’ve had dreams where women are very obviously coming on to me, and I completely miss it.  I’ve told women in dreams to put their clothes back on, because they look cold.  It’s like the part of my brain that generates dreams didn’t get the memo that I’m asexual, so it still is sending out these prompts for sex dreams, but the rest of my brain doesn’t process them, so they always end up weird.

Many asexuals say that they’ve never had sex dreams of any kind.

You think that “sexy” clothes just look uncomfortable or cold and can’t understand why anyone would wear them.

Tight pants look like they’re going to squeeze the life out of someone, and if it’s a guy wearing them, you know he’s gotta be in pain.  Heels look like a broken ankle waiting to happen.  Shirts that expose the midriff have to be freezing in this weather.  All that lace is just going to leave a weird pattern in your skin.  Thongs seem like they’re going to cut you in half like a wire saw.

And I never got the point of make-up, either.

You don’t really fantasize.

Everyone else seems like they undress people with their eyes.

Everyone else seems like they dream about having their way with the quarterback or the head cheerleader.

Everyone else seems like they would “hit that”.

But not you.  It’s not that you won’t, because you think it’s sinful or something like that.  It’s that you don’t.  Your mind just doesn’t work that way.  It doesn’t spontaneously imagine leaping into bed with someone.  Maybe it’s even that you can’t.  Maybe you’ve tried to devise erotic fantasies and have failed.  You tried to undress someone with your eyes once, but you couldn’t even figure out how to get their bra off.  And if you can make it to the hot & heavy, rather than picturing the perfect mix of ecstasy and passion, you get bogged down in the details and distracted.  You spend so much energy trying to maintain the fantasy that you lose whatever pleasure you were hoping to get from it.

You don’t like sex.

Some asexuals don’t like sex.  They don’t want to do it, they don’t want to see it, they don’t want to hear it, they don’t want to think about it.  At the age when most people were hearing about sex and thinking “I’d like to try that”, they were thinking “You want me to do what with WHAT?  No.  Just.  No.”

While not liking sex is not the same as asexuality, many asexuals don’t like sex, and discover that they’re asexual when they’re trying to find out why they don’t like sex.

A lot of non-asexual people feel this way, too, when they first hear about sex.  Let’s face it, the whole process is a bit icky, after all.  However, for most people who feel this way, those thoughts are pushed aside once sexual attraction kicks in.  But for the aversive asexual, sexual attraction never comes along to override these feelings.

The “ick factor” isn’t the only reason people don’t like sex.  Some asexuals don’t like sex because they find it uncomfortable or boring.  There are thousands of reasons that someone might not like sex.

You like sex, but it doesn’t feel “right”.

I don’t mean this in an “Oh, it’s sinful and dirty” sense.  I mean it in the sense where something seems off, like gears with mismatched teeth or walking with gum on your shoe or using a shopping cart that always pulls to the right.  At first glance, it seems like everything’s okay, but the more you think about it, the more things feel off.

Perhaps you physically enjoy sex.  Maybe you like making your partner feel good.  There are things you might really like about sex, but at the same time, there’s something missing.  When you watch your partner’s reactions, it’s clear that there’s something there that you’re not feeling.  It’s impossible to put your finger on it, but you know there’s something there.  Some intangible spark is behind their eyes, and you’re acutely aware that spark is missing in your eyes.

This was how I felt when I had sex.  It physically felt great, but emotionally, I was not connected to the moment and to my partner.  She wanted it, she was into it, she had been craving that moment for months, while I just didn’t have any of that.

You had sex because that’s what you were “supposed to do”.

You never were really interested in having sex, you never felt a drive or biological desire to have sex, but you thought you wanted to have sex because “that’s what people do”.  Later on, you got a partner, they wanted to have sex and you went along with it because “that’s what people do”.  You kept having sex because “that’s what I’m supposed to do”.  It felt more like an obligation or a chore than the expression of love it was supposed to be.  At first, you may have even wanted the experience, but as time went on, you grew tired of it.

When you encountered the naked body of someone for the first time in a sexual situation, you looked at it like a real-life anatomy lesson, rather than an object of desire.

This one happened to me.  I was in my bedroom with my first (and so far, only) girlfriend.  Following her lead, we were fooling around a bit.  She was wearing short shorts and sitting on my bed.  She sat me down on the floor in front of her, spread open her legs, and pulled aside her shorts.

I think that most young men in this situation look upon it with unbridled glee.  It’s a milestone in their life, something they’d been working toward, often for years.  Instantly, their mind fills with ideas and opportunities and a thousand fantasies, any number of which could come true within the next five minutes.  For many men, a sight like that is like being invited into the playground of their dreams and told to run wild.

So, what went through my mind?

“Oh, so that’s how it all fits together!”

There was no explosion of sexual urges, no endless stream of desires.  I didn’t really even feel compelled to touch it.  Instead, I was busy looking over the terrain like it was a road map, full of places I’d only heard of in passing.  I wanted to identify all of the bits and pieces that I knew were supposed to be down there and see how they were all oriented relative to one another.

Needless to say, I now look at this event as one of the big red flags that should’ve clued me in that I was asexual years ago.

You focus on the motions, not emotions.

