Good morning, babies, and especially the best. I have two riddles for you.

Riddle number one.

What do you call a YouTube video featuring Sam Vaknin?

Yes, a YouTube. Not funny, eh?

Okay, let’s try another one. What is the only thing?

The only thing, absolutely, better than wine and sex. The only thing better than wine and sex is a video by Sam Vaknin about wine and sex.

And indeed, you guessed it right. This is the topic of today’s video.

People with low sex drive and people with no sex drive.

Now, believe it or not, there is a typology of these people. There is a huge confusion regarding people whose sex drive does not conform to social expectations, whose sex drive frustrates their intimate partners, whose sex drives cause them distress.

And today, I’m going to provide you with what Wikipedia calls a disambiguation page, a disambiguation guide.

Let’s start with the most clear-cut case, people who are asexual.

Now, asexuality is not yet an accepted clinical category or diagnosis. Many psychologists reject the possibility of someone without a sex drive at all. Many clinical psychologists and many psychiatrists claim that if you don’t have a sex drive, if you don’t experience sexual cravings, if you don’t act on sexual impulses, etc., etc., something’s wrong with you. You have a problem.

But a growing body of evidence suggests pretty conclusively that actually 1% of the population are born without a sex drive. They are devoid of other directed sex inclination or tendency or propensity.

Now, that’s a very important distinction. Asexuals are not sexually attracted to other people. In other words, it’s a form of lacking or unusual object relations. Sex drive is other directed. It’s relational. It’s externalizing. It’s outward facing.

And Freud linked the sex drive to the life force, which he called Eros or, later, libido. The sex drive is libidinal.

Because babies, newborns have a sex drive, they have a libido, they actually engage in sexual acts. We all know that babies must obey, for example.

But there is a very important distinction between autoerotic sex acts, sex acts which are directed or sex drive which is directed at oneself, the kind of sex drive that narcissists have, for example, well into adulthood, and other directed sex drive, sex drives that targets other people and regards other people as sources of pleasure and gratification.

Asexuals are devoid of that component, but they are not devoid of the first component. In other words, many asexuals are actually autoerotic. For example, the majority of asexuals must abate. They must abate as a form of release, as a form of physiological release, the same way people eat when they are hungry or drink when they are thirsty.

That part is true. The masturbation is not indicative of a full-fledged, mature, constellated, coherent and cohesive sex drive or urge, sexual urge, but still they do must abate. So this is indicative of a dormant, latent sex drive which is inwardly directed, self-directed, autoerotic.

However, the entire panoply of sex actions, sex motivation, sexual urges, sex drive which is directed at other people is missing in asexuals.

Now, some asexuals crave intimacy and companionship and romance. They actually have relationships which comprise these three. They have intimate partners, they have companions, they have romantic flings and engagements and assignations and what have you. They just don’t engage. It doesn’t culminate in sex. They don’t engage in sex.

So some asexuals do everything with other partners, do have intimate relationships, but sex is not a part of the relationship.

Now mind you, 21% of marriages are sexless marriages. We define sexless marriage as marriage with fewer than 10 sexual encounters annually in a year. So if you’ve had sex with your wife fewer than 10 times last year, you’re in a sexless marriage. So 21% of marriages are sexless and we believe the figure to be probably double that, maybe half of all marriages are sexless.

So asexuality makes appearances in very surprising places. The consumption of pornography, for example, is autoerotic. You could be asexual with your wife and still consume pornography in order to ratify yourself autoerotically. So you see, this is the problem when we try to delineate and delimit and demarcate asexuality from celibacy, asexuality from sexlessness.

It’s a murky field. It’s not entirely clear. If you’ve been celibate for 15 years, like I have been, are you asexual? If you then resume sexual activity, have you ever been asexual? If you are sexless with your wife, but not sexless with others outside the marriage, or are you asexual in some part of your life?

So it’s very difficult to define.

