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

by Angela Chen

The prefix a- means without, and so she is considered to have no sexuality. It’s right there in the name. But

“If I envision people, they don’t have faces or names or bodies; it’s more of a concept. But having someone in control of me in some way, acting like I ‘have to do these things,’ or like I am like an inanimate object, works for me. That’s sort of my fantasy.” To better reflect Sarah’s experience, the way we use the language of sexuality may require rethinking.

Take it one step further and pretend: Nothing means anything, but other people are getting something out of it that you’re not. They are seeing the same floppy bodies that you are, but the bodies mean something different. The bodies are provoking some kind of reaction that you are not having. The show makes them think about what they might want to do with their body to the other bodies on display. It doesn’t make sense. Take that feeling of bafflement and magnify it. Apply it to everyone all times. Welcome to the ace world.

The ace world also includes people who identify as gray-asexual, or gray-A, a more catchall phrase that encompasses experiences like only occasionally experiencing sexual attraction or not experiencing it very strongly.

these terms have great value because more precise language leads to more precise discussions.

Allos are sexually repulsed by plenty of people. Many spend the majority of their time sexually indifferent as well. The proportion is usually different—sex-repulsed aces are usually sex-repulsed 100 percent of the time—but adopting this language at a more granular level, to describe feelings day by day and track experience, can be helpful. “Asexuality has taught me a language—a vocabulary for sex-neutral, sex-repulsed, sex-positive, and then I can place myself on that scale for the day and try to initiate sex and try to create a better sense of connection,” says Alicia, an ace scholar with an allo partner.

Aesthetic attraction can guide romantic attraction, or the feeling of being romantically interested in or having a crush on someone. Romantic orientation, then, denotes the gender that people usually develop crushes on.

Breaking the link between aesthetic and romantic and sexual attraction makes it possible to understand each type on its own terms instead of mistaking one for the other. New ways to talk about attraction mean new ways to think about attraction, to more clearly evaluate a bond.

“My friend said, ‘I feel like other people put out a certain energy when they want to attract someone,’” Shari remembers, “and I still don’t have any idea what this energy is.”

Regardless of whether we have sex, we don’t relate to sexuality the way that, seemingly, allos do. We do not center sexuality in our lives.

Life is not a science experiment. Nobody can run multiple simulations of their experiences, tweaking one factor here and another there to see how the outcomes differ.

In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich argued that heterosexuality is not merely a sexual orientation that happens to be the orientation of most people. Heterosexuality is a political institution that is taught and conditioned and reinforced.1

It makes people believe that heterosexuality is so widespread only because it is “natural,” even though, as Rich writes, “the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.”2

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 world has not encouraged sex for those who are poor or for people of color. As Illinois State University gender studies scholar Ela Przybylo points out in an interview, sex negativity exists alongside compulsory sexuality; people celebrate queerness even while homophobia is rampant.

Aces do not comply and so are dismissed and told that our experience is depression or delusion or childish innocence, and that we cannot play with the big kids. We are not quite right, or not quite worthwhile—made in the shape of a human but with faulty wiring and something lost, something fundamental to the good life.

Incels, however, are not merely lonely. They are also entitled, and here my sympathy ends. Instead of questioning the narrative of masculinity that prioritizes sexual conquest, incels lean into it, misusing evolutionary

psychology to make themselves more miserable and falling into reductionist theories about genetic fitness and how the purpose of men is to impregnate as many women as possible.

Ace men tell me that people of all genders assume that they are secret incels who hide behind a made-up identity. Such is the trap: Even when a man doesn’t want sex, he can be lumped in with the men who will kill in their desire to have it.

Years of Hunter’s life had been spent wondering what was wrong until he learned about asexuality

from an Instagram bio, yet it’s not uncommon for ace activism to be considered a nuisance and a joke.

Sexuality is not merely what you do, it is part of who you are, part of the truth of you. As philosopher Michel Foucault argues in his History of Sexuality, this social emphasis on sexuality is the result of historical and political forces.28

In culturally liberal circles, the sexually conservative woman is often considered to be sexually repressed—and the sexually repressed woman is a symbol of a time before freedom. She is uptight and in denial, white-knuckling her way through life. She is the perfectly coiffed fifties housewife, lacking the ease of liberated counterparts who are in touch with their bodies and secure with their place in the world. The sexually repressed woman is an object of pity and a reminder of the importance of progress. She is embarrassing.

The words used to describe women who didn’t have sex (celibate, abstinent, pure, chaste) seemed either clinical or moralistic in a way I disdained. The words used to describe women who did (free, empowered, bold) I liked and wanted to apply to me. I absorbed the language of archetypes and aesthetic tropes—the repressed woman, the liberated woman—instead of thinking more critically about whether these stories were true and, if so, what they might imply about how we connect sex and politics and power.