When dealing with sex and physical closeness, you put an emphasis on trying to make the right moves, like touching the right place in the right way, instead of focusing on the emotional aspects.  In some cases, the pressure you feel to push all the right buttons may make the experience highly unpleasant.

“If I try it, maybe I’ll like it.”

So, you haven’t had sex.  You’re not terribly enthusiastic about it, either.  It’s not that you’re against it, it’s just not all that interesting to you.  But everyone else seems to like it, so maybe you will too, if you just gave it a chance.  Maybe you just need to try it out and you’ll see what the fuss is about.

I call this the “Green Eggs and Ham” hypothesis:

You do not like them, so you say.  Try them!  Try them, and you may.  Try them and you may, I say.

The idea that maybe you’ll become interested in sex if you try it out is a compelling one.  The thinking goes, how can you really know if you’re not interested if you don’t give it a shot?  Well, the answer is that you really can know.  After all, you don’t actually have to hug a saguaro cactus to know that would be unpleasant.  So, if you’re certain that sex is not for you, then don’t feel pressured to prove that you don’t like it by going a few rounds.

On the other hand, if you feel this way, you’re open to the experience, and the right situation comes along, then go for it.  Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t, it doesn’t really matter, either way.  I felt this about myself, and I did try having sex.  Of course, what it lead to was…

You had sex and thought “Is that it?”

That’s it? That’s all there is?

Weren’t there supposed to be fireworks and standing ovations?  Wasn’t my life supposed to be changed forever?  Wasn’t it supposed to be the single greatest experience of my entire life?

What was supposed to be so great about that?  Why do some people devote their entire lives to pursuing that?  How could that possibly be responsible for ruining the careers of so many politicians?  How could so many people consider that to be the very meaning of life?

I don’t know, I guess it was kinda fun, a little bit, sorta.  Bit boring, though, too.

I mean, seriously?  Is that really it?  What’d I miss?

Meh, whatever.

You don’t like masturbating.

Maybe you’ve tried it before, but it didn’t work out and you didn’t get anywhere.  Maybe you never saw the point.  Maybe you do it, but you look at it like any other bodily function, like a sneeze or a shiver.  Maybe you think it’s gross or disgusting or repulsive.  Maybe you do it and wish you could stop.  In any case, you don’t look at it as something pleasurable and fun.  And it’s not out of a sense of guilt or shame or anything like that.  You just genuinely don’t enjoy it.

You masturbate, what would you need anyone else for?

You might look at other people and how they talk about sex and about what person X did for them last night, and think, “Huh, I can do that by myself.  I don’t need any help.”  You’re perfectly fine taking care of yourself and really don’t mind reservations for sexual pleasure as a party of one.  When other people talk about masturbation as if it were some sort of consolation prize for a distant runner up, you’re a bit confused, because it certainly doesn’t seem like a terrible thing to you.

When you think about having sex with someone else, you may think that a second person would just get in the way and complicate things.  Maybe you’ve even had sex and didn’t think that it was really any better than what you’re capable of by yourself.

You think arousal is annoying.

Instead of looking at arousal as a sign from down below that you need to get all sexed up as soon as possible, you just find it annoying.  It’s distracting.  It’s random.  And, for some people, it literally gets in the way.  If you could shut it down, you would.  It’s never directed at anyone, you don’t really want to do anything with it, it’s just kinda there.

————

Tomorrow’s conclusion is all about other people and things.  Hope to see you there.

Links to the posts in this series:

“But asexuals can’t masturbate!”

Do asexuals masturbate?

Maybe.

“Maybe” isn’t an answer.

But it’s accurate.

No, really, do they?

No. And yes. It depends on the person.

So some asexuals masturbate?

Correct. And some don’t. It’s perfectly fine either way.

Do you masturbate?

That is an extremely personal question and is quite rude to ask. Just because I’m asexual doesn’t mean that it’s somehow okay to ask me that.

But do you?

Yes. And I’m good at it, too. But if I weren’t writing a post about asexuality and masturbation, that little tidbit would be absolutely none of your damn business.

How can an asexual masturbate?

For the most part, they just kinda rub until-

No, I meant, how can someone who masturbates be considered asexual?

Simple. Masturbation has nothing to do with sexual orientation. A gay person doesn’t engage in some sort of homosexual masturbation. A straight person is still straight even if they don’t touch themselves now and then. It’s no different for asexuality.

But masturbating is a sexual act. You can’t perform sexual acts and still be asexual.

Certainly, masturbation is a sexual activity performed using sexual organs and it produces a sexual response. There’s a misconception that an asexual must be devoid of all sexual properties and sexual responses and cannot experience sexual pleasure. I used to believe that myself, in fact, before I discovered what asexuality really is. I used to think that I couldn’t be asexual because I masturbate. But not the case at all. Asexuality is all about attraction, not action, it’s an orientation, not behavior. Being asexual does not mean one cannot or does not take part in sexual activities. Being asexual means one does not experience sexual attraction. Asexual people generally can and sometimes do take part in sexual activity. Masturbation is the most common.

Why would an asexual person bother to masturbate?