But we tend to think that 1% of our population are born without a sex drive right now. It’s still not accepted wisdom. It’s still not the orthodoxy. We don’t teach this in universities, but there’s a community of asexuals online and you’re well advised to visit their forums and see what they say about themselves.

There are two types of asexuals. Asexuals which do not need sex, do not require intimacy, do not seek or crave companionship and romance. And these are actually schizoids. These are people with schizoid personality disorder and they are mistaken for asexuals.

And then there’s a group of asexuals which have relationships, social edge relationships, intimacy, companionship, romance, spending time together, loving each other, cuddling and hugging and you name it, but they don’t have sex because they don’t need sex. They are simply born without the sex drive or they had evolved to become adults without a sex drive.

So this is asexual.

Now there is a hyposexual. Hyposexual is a person whose sex drive is either infrequent or intermittent, but is also distressed by this fact.

So the hyposexual, to qualify as a hyposexual, there are two requirements, an intermittent or infrequent sex drive and distress, subjective distress caused by the intermittency and infrequency of the sex drive.

Some disturbance, some ego destiny and even problems in functioning, a self-perceived deficiency.

I will discuss hyposexuality a bit later at much greater length.

On we go, schizoid personality and especially people with schizoid personality disorder.

The schizoid finds sex unappealing, repetitive, tedious and in some cases although rarely disgusting. So such a schizoid would avoid sex and definitely not seek sex actively or passively. In other words, he would tend to reject or ignore or even not notice sexual advances by other people.

Most schizoids also abstain from having any kind of relationship, not only sexual. Most schizoids live alone, they have no family, they have no sex, they have no companions, they have no intimate partners and they barely communicate with their families of origin.

Some, a big proportion of schizoids end life completely isolated with not a trace of a hint of a hint of a shadow of any human interaction to the day they die, to their dying day.

So this is the schizoid personality of schizoid personality disorder.

There is a mild attenuated version of the schizoid personality. It is described by Len Sperry in his book on personality disorders and this is known as the schizoid style.

Unlike the schizoid personality, someone with a schizoid style actually does enjoy sex, but he doesn’t go out of his way to find sex. So he enjoys sex the same way some people enjoy caviar. I mean, you enjoy caviar and you’ll eat caviar, but you won’t go out of your way to find caviar and you’re definitely not going to eat caviar every single day. Caviar is tasty once in five years, once in 10 years, once a year.

Then this is the attitude of the schizoid style to sex. Sex is fun. Sex is lovely. Sex is gratifying. Sex is satisfying. Sex is a huge pleasure, but why pursue it? If it comes, it comes. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. You don’t watch the same movie day in and day out for the rest of your life.

So sex is just one of a myriad of a gamut of possibilities, entertainments, occupations, hobbies and so on and so forth. One of them is sex and you have sex, the person with schizoid style has sex infrequently not because he has a problem with the sex drive like the hypo-sexed, hypo-sexual person, but because sex is one of many options. So he doesn’t go out of his way.

The person with schizoid style can go on for years, sometimes decades without sex, but when the opportunity presents itself, when the opportunity throws their self at his feet, the schizoid style thoroughly enjoys the proceedings. In other words, the schizoid style, for example, is likely to respond positively to sexual advances, likely to flirt and likely to seduce when the opportunity presents itself.

However, he is not likely to generate the opportunity. He is not likely to actively seek sex. He is likely to react. He is reactive and responsive when sex presents itself.

And then he enjoys sex thoroughly. He loves sex. He adores sex the same way he adores caviar or playing the piano.

These are things you don’t do on a daily basis, presumably.

Then we have the cerebral narcissist. The cerebral narcissist is essentially sexless, but not asexual. The cerebral narcissist has an auto-erotic sex drive. He finds gratification with himself and within himself. He converts his body and his mind into erotic objects. He makes love to himself, in effect.

Indeed, cerebral narcissists consume pornography all the time and they masturbate as the main venue of sexual release and sexual expression.

And so cerebral narcissists derive narcissistic supply from intellectual pursuits. They leverage their intelligence. They are pyrotechnically intelligent. It’s like a display of fireworks.

