well homosexuality is something different from the common human experience whereas asexuality is something missing, as is deafness

but then, we don’t focus very strongly on people who are lacking (say) a sense of smell.  we care about that so little that we don’t even have a common word for it.  we take for granted that most humans can smell things, but we don’t rely on it as a primary form of interaction.  as a result we aren’t spending a lot of effort trying to fix it, but we also don’t have any real culture built around it either.

so i suspect asexuality occupies this weird middle ground where it gets a lot of attention from people who think sex is awesome and thus it’s a huge shame if anyone else doesn’t also enjoy it.  it’s not strictly a necessity, so we don’t have any real reason to get all fidgety about it, but our culture thinks it is.  but, you know, i think plenty of things are awesome that other people have no patience for whatsoever, and that’s just how it goes.

thought experiment: would deafness be an impediment if a group of deaf people lived on their own, isolated?  no hearing people would be awkwardly trying to communicate with them, there would be no warning systems that relied exclusively on sound, etc.  hearing would no longer be necessary, so would being deaf be a problem?  i suppose not.

and something else i wonder but don’t actually know: as i understand it, trauma can turn a sexual person off of sex entirely.  is that something that ought to be “fixed”?  if such a person genuinely wants nothing to do with sex any more, how is that different from “natural” asexuality, aside from the cause?