Gallery Carre
No Sex, Please. We’re Asexual.
Aug 5th, 2025 by Jefferson
As a student at the University of Liverpool in the 80s, Chris Coles called himself asexual. It made sense to him. “I was studying biology,” he says. “And asexual organisms don’t have sex.”
But few people understood the term so, as a young man in his 20s, Coles described himself as celibate. When he hit his stroppy 30s, he would tell people he was frigid.
The confusion over just what label to use is only one of many challenges asexuals in our sex-obsessed society face. Of all the sexual minorities - homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, and those with proclivities for just about anything - asexuals have had a low public profile and a real sense of isolation. Now they are banding together in a bid for recognition, understanding and acceptance.
An asexual person is commonly defined as someone who experiences no sexual attraction towards other people. But some professionals think the term is somewhat imprecise.
Clinical psychologist and director of Sex Therapy NZ Robyn Salisbury says some people who call themselves asexual still masturbate regularly - “which isn’t asexual to me”.
Salisbury says sex therapists would call that auto-erotic - that is, enjoying their sexuality themselves - rather than asexual.
Coles, now aged 40, is the self-appointed poster boy for the asexuality movement in New Zealand. After 28 years of feeling ill at ease with his lack of sexual attraction, he remembers the overwhelming sense of relief when he discovered the San Franciso-based website, Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN).
To finally realise where he fitted in and to encounter other people who felt exactly as he did about sex was a watershed moment for him.
“Until I came across AVEN, I basically thought I was the only person in the world who felt the way I did. It’s very isolating,” he says.
Coles is now determined to raise the asexual profile so that no other young person need spend decades in the sexual orientation wilderness.
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