Gray areas.

In Salon:

Many react to the idea of someone having zero interest in sex as offensive. It goes against everything we understand about what makes the world go 'round, so it's an inherently confrontational concept. With this disbelief often come attempts to write asexuality off as a result of repression or sexual trauma (as of now there's no evidence of that). It becomes even more complicated for people to understand when they discover all the variation within the asexual community.

Is this discussion of "asexuality" where the notion of "sexual identity" really starts losing its usefulness?

What I'm seeing is that some people are finding that they don't fit any of the sexual identities on offer -- homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and so on. They're are positing yet another sort of identity. And I'm sure this solution is helpful on some level, but I take the existence of the problem as an indication that there's something wrong with how we're using these ideas in the first place. So my reaction to this article is think that the framework of sexual identity is just not the best way to approach questions about "what intimacy is, what human connection is, and how you build that."

On the other hand, maybe modern people just don't have another framework available.

[Via The Dish]