  • Sometimes they do it to relax.
  • Sometimes they do it as a stress reliever.
  • Sometimes they do it because they’re bored.
  • For women, it can help with period pain.
  • For men, it can help with embarrassing issues like spontaneous erections or nocturnal emissions.
  • Sometimes they consider it a bodily function.
  • Sometimes they do it because their libido wants them to.
  • Sometimes they do it to prevent prostate cancer.
  • Sometimes they do it because it’s like “scratching an itch”.
  • Sometimes they like to perform a self-test to make sure everything is in working order.
  • Sometimes they just want to.
  • And, oh yeah, going out on a limb here, but could be because orgasms tend to feel good.

In other words, asexuals masturbate for pretty much the same reasons non-asexuals do. (Please note that this is not meant to be a complete list of possible reasons.)

So, it’s okay to be asexual and masturbate. It’s okay to like it, too. It doesn’t cancel out your asexuality, it doesn’t minimize your asexuality, it doesn’t mean you’re faking your asexuality.

How can someone who has an orgasm still claim to be asexual?

Having an orgasm does not, in any way, invalidate someone’s asexuality. An orgasm is a physical response to stimulation. It’s not related to one’s sexual orientation, it doesn’t require sexual attraction to work. To say that someone who has an orgasm can’t be asexual anymore is ridiculous. When a heterosexual has an orgasm, it’s not somehow a function of a heterosexual orientation. When a bisexual has an orgasm, it’s not a “bisexual orgasm”. So why would it be any different for an asexual? Why would the asexual orientation somehow get canceled out by an orgasm? Am I suddenly turned straight or turned gay by an orgasm? How would that happen? I wasn’t attracted to anyone before the orgasm and I’m still not afterward, so if I’m not asexual anymore, what am I?

Do asexuals enjoy orgasms?

In general, yes. I know I do.

How do asexuals masturbate?

Exactly the same way someone who isn’t asexual does, with all the variants that implies. There’s no such thing as “asexual” masturbation. We’ll use the same methods, techniques, and implements as everyone else. We’ll range in frequency from absolutely never to several times a day.

“Implements”? You mean sex toys?

Yes. Like many non-asexual people, some asexuals will use sex toys to help them get off. In fact, I probably have a larger collection of toys than most non-asexual people.

(And for the record, males can and do use sex toys, too.)

But some of these “implements” are anatomically correct. Doesn’t using them mean the person is attracted to the anatomical part it’s a facsimile of?

Absolutely not. Anatomically correct toys are designed that way because that shape is obviously quite effective at achieving the desired stimulation. Using something that works doesn’t somehow make someone less asexual. Or maybe they’re using one because they liked the color or because it was in the $5 bin. It doesn’t matter. Using sex toys of any kind, from a formless bullet vibrator up to a fully anatomically correct RealDoll does not mean someone is not asexual.

So, if you’re not attracted to people, what do you think about while you’re going at it?

Well, this is certainly different for different people, but here’s some things I think about: Furniture. Vacation plans. The weather. The day at work. Things I did with my ex-girlfriend. Politics. Things I did with myself in the past. Some TV show or movie I watched. Video game music from the 80s. However, for the most part, my thoughts are “That feels good” and “That feels even better”.

Wait… “Things I did with my ex-girlfriend”? How can you think about that and consider yourself asexual?

I can think about that because it felt good. I never found her sexually attractive. However, just because I never found her sexually attractive doesn’t mean that I didn’t find her sexually effective. When I was stimulated by her, it was extremely pleasurable and it did lead to orgasm. The memory of that sensation is extremely arousing. It’s not a memory of her body or a longing to have sex with her again. I was sort of bored when I had sex with her, even though it did feel good.

Don’t you ever fantasize?

Personally, I never really fantasize. I’ve tried, but it never works. My mind always focuses on the details and the stage direction and never on the imagining having sex part. Fantasies always seem to end up more distracting than anything. It’s so much effort to get the imaginary naked woman in the right pose and performing the right motions that the slightest stray thought would kick me out of the fantasy and force me to start over. (Not to mention that the thought of the imaginary naked woman in any pose never really did anything for me…) The one that’s come the closest to working is imagining myself demonstrating how I masturbate to someone else, which isn’t really much of a fantasy and usually just leads to me dropping the other person and going back to just thinking “That feels good”.

Some other asexuals will fantasize while masturbating. Often, they’ll describe it as imagining a sexual situation with a placeholder partner. Essentially a faceless, sometimes genderless prop that’s only there to provide an element that would be missing otherwise. For instance, they may imagine a person with a mouth performing oral sex on them. In this case, their thoughts are focused on the act itself and not any kind of attraction to the person performing the act. Sometimes the placeholder will be there to fulfill a fetish that the person finds arousing, in which case the focus is on the object of the fetish, and not the placeholder.

It always used to seem strange to me that so many people would say that you couldn’t masturbate without thinking of someone while doing it. There’s the religious thought that the reason masturbation is considered sinful is that it requires lust in the form of a fantasy, and I never understood that because I never needed lust, so why did anyone else? I would just grab it and go, without thinking about anyone. It was very mechanical. Fun, but mechanical.

How can you get aroused if you’re not thinking of someone sexually?

You don’t have to think of someone sexually in order to get aroused. You don’t have to be sexually attracted to anyone or anything in order to masturbate. You don’t have to be sexually attracted to someone to experience and enjoy an orgasm. All you have to do is touch your sensitive bits in the right way and presto! (And sometimes it doesn’t even take that much…) There’s a reward there that doesn’t require sexual attraction. I understand that, for most people, fantasy and attraction certainly helps the process, and I’m not disputing that. But it’s not a requirement.

