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

by Angela Chen

“I can be jealous, I can experience adoration and devotion toward my friends, all these intense qualifiers that we usually put toward romantic love,” Leigh says. “In past relationships, I was like, ‘Do I actually want a romantic and sexual relationship, or do I just have a really intense platonic love for someone and I wanted to have some sort of validation that I was significant in your life the way you are in mine?’”

Nor am I claiming that romantic love is platonic love but deeper somehow. Shallow romantic obsessions exist without being love at all, as do profound, loving friendships that trump romantic bonds. 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.

Leigh came out as queer at sixteen, half a lifetime ago. “I spent a lot of time being single,” they say. “I’m 6’1”, I’m not a skinny supermodel, I’m a lot of person. And before I understood my gender identity, that was also at odds with the ideas of traditional femininity.”

Meeee

The bond between queerplatonic partners is not sexual, nor does it necessarily seem romantic to the people in such a partnership. Some people feel differently about their queerplatonic partner than about either a friend or a romantic partner. For others, a queerplatonic partnership is less about a unique feeling and more about acknowledging each other’s importance in a way that is rare for relationships that aren’t explicitly romantic. These relationships transcend the bounds of what is typically found in friendship alone, even when “romantic” as a descriptor seems wrong. The queer part is not about genders, but about queering that social border. Mutuality is key: smith plays an active role in the life of a friend’s child, but none of the adults involved view the relationship as queerplatonic, even though others in the same situation might describe the relationship differently.

Do you consider yourself poly? I asked Leigh. Unsure. Leigh’s husband didn’t consider their marriage to be open and Leigh and Taylor’s relationship wasn’t exactly romantic. On the other hand, as Leigh says: “I don’t know if my feelings were really different for my husband and QPP. If you’re in the small group of people I care about, I feel pretty much the same about all of you. That’s just how I do relationships.”

It is interesting how dofferdt it is for everyone because my relationships are like Leigh says but i do consider myself polyam

I am, however, curious about what would happen if everyone more carefully considered the distinction we make between friendship and romance, and the way we treat them differently and why. Many people are hesitant to say “I love you” to friends, much less ask, “How do you feel about time? What are we to each other?” As Leigh noted, outside of romance, there is no “defining the relationship” talk unless something has already gone wrong. Couples therapists usually focus on romantic couples, and no advice industry is available to help people recover from the loss of a friendship, though friend breakups can be as devastating as the romantic kind. The looseness of friendship and lack of official obligation is a delight for many, but as a general rule, people tend to treat casually that which is less important.

As queerplatonic relationships show, we can borrow from the language and norms of romantic relationships to structure other types of feeling. Queerplatonic partners take a type of relationship that is usually taken lightly and decide that it is important enough to merit unusual and potentially awkward conversations. Relationships of many kinds can be important enough to risk those talks, to set expectations and dig in.

When the desires don’t fit the labels, it is often the labels that should be adjusted or discarded, not the desires. If everyone is behaving ethically, it doesn’t matter if a relationship doesn’t fit into a preconceived social role, if it feels neither platonic nor romantic or if it feels like both at the same time.

Love and caring are precious and appear in contexts beyond the romantic; they are not necessarily the most powerful in romantic contexts either. One group of people feels this truth especially acutely: those who are aromantic, or aro. They know that elevating romantic love ends up harming everyone. They’re waiting for others to catch up.

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.

You see, if all humans have a baseline of sexual desire and nothing is currently wrong, saying no on a beautiful, happy day to a beautiful, happy partner means you are selfish and intentionally withholding. You don’t want to be that kind of person and you love your partner. So you say yes.

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.

So coercion looks like being told that you would have sex if you really loved someone. It feels like being afraid to see your partner because you don’t want to keep denying them sex. It feels like, as activist Queenie of Aces writes, making a list of all the reasons you shouldn’t have sex now (not old enough, haven’t been dating long enough, birth control access could be a problem) but never knowing that the real reason—that you don’t want to—is the only one you need.2 It feels like wishing that you were religious so you could at least use religious celibacy as an excuse. It feels like being hurt by having to have sex and learning that you shouldn’t have had to have it because there’s nothing wrong with not wanting sex ever—and looking back and revoking consent, in your own mind if nowhere else.

Guilt and shame and anger: Shame at saying yes, anger at not knowing you didn’t have to say yes, shame at not standing your ground and saying no, anger at partners for not telling you to say no, guilt at being angry because no one knew better.

Sexual rights should not be assumed and self-determination must never end upon entering a relationship. You can give a no with zero caveats in each and every situation, full stop. You can say no if someone loves you and you love them back. You can say no for the rest of your life. Loving another person should never mean forfeiting bodily autonomy.

Differences in libido can be a source of shame for both sides, and claiming that sex shouldn’t matter at all or judging someone for wanting to leave is not helpful. If sex is important, let sex be important. It’s okay to leave and have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you. Just remember that leaving for sexual reasons does not mean the other person was wrong.

“Multiple times I have given explicit consent to partners, but mentally I didn’t want to do that,” says Sebastian, the model from Canada. “Even if somebody had picked up on my body language, I would still have said, ‘No, it’s fine, keep going,’ because then you deal with feelings of guilt and shame for not wanting it.” In all of these cases, there is some form of yes and some form of no.

It is not necessary to prove that sex is inherently good. It is not. For some, it is never good and never wanted, no matter how seemingly ideal the circumstance or how caring the partner. Mixed experiences, mixed layers of agency, and mixed attitudes toward sex all exist, and honoring these is more important than clinging to the idea sex is by default nice, or that there always exist conditions under which it can be wonderful. Sex is complicated, and accepting what happens and how people feel—even if it transgresses expectations of how things are supposed to happen and how people are supposed to feel—is the