Lord Happy Toast

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Mandrewliter is a member of the asexual community involved with academic outreach, with a particular focus on the relationship between asexuality and the diagnosis Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, currently listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, text revision (DSM-IV-TR). Since September 2010, he has been a member of the AVEN Project Team

Blogging and website

Mandrewliter first joined AVEN shortly after discovering the asexual community in September 2007, during his first semester of an MA/Ph.D. program in linguistics in the United States. He quickly took an interest in research on asexuality and trying to develop a framework for understanding asexuality. He got involved with AVENues, where he had a number of articles published beginning in March 2008. In June 2008, he began writing a blog, initially called "Musings on an Asexy Theme," which he later renamed "Asexual Explorations." Out of that blog grew the website Asexual Explorations, which hosted static content versions of work on his blog and the most extensive bibliography on asexuality to date. His blog was renamed Asexual Explorations Blog.

HSDD and the paraphilias

Beginning in summer 2007, some members of AVEN formed a small group of people formed the "AVEN DSM Taskforce", a group aiming to promote dialogue with experts in human sexuality regarding the relationship between asexuality and HSDD and how (and if) means could be taken to make DSM-5 more asexual friendly. Mandrewliter was in charge of the background research for this project and did much of the writing of the final report that was submitted to the DSM-5 Sexual Dysfunctions Subworkgroup, a project written about in Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder and the Asexual community

Growing out of this work regarding HSDD, mandrewliter became interested in and involved with another part of the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders chapter of the DSM--the paraphilias. He now has written two peer-reviewed articles on this subject, one letter to the editor, and given two conference presentations. While the specifics of each vary considerably, collectively this growing corpus of work constructs a mounting argument for removing the paraphilias from the DSM. Mandrewliter also maintains a bibliography regarding the controversy surrounding DSM-5 and the paraphilias.

Project Team

In September 2010, mandrewliter was elected to the Project Team. He played a role in getting more people working on improving the wiki, and tried, without much success, to get more contributions to Asexual Perspectives. He was also active in trying to reform the PT as an institution on AVEN, and to carve out a more clearly defined role for the PT. In January to March 2011, he played a major role in creating a set of procedures for people wanting to use AVEN for academic research. These procedures give the PT a primary role in coordinating with researchers. Because of this, there was concern about what might happen if a future PT did not have anyone knowledgeable enough about research issues to fulfill this role, the structure of the PT was modified so that there would be one Dedicated Research Coordinator and four general PT members. Recognizing that if such a role was created, he was likely to be the first Dedicated Research Coordinator, Mandrewliter chose to neither advocate for or against this position--getting this changed approved by admods was lead by Michaeld.

In September 2011, Mandrewliter became the first Dedicated Research Contact by default as no one else ran in the election for that position.

Articles:

Methodological Issues for Studying Asexuality

Pathology and Asexual Politics

Defining paraphilia in DSM-5: Do not disregard grammar

Defining Paraphilia: Excluding Exclusion

Disregarding Science, Clinical Utility, and the DSM’s Definition of Mental Disorder: The Case of Exhibitionism, Voyeurism, and Frotteurism

Website and Blog

Asexual Explorations Blog Asexual Explorations