Hus / asexuality in the media
Monday, January 23rd, 2012 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkoshiToday's episode of House includes asexuality as one of its topics/sub-plots. Yet to see how they end up dealing with it. They also showed a neat-looking large touchscreen computer panel/display thing in one scene.
And this commercial amused me greatly.
Spoiler for the House episode...
They ended up trying to explain away/discredit asexuality. The guy's asexuality was scripted as being due to a medical problem, and his wife's asexuality was scripted as being a white lie she engaged in, because she loved her husband and wanted to be with him.
Sigh. I don't know what is worse - having it not be shown/discussed in popular media at all, or having people try to discredit it. But I suppose you have to start with the latter, before people can begin to accept it.
Another thing about the episode that seems odd, is that they implied that non-asexual females can be happy without sex - that a loving relationship is more important for them (or at least for some of them) than sex. So, apparently the wife is not really asexual, but she's fine with or without having sex.
The show also implied that asexual people don't masturbate and don't have orgasms. I suppose that would be too complex a topic for them to bring up as part of a single episode sub-plot. And it's not actually relevant to asexuality, which isn't about whether one enjoys sex or not, but whether one experiences sexual attraction.
Hmm. So the wife really may have been asexual - she claimed to enjoy sex but showed no clear sign of having a sex drive or of experiencing sexual attraction. But House and Wilson weren't considering/understanding asexuality from that standpoint, or else Wilson wouldn't have agreed that House won the bet.
And this commercial amused me greatly.
Spoiler for the House episode...
They ended up trying to explain away/discredit asexuality. The guy's asexuality was scripted as being due to a medical problem, and his wife's asexuality was scripted as being a white lie she engaged in, because she loved her husband and wanted to be with him.
Sigh. I don't know what is worse - having it not be shown/discussed in popular media at all, or having people try to discredit it. But I suppose you have to start with the latter, before people can begin to accept it.
Another thing about the episode that seems odd, is that they implied that non-asexual females can be happy without sex - that a loving relationship is more important for them (or at least for some of them) than sex. So, apparently the wife is not really asexual, but she's fine with or without having sex.
The show also implied that asexual people don't masturbate and don't have orgasms. I suppose that would be too complex a topic for them to bring up as part of a single episode sub-plot. And it's not actually relevant to asexuality, which isn't about whether one enjoys sex or not, but whether one experiences sexual attraction.
Hmm. So the wife really may have been asexual - she claimed to enjoy sex but showed no clear sign of having a sex drive or of experiencing sexual attraction. But House and Wilson weren't considering/understanding asexuality from that standpoint, or else Wilson wouldn't have agreed that House won the bet.
no subject
Date: Tuesday, January 24th, 2012 11:42 pm (UTC)Also, I assumed that the writers felt they were being enlightened to make the wife the person who was sacrificing her enjoyment of sex to accomodate the husband's asexuality. It read as more of a play on traditional gender assumptions than a commentary on what it means to be asexual.