And when people are old and amazed and admire the cerebral narcissist and adulate him for his intellect, for his intelligence, that’s the kind of narcissistic supply he seeks. That’s the kind he wants.

And he converts his celibacy into a proud ideology. The fact that he’s not having sex makes him feel proud of himself. Because by not having sex, he renders himself superior to common people. Common people who are like animals, who lust and bang bestially. He’s above sex. Sex is for animalistic, primitive, stupid people. It’s not for him.

His intellect and his intelligence endow him with superhuman capacities. He’s godlike. He’s omniscient.

So sex drags him down. Sex contaminates him, adulterates him. Sex with others, mind you. Contaminates and adulterates him.

Also, sex is a challenge to grandiosity because it implies some kind of dependence on the other party, a collaboration. There’s a need to reciprocate, a need to gratify the other party. There’s a give and take. There’s a bargaining phase.

And the cerebral will have none of it because he’s so far superior and so endowed intellectually that no one has a right to demand anything from him. Any attempt to negotiate and to compromise, for example, in the sex act is perceived as undermining his grandiosity, his omnipotence, his godlike attributes and qualities.

And so he avoids sex.

The cerebral narcissist avoids other directed sex as a form of aggrandizing himself. He is inordinately proud of his accomplishment. I’m not having sex because I don’t need sex and I don’t need sex because I don’t need anyone. I’m self-sufficient. I’m divine.

That’s a cerebral narcissist.

Mind you, there is no type constancy. The cerebral narcissist does become somatic given certain circumstances. For instance, when the cerebral narcissist loses his main source of supply, he’s likely to become somatic in order to find and groom and love bomb and acquire a new source of supply.

So cerebral narcissists make use of sex in order to guarantee the presence of an intimate partner in a future shared fantasy.

It’s a part of the grooming and love bombing phase and it’s of course a form of false advertising. They lie to the partner. They pretend to be sexually active and sexually interested. They pretend to love sex and to like sex, but actually it’s all a facade. It’s all a show intended to capture the future intimate partner, to convince her that it’s going to be heaven, at least sexual heaven.

This is the cerebral narcissist that the histrionic person with histrionic personality disorder, most people diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder are women, which raises a red or a black flag over the whole diagnosis.

But histrionics are flirtatious, flirtatious, seductive, but studies have revealed that people with histrionic personality disorder are actually sex averse. They are what used to be called frigid.

So the more flirtatious the person is, the more ostentatiously and overtly and conspicuously seductive, the more the person engages in the chase and in the conquest, the less likely that person is to be actually interested in sex. It is histrionics regulate their moods and self-esteem via the chase, via the conquest, not via the sexual act.

They regard the sexual act as drudgery, as a chore. They’re very reluctant to engage in it. They try to get it over with and sex with histrionics is seriously bad, very low quality. Histrionics therefore exactly like borderlines and others are far more likely to engage in casual sex and far more likely to be promiscuous because they don’t want regular long-term sex. As I said, they want to just get it over with.

Psychopaths are the same for different reasons. So this is the picture of people whose sex drive is either very low or non-existent.

But you have noticed throughout this presentation, I was confined myself. I was talking exclusively about other directed sex.

Actually, all these people are autoerotic. The asexual, most asexuals masturbate as a form of physiological release, which requires absolutely psychologically requires autoeroticism.

Cerebral narcissists masturbate and consume porn and they’re highly autoerotic.

Same with histrionics and all the others.

Autoeroticism is an infantile feature which survives into adulthood in everyone, by the way. That’s why adults, healthy adults, normal adults, like to have sex facing mirrors because they can see themselves in the mirrors.

So in the mirror, and this arouses them, self-gaze, self-regard, seeing yourself in the act is very arousing, even for totally healthy and normal people. And it is irresistible for these types.

However, other directed sexuality is impaired or non-existent in all these aforementioned types.

And now I would like to discuss hypo-sexuality.