This post is being cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda, and is written for a general audience.
“Asexuality is not the same as celibacy” is a common line in introductory explanations of asexuality, but as I discussed in an earlier post, mocking celibacy can still be asexual-unfriendly. Here I will go further in depth.
The distinction between asexuality and celibacy plays the same role that “born this way” plays for LGBT people. The purpose of each talking point is to establish that LGBT/asexual people did not choose their orientations. The slogans can be useful, particularly in hostile environments. However, if people become more accepting, if people realize it does not matter if it is chosen, perhaps we can move beyond slogans.
Aside from the politics, there is also a question to what extent it is really true that LGBT people are always “born this way”. If you look, you will find people who subjectively experienced a choice, people who emphasize that their identity or behavior are chosen, and people who would like an honest look at the empirical evidence.
Similar questions may be raised about asexuality and the extent to which choice plays a role in it. While asexuality and celibacy certainly have distinct meanings, we want to know exactly how far that distinction goes. For example, some people take that to mean that asexuals and celibates are non-overlapping groups. But is that really true?
What even is celibacy?
My commentary is indebted to ACH, who wrote three blog posts on this subject back in 2008. In his investigations, ACH realized that he did not truly understand what “celibacy” meant in the first place. He found the following definitions in the dictionary:
1. abstention from sexual relations.
2. abstention by vow from marriage: the celibacy of priests
3. the state of being unmarried.
To see which of these definitions was most common, he looked at a few different sources, finding that the first one was dominant. Although amusingly, the Wikipedia article at the time denied the validity of the first definition, while also using the same definition in its examples.
Aces most commonly define celibacy as abstention from sex. But even within this definition there are ambiguities. Is abstention a state of being? Is it an action? Is it a choice? How much of an active role does “choice” imply? And finally, if an asexual does not have sex, do they count as celibate?
Celibate aces, by the numbers
The answer, of course, is that different asexuals have different views on the matter. We now have quantitative data on this question, in the form of the 2014 Asexual Community Census, which I helped design and analyze. Among aces who are sexually inactive, 12% identify as celibate. Those who did not identify as celibate were asked to check off applicable reasons from a list:
I think celibacy suggests deliberate effort in not having sex.: 70.8%
I think ‘celibacy’ has strong religious connotations that don’t fit me: 42.1%
I’m not currently sexually active, but open to it, so I don’t think celibate would fit me: 32.7%
I don’t think a person can be both asexual and celibate: 6.11%
The percentages do not add up to 100% because respondents were allowed to check off multiple reasons. This is an amateur survey and should be regarded critically, but it suggests that many asexuals disidentify with celibacy because of the connotations of effort, choice, commitment, or religious motivations. And then, of course, there are those 12% of sexually inactive aces who do identify as celibate. Either the connotations aren’t strong enough to discourage them, or they believe that the connotations are apt to describe their personal situation.
Note that the census is not representative of asexuals in general, but is a sample of online communities, where most people have had some contact with the “asexuality is distinct from celibacy” slogan. I suspect that aces who have less contact with the community would be more likely to identify as celibate.
By the way, the survey asked about celibacy because someone on the committee wanted to gauge interest in a voluntary celibacy community, which would include both aces and non-aces. I want to give a shout out to their voluntary celibacy page.
Personal reflections on celibacy and choice
Another survey result was that 12% of aces are sexually active, and well I’m in that 12%, so naturally I would not describe myself as celibate. It seems to me that “celibate” could potentially convey useful information, distinguishing those aces who are sexually active, and those who are not. Alas, the statistics show that celibacy means different things to different people, thus failing to convey useful information. “Sexually active” and “sexually inactive” are much more informative terms (although also ambiguous at the boundaries), and bypass any religious connotations.
Regardless of preferred terms, I would like if more people embraced the idea that when aces don’t have sex, it is still a choice. That a choice is predictable and straightforward does not make it less of a choice. I want it to be clear that asexuals have agency.
In the opposite situation, if a person has said yes to every solicitation of sex they have received so far, we would not claim it had stopped being a choice. To say it stopped being a choice would be to deny the person’s agency. On the other hand, the decision to say “yes” to a solicitation seems more like an active choice, while merely avoiding solicitations seems more passive. So I could see it both ways.