Why would an asexual start to masturbate in the first place if they’re not turned on by someone?

Any number of reasons. Sometimes they’re told that it feels good and want to try it out. Other times their libido will kick in and downstairs will start screaming out for attention. And sometimes it’s because they think that’s what they’re supposed to do, after all, it seems like everyone else is.

In my case, in fifth grade sex ed (Which was basically nothing more than a vocabulary lesson) introduced me to the terms “masturbation” and “orgasm”. Masturbation was defined as “the self-stimulation of the genitals to orgasm” and orgasm was “an intense pleasurable sensation in the genitals”, and I eventually put the two definitions together and realized that it was something I wanted to try. I eventually managed to work out how it was done some time later.

You mentioned a libido? An asexual person can’t have a libido.

Actually, many asexuals do have a libido or a “sex drive”. They’ll have “urges” and desire sexual stimulation. But while for a non-asexual person, those urges tend to be directed toward another person, for an asexual, they’re often directionless. But that’s a topic for another post entirely…

What about porn?

What about it?

Do asexuals use porn?

You’re just asking that so you can say “Ha, gotcha!” when I answer, aren’t you?

No, not at all. Do they?

Sometimes, yes.

Ha! Gotcha! You can’t be asexual if you use porn!

I knew it…

Anyway, yes, asexuals sometimes will use porn while they masturbate. And no, it does not mean that they’re not asexual.

People who watch porn don’t necessarily find the performers sexually attractive. People who watch porn don’t always want to participate with the performers.

Consider it another way. Watching a cooking show on TV doesn’t necessarily make you want to cook whatever they’re fixing on the show, does it? You might not even like whatever it is. But it’s food, people are eating, and that makes you hungry. So you go get a bag of chips.

With porn, you might not want to do what they’re doing, you might not even like what they’re doing, but you may find it to be arousing simply because they’re aroused. You watch it and think “They seem to be enjoying what they’re doing. I have one of those, too, and I bet that feels good. Now I want to feel good.”

Enjoying porn has no bearing on your sexual orientation. Research has shown that women who are straight will often have a strong arousal response to lesbian scenes. And the very existence of the “money shot” in porn aimed at straight men should put any argument to rest. After all, if straight men didn’t find the shot of another man having an orgasm and ejaculating (Often by his own hand) to be arousing on some level, then why would it be so prevalent? It doesn’t mean that the viewer is secretly gay and repressed. It just means that they don’t necessarily have to feel sexual attraction toward something to be aroused by it.

In my case, I find most porn to be dull, uninteresting, and repetitive. I get more out of the sense that the performers are legitimately having a good time and experiencing pleasure than I do from the way they look or what they’re doing. I am very easily distracted by things in the background, like movies on a shelf or views out the window. And things like poor lighting and poor camera work will absolutely kill a scene. Sometimes I’ll watch porn for educational purposes, to see how other people do things and pick up a few tricks and techniques.

What about asexuals who don’t masturbate or don’t enjoy it?

Then they don’t masturbate or don’t enjoy it. Not every asexual has to masturbate. Not every asexual that does masturbate has to enjoy it. If you don’t masturbate, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If it’s not your thing, don’t worry about it and don’t worry about what other people might think. It’s no one’s business but your own.

Will masturbating make someone not asexual somehow?

Masturbation isn’t suddenly going to make you not asexual anymore, so don’t feel like you have to try it to know for sure that you’re ace. I’m pretty solid evidence that no amount of masturbation is likely to change your orientation. At most, you might discover that you like the way it feels and want to keep doing it.

What about asexuals who are curious about trying it?

If you’re looking for a step-by-step instruction guide, nope, not going there. I do have some other advice, though.

First: Relax.

Second: Don’t turn it into a chore. Presumably you’re doing it because you want it to be fun. It won’t be fun if it’s a chore.

Don’t feel defeated if you don’t get anywhere your first attempt, because you probably won’t. No one does. You’re not a failure and your equipment probably isn’t defective. It’s a learned skill and takes practice. I probably had to try for months before I got anywhere. Of course, those were the days before search engines, so it was all trial and error for me. At any rate, persistence is the key. You need to find out what works for you and not be afraid to try something new. And don’t be afraid of calling in a little bit of artificial assistance. Many people, male, female, or otherwise, will use lubricants or toys to help them get off.

Don’t feel guilty, as if you’re betraying your asexuality. You’re not.

You don’t necessarily need a libido in order to become aroused. It probably helps, but it’s not required. With the right mindset and the right stimulation, you can usually wake things up downstairs. Honestly, I’m not even sure I have a libido. I rarely, if ever, feel “urges” or feel “horny”, or any of the other things people describe as a libido at work. Whenever I masturbate, I usually have to spend a bit of time getting myself ready. However, I have read things which claim that sexual activity itself in some cases may increase libido in a sort of feedback effect. The more you do, the more you want. So you may have a dormant libido that masturbation could potentially awaken.

And most of all, if you don’t like it, stop. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. If you’re not getting anything out of it, don’t do it and don’t worry about it.

Anything more?

