It makes people treat others like crap if they do not find them sexually attractive and it drives them to kill each other if repressed or denied.

and not the least, it drives them to a variety of "small" but really terrible offenses that are just brushed off as "funny".

There is a current thread about what has been the worst thing teacher have said (done) to kids and there is a disturbing number of sexually driven things that are just stupid or down right offensive and dehumanizing. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/34fvry/teachers_of_reddit_whats_the_worst_thing_you_have/

For example:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/34fvry/teachers_of_reddit_whats_the_worst_thing_you_have/cquhi0o http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/34fvry/teachers_of_reddit_whats_the_worst_thing_you_have/cqudpc9

There is an interesting post/discussion going on about some woman who refuses to have sex with her husband. She sounds like a self-centered bitch but I can understand some of the things she says - she just is completely oblivious to the feelings of anyone other than herself. She does not get why sex is so interesting to others, I can understand that, but she fails to recognize that others clearly feel differently.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AdviceAnimals/comments/30nuri/to_the_low_libido_lady_who_hates_having_sex_with/

What I found interesting was that among the comments there are several from men who describe being in a similar situation. A surprising number in fact. They find themselves with wives who do not want to have sex at all or very little. It sounds like the wives played along (had sex as expected) but eventually reverted to their true low sex drive state. It is hard to keep up pretending to like sex. Eventually that fails. Maybe in some or most cases it is due to some medical condition, but maybe not.

In contrast to this, I previously happened on a comment thread about men struggling with wives who wanted sex more than they did- they were the ones who felt pressured into sex. They felt mistreated by wives who demanded sex and expected them to perform.

It made me wonder, maybe having little or no sex drive is actually more common that we think. We grow up assuming we are supposed to be sexual, we try to be sexual, play along and get married, and then are stuck having to keep up the facade of wanting sex. If true, this is brutally unfair to both the husband and wife. Both sexes would suffer if paired up with someone who's sexual drive does not match theirs.

Given that sex is so intensely important to those who want it, the priority of people should maybe be finding a partner who has a matching sex drive, even more than one who initially attracts them (more than physical appearance). Being physically attracted to someone does not indicate a matching sex drive. Especially when nearly everyone is raised to think they must act "sexy", regardless of their interest in sex. People solely focus on a particular "look" they like. Too bad. It seems like there are a lot of miserable couples with mismatched sex drives.

I wonder if it would help if society would accept that some people do not have much desire for sex and if it were OK to admit that. Too bad it is not socially acceptable to not be "sexy" and not act "sexy". To bad people are not encouraged to portray what they really want in a relationship. If they could, then people could more easily find a sexual partner with a matching sex drive. Right now, everyone has to be "sexy" to be socially acceptable and popular so everyone tries to portray a "sexy" image, regardless of their desire to have sex.

I feel like I see people differently than most. Sometimes it just seems like I live in a world that has gone mad with sex. It seems like it drives people to crazy extremes and forces them to build their lives around the pursuit of it. I used to be convinced that religion and religious fanaticism was the primary driving force behind a lot of evil in the world but sometimes what I see on reddit has made me I wonder about that.

Maybe it is just skewed by the population that posts on reddit, but posts about "every mans dream" (a post of one man with two women and the comments were all about how much they wished for that), post after post about sex and the pursuit of it.

I know most people think it is an illness to not be a slave to your sex drive (to lack a sex drive), but that seems ridiculous to me when you see the extremes that people go to to satisfy their drive. From my perspective it looks like an illness to be a slave to it. It drives people to insane lengths to satisfy it and it dominates nearly everything they do. It is hard to imagine why you would want that. Maybe that is just reddit. I don't really know.

I look at people at work sometimes and I wonder if they too are driven like that. Maybe that is why some men feel the need to ask women to cover up (like hijabs) - they really cannot control their thoughts or physical response to a woman they perceive as sexually attractive - and the same for women who see men they are attracted to.

Why is this? I have no idea really.

I suppose we could take the path of pretending to desire it, and thus appear "noble and pure" by abstaining.

Why is that? It feels like some people are really personally invested in the meaning of "asexuality" and that to even suggest an alternate meaning is to suggest they are something else. I do not mean to define it differently. To be as clear as possible, I do not mean to define anyone or anything. I do not mean to challenge anyone's definition of themselves or the meaning of the words they use.

I am not trying to "split" some community. I honestly do not feel I belong to the community that calls itself "asexual", due to how they define it. For me gender is irrelevant and sex drive (presence/absence) is the relevant characteristic.

Neither it better than the other, they are just different. If it turns out that I am the only one who sees it this way, that is fine.

