Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

by Angela Chen

Repeat after me: sexual attraction is not sex drive. These two phenomena are often treated as interchangeable, but understanding that they are separate helps explain ace experience.

(As a side note, it’s important to clarify that neither sexual attraction nor sex drive are the same as physical arousal.

Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.

The label of asexual should be value neutral. It should indicate little more than sexual orientation. Instead, asexual implies a slew of other, negative

associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken. These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel.

I, for one, am not pro-sex. I am not sex-positive or sex-negative. I am pro-pleasure, which does not need to include sex at all, and I am pro-sexual choice—real choice.

As we have seen, compulsory sexuality exists for straight white men. But for people who come from more vulnerable communities and are weighed down by extra layers of social conditioning, figuring out whether one’s asexuality is human variation or externally imposed

“Being a Black asexual woman often feels like living in the shadow of the mammy, a caricature

whose asexuality is conceived of only because she is expected to mother everyone around her,”

It’s hard if you confirm a stereotype and it’s hard if you violate a stereotype and it’s hard if you think you’re violating the stereotype only because you hate it so much.

I felt so ambivalent about being Asian, female, ace: internalized racism and misogyny, self-hating, always too eager to perform for the white gaze, the male gaze, the allo gaze, always caring too much about the approval of those who are least likely to understand and most likely to withhold.

If someone is not in a romantic relationship, they are to be pitied or mocked. If someone doesn’t want a romantic relationship at all, they are heartless like a serial killer. The spinster becomes a pathetic creature, a strange and unwanted woman. The bachelor is either closeted or emotionally stunted. If he’s hot, he’s irresponsible and a rake.

Hermeneutical justice is a structural phenomenon. It is about marginalized groups lacking access to information essential to their understanding of themselves and their role in society—and these groups lack this information precisely because they are marginalized and their experiences rarely represented.

Queenie of Aces

it takes active work to step back, to create even enough space to take a breath and admit that maybe you don’t know what you want, but what has been offered has never felt right.