Vaginal photoplethysmograph

Transcription

Morag Yule, a student of Dr. Lori Brotto, from the UBC Sexual Health Lab presented their current research on Asexuality at the Asexuality Conference held in Toronto on June 28, 2014. Okay, so my research, it comes from a completely different angle. Can everyone hear me? So, my name’s Morag. I do research with the UBC led by Lori Brotto. She’s written several papers on asexuality. We’ve been doing research for about 7 years now on asexuality so I’ll do my best to cram all of that information into the next 10 - 15 minutes Basically, our research really comes from a more clinical psychology kind of perspective so it’s more quantitative than a lot of the qualitative research you’ve been hearing so far. The reason we do the research that we do really comes from some of the criticisms that have come up when clinicians and sex researchers and more “science-y”, kind of based, um, critics. These people don’t believe that asexuality exists - not everyone, but you know, this comes up, or that it’s actually a sexual dysfunction like hypoactive sexual desire disorder. And so our line of research is trying to tease apart these criticisms and see what we can come up with from a clinical physcology prespective And so coming at it from having trained as a sex therapist and also the therapist in anxiety – how do we work with asexual people in making sure in those contexts. That’s where I’m coming from. So Lorri Broto did an original study after Anthony Bogaert’s 2004 seminal paper on asexuality that looked at qualitative research of asexuals and found that asexuality is most likely a sexual orientation or best conceptualized as a sexual orientation the way our field would see it. Since then, we’ve done a number of studies: looking at sexual arousal in asexual women, biological markers in asexual individuals, development of scales to actually identify asexual people for research purposes who might have not heard the term asexuality before mental health and asexuality, and also sexual fantasy among asexual individuals. So this is work we’ve done and this is what I’m going to tell you about and then I will tell you our plan for what’s next. So, sexual arousal in asexual women. This is the first asexual study that I was involved with. We started this in probably 2007. So what we did is we compared – we brought asexual women into our lab and showed them erotic films and measured their sexual arousal. The reason we did this is to see if there’s actually something “wrong” with asexual women in terms of their body not working properly, which is one of the things people bring up. And what we found is - oh, this is the lab. This is to show that it’s not scary. It’s quite nice. Sounds much weirder than it actually is when you come into our lab. This is a private locker room. Women are in there on their own. So we use what’s called a vaginal photoplethysmograph pictured here. It’s just like a little tampon that’s self-inserted into a woman’s vagina and it measures the change in blood flow as we show erotic films. Heh, it’s great. So, we have asexual women come into the lab, watch erotic films, and this graph just basically shows that asexual women actually have the same increase in sexual arousal to erotic films as women of heterosexual orientation, homoexual orientation, and bisexual orientation. This is all the same and this fit into our physiological sexual arousal pattern of women of all sexual orientations in general. So this indicated to us that asexuality is not a disorder of sexual arousal and fits into our conceptualization of sexual orientation. Does that make sense? One thing that did come out of this is that asexual women, who are on the end…those bars basically show that when we asked them how sexually attracted they were or how sexually attractive they felt while watching these erotic films, um, they weren't compared to - see those dark pink bars on the other sexual orientations? They’re getting more subjectively aroused whereas asexual women’s sexual attraction to those people were not, so their body is responding as like a reflex, but their brain isn’t, which is what we would expect because they’re not sexually attracted to the people on the screen. Um, so this basically suggests asexuality is not a disorder of sexual arousal. This was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2011. Okay. The next study we did was on biological markers of asexuality. The reason we did this study is because we want to say, “There are, there’s evidence in the sexual orientation literature that there are some indicators of prenatal testosterone such as handedness so people like gay men are more likely to be non right-handed than straight men, as in ambidextrous or left-handed.” And this is thought to be one of the indicators of prenatal hormones, so something’s going on before birth - not a choice, something in the way that we’re build. So we looked at handedness, older siblings, and finger-length ratios which is a long story but basically the ratio between second digit and fourth digit is an indicator of prenatal testosterone. So we looked at this in asexual individuals. We found (basically these graphs you don’t have to worry too much about them) asexuals are much, much more likely to be non right-handed than both gay and straight men and women, which is actually a big finding because as you can see, this is for asexual men, but about 28% of asexual men in our study were non right-handed compared to 11% of the sexual people. Big difference. So this is an indication or one of the first indications that... people were born that way. Um, that was just for women. Anyway, so, also older siblings. For some reason, asexual individuals have less older siblings. Yeah, fewer older siblings than sexual individuals. I don’t know why this is but it’s another – there are some theories about maternal-immune hypotheses and how this influences prenatal environment, so basically just another indicator that asexuality is something that develops in the prenatal environment before you’re born. Yes. All right, so let me just back up. So asexuals are more likely to be first born? Is that a simple way of putting what you just said? Well, for sisters. It was sisters and brothers that we separated out, so older sisters and older brothers. I’m not presenting the data very well, so no it wasn’t more likely that they were going to be first born. We didn’t actually ask them how many younger siblings there are, just how many older siblings. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Is there a correlation between handedness and females and asexuality, stuff like that? Sorry, say that again. Is there a correlation between females and handedness or is it something not known? No, females and handedness and asexuals, as well. So is it the left hand or - Non right handedness, so ambidextrous or there’s actually a scale, a handedness scale so you get a score. Again, I can’t really explain these data or why it is the way it is. It’s just some indicators that there’s something biological going on. Yeah. I’m just wondering if you’ve found any correlation with twins. We haven’t done any twin research yet. One day. There’s so much research to do. Anyway, the take home message from this is that there’s something biological going on. There’s patterns of biological stuff, which again suggests that asexuality may be a sexual orientation rather than some sort of sexual dysfunction. Um, I don’t know if I want to get into this because it’s actually for research purposes only and I have some, you know like for research purposes, what we do is we recruit people from AVEN, which is great, but these are a specific group of people. So, in order to do some of this research, we need to find a way to identify people who might not have heard the term asexual yet so they wouldn’t write that in the little box, but they still lack sexual attraction. So we’re trying to figure out ways of being more inclusive in our surveys without labeling anyone. We’re very aware that self -identification of asexuality is how people identify and that’s great. But for research purposes, we have to somehow put people in boxes, so trying to find out a way to do that in an inclusive way can really more appropriately inform our findings. So we develop a new questionnaire, which was just accepted for publication actually in the APA journal for Psychological Assessment. So this is going to be showing up a lot more in asexuality research. It’s actually going to be quite useful. Um, sexual fantasy among asexual individuals. As part of a larger study, we asked people: asexual individuals, also people with desire disorders what they sexually fantasized about because asexual individuals masturbate, some of them, a significant – large proportion. So what do they think about while they’re masturbating? This is a question that comes up when I present at conferences. And so, especially because sexual fantasies are thought to be universal, or they have been up until now, to reflect a person’s true sexual desires more than their sexual behavior. So, we asked a couple of questions and found that asexual people are much less likely to never have had sexual fantasies. So basically all of the sexual people that I asked in that internet study had had a sexual fantasy at some point. Asexual people, 40 of them, 40% of them had not. That’s a big difference. And then, when we asked asexual people what they sexually had fantasies about – we didn’t ask the question well enough. This is an upcoming study that will be posted on AVEN in the next couple of weeks. Look out for that. Um, 11% of asexuals said, “My sexual fantasies do not involve other people.” None, basically none of the sexual people said this. This is, you know, really interesting for us as clinical researchers. We want to know what people are fantasizing, what’s going on there. So what... again asexual individuals have different patterns of sexual fantasy than other groups including those with problematical sexual desires, so this is differentiating asexuals from sexual dysfunctions, which is really interesting. I’m still not sure what all these things mean but we’re starting to get a picture of asexual as a sexual orientation, not a sexual dysfunction. And we just got accepted for publication as well. So, where are we going from here? So this first study, we’re looking at sexual arousal in asexual men. Now recruiting everybody, so we’re working with Tony Bogaert who’s the person who did that first asexual study that everyone generally knows about – the 1% of the population is asexual study. He’s going to be running participants at his lab in Kingston. And Katie here is from his lab, so if anybody’s interested in more information, she’s right there. Go talk to her for details or talk to me because we really want to get a picture of what happens when we show asexual men erotic films and how does that fit into our conceptualization of sexual orientation in general. We’re also designing sexual fantasy online study, which I’m going to be posting in the next couple of weeks Follow-up with a questionnaire study and then also getting into subtypes of asexuality. This has been a big discussion in this conference and we have not covered this in research yet. We generally have went, “You’re asexual or you’re not asexual. How does that compare?” It’s not good enough. We need to start looking at aromantic, gray-A, all of the other things. So that’s in the works as well. That’s it. Those are my supervisors, credit by CIHR and if you want to get in contact, then send me an email and I’ll be happy to talk to you: [email protected]