Gender and Race

• White women may be stereotyped as frigid or as not being interested in sex anyway, minimizing their identity and legitimizing pressuring women into sex. Their asexuality is also sometimes treated as a sexual challenge to be overcome.
• Black people are stereotyped as sexually promiscuous or hypersexual, so they may be assumed to be incapable of being asexual.
• Men may be assumed to be incapable of being asexual because masculinity is often associated with sexual experience.
• “Stereotypically, Asian women are hypersexualized and Asian men are desexualized.  Each of these come with their own set of issues for asexuals.  Asian asexual women might be disbelieved because they conflict with the stereotype.  Asian asexual men might be assumed to conform to the stereotype completely, even if the stereotype is actually very different from asexuality in real life.  Also, sometimes people say Asian men are stereotypically asexual, which is bad because it’s using the word “asexual” as a pejorative.” (http://skepticsplay.blogspot.com/2011/05/forecasting-issues-of-race.html)
• Latina women are hypersexualized.
• Indigenous women are hypersexualized.

 

Disability

• Disabled people have often been assumed to be asexual, so the disabled community has worked to distance themselves from that stereotype. Meanwhile asexuality has often been assumed to be a medical condition, so the asexual community has worked to distance themselves from that stereotype. This leaves asexual disabled people to often feel left out of activism from both communities. (https://nightengalesknd.livejournal.com/91695.html)

 

Religion

• Many religious people and groups expect everyone to get married, have sex with their spouse, and produce biological children if they are physically capable of that. Anyone who does not want to follow that path may be shunned or pressured into following that path, even beyond the pressure that society at large puts on people to follow that path.
• Many traditions believe that sex should only occur in marriage. Many allosexual aromantic people in particular may come into conflict with this belief.

 

• Islam
  • May teach that “marriage is half the religion” (Check out this blog to learn more about asexuality and Islam https://ace-muslim.tumblr.com/post/87801042181/asexuality-islam-and-marriage-masterpost)
• Buddhism
  • Historically “monasteries didn’t want asexual folks because they wouldn’t have to struggle to maintain their vow of chastity” (https://queenieofaces.tumblr.com/post/33162409457/one-plus-one-makes-three-summary)
  • In Japan, “During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pro-clerical marriage advocates increasingly argued that sexual abstinence was unnatural and potentially harmful to the body, psyche, and society.” (page 202 of Neither Monk nor Layman: Clerical Marriage in Modern Japanese Buddhism by Richard M. Jaffe)
• Christianity
  • Many traditions encourage celibacy, but only as something to struggle for
  • Many traditions consider asexuality impossible. For example:
    • The United Methodist Church says “all persons are sexual beings” (https://www.umc.org/en/content/social-principles-the-nurturing-community)
    • The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says “Human sexuality is woven into the fabric of each man and woman.” (https://www.usccb.org/topics/natural-family-planning/love-and-sexuality)
• Paganism
  • In many pagan traditions , “to not enjoy sexual experience as a woman is seen as setting a limit on yourself” and there is an emphasis on “sex as worship and divinity” (https://irrationallypragmatic.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/the-trauma-of-being-an-asexual-pagan/)