When people criticize celibacy, I just have no idea what they mean. Do you know?
I don’t “identify as” celibate or asexual because the phrase “identify as” is a plague on language that needs to die.
I am asexual. Whether I am celibate depends on definition.
@Jake Harban,
I find “identify as” to be a useful phrase. Because even if I find the definitions complicated, in the end there’s still the question, do I use this word to refer to myself or not? There are many words in asexual lingo which might apply to me but which I do not use because you can’t use them all. And there are some words I use for myself even if the details aren’t exact, because as a physicist I have high tolerance for approximation.
Either a word applies to you or it doesn’t. If the definition of a particular term is complex and/or unclear enough that you’re uncertain whether the word applies to you, why would you say it does? After all, I wouldn’t describe myself as “romantic” OR “aromantic” until I get a more precise idea of what those words mean. I could say that I “identify as” aromantic because my vague understanding of what that means is more true of me than the opposite, but I’d just be confusing people by creating one-off definitions that leave me talking past any listener.
@Jake Harban,
As I already said, I have high tolerance for approximation. For instance, in years past, I have told people that I am asexual, because they wouldn’t have understood what gray-A meant, and it wasn’t clear at the time that “gray-A” would even stick around as a term.
Furthermore, I do not agree with the claim that a word applies to me or it doesn’t. I tend to think prototype theory is important, and that words do not have precise meanings that can be expressed in definitions.
“Approximation” is all well and good, but using words that are only vaguely defined easily leads to confusion.
After all, you had a post not too long ago arguing against the mocking of celibacy as discriminating against asexuals. However, I was happy to mock celibacy because it’s not discriminatory against asexuals. No matter how tolerant of approximation you are, the fact remains that if we disagree over what “celibate” means we’ll end up having a rather pointless dispute that can only be resolved by having a precise definition.
Thus far, I’ve had very little to do with the ace community such as it is. There’s a variety of reasons behind it, but one of them is because every time I try, I end up bombarded with a small dictionary’s worth of ill-defined words so that I can never figure out what anyone is trying to say.
@Jake Harban,
Well that seems backwards to me. The drive for more labels comes from a desire for precision. Note that in my previous example, that when I was approximating, I used the common label “asexual”, and when I’m not approximating, I use the more specific label “gray-A”. So you can complain about approximation, and you can complain about too many words, but those complaints are in opposition to each other.
No, the thesis was that it’s okay to not have sex, whether you’re asexual or not.
I’ve never complained about too many words. In my previous post, I complained about ill-defined words whose meaning is never made clear and which seem to jump between many tangentially related concepts.
For example, I asked for and received a definition for “romantic” (and thus “aromantic” by extension). I got generally coherent definition that made it easy to understand the distinction between romantic and aromantic aces— but which precluded any possibility of a “romantic orientation” despite the same person who gave me the definition talking about “heteroromantic” and “panromantic” people.
That’s my point. Your definition of “celibate” was “doesn’t have sex” while my definition of “celibate” was “doesn’t have sex despite wanting to.”
Not bothering to define the term could have easily led to a pointless argument in which you argue that mocking celibacy mocks aces since most of us choose to be celibate, while I argue that mocking celibacy doesn’t mock aces because we can’t be celibate by definition.
@Jake Harban
I’m just going to refer you to another post I’ve written about how words in general are ambiguous, and asexual vocabulary is not unusual in this regard.
I think you are continuing to miss the point of that post. I don’t approve of mocking people who don’t have sex despite wanting to. This is true whether or not mocking celibacy mocks aces.
Nonetheless, it is worth knowing whether celibacy and asexuality overlap. And that’s a question I prefer to answer with experiment, rather than relying on theories of what the definition of celibacy should be.
All language has some ambiguity, but if I can’t make head or tail of what you’re talking about then I really can’t engage with it.
I may not be able to come up with a perfect definition of “table” that won’t have squishy edge cases, but if you say “table,” I will generally know what you mean.
If you say “heteroromantic,” on the other hand, I’ll have absolutely no idea what you mean. I have seen two workable definitions for what “romance” is, but one precludes aces and the other precludes romantic orientations. So unless you offer me a vague but workable definition, I’ll be unable to follow anything that talks about asexual romance.