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I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.
There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all. Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman. Agreed, not everybody who claims the label, but we can say that about autism and ADHD and the rest of such self-diagnoses, which does not mean that autism is not a real condition.
Well, when you figure that one out, tell me because I've been a woman all my life and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men. If you mean the simplistic model of "women want meat, men want sex, swap one for the other" good luck there honey. "Your meat is not good enough" - harsh truth or women just being bitches?
I suppose so, in the sense that both men and women can be paraplegic or born blind or whatever.
The ADHD comparison falls apart in that when someone claims to have ADHD they're trying to get the treatment for ADHD (meds, extra exam time) to get an advantage. People who claim to be asexual claim don't want to be treated for it at all.
There's a difference between people with low libido, who find this distressing and alienating to partners, and who want to have more sex and be more interested in sex, and so they seek treatment, and people who are asexual, happy about that, and don't want to change.
The self-diagnosed online types who have a laundry list of illnesses from the physical to mental, to prove what sensitive little flowers they are and how you cannot be mean to them at all, are the ones who may latch on to asexuality/demisexuality as another way to burnish their resumés, as it were: now I'm queer as well (if I can't manage to be trans or gay or lesbian or bi) so if you say anything at all that I disagree with, I can now accuse you of homophobia as well as the rest of the list of your crimes against the differently abled.
I disagree that the second group of people exist, or should exist. Lacking a libido isn't a natural and full category of human, it's a moral, emotional, and physical cripple incapable of basic human functioning. Extremely low libido should be distressing and will always be alienating to partners, it isn't an "identity" that society should be acknowledging as a point of negotiation.
"Wifely" or "Husbandly" duties are a basic part of marriage, sexuality is a basic part of humanity.
We need to reject these kinds of ideas root and branch, they are essentially anti-human.
Would you consider priests, monks, nuns, and other people who have never engaged in romantic relationships throughout their lives because they had a different calling to be a group of people who shouldn't exist? I think it is clearly wrong. Just because it isn't how most humans function, doesn't mean that these people are any less human.
People who choose to live in a certain way in accordance with their beliefs != People who lack fundamental human feelings
People who have urges to sin and resist them != People who lack urges
Gluttony is a sin. Someone who has no hunger, no urge to eat and no pleasure in food, is crippled and missing a fundamental human experience. A monk who chooses to live on a scanty diet of bread and water is making a choice for piety, a choice that is meaningless if he was born with a generic dysfunction that prevents him from feeling hunger or enjoying food.
Wrath is a sin. But someone who feels no anger, no urge to revenge when wronged, is missing a fundamental part of human experience. The nobility of choosing to turn the other cheek is meaningless if one simply lacks the neurons that fire that way for revenge.
So on and so forth to Lust.
I wouldn't say they are crippled since that implies they have a disability to live their life successfully. They might be missing a fundamentally human experience, but they are missing it in a good manner which will help them live a better life. Avoiding gluttony, wrath and excessive lust is good.
Notice your slip here, you've subconsiously moved the goalposts on yourself: excessive lust is bad. I agree! Excessive lust is bad, but some lust is necessary to human life, even if it exists only to be resisted! Someone who lacks any sexual desire is missing a gear.
Maybe, sometimes, having a genetic defect to lack any libido causes them to lead a better life along certain metrics, if not others. And there are very few armed robbers or murderers in wheelchairs, but being unable to walk is pretty much your textbook definition of a cripple. It would seem ridiculous to say that wheelchair bound folks are more moral because they don't commit violent crimes. And it would be obvious to say they are cripples, despite the fact that they're less likely to end their lives in prison.
So either you're proposing a new definition of cripple by which any possible moral benefit obviates the many clear limitations imposed.
Or given that you already copped to only excessive lust being bad, your concept of Asexuality is something more like, extant but weak sexual desire?
Yeah but not having lust isn't preventing them from having sex, asexuals don't lack the ability to do so. And even if they did, since many people live excellent lives after foregoing sex, I don't think they are missing out on something crucial. I don't see how they are a cripple. Maybe they wouldn't understand sexual desire in their fellow human beings as well, but I don't see any other negative effect.
I said excessive lust since gluttony is already the word for eating in excess. Not having hunger signals is not bad, people can still live a good life without feeling hungry. Also, I believe anger is bad in all amounts. I will say lust as an emotion is neutral in moderation. Saying excessive lust is bad doesn't imply that having no lust is bad.