I’ll just leave you with this:

If you’re asexual and you masturbate, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you don’t masturbate, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you masturbate to porn, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you don’t masturbate to porn, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you masturbate using sex toys, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you don’t masturbate using sex toys, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you masturbate and you like it, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you masturbate and you don’t like it, then you’re still asexual.
If you’re asexual and you want to masturbate, but haven’t, then you’re still asexual.

(Please also see the companion post I wrote for Asexual Awareness Week, which elaborates more on my personal views on the topic, and where I stole a number of lines from:  http://www.asexualityarchive.com/aaw-day-6-masturbation/ )

AAW Day 6: Masturbation

One of the most common question asked of asexuals is “Do you masturbate?”.

The answer:  Yes.  I do.

(Not all of us do.  Some of us do, some of us don’t, and some of us can’t.)

(BTW, it’s NOYDB.  So stop asking.  Anyway…)

It generally confuses people when we do, though…  (It even confuses us sometimes.)

It’s not just “scratching an itch” for me.  It’s not “just a biological function.”  It’s not “cleaning the pipes.”   It’s not a way to calm an undirected libido or prevent nighttime accidents.  It’s not some bothersome vestigial leftover of the sexuality I’m supposed to have.  It’s none of that for me.

I do it because I like it.  It feels good.  It’s fun.

And it does not invalidate my asexuality to feel this way.

Asexuality means that I’m not sexually attracted to anyone, it does not mean that my equipment doesn’t function.  It functions, and how.

You don’t have to be sexually attracted to someone to become aroused.  You don’t have to be sexually attracted to someone to experience and enjoy an orgasm.  All you have to do is touch your sensitive bits in the right way and presto!

I never understood the old religious claim that “Masturbation isn’t necessarily a sin, but lust is, and you have to have lust in your heart in order to masturbate, because you’re fantasizing while you do it.”  It just didn’t make sense to me. I never had lust.  I never fantasized.  When I first heard it, I was young and had only recently started masturbating.  At the time, I just figured that I was new and I hadn’t figured out quite what I was supposed to be doing, and that when I got older, something would kick in and I’d start fantasizing and feeling lust and have to confront the moral question then. (And all this even though I was never actually religious…)  But all that happened was I got older.  The lusting and fantasizing never began.

I don’t fantasize.  I just can’t.  I’ve tried, though.  I tried to picture naked people doing naked people things.  I tried to imagine erotic scenarios.  It never worked for me.  I tried because it was supposed to help.  It was supposed to turn on the sexual overdrive and make everything ten times more exciting.  All it did was distract me.  I had to concentrate so hard on the mental stage direction that I lost focus on what I was doing.  It was so much effort to get the imaginary naked woman in the right pose and performing the right motions that the slightest stray thought would kick me out of the fantasy and force me to start over.

If you start to plan out the script of your sexual fantasy because your brain doesn’t do improv in that genre, that’s a pretty good sign that something is up.

That bothered me for a long time.  Everyone else fantasized while they masturbated and I just couldn’t.  That bothered me more than my lack of interest in dating ever did.  Not wanting to ask a girl out could conveniently be explained away by shyness or social anxiety.  But not being able to include her in a sexual fantasy that would have stayed in my mind and been free of awkward conversations and fear of rejection?  That made me feel broken.

I eventually overcame that, well before I discovered asexuality.  I realized that it didn’t do anything for me, I just didn’t think in that way, and it wasn’t actually a problem for me.  I enjoyed masturbating adn I wasn’t going to let something like that stand in the way.

So, that brings up what is probably the second most common question asked of asexuals:  “If you’re not attracted to anyone, what do you think about when you masturbate?”

(Again, NOYDB.)

What do I think about?  Furniture.  (No, really.  I have planned out how to decorate a room while involved.)  My day.  The plot of some TV show.  Video games.  Politics.  Music from the 80’s.  The next vacation I’m going to take.  The weather.  But most of all, I think about two specific things:

“That feels good.”

and

“That feels even better.”

An Asexual on Sex

A quick note before I begin: To all the asexuals out there: It’s okay to be a virgin and it’s fine to not be a virgin. It’s okay to be curious about sex and it’s fine to not be interested in it at all. It’s okay to enjoy sex and it’s fine to dislike it. It’s okay to not want to experience sexual pleasure and it’s fine if you want to orgasm by yourself or with someone else. It’s okay to have sex and it’s fine to not have sex. Your experience may be different than mine, and it doesn’t mean that you’re wrong or your broken. It just means that you’re not me, and we’re each walking the path of our own lives.

All asexuals are virgins, right?

No, we’re not all virgins. Some of us are virgins. Some of us have had sex a few times (I’m in this group). And some of us have had a regular sexual relationship with a partner (or multiple partners).

How can you be asexual and have had sex?

Asexuality is a sexual orientation, just like heterosexuality or homosexuality. Sexual orientations are not defined by who you’ve had sex with throughout your lifetime, they’re defined by who you’re sexually attracted to. Think of it this way: A heterosexual male is heterosexual because he’s sexually attracted to women, even if he’s still a virgin and hasn’t had sex with any women. And if there’s that one night in college where he was young and confused and really really drunk and he went a little bit too far with that guy from the party because it seemed like a good idea at the time, that doesn’t make him gay or bi, because his sexual orientation is defined by his attraction, not his youthful indiscretions.

