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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Angela Chen
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March 18 - May 21, 2025
let’s first unpack the idea that people who don’t want sex are sick. Doctors in the West have been worried about the “problem” of low sexual desire since at least the thirteenth century, when Pope Gregory IX wrote about the issue of frigiditas.
Today, people who insist that low sexual desire is a form of medical dysfunction have a convenient ally in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnosis in the US. Since 1980, the manual has included a diagnosis that was once called “inhibited sexual desire disorder” and, after changing names a few times, it is now most commonly referred to as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD.1 (In the DSM-5, the disorder is split into male and female forms, but let’s stick to general HSDD to keep things simple.)2
The officialness of the DSM encourages others to ask aces, and aces to ask ourselves, if we’re sure we’re not sick and if we’re sure we shouldn’t be cured.
***This is why we either need a complete overhaul of this "manual" or to delegitimize it.
Addyi was supported by a pharmaceutical-funded campaign called Even the Score, which is prime example of feminism being used to sell dubiously successful products. Even the Score argued that it would be feminist to approve the drug because it focuses on women’s pleasure, never mind all the complications: Women had to take the pill daily, couldn’t consume alcohol while taking it, and experienced side effects including nausea and fainting.
First aired in 2012, “Better Half” remains one of the most high-profile depictions of asexuality on a major show. For many, it was their introduction to this “wildly screwed-up” orientation. Even today, when I tell people I am writing a book about asexuality, many allos will mention the episode, adding sheepishly that it confused them then and that they are still sort of confused now.
As such, the target of House’s incredulity reveals the extent to which compulsory sexuality is accepted. House isn’t real, but the people who wrote this episode are and they thought it was okay to approve this storyline, playing right into the idea that aces and the ace-adjacent need to be disabused of their notions.
As for the asexual exception, its existence requires twisting the mind in strange ways. Saying that someone has HSDD unless they identify as ace is like saying that someone who experiences same-sex attraction has a psychiatric condition unless they happen to identify as homosexual.
Aces encourage personal exploration, emphasizing that people must decide for themselves if they are asexual. I have told others that their experience as described to me lines up with the experiences of other asexual people. I have never “diagnosed” someone as asexual or insisted that they must identify this way.
Diagnoses can provide community, as well as the insurance codes necessary to access specialized treatment.
It is difficult for me to see the purpose of a diagnosis that is not very likely to connect you to useful services but that is likely to reinforce the idea that you are medically unwell.
Throw together some criteria, approve it by vote, and anything can become an official psychiatric disorder—which means that the manual has long been a mirror for biases that would horrify many people today. Fifty years ago, a man who wanted to have sex with other men would have been classified as mentally disordered, and this would have been supported by the DSM’s entry for homosexuality, which wouldn’t be fully dropped until the 1980s.24 Today, a man who has little interest in partnered sex is still considered to have a psychiatric disorder. Both diagnoses arise from narrow-mindedness.
Following her commitment to the Virginia State Colony, Carrie would become the plaintiff of Buck v. Bell, representing the agrument that no person should be sterilized against their will. The case made it to the Supreme Court. To Holmes, Carrie—young, unwed, supposedly promiscuous and mentally deficient—represented a vision of America that could not be allowed to continue, and so he ruled in favor of eugenicist John Bell, the superintendent of the colony. There was only one dissenting opinion, so Carrie was sterilized. The case was cited by the Nazis as they developed their own eugenics
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Buck v. Bell is one of the most harrowing Supreme Court decisions, a continual reminder of the strain of eugenicism in the history of the United States.
For a long time, a lot of the most dominant voices in the asexual community said over and over, ‘I was not abused, I was not traumatized,’ because there’s such a desire to distance oneself from abuse or trauma being a cause of asexuality, as that would mean asexuality is a problem that could be fixed or cured,” KJ Cerankowski, a professor of gender studies at Oberlin College and coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, tells me. “The result is that people with sexual abuse or trauma histories—who aren’t sure how that relates to their asexuality—are dismissed.”
The obsession with the origin of asexuality, this pressure that makes proving asexuality nearly impossible, comes from—you guessed it—the belief that every person should be sexual, whether that belief comes from the general public or is enforced within a particular community.
Compulsory sexuality makes asexuality prone to double standards.
The parent who asks one five-year-old boy which classmate he wants as a girlfriend asks another five-year-old ace or gay boy how they can already know their sexuality.
There should be freedom to not identify as ace if it doesn’t serve you, freedom to be ace and still be curious about sex, freedom to identify as ace and then change your mind.
“There are different circumstances under which people might find themselves identifying with different sexualities, and I do think we have to allow movement and fluidity as we think more complexly about sexual identities.”
If the options asexual and allosexual are equally available—in visibility and in what people believe about what these identities mean—and a person chooses allosexual, that is reasonable evidence that they are allosexual. If the only acceptable option is allosexuality and a person chooses allosexual, it is far more likely that this choice is the result of the shame of being abnormal. People will deny their aceness and explore forever in the hopes of discovering that they are allo after all.
Lack of sexuality means being dried up and tired. In addition to being associated with children, it is associated with being old, because old people supposedly never again feel “the rush of excitement that comes with the first brush of the lips, the first moment when clothes drop to the floor.”44
which can leave those of us who weren’t particularly sexual to begin with wondering if we have already disappeared, already evaporated.
If asexuality is fine, so is every other form of low sexual desire or so-called sexual dysfunction. Anyone who has any form of desire or attraction lower or higher than “normal” can still be okay. Better than okay.
I want to be close to you and special to you, the way you are to me, but I do not want to be sexual with you, this comic says. I want to be emotionally intimate with you and I want to be in love with you, but not in that way.