I will also note that people who choose to live like monks, priests, nuns, etc. do everything in their capacity to train their mind to stop feeling lust in the first place (and also other emotions like wrath). And I believe that it does work, since brains are neuroplastic, habits are powerful and in my own experience I have almost eliminated anger as an emotion after trying. Even in the rare times you start experiencing the emotions you are avoiding, you learn to immediately notice it and let it go. I agree that if someone did not feel these emotions in the first place, then not acting upon them is not a moral virtue like it is to intentionally choose to resist and forego those emotions. Considering that people make it a goal to stop feeling lust and acting upon it and view that as a good outcome, I am not convinced that not feeling it at all makes someone a cripple.
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I directionally agree, but the wording seems too strong. IMO asexuals aren't exactly a menace to society and we needn't worry overly much about them. OTOH of course they can't expect to have normal relationships with regularly-sexual people.
Asexuals existing off on their own aren't any threat to society, asexuals advocating for asexuality as normal are.
Just as people in wheelchairs are no threat to society, unless they start crowing over the moral superiority of being crippled, and heathy people start cutting off their legs.
That's fair. I guess we need to exercise some caution lest we end up in a Demolition Man dystopia in which the enlightened future society disdains "fluid exchange" in favor of VR.
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See, here is where our opinions sharply diverge. I don't want to fucky-fucky like a rabbit in spring? Well gosh, then I'm not a real human! Asexuality does not mean incapacity to have emotional and relational bonds with others, it just means 'no sex'. It doesn't even mean 'no romantic love', that's aromanticism!
Taking a look at the news pages about the people who do experience sexual arousal and so are not 'moral, emotional and physical cripples incapable of basic human functioning', what do I see about these paragons who have the fullness of erotic desire?
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2025/05/14/fred-and-rose-west-a-british-horror-story-review-a-chilling-gaze-into-a-monstrous-soulless-void/
Serial killer couple from decades past. They were in love and sexually functional, you know!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39x1ggj3e3o
Man murders his daughter by deliberately running over her. If he had a wife and family, he had normal sexual and romantic human relationships, unlike those soulless asexuals!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/14/prison-officer-came-in-on-days-off-to-have-sex-with-rapist/
Female prison officer attempted to get pregnant by convict. They're so in love, your honour! Okay, the guy is a convicted rapist, but that just means he is so overflowing with normal human attraction to potential sexual partners that he shares the love vigorously!
I can find a lot of stories of that type, if we want to argue about moral cripples.
Dude that's not even "Hitler was a vegetarian!"
This is like saying "Hitler had legs."
Hitler certainly fucked.
People who don't have the full range of human emotions and experiences are cripples. That doesn't make them morally bad people, sure, but it's wrong to pretend they aren't cripples. Being deaf is substantively worse than not being deaf, and deaf "activists" who want to lobby against cochlear implants are insane.
It's also wrong to say that people who don't experience X the way other people do are non-functional.
I can be perfectly functional doing my job where I have to take needs and wants into account, without having the desire to fuck the clients (in this particular job, that would be Extremely Problematic if I did, given the age-ranges involved).
"People who don't experience sexual desire are non-functional" is not the smackdown argument you present it as, given the steaming mess that sexual desire leads a lot of "normal, functional, non-cripple" people into. Maybe dialling down the instinct to "me horny me gotta fuck" might, in fact, be a benefit for society? If it stops teachers sexually assaulting eleven year olds, for one instance?
Merriam Webster definition of Cripple (Noun):
Let's just keep that in mind.
Sure. And a guy in a wheelchair can be perfectly functional doing working a desk job as an insurance salesman, and a guy born without fingers can probably with a bit of adaptation deliver for DoorDash, and a blind guy can live on his own with the right tools and education given to him. Those are pretty much central examples of Cripples, they are missing important parts of human life, and that they can live productively within limits doesn't obviate the existence of those limits and missing experiences.
Nor does it make sense to point to those limits and say they must be better people as a result: very few people in wheelchairs commit assault in bars, a man without hands is unlikely to strangle a woman, the blind are very rarely petty thieves. They are all, nonetheless, central examples of Cripples.
But more to the point, you're not beating the allegations when your understanding of human sexuality in this conversation is exemplified by:
And a series of allusions to pedophiles and criminals.
That inability to empathize with the basic human erotic drive, one that has been identified by artists and philosophers and psychologists as the basis for so much of art and culture and human behavior, that is a crippling loss. The inability to fulfill, willingly, the duties of marriage; that is a crippling loss. The obvious difficulty in reproduction, that is a crippling loss.
A guy in a wheelchair might say, hey I'm still the top boat insurance salesman in Central New Jersey, and what's the big deal about "running" anyway amirightguys? But if he were offered a surgery that would allow him to walk and he said no I prefer the chair, we'd call that disordered thinking, we'd call it strange. We'd say he has an insane view of human life if he would prefer to be in the chair. And we'd certainly seek to censure, if not censor, him if he started advocating for healthy people to hop into wheelchairs and refuse to or prevent themselves from walking.
