Antisexualism

Not to be confused with Anti-sexism.

Antisexualism is opposition or hostility towards sexual behavior and sexuality.

Religious

Some forms of early ascetic Gnosticism held all matter to be evil, and that unnecessary gratifications of the physical senses were to be avoided. Married couples were encouraged to be celibate. According to some sources, the early Christian theologian Origen castrated himself to avoid temptation and remain pure. The Skoptsys were a radical sect of the Russian Orthodox Church that practiced castration and amputation of sexual organs. The Skoptsy believed that Christ had been castrated during his crucifixion, and it was this castration that brought about salvation. Boston Corbett, who was involved in killing John Wilkes Booth, castrated himself after being mocked and tempted by prostitutes. Ann Lee was the founder of the Shakers, a radical Protestant sect that opposed procreation and all sexual activity. The Shakers were more opposed to pregnancy than anything else. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the "corn flakes" variety of breakfast cereal, was opposed to all forms of sexual activity, especially masturbation. The Road to Wellville satirized his life and practices. Father Divine, founder of the International Peace Mission Movement, advocated religious abstinence from sex and marriage and taught that sexual objectification is a root cause of undesirable social and political conditions.

Non-religious

The Anti-Flirt Club, set up in the United States during the interwar period, was set up in order to allegedly protect women from unwanted advances from men in their cars or on street corners.

The most popular venue of antisexuals is the Antisex.info (Antisexual Stronghold) website founded by Yuri Nesterenko. He has been widely recognized as the leading antisexual activist since he launched a FidoNet-based antisexual community in 1995. The community claims to have created the International Antisexual Movement (IAM). While putting forward the slogan "Say No to sex," the spokesmen of the IAM endeavor to people to understand no sexual urges to be so violent that they may not be deterred through mental reason, or else transformed through abstinence. The IAM aims to demonstrate what it finds to be unsound about this opinion, that some should say they be constrained to sexual drive; and on the other side many for lack of knowledge of themselves follow sexual needs as the sayings or decrees of reason. Some members of the IAM say they have successfully overcome the desire for sex.

Fictional

• The Junior Anti-Sex League, in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a group of young adult Party members devoted to banning all sexual intercourse.
• The film Demolition Man takes place in a future in which sexual intercourse is banned by the high-ranking "Evil Mr. Rogers" character, Dr. Cocteau. Reproduction is achieved clinically and the experience itself is simulated through virtual reality.

See also

• Asexuality
• Opposition to pornography
• Sexual repression
• Celibacy
• Erotophobia
• Erotophilia
• Sex-positive
• The Kreutzer Sonata
• Sexual abstinence
• Cathar Perfect