For feminists like Ellen Willis and Susie Bright, the MacKinnon-Dworkin approach encouraged a sexual conservatism that did not serve women.

Sex-positive feminists like Willis and Bright did not believe that porn was always demeaning. They did not approve of the conservative allegiance to ban it or of giving politicians (who were so often men) so much power in controlling women’s sexuality. It was important to undo the social conditioning of shame.

First, the important message that most women are conditioned to be sexually inhibited was delivered with a lack of nuance. “It seems that the message is ‘we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want,’” says Jo, an ace policy worker in Australia. “Except ‘as much sex as we want’ is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we’re either not being our true authentic selves, or we haven’t discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven’t grown up properly or awakened yet.”

Inside the charmed circle is everything that is socially acceptable, which traditionally means monogamous, married, vanilla, heterosexual sex in private. Outside these borders would be, for example, promiscuous sex, group sex, and so on. The charmed circle represented the conservative, rigid status quo.

Sexuality, which is already a maturity narrative where sex leads to adulthood, then becomes a political maturity narrative as well, an evolution in thought and practice.

“In queer radical circles and in much of the left, the worlds in which I operate, there’s a widely held idea that one’s political radicalism can be attached to one’s sexual practices,” writes activist Yasmin Nair.13 “And too often, we hear of people coming out into radical queer communities, often at very young ages, being told that they can’t possibly be radical enough unless they’ve entered into polyamorous and orgiastic relationships.

The assumption of a ubiquitous, voracious libido ignores the reality of sexual variation.

Political gatekeeping based on sexuality also alienates feminists for whom sex is not the priority.

Sex is not the center of my feminism either, and I do not have time for those who would say that this calls my feminism into question. I am no longer concerned with having a super-exciting sex life.

The woman who hates sex and may be repressed but who supports comprehensive sex education and pressures legislators to pass equal pay laws is a political success. The one who brags about using men but ignores the need for any greater action, less so.

I did not challenge the belief that a good feminist would not be apathetic to sex.

I read The Ethical Slut and blog posts promising to teach me how to “hack myself into being polyamorous,” and filled out worksheets to “map my jealousy” and try to contain it or, better yet, obliterate it. I believed that my desire for monogamy and disinterest in casual sex were not preferences worthy of honoring, but political and moral failings that must be overcome. I thought I was weak and stupid.

“I’m X but Y” always throws someone under the bus.

“I’m ace, but not ace in the boring way that you’re thinking” is still a dart, a subtle reinforcement of all the lessons taught about what it means to be frigid.

It is not enough to say that everyone should only do what they want. That’s a bromide that anyone can parrot and it ignores the ways that society pressures us to want certain things. Back it up. Show us examples of powerful, enviable women who are openly indifferent to sex, secure in that decision, and not constantly challenged by others.

It is possible to encourage others to experiment while trusting them if they say sex doesn’t do anything for them.

Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw addressed this phenomenon when she coined the term intersectionality in a 1989 law article that pointed out a major weakness in anti-discrimination law: it only acknowledges a single axis of oppression.5

Asexuality is tied to whiteness because white people (and especially white women6) are often assumed to be sexually “pure,” whereas Black and Latinx people are often considered hypersexual—and these racialized sexual stereotypes are a form of control themselves.

Ace then adds another layer, leading Selena to feel boxed in by how all the stereotypes fit together or are in tension, like whether it’s weird that a trans person would not experience sexual attraction.

provocative photos. “We still expect people to dress for other people and think that if a woman is making herself look good, then it’s to attract someone else,” she says. Tired of these responses, Yasmin started the hashtag #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike to show that there is no single ace aesthetic.

“I like it when people give me attention! I like being interesting! And these are all things that our societal narrative attaches to sex,” Selena says. For allos, sex is so natural an explanation for behavior that other reasons, such as wanting to dress creatively for its own sake and wanting to be seen just to be seen, can be hard to fathom. “I’m like ‘I want you to stare at me, but I don’t want you to fuck me, and they have nothing to do with each other,’” Selena continues. “And then allos are so funny because they just insist that those have everything to do with each other.”

Each time someone is surprised by their existence, especially as women of color, another stereotype about the meaning of sex and who desires it and who doesn’t is debunked.

Let’s call it what it is, all these descriptions I’ve given of how 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.

Toni Morrison, who knew as much as anyone about the power of stories, once proclaimed that from her perspective there are only Black people. “I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central,” she said. “Claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.”

For a Black author to center Black people and not write for the white gaze should not be at all extraordinary, yet it felt like it was.

We can fight stereotypes, racial and otherwise, and also, as Selena said, try to spend time with those who see us fully.