I'm betting lots of you have already seen this, but if you haven't, it's worth mentioning: Psychology Today, a magazine that can be found on newsstands near you, has an article which involves asexuality. The article, called "Typically Twisted", talks about "taboos" that are actually normal. And the introduction also gives some interesting insight about "normality". Surprise, it's boring! Check it out.
I don't like how "asexual" is in quotes like this, as if its existence is negotiable (unlike taboos and normality)-- that's one of my pet peeves. You don't see ninja zombies from Mars in air quotes. A shout to AVEN would have been nice too, but hopefully it will earn us some curious Googlers. Overall though, a very good message. Sweet!
6 comments:
I didn't read the whole article (as I didn't expect much from it), but the part on asexuality... existed, so that's a plus. (Here ends my positive comments about the article.) The use of "asexual" was a bit disturbing. I've seen it done before (like in some stuff from the '80s when some sex-therapists needed to use a word to describe people who were never interested in sex and couldn't think of anything else.) I think there is a real suspicion about us. I was also bothered by the emphasis on how rare asexuality is--that it's only 1% of the population, ignoring the fact that Bogaert suspected that figure was probably too low.
I can't disagree with any of that, pretzelboy; thanks for commenting. I'm glad that you agree about the "asexual" thing. I thought people might see that as an over-reaction on my part, but "" can really speak volumes.
I read the article, and I basically found it to be a collection of common sense statements. Is that all psychology really is?
PS - The "" was stupid. They only used it once, though, so that was good. I am also glad that the pointed out how asexuals aren't just people who have had traumatic experience with sex and are now afraid of it.
ah, psychology today. I've never really understood why my school subscribes to that magazine. it's such a ridiculously pop culture version of psychology. that said... the more visibility asexuality -- (note the lack of quotation marks, hee hee) -- receives in popular/ mainstream culture, the better, I suppose. hopefully it will mean better articles in better journals soon.
I basically found it to be a collection of common sense statements. Is that all psychology really is?
Hee, hee! Great observation. I think you're probably right.
I'm taking a cognitive psychology class right now and the teacher talked about that. The issue is that many of our common sense ideas about psychology are right, but some of them are wrong, so it is important to do research to separate the two. But this results in research that finds obviously true things to be true. Also research psychology and pop-psychology are a bit different.
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