Jay launched the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), an online community dedicated to raising awareness of asexuality and providing support to people who identify as asexual, in 2001, when he was 18 and a college freshman. "I had spent the past four years struggling to realize that I was okay, and I didn't want other asexual people to have the realize the same thing," he says. The website soon became a rallying cry: first for hundreds, then thousands, and later tens of thousands of people who felt alienated from the sexual stories and imagery that dominate our culture.

At its most basic, asexuality is defined by an absence of sexual attraction. Some asexual people are in romantic relationships, others aren't. Some are outgoing, others are shy. Some are sexually active for the sake of their partners or social pressure, some have never so much as kissed another person. Some think sex is disgusting, some are indifferent, and some think it's great for other people but have no wish to "go there" themselves.

But what all asexual people have in common -- and what defines asexuality as an orientation -- is that, while they may have a desire to connect with other people, asexuals have no desire to connect with them sexually. Asexual people are not the same as celibate people: it's not that they are purposefully or unintentionally abstaining from sex they would otherwise like to have, but rather that they have no interest in it.

There have always been people who didn't want or seek out sex, and there have long been people who have described themselves (even if only in the recesses of their own minds) as asexual. It's just that before Google came along, they couldn't find each other. David Jay didn't invent asexuality. But his website did arrive right at the critical moment at which a person typing that word into a search engine could stumble upon a relevant community -- rather than, say, an article about the reproductive systems of sea stars.

But although the Internet provided the technology for people to start talking about asexuality, it was not the only -- or even the most important -- condition necessary for that conversation, says Mark Carrigan, a researcher at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. "There had to be something about [asexual people's] experience that led them to want to have those conversations in the first place," he says.

That something is the sense of not just difference, but of defect, that Jay alludes to in his memories of middle and high school. "For a couple of years I just assumed that I was broken," he says.

And that feeling of being broken is more than just a matter of individual neurosis. It is illustrative of how deeply what Carrigan calls "the sexual assumption" is embedded in our society -- "the idea that everyone has sexual attraction, that it's this powerful force inside of you, and that it is experienced the same way by every person," Carrigan explains.