Many still experience romantic attraction and use a romantic orientation (heteroromantic, panromantic, homoromantic, and so on) to signal the genders of the people they feel romantically toward and crush on.
Allos can wave their hand and say, “There are people I want to sleep with, and I don’t want to sleep with you, so it’s only platonic.”
Asexuality destabilizes the way people think about relationships, starting with the belief that passionate bonds must always have sex at the root.
Romantic love can be more expansive than sexual attraction because heterosexual sexual attraction, while usually necessary for producing kids, is not required for successful co-parenting. To use ace lingo, sexual attraction and romantic attraction don’t need to line up.
One-night stands and fuck-buddy arrangements are all explicitly sexual and explicitly non-romantic. The opposite conclusion—that for some, infatuation never included and never turns into sexual desire—is harder for people to accept, at least in the West.
Romantic friendships were passionate on their own terms because passion is possible in many types of relationships.
Believing that everything containing a special, charged energy must be sexual is not only simplistic; it can also shift how a relationship is perceived in a harmful way.
Wanting to be “intimate” with someone—even emotionally intimate—can seem lewd. Being in a “relationship” with a friend sounds sort of odd. A thesaurus search for passionate offers as synonyms wanton, lascivious, libidinous, aroused, sultry, and, well, sexy.
To isolate romantic feeling, I asked that we peel away social role and performance, but the differences seem partially created by both. “Platonic” and “romantic” are types of feeling while “friend” and “romantic partner” are social designations, and the latter molds the former.
I am not claiming that romantic and platonic love are secretly the same; there can be any number of small factors or combination of factors that differentiate the two.
I am saying that people think of romantic and platonic love as two distinct categories, but, frequently, there is overlap and no clean separation, no one emotional feature or essential component that makes a relationship one or the other.
“You’re my person” isn’t tied to official romantic relationship status. Meredith isn’t Cristina’s person because Cristina can’t find someone to date. The women didn’t abandon each other once they found boyfriends. Their importance to each other is of a different tenor. Explaining her relationship with Meredith to her boyfriend, Cristina tells him this: “If I murdered someone, she’s the person I’d call to help me drag the corpse across the living room floor.” She is, not him.
Queerplatonic partnerships shouldn’t be infantilized or idealized as these “too pure, too good” relationships protected from emotional storms. They may be subversive; they may challenge entrenched hierarchies; but they are still relationships between people and people are always flawed.
Again and again, friends would respond with a suggestion, only to see someone else chime in and point out that, actually, Watership Down and East of Eden do have romantic and sexual themes, you simply forgot. Romance is so taken for granted that we often don’t register it, the way we rarely register if all the characters in a novel are white. This message affects our values and our hopes, all while fading so cleanly into the background that it’s barely even evident.
Lyrical court opinions and throwaway comments alike can make it difficult to figure out whether you truly want a relationship or just believe that without one you will always be pitied.
Yet, the one group I felt knee-jerk skepticism toward were men like David, who are aromantic but not asexual. I am a woman who has spent a decent chunk of my life listening to friends’ horror stories about men, many of them jerks who wanted nothing but sex. Part of me remained suspicious that “aromantic but not asexual” was a cop-out for an immature man trying to justify bad behavior.
Still, it was hearing David talk about how these same stereotypes hurt him that changed the situation for me emotionally. Because he’s male, people will say he’s “just a horny guy” and a monster, he tells me, even though he really does care about others.
Offering legal and social benefits only to the romantically attached suggests that the mere presence of romantic feeling elevates the care and deserves special protections, even though friendship and other forms of care, which can come with less obligation, can include more love, more freely given. Therefore, the legal and social privileges of marriage should be extended to all mutually consenting adults who wish for them.
Milestones become bittersweet, like when Jo’s best friend moved out to live with her boyfriend. “I can’t begrudge her for this, of course, and I am happy for her because she is happy,” Jo says. “But it was hard because we had this really good thing going but I have now been deprioritized. This will probably keep happening for the rest of my life because that tends to be what people do. Their primary romantic relationship takes precedence over friendships and sometimes their family.”
It is still unfair that people worry that not having a romantic partner means they can’t take care of themselves in old age. Amatonormativity and the assumption of free familial care have made it easier to ignore the necessity of changing welfare and labor laws to make eldercare more financially accessible and also to compensate the caregivers more fairly. When the infrastructure of care work and eldercare changes, it will help those who are aromantic, as well as everyone who has this worry—including
The belief that marital rape is acceptable is so widespread that when reports surfaced that Donald Trump’s ex-wife Ivana had accused him of rape, Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen defended his client by saying that “you can’t rape your spouse.”
Marital rape is illegal, but it took a long time to get to that point. In 1979, then California state senator Bob Wilson jokingly posed the following questions to a group of female lobbyists: “If you can’t rape your wife, who can you rape?”7 Lawmakers in the state of Virginia didn’t make it possible for someone to be prosecuted for spousal rape until 2002.
As long as people don’t know about asexuality—hell, forget about the label, so long as they don’t know that saying no forever and for any reason and in any context is okay—sex education, sex therapy, and popular depictions of sex are incomplete and people don’t have the relevant information to fully consent.
Hermeneutical injustice can be the norm, and unspoken social rules are powerful in their invisibility. Asking a person to work on themself to have more sex seems natural and intuitive, but imagine asking the allo partner to be celibate. It’s barely thinkable.
In all of these cases, there is some form of yes and some form of no. A simple platitude, “Rape is not sex” cannot take into account all these subtleties and instead leads people to wonder how to process a consensual, negative experience and how they’re allowed to feel afterward.
Everyone should acknowledge the other side too, that we can hurt someone even if we did not mean to and even if we checked in and tried to do due diligence.