An asexual who has had sex simply isn’t sexually attracted to the person they’ve had sex with.

But, um, how can you be asexual and have had sex? I mean, physically?

Physically, there is no inherent difference between an asexual person and someone who is not asexual. We’ve got the same parts and pieces in the same arrangement and angles as everyone else, and they’ll work the same way, too. The only difference is emotional: Who we feel an urge to use those parts and pieces with. A heterosexual person wants to use them with someone with different parts and pieces, a homosexual wants to use them with someone with matching parts and pieces, a bisexual or pansexual doesn’t really care, and an asexual doesn’t really feel an urge to use them with anyone else.

Asexual males can get erect and ejaculate, and the sperm is normal human male sperm, it’s not some sort of magic sperm that can grow into a clone of the father on its own under the right conditions.

Asexual females can get wet and engorged and can get pregnant, and a pregnancy requires a male contrubution, they’re not capable of parthenogenesis.

Asexuals of any sex are capable of orgasm.

So, uh, asexual women having sex, that I get. “Lie back and think of England” and all that. They don’t have to do anything. But asexual men… How does that work?

Blood fills the spongy tissue of the penis, causing an erection, and the erect penis is-

I know how it works, but how does that happen?

You mean, how can an asexual man get an erection without being sexually attracted to the person they’re with?

Yeah, what’s the deal with that?

Obviously, the ability to achieve erection and not be sexually attracted to the person the erection will be used with is not an isolated feature unique to asexuals. There are plenty of examples of gay men who have fathered children through natural insemination. There are also plenty of examples of men (gay, straight, or otherwise) who’ve left the bar at last call with whoever was willing to join them. A man clearly does not have to be sexually attracted to someone to be able to have sex with them.

I can only speak for myself here, as I’ve never run a survey of non-virgin asexual males regarding erectile capacity during intercourse, but here goes. Even though I’m not sexually attracted to anyone, my body can and does respond to sexual situations. It’s like downstairs says “Oh, hey, SEX! I know what that is. I’ll go get ready in case you need me.” It’ll react that way to some sex scenes in movies, or to porn, or to knowing that you and your girlfriend had planned on having sex for about a month and now she’s getting into bed with you. It may be a Pavlovian response, where I know that the situation may have the reward of sexual pleasure, so my body gets prepared. Additionally, an erection can be caused by physical stimulation, regardless of the source of that stimulation. Many men have gotten erections from tight underwear, loose underwear, driving on bumpy roads or getting a physical at the doctor, and none of those things are generally targets of sexual attraction. When I had sex, there was a decent period of touching and caressing prior to starting intercourse, all of which was arousing. In fact, immediately after putting on the condom, I required a bit of direct stimulation to make the erection usable.

Some people confuse an getting an erection with sexual attraction. It is very important to note that they are not the same thing. Certainly, an erection can be the result of sexual attraction, but there are many other ways to get one (Like the physical stimulation mentioned above), and most of those other ways will work the same way on an asexual’s penis as on a non-asexual’s penis. Hell, when I was in the 7th grade, I used to get an erection every day in math class. Now, I like math and all, but I don’t like it that much. Sometimes erections just happen and there’s no reason for it.

Oh, and, don’t forget: Despite what President Clinton may have claimed, sex doesn’t necessarily require a penis to be placed within a vagina. So it doesn’t require a functional penis to be involved. It doesn’t even require a penis at all. Hands, mouths, and various devices and implements that may or may not be battery-operated can all be used during sexual activity.

Why bother? I mean, if you hate sex, what’s the point?

As I noted in an earlier post, views on sex vary widely among asexuals. Many asexuals do not hate sex. There are many reasons that an asexual person might have sex. These reasons include (but are not necessarily limited to):

  • To please their partner.
  • Because they’ve been told, “Try it, you’ll like it”.
  • To satisfy their libido.
  • Because they’re bored.
  • To find out what its like.
  • Because they want children.
  • To “fit in” with other people.
  • Because it feels good.
  • Because they want to.

I had sex because my girlfriend at the time wanted to have sex with me. She knew that I wasn’t all that interested in sex, but we figured that it was worth a shot because maybe I’d become more interested in it if I experienced it. Of course, I did want to know what it was like, since sex is supposed to be this super-amazing, mind-blowing, life-altering thing that everyone else seems to be relentlessly chasing. Something like that’s gotta be good, right? But most importantly, I did it because I wanted to do it. No amount of begging and pleading would’ve gotten me to do anything if I didn’t want to do it (Anyone who’s tried to get me to eat Thai food knows that). In the end, I wasn’t terribly impressed. It was okay, I guess, but nothing to get all worked up over. It just wasn’t my bag.

What do you do when you have sex?

You know all the different things non-asexuals might do that they’d consider to be sex? Yeah, asexuals might do any of those. It’s not like there’s some ace code of conduct that says asexual women must lie passively and asexual men must thrust in the missionary position and any deviations from these standards are punishable by no cake for a month. During sex, asexual people, regardless of gender, can be as active or as passive as they want to be, and engage in activities ranging from dull to kinky.

But can you feel anything?