Channeling https://www.2arms1head.com/, are we?
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Oh, I don't know about that. You get enough attractive young women together, along with perhaps a cute twink or two (just for variety), who are all extremely intent on trying to cure my (crippling?) asexuality? I'll absolutely submit to that conversion therapy, in earnest.
People have written many books describing this stuff, or so I'm told.
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No, it's just sellers being sellers (and yes, every seller does this- talk to some salespeople sometime, they'll have plenty of examples). Buyers can deal with that in constructive or destructive ways. I'm more interested in the dynamics between the two.
Sellers have a vested interest in frustrating price discovery.
Sociobiologically/evolutionarily speaking, you are the seller (and were not only quick to claim yourself as such, but you also mocked/confuse me for being one of those damn low-ballers) so naturally, you'll tell me that price discovery is dangerous- you're simply following your incentives to do that.
I assert that treating your [hypothetical] sons the same way, and telling them that lie rather than the truth, is net-negative; both because "yeah, actually, prospective sellers really do work like that", and because by not doing so you choose to make your [child] sacrifice to the social religion of "seller good buyer bad" (or "capital good labor bad", or "woman good man bad") rather than the actual truth. Same thing with fathers and daughters, though the incidentals are slightly different.
And it's not like it's bad to follow those incentives, but my entire point is to use simple market conditions as the framing, not whether or not it be morally better to be a buyer or seller (or the moral questions of buying or selling); this is the point of disclaiming "but buying/selling sex is just prostitution" as morally neutral even though that is completely 100% descriptive of what happens.
Yes, it is; the problem with the label is that it once used to describe a real thing (and by the few people who actually speak both honestly and more self-awarely about it than others), but it has been appropriated by marketing/sellers to achieve a better negotiating position.
Like what? The "battered housewife" is explained spectacularly; a seller who has priced themselves too low or has an overactive instinct to sell in this area. This is also why, as the price of women increased due to their economic situation improving through technology, wife-beating and spousal abuse has declined: husbands simply cannot afford women that will permit them to do that (and that's ignoring minimum-wage and employee protection laws, which age of consent and anti-marital rape/no-fault divorce/abortion laws serve as, respectively).
Oh yeah, and trophy wives are Veblen goods.
This has got to be the craziest explanation for domestic violence I've ever read, and I'm following a current murder trial where the guy who killed his wife is plainly lying through his teeth about everything that led up to the murder, as well as the murder itself, and the aftermath of the murder, including allegations that he was a victim of long-running domestic violence (but never told anybody because well he didn't like them to think badly of his wife).
The question I think about is "why would a battered housewife not only stick around, but defend her husband's actions?". There's no rational reason for that, so this has to be a function (or malfunction) of some basic instinct.
I posit the basic instinct is "sell sex in exchange for resources", and that violent men tend to, for some women, result in the seller perceiving that the price the buyer is paying is high enough to labor as a very literal punching bag. Which also explains a few other weird things, like "women obsessed with serial killers".
It also explains why the modern women is choosier: on an intellectual standpoint/when women have other options, the odds they'll be selling sex for anything resembling a reasonable price is lower and they'll only consider lower prices when the "Reproduce Now" instinct turns on[1] (the flipside, of course, is that higher-quality women are now available at a bargain price if you're willing to look for them, which is to a point why so many software guys marry Asians[2] when they hit 30). The selection effects on the sexual marketplace are simply downstream of this; the reason men who can't pay as much still get laid regularly is because not every woman is Homo Economicus, and even when they are they aren't that way all the time.
The men and women who lack the instinct to min-max this way, or perceive the requirement to either be very muted or only have the cosplay of buy/sell on their minds? Those are the real "asexuals". They lose because they just want to be left alone and do their weird thing where they constantly fuck around.
[1] Buyers call this the "beta bucks"/"once she's had her fun" phenomenon; sellers usually just call it "settling".
[2] Their genetics predict a superior product even if their cultural outlook was more hostile to men on average, and it isn't... unless you also happen to be Asian.
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Do you see what the problem is? If there are women who say no because they don't want to have sex, and there are also women who say no but are just acting coy about it, then the only way for a man to find out which is which is to keep pushing and see which ones give in and which ones put up real resistance. Any man who stops the second a women lets out a token "no" (or, worse, believes in affirmative consent) is never going to get laid, because that is simply not how women work. Modern notions of consent make a rapist out of every sexually successful man.
Seems to me like this is the fault of women, not of men.
Avoiding sexually harassing people is more important than "getting laid" because it causes a lot of harm.
Having to harshly reject advances every once in a while is less harm than never getting laid, according to my calculation.
This is a false dichotomy. I don't see why someone would never get laid just due to affirmative consent. Also, not getting laid is not a harm, it is at worst missing out on something great.
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