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

by Angela Chen

What I didn’t know was what it felt like to want sex without a specific person in mind. To think about sex at all when I was alone. To feel any physical urge for sex distinct from wanting the emotional intimacy it created.

Everyone wonders how to separate friendship and romance when sex is not part of the equation.

Most people are constricted by sexual norms; aces, even more so, at times to the point of exclusion.

For them, a word like “hot” could indicate a physical pull of the type Jane had described. For me, “hot” conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure. Their sexual encounters were often motivated by libido; I didn’t even know that I lacked a libido.

Another thing you need to remember, and something that, for some reason, has never really occurred to you before: You can ask things of others too. You can ask them to compromise. It is not always you who have to.

Our strange courtship might have created problems in many other areas, but we found each other beautiful and I enjoyed having sex with Henry. It felt intimate, like I privy to an experience that others were not. It gave me the feeling I had always wanted: not sexual pleasure, but the thrill of specialness.

Being repulsed by sex can be a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction, but a lack of sexual attraction can also be hidden by social performativity or wanting (and having) sex for emotional reasons—and because the different types of desire are bound together so tightly, it can be difficult to untangle the various strands.

This matters, because language is a form of power. It creates categories that help us interpret the world, and that which is not easily available in language is often ignored in thought itself. A shared vocabulary makes ideas more accessible while a lack of language can render an experience illegible. It can isolate.

To explain asexuality and what it means to not experience sexual attraction, aces must define and describe the exact phenomena we don’t experience. It requires us to use the language of “lack,” claiming we are legitimate in spite of being deficient, while struggling to explain exactly what it is we don’t get.

Aces don’t experience this. Aces can still find people beautiful, have a libido, masturbate, and seek out porn. Aces can enjoy sex and like kink and be in relationships of all kinds.

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.

The specificity of language can force us to look more closely at what we want and what leaves us cold.

That aces can point out contradictions around sexuality and language does not mean we need to solve them or that we are capable of doing so. The lack of tidiness frustrates me, but reality is rarely simple. Sexuality can be more than sexual orientation and aces can still lack a sexuality. People who experience sexual attraction can still be part of the ace community. Kink can be sexual for some and only about emotional dynamics for others.

Over and over, I return to an aphorism coined by the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzbski: the map is not the territory. The saying contains both tension and promise. A map is a simplified representation of what is actually there and the landscape is always richer than the markings captured on the page. Yet maps and simplification can still be helpful—after all, all models are wrong, but some are useful. All representations are limited, but better ones can still broaden the gaze. It is time for new and more detailed maps. Asexuality offers these more precise maps, but we must remember that a map is still a map and that the phrase “Welcome to the ace world” is a misnomer. There is no one ace world. It should be “Welcome to the ace worlds,” one of many entry points for understanding.

If the phrase compulsory sexuality sounds familiar, that’s because it borrows from the poet Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality. 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

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.

Sex felt “forced and unnatural”—not forced as in nonconsensual, more like he had to force himself to initiate. Not unnatural as in uncomfortable, but rather that it was unintuitive and he had to focus intently on the movements from moment to moment.

It is a failure of society if anyone needs to say “I have a partner” to turn someone down, and it is a failure of society if anyone needs to invoke a sexual orientation to avoid unwanted sex because saying no doesn’t do the job.

In many ways, the ace movement grew out of opposition to this idea that sexuality must be a cornerstone of both identity and existence. Though asexuality has become a sexual identity in itself, it can also be understood as a way of living that simply refuses to care about personal sexuality.

If aces make a big deal out of being ace and demand to be recognized, if we have created groups of our own, it is because we want a place away from sexual pressure. If we fight for visibility and change, it is because we want that pressure to be lifted for others too.

For so long, women have been encouraged to deny our sexual needs and instead serve the needs of men. Our worth is tied to sex. We are sexualized until we are too old, yet shamed and policed for being sexual ourselves, prevented from exploring what we desire or are allowed to desire—and this is doubly true if the women in question aren’t straight.

If having sex were merely cool, this would have bothered me little. However, sex had also become feminist and this I cared about. Through a subtle series of twists, like in a game of telephone, sex for liberal women has become more than a way to enjoy ourselves or even prove that we’re desirable. Conspicuous consumption of sex has become a way to perform feminist politics.

Enjoying sex is proof that someone has done the work of self-liberation while staying at home alone can feel like disappointing the activists who worked so hard to offer women other and more exciting options.

The meaning of sex and feminism and liberation is different for poor women and women of color, disabled women, and women of faith. Wealthy women with many partners are more likely to be considered liberated, for example, while working-class women with many partners are more likely to be considered trashy. Queer women have to deal with homophobia, the stigma of hypersexuality, and fetishization. Trans women are shamed and their gender identities are denied. All this can make it difficult for women to express their sexualities at all.

Liberated sexuality—that is, sexuality free from social shaming—can look like promiscuity or it can look like celibacy. And because liberated sexuality exists in many forms, there is no reason that being sexually conservative must mean being sexually repressed and no reason that being sexually conservative must prevent one’s political radicalism.

Pursuing pleasure can be wonderful, but not having a super-exciting sex life does not make one a political failure, not when there is so much other work to be done, on issues of violence and economics and education and more. 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.

Sexual diversity of all kinds is important, and one’s personal sexuality does not create the limits of their political activism, in either direction.

The Combahee members observed, as many would after them, that “major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Racial oppression is difficult to separate from class oppression and from gender-based or sexual oppression because they are experienced simultaneously and “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives,” resulting in, for example, “racial–sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual.”

Race and gender and sexuality intersect, and the way for them not to intersect in a limiting way is to support the possibilities of every part.