We can. Nothing about asexuality prevents an asexual person from experiencing physical sexual pleasure, whether that pleasure comes from a kiss on the cheek or genital stimulation. An orgasm in an asexual is no different than an orgasm in someone who isn’t. Sexual response will vary from individual to individual, just like among non-asexual people. Many asexuals who have had sex have never experienced an orgasm or may experience pain during intercourse (particularly women), however, you’ll find the same issues among non-asexual people, as well.

As for me, do I feel anything? Hoo-boy howdy yeah! Um, I mean, yes, I found the act of intercourse to be quite pleasurable physically.

None of this makes any sense to me. Asexuals having sex. “Asexual” means “not sexual”, so it’s not possible for an asexual to do sexual things. Are you sure you’re ace?

I don’t like the description of asexuality as “non-sexual” or “not sexual”, as I feel those terms carry the implication that an asexual person has no sexual ability or is incapable of doing anything of a sexual nature or is impotent. That’s simply not the case. Asexuality alone has no bearing on physical and physiological attributes and functions. I’ve got a penis and a pair of testicles. I can get erections. I can masturbate, lubricate and ejaculate. I can experience the intense physical pleasure of an orgasm. I can father a child. All the parts down below are present and functional, just like in any other healthy factory-original male. The only difference is that I don’t have any burning interest in using those parts with anyone else, because I’m asexual. Not having any interest doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of doing so.

What was sex like, from your point of view?

Somewhat analytical and disconnected. I was far more into trying to figure out what actions I was supposed to be taking at the various points in the process. Am I supposed to kiss the breast or caress it now? Is the clitoral stimulation too fast or too slow? I distinctly remember being bored at one point, wishing that my orgasm would arrive so that I could stop. It wasn’t the epitome of all life experiences, as I’d been led to believe. But at the same time, it felt good, both physically and emotionally. The whole process felt different and in some ways better than masturbation, the warmth and the varying pressure being notable examples. And I very much enjoyed sharing the experience with the woman that I loved at the time.

Interestingly enough, I have a record of some emails I sent to my partner on the subject in the days following our get togethers. They’re a monument to aceness. Instead of things like “Oh baby, you were so hot last night” and “I just got hard again thinking about what we did”, these mails are full of more practical issues, like the application of lubricant, discussion of technique, and talking about how I wasn’t expecting to be thirsty after sex. Anyway, here’s some quotes from those mails:

“Anyway, yes, I did enjoy it. It was different than I had imagined. It took a lot longer than I was expecting (Must’ve gotten caught up in the rhythm and forgotten to orgasm…). And it felt different, too. The way people always talk, I was expecting more of an electric explosion type of ‘WowWowWOWOW!’ sort of feeling the entire time. Sure, it was nice, but I don’t see why it gets people acting stupid and ruining their lives and such.”

“At the beginning, it wasn’t that much different from masturbation and was fairly dull and repetitive, almost ‘Is that all there is?’ “

“Touching there, kissing here, rubbing there… It doesn’t make much difference. It all feels pretty much the same to me. Stroking your breast does about as much for me as stroking your shoulder.”

“Anyway, I will be willing to do it again sometime. It meets with my approval.”

Your honor, I would like to submit these letters as Exhibit A for the proof of the existence of asexuality…

Um… Yeah. Wow. So, uh… What should I know if I, as a non-asexual person, want to have sex with an asexual?

As I wrote above, asexual people can have sex and still be asexual. There’s nothing physically preventing most of us from doing so. However, just because someone can physically have sex doesn’t mean they will want to. Many aces do not want to have sex. They may be repulsed, they may not be with the right person, it might not be the right time for them, or they may simply not want to. Even those who are willing to have sex are generally less into it and won’t do it as frequently as a non-asexual partner might prefer. Trying to coerce or pressure or guilt an asexual into having sex with you is an officially uncool thing to do. “No” means NO.

Sometimes aces will be willing to work out a compromise situation when they’re in a relationship with a non-asexual person, but it’s important that such a compromise come from a place of respect and that the compromise be honored by both parties. The single most important thing to remember when dealing with a sexual relationship with an asexual person is that you need to talk to them. Communication. Tell them your wants and needs and listen to their wants and needs. And talk. Don’t accuse and don’t demand. Also, not all asexual people will be willing to compromise.

Understand that an asexual person probably sees sex in a very different way than you do. You might see it as the supreme expression of love, joining of two souls into a single blissful passion. They may see it as the rubbing of genitals against each other for a half hour or so. They may not find you sexually attractive, but that’s not a personal rejection of you and there’s nothing you can do about it. It doesn’t mean they think you’re fat or ugly or horrible to be around or they don’t love you anymore. Their minds just don’t work that way. You will need to learn to accept that.

One thing I’ve seen happen again and again is that the asexual person will gradually become less and less willing to have sex. There can be many reasons for this, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re falling out of love. They may have come to the realization that they can’t overcome their repulsion. They may have started feeling guilty that you’re clearly attracted to them and they can’t return the favor. They may be growing less and less comfortable in sexual situations. The novelty might be wearing off. Or they may simply not be as willing to do it anymore. You will never know what the reason is if you don’t talk to them about it.

And again, no means no. If someone doesn’t want to have sex with you, then they don’t want to have sex with you. It doesn’t matter that they’re asexual. It doesn’t matter if they’ve had sex before, even if that sex was with you. No means no.