Do we expect the blind to fight a lack of sight? or the deaf to spend a lifetime fighting for hearing? Sometimes blindness/deafness can be reversed but when it cannot be reversed, do we expect them to fight for sight or hearing so that they can be "whole" or live a complete life?

Clearly we do not, and it is much more productive for them to focus on learning to live in a world designed for sighted or hearing people than to fight what they are. In some senses they may even have advantages and better developed alternate senses that more than make up for a lack of sight or hearing.

Similarly, sometimes a lack of a sex drive may be a temporary situation and maybe can be reversed but what if it cannot? Is that even such a terrible thing? Wouldn't it be better to focus on living in world designed for the sexual than spending a lifetime fighting the lack of a sex drive? Is it really such a terrible thing to lack a sex drive? Does it make me "incomplete"?

I am 52, soon to be 53 and I have spent a lifetime trying to find that magical person, or place or event or whatever, that would make me a sexual person. Just like sight or hearing can be lost due to injury, I supposed it is possible that I lost my sex drive due to childhood injury at a very young age. Or maybe I was born that way. I really do not know but that seems irrelevant now. Whether it was destroyed at 5 years old or never existed to begin with, does not matter. I am who I am. Do I have to be something else?

Does a blind person need sight to be a whole person or live a fulfilling life?

Why does it seem like some people want non sexual (no sex drive) to be the same as people who do have a sex drive but for whom that drive is stimulated by non-traditional events or things rather than the more common people to people thing?

Neither is a bad thing, nothing is wrong with either (so long as everyone involved is consenting), but they are not the same and I still do not understand why there seems to be a persistent insistence that they are fundamentally the same.

Apparently some people get a sexual response to unexpected things (and the more I read on this the more it puzzles and astounds me) instead of responding to another person. That seems one of the ways to define "asexual".

Regardless of what they are responding to, they are a sexual being still, just not stimulated by the more conventional things.

I wonder if this is due to the pervasive belief that we are all sexual beings and cannot possibly not be. I could be wrong, but I still question that belief. I can't imagine getting a sexual response to a man, let alone nails on chalkboard.

I guess I am still exploring the way the term "asexual" is defined. It stills seems like most of the time it is associated with low or no sex drive (in spite of the fact that r/asexuality insists otherwise). For example, on this page discussing how it is displayed in pop culture, the examples are all "suspected asexual" due to an apparent lack of sexual activity (implying a lack of a sex drive)

http://asexuality.weebly.com/pop-culture-references.html

The implied definition of "asexuality" illustrated here is pretty much what I would have expected.

In another example, here too, suggests that they assume an asexual lives a life without sex.

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2012/life-without-sex-imagining-asexuality-popular-culture

This is how I would have expected to define asexuality.

It really surprised me to have so many people tell me asexuality had nothing to do with sex drive - I was really confounded by one who even claimed to have a sex drive "through the roof" but still considered himself asexual because he did not want to have sex with his girlfriend of 6 years. What was he having sex with? I have a hard time imagining this - so what exactly does drive his "through the roof" sex drive? I assume himself. I cannot imagine that someone who is self described to be driven to masturbate that much would be described as "asexual". Self-sexual seems more appropriate. That would be a logical description that is much more easily understood.

AVEN describes it as:

According to the The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, AVEN: An asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. http://www.campuspride.org/tools/introduction-to-asexual-identities-resource-guide/

That still suggests a low or no sex drive. How can a person with a "sex drive through the roof" claim to not experience sexual attraction? Clearly they experience sexual attraction, just not to conventional men or women apparently, but to something else (such as themselves or objects).

I can't help but wonder why this all came about. Someone mentioned that this defintion was to be more inclusive but it seems to me that they have been so "inclusive" as to exclude the most logical meaning.

http://www.reddit.com/tb/2znvsg

I am 52, female, I was married, divorced, four great kids, now grown up, none at home, sadly enough.

I am a microbiologist with a PhD. I work as a Principal Scientist in the Pharma industry. I like to think I help keep the drug/vaccine supply safe. I play my part anyway.

Currently, "asexual" is defined as "a person who does not experience sexual attraction". http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2010/12/brief-history-of-antisexuality.html

That seems different from "not attracted to either gender". "not attracted to either gender" suggests they can be attracted to something else (such as them selves? sex toys? ...?), just not to males or females. I wonder if they are attracted to androgynous people...

"does not experience sexual attraction" seems very different from that and sounds more like no sex drive at all.

I really had no idea it was so complicated. No wonder people took offense at my comments in r/asexual. I had no idea what I was treading on or the history of how the definition has been disputed. It is interesting.

http://asexystuff.blogspot.com/2008/09/defining-asexuality.html