Patterns of Genital and Subjective Sexual Arousal in Cisgender Asexual Men

ABSTRACT

Human asexuality has been defined as a lack of sexual attraction to others, although its nature is not well understood. Asexual men’s genital and subjective sexual arousal patterns were compared to sexual men’s to better understand asexual men’s sexual response patterns. Using a penile plethysmograph to measure genital arousal, 20 asexual, 27 heterosexual, and 22 gay cisgender men (M age = 28.28, SD = 9.41) viewed erotic films depicting sexual activity or masturbation, and a subsample engaged in sexual fantasy of their choosing. Questionnaires assessing sexual function and behavior were also completed. Asexual men scored lower on sexual desire and orgasmic function, higher on sexual aversion, and did not differ on overall sexual satisfaction. Compared with gay and heterosexual men, asexual men demonstrated lower genital and subjective sexual arousal to the erotic films but displayed similar sexual arousal when engaging in sexual fantasy. Asexual men’s lower levels of sexual excitation rather than their higher levels of sexual inhibition were associated with lower responses to the erotic films. These findings suggest asexual men have preferred sexual stimuli that differ from sexual men and have a similar capacity for sexual arousal as sexual men. Collectively these findings add to a growing literature aiming to understand the nature of asexuality.

Acknowledgments

Film stimuli were generously provided by Dr. Meredith Chivers at Queen’s University. Thank you to K. Abbs, M. Antczak, M. Dragan, M. R. Hoffarth, and L. Jamieson, for assistance with data collection and D. Molnar for assistance with statistical analyses.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author Contributions

Drs. Yule and Brotto developed the study concept and design. Testing, data collection, and data analysis were performed by Drs. Yule and Skorska. All authors were involved in data interpretation. Dr. Yule drafted the initial manuscript and Dr. Skorska drafted the revised manuscript, under the supervision of Drs. Brotto and Bogaert. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2022.2071411

Notes

¹ This term has been used in the past to refer to male same-sex attraction but is no longer recommended by the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association, 2020). We use the term here for historical reasons.

² The authors note that there is increasing use of the term “allosexual” to refer to sexual persons as a way to avoid centering or normalizing the experiences of sexual individuals over Ace experiences.

³ Given the conflicting results regarding sexual arousal in bisexual men, we did not include bisexual men in the current study.

⁴ This study was carried out prior to the 7^th edition of the American Psychological Association’s publication manual (American Psychological Association, 2020) which recommends against the use of the term “homosexual.”

⁵ The subjective sexual arousal subscale consists of two items, “sexually aroused” and “sexually turned off,” with one item reverse coded. The Cronbach’s alpha for the Before timepoint was α = 0.22, 95% CI = −0.37–0.55, r = .16, p = .266, and the Cronbach’s alpha for the After timepoint was α = 0.51, 95% CI = 0.14–0.72, r = .35, p = .012. Spearman-Brown Coefficients were 0.27 for the Before timepoint and 0.52 for the After timepoint. Given the subscale consists of only two items and there is no current literature to suggest which item would be most representative of the subscale, we removed this subscale from analyses.

⁶ We also conducted analyses with raw change scores converted into z-scores (to take into account differences in penis size and sexual responsivity, and allow for comparisons between participants and sites; Murphy et al., 2015) and results did not differ (results not shown).

⁷ LSD pairwise comparisons were conducted for IIEF Sexual Desire, IIEF Overall Satisfaction, SAS, SES, SIS-1, and SIS-2. Games-Howell pairwise comparisons were conducted for IIEF Orgasmic Function due to a significant Levene’s test.

⁸ LSD pairwise comparisons were conducted for the male-male, male-female, and male masturbation film clips. Games-Howell pairwise comparisons were conducted for the female-female and female masturbation film clips due to a significant Levene’s test.

⁹ LSD pairwise comparisons were conducted for the female-female, male-female, female masturbation, and male masturbation film clips. Games-Howell pairwise comparisons were conducted for the male-male film clip due to a significant Levene’s test.

¹⁰ Six asexual participants (out of 20) identified as gay or heterosexual (see Participants subsection in the Method). In a one-way ANOVA within the asexual participants, those asexual participants who identified as asexual were less likely to be subjectively aroused to the female-male film clip than those who identified as heterosexual or gay (F(1,16) = 6.57, p = .021).

¹¹ LSD pairwise comparisons were conducted for sensuality-sexuality. Games-Howell pairwise comparisons were conducted for subjective sexual arousal and autonomic arousal due to a significant Levene’s test.

¹² A significant Levene’s test for anxiety before fantasy (p = .005) warrants reporting of the robust tests of equality of means via the Welch test statistic (2, 27.82) = 1.44, p = .255, and the Brown-Forsythe test statistic (2, 28.08) = 1.71, p = .200.

¹³ LSD pairwise comparisons were conducted for the male-male, male-female, and male masturbation film clips. Bonferroni pairwise comparisons were conducted for the female-female and female masturbation film clips due to a significant Levene’s test.