“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,’”

An inherent irony is present in this prescription. This book is partly an attempt to explain asexuality to allos, and many aces have thanked me and said that it’s necessary. I hope that the explanation will reach its audience. I also hope that over time we will move closer to not feeling that any explanation is necessary and that we can shed the need to be understood by these others. Let these others think what they will. Our own attention, at least, can be turned more strongly to ourselves. Stereotypes are out there. In our own minds, many narratives of self can be spun from the same starting materials.

There exists no perfect, ironclad formula for understanding how sexuality and health interact, but that hasn’t prevented people from believing an elegant but incorrect statement: people who don’t want sex are sick, and people who are sick—that is, mentally or physically disabled or different in some way—don’t want sex.

The disabled community has spent a long time fighting the idea that disabled people are, or should be, asexual. The ace community has struggled for as long as it has existed to prove that asexuality has nothing to do with disability.

Again, it is possible to be distressed by something—plenty of aces are distressed about being ace—without the cause of that distress being a problem in itself.

Compulsory sexuality is the belief that it’s “normal” to be lustful. The flip side is that groups that are already perceived as less than “normal”—like older people, people who are autistic, Asian men, the racist stereotype of the mammy, or disabled people—are desexualized, considered sexually unattractive to others, and assumed to have no lust of their own. Beautiful abled women may be told to remain virginal and shamed into chastity, but their bodies are still considered objects of desire, used as props in movies and to sell beer. The bodies of those with physical disabilities, however, are seen as deviant and ugly—and disabled people are considered to be eternally childlike and not ready for sex—so the idea of disabled people having a sex drive is repulsive.

Notably, disability scholars Maureen Milligan and Aldred Neufeldt claim that asexuality among the disabled is largely a myth, and a self-defeating, self-perpetuating one at that. “Physical and mental impairments may significantly alter functioning, but do not eliminate basic drives or the desire for love, affection, and intimacy,” they write.39 Milligan and Neufeldt argue that while people with disabilities might have fewer opportunities to have sex, that doesn’t mean the desire itself is absent. The problem isn’t the amount of desire, it’s what other people think about their amount of desire and how defeating the whole situation can be.

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. When a preference or behavior is socially accepted, people don’t care about its origins, even when the origin is similarly influenced by multiple factors.

Straight people can start identifying differently without their straightness being called “just a phase,” yet aces—and all others who aren’t straight—have less room to be fluid. Sensitive people who would never tell a gay man that he hasn’t found the right woman think little of saying the same to an ace person. 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. Straight people are rarely treated like they’re close-minded for knowing their sexual orientation, but aces are assumed to be unsure and always on the brink of finding the person who will change everything.

All aces should be welcomed into the community. There are no gold-star aces among us, but we are not the worse for it.

The long answer is the societal one, about what must shift on a greater level. It truly is necessary to question the expectations that others hold for us and the purpose and origin of these expectations. Each person should explore who they are and what they want and how all that might change.

think people go in and out of heterosexuality and homosexuality and queerness in various ways, and why can’t that also be true for asexuality?” asks Cerankowski, the gender studies scholar. “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.” Age and health, for instance, may factor into sexual identity and experience and “taking this more fluid approach to sexual identity formation does not necessarily negate asexuality if it’s not this essential lifelong thing; there are just different ways of experiencing sexuality.”

It is a moral imperative that both the disabled community and the ace community welcome disabled aces. The disabled community must welcome disabled aces because sexual variation exists and disabled people can be ace, and there is nothing wrong with being ace. The ace community must welcome disabled people because sexual variation exists and ace people can be disabled, and there is nothing wrong with being disabled—and because the power of the ace movement does not depend on purity of origin.

You can be asexual if your disability caused your asexuality, and you can be asexual if sexual trauma caused your asexuality, and you can be asexual if you lose your sexual desire later in life. The asexual community should be there to help in all these cases. You don’t have to be part of the asexual community forever, but the lesson that a happy life for aces is possible, regardless of origin, is one that is important and one that includes you too. It’s for you even if you don’t identify as ace. 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.

Doing away with compulsory sexuality also means doing away with hypersexualization and desexualization. Many voices are needed. No more being thought strange for not wanting sex, or people being shocked if you do. We should ask people what they want and not be surprised, no matter the answer. And we should tell them that no matter their answer, we will work to make sure that life can be good for all.

Language betrays us by making sexual attraction the synonym for fulfillment and excitement itself. When describing different types of social energy and intimacy, like the mind-meld of creative collaborators or the trust between pastor and congregant, there are few metaphors that don’t resort to the sexual. 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.

think people sometimes make sense of things as romantic crushes when really it isn’t,” CJ Chasin, the ace researcher, says. It’s common for two close friends to be accused, even jokingly, of being romantically obsessed with each other and in denial about it. They themselves may wonder if their feelings toward each other are romantic. “Why can’t that ‘denial’ go both ways?” continues Chasin. “Maybe you’re just in denial about friend intimacy.”

Developing and normalizing language that lets us talk frankly about emotional intimacy without it seeming like a come-on will help the world come into focus. Better language will protect us from confusing intention or misinterpreting emotion when that might be inappropriate, and it allows us to enhance the energy that is present without trying to turn it into something else. It will let us talk about relationships for what they are, not what they resemble.

In every case, this game of mix and match creates a multiplicity of possible—and often opposing—labels for each combination of emotions. “Romantic” and “platonic” are categories that people experience differently.

Sensitivity, attachment, and caring are part of any healthy relationship. People who are polyamorous have multiple romantic partners without the desire for exclusivity. Infatuation might be the factor that aligns most closely with widespread ideas of what romantic love feels like, yet it’s common to idealize a new acquaintance or feel possessive when a best friend becomes close with someone else, and romantic love doesn’t automatically turn platonic once early energy wears off.