It is only fair that I post in this thread, as I encouraged to write about something else than martial arts comparison. I like the effort.
This has to do with Jin Yong’s writing style. His wuxia novels have something in common with the medieval courtly love genre; especially ones where physical sexuality is not even mentioned. There is romance and love between characters, but sexuality or the deed of sex is very obscure in his novels. Most of the time, sex is associated with negative characters or lecherous characters: think Ouyang Ke, Yun Zhonghe, Tang Pei, Feng Tiannan, Zheng Zhibing and a more positive one Tian Boguang.
In all Jin Yong’s novels, none of the characters consummate their love. They have children, but we don’t read the acts. In contrast, Gu Long does have this quite explicitly. We associate Jin Yong novels of being sex-free. That is why the readership is so angry, outraged, and it blasphemous that Zhen Zhiping raped the Little Dragon Girl. We didn’t expect this? Not even Yang Guo, the hero, of the story got physical with the heroine, and suddenly the Taoist priest defiles her. How dare he!
Similarly, why is the Duke of Mount Deer so controversial because Wei Xiaobao did rape those girls? But also, because Jin Yong broke his own rule of upholding courtly love in his last novel. His last protagonist was not a hero of courtly love; in fact, he tried to persuade a character named Hu Rizhi who was a crush on Chen Yuanyuan for decades to ‘do something’ instead of quietly protecting her in secrecy.
I don’t really see it as asexuality, but more as the writer’s belief in this concept of courtly love for his novels. In many ways, Jin Yong is similar to Tolkien, I hate to compare because I find when people say ‘Jin Yong is the Asian Tolkien’ so imperialist. Why can’t Tolkien be the ‘Western Jin Yong’?