Photo by Flickr user davidgljay. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Via Marginal Revolution, it looks like the mainstream is finally (finally!) starting to notice asexuality.

Here is much more, interesting throughout, hat tip to The Browser.

Source: Marginal Revolution

It's about time.

I love that the image MR author Tyler Cowen chose was of an asexual man. It's neither intolerable nor inconceivable that a man would be disinterested in sex, because there are plenty of examples in history and around the world, plus there's a whole minor literature of complaints by women of their partners "slowing down," of various religious dictates of men's obligations to "provide" or "service" their wives, of men mourning the loss or declines of their libidos, and so on. And the whole semen conservation thing.

There's also whole unusual-in-the-west notion that men are naturally chaste, modest, and moral and instead it's women who should be blamed for promiscuity (though usually because they want to get pregnant, not, heaven forfend, that they're ever just horny.) Which explains why acceptance of Rule #1 makes it seem (falsely) logical that it's women who are most likely to be asexual.

But if it's not inconceivable and intolerable to become a third bogus Rule of Desire it's certainly not a familiar notion that young, healthy, even vital men might ever be disinclined or disinterested.

In reality, of course, men and women seem to be roughly equally inclined to be asexual.

Anyway, asexuals: they're neither straight nor queer but they're here. We'd all be better off if we got used to it.