“Don’t you all hate sex?”

All asexual people think the same way about sex, right? Don’t you all hate sex?

Not at all, actually. The opinions on sex among asexuals are just as wide and varied as the opinions of non-asexuals on sex. Some like it, some hate it, and some don’t care at all. Asexuality is only the lack of sexual attraction. Beyond that, anything goes.

Well, how do you feel about sex?

I am a “sex-positive” asexual. That may sound contradictory, but it does not mean that I want to have sex. What it means is that I’m fine with sex. I don’t hate sex, I’m not repulsed by it, I don’t look down on other people for having it, I’m not ashamed about the fact that I even had sex, once upon a time. I recognize that sex may be important to other people and I do not have a problem with that. I find sex and sexuality strangely fascinating, and I always have. I have a sort of detached anthropological scientific interest in the subject. Although I don’t really have any desire to take part in most of the activities and practices I’ve heard about, I still think it’s good for me to know about them, and I like learning about them. If you saw my bookshelf, you would likely not believe that I’m ace. I’ve got sex encyclopedias, sex manuals, books on masturbation, fellatio, and cunnilingus, even a book that describes 365 different ways to have sex, so you can do it differently every night of the year (Except during a leap year, apparently). I know about things some of my non-asexual friends have never heard of.

(Please note that “Sex-positive” doesn’t mean that I think that all sex is automatically good. There are certainly some aspects of sex which are terrible.)

However, wanting to learn about sex does not mean that I actually want to have sex. When it comes to having sex with a partner, I’m largely indifferent. I don’t actively seek it out. I’ve done it before and wasn’t all that impressed, but I wouldn’t necessarily be against doing it again in the right situation.

Okay, so some asexuals are fine with sex. What about the rest of them?

Not every asexual is sex-positive. Many asexuals are repulsed by sex. Repulsion goes beyond simple disinterest. A repulsed person is generally disgusted by the thought of sex or of sexual things. There are many variations of repulsion among asexuals. Some think that all sex, anywhere, by anyone, is “icky”. Others are only repulsed when it comes to any form of sexual situations involving their own bodies, but are fine with other people having sex. Some repulsed people may be fine with their own bodies and may masturbate, but find the thought of doing anything with someone else disgusting. In some cases, the mere mention of an anatomical word is enough to cause someone to feel sick to their stomach.

Being sex-positive and repulsed are not mutually exclusive.  It’s possible for someone to believe that pretty much whatever goes on between consenting adults is fine and dandy, but at the same time be repulsed about the thought of engaging in sexual activity themselves.  Part of sex-positivity is a sense of “to each their own”, which means respect for how much or how little sex a person chooses to have, whether it’s five times a day or zero times in a lifetime.  There are no “sluts” and there are no “prudes”.

Repulsion, by itself, is not necessarily an indicator of asexuality. Many non-asexuals are also repulsed by the thought of sex. They’ll experience sexual attraction, but once their thoughts turn toward the act of having sex, their thoughts will be blotted out by the ickiness of the fluids and the body parts and other goings on. Some people may even mistake repulsion for asexuality, thinking that because they find sex disgusting, that must mean that they do not find anyone sexually attractive, which is not the case.

Some people have reported some measure of success in overcoming repulsion by engaging in exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is the process in which a person attempts to overcome a fear by gradual and repeated exposure to the thing that causes the fear. For instance, someone who is arachnophobic would be shown pictures of spiders in an attempt to desensitize the person to spiders. For someone who is sexually repulsed, they might try looking at pornographic images or videos, reading about sexual acts, or examining their own bodies as a way to minimize their repulsion. (Of course, your mileage may vary. I’m not a psychologist or therapist and I’ve never been sexually repulsed, so I might just be completely off base here. I would strongly suggest that you find someone who actually knows what they’re talking about before attempting any therapy of this sort. Don’t just listen to me. Also, don’t blame me if you end up scarred for life after you see some of the things out there on the Internet…) It’s also important to note that exposure therapy should only be attempted by those who actually want to change how they feel about sex. If you’re repulsed by sex and don’t really have a problem with it, then don’t worry about trying to “fix” youself, because you’re not broken.

Why do I always hear about asexuals that hate sex and everyone who has sex?

I believe you’re confusing asexuality with anti-sexuality. They are not the same thing. Anti-sexuals believe that sex is bad or wrong, either because of a religious objection, or because they believe that sex is at the root of many of the world’s problems. While it is possible for someone to be both asexual and anti-sexual, one does not have to be asexual to be anti-sexual, and not all asexuals are anti-sexual. (In fact, the majority of them are not.)

So, do all asexuals fit perfectly into one of these groups you’ve mentioned?

It’s possible to be some mixture of the categories I’ve described above, and it’s also possible for someone to fall into a category I haven’t mentioned. However, just because someone is asexual, you can’t know which, if any, of these categories that person will be. You’ll need to talk to them to find out. It’s generally considered rude to assume that they’re a certain way. Furthermore, it should be noted that someone’s general impression of sex may not apply to every specific situation. For instance, just because an asexual is sex-positive, that doesn’t mean they’ll be willing to have sex with you or anyone else.  Just because an asexual is repulsed, that doesn’t mean they’ll flee the room in horror if the conversation turns to sex. Communication is the key to understanding the individual.