Alfred Kinsey's famous scale had a hidden extra category: X
Kinsey rated people from 0, exclusively heterosexual, to 6, exclusively homosexual. But he also set aside a category marked X for those with no sociosexual contacts or reactions at all. Decades later, a British survey found that about one person in a hundred had never felt sexual attraction to anyone.
Asexuality means lacking sexual attraction to others, or having little or no interest in sexual activity. It differs from celibacy and abstinence, which are choices of behaviour often driven by personal or religious beliefs, whereas orientation is thought to be enduring. Researchers still disagree over whether it counts as a sexual orientation. People on this spectrum often shorten the word to ace, and the wider group is called the ace community.
Hard numbers arrived almost by accident. In 1994 a British team surveyed 18,876 residents to gather sexual health data in the wake of the AIDS pandemic, and 1.05 percent said they had never felt sexually attracted to anyone. The Canadian researcher Anthony Bogaert took up the finding in 2004. Later estimates vary: a 2013 analysis of British data from 2000 and 2001 put the figure at 0.4 percent for ages 16 to 44, while a nationwide Japanese survey in 2023 found 49 of 5,339 respondents, about 0.9 percent, identifying as asexual.
Lacking sexual attraction does not mean lacking romance. In a 2020 study, 74 percent of asexual participants reported romantic attraction, with biromantic the largest group at 38.3 percent. Some people describe themselves by romantic orientation as heteroromantic, homoromantic or panromantic, and those without romantic attraction may call themselves aromantic. The community has coined its own vocabulary, such as squish for a platonic crush and queerplatonic for close relationships that are neither romantic nor sexual.
Between asexuality and allosexuality, the term for people who do feel sexual attraction, lies gray asexuality. Demisexual people, for instance, feel attraction only after forming a strong emotional bond. Organised communities grew with the internet from the mid-1990s, and the best known, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, was founded by David Jay in 2001.
Source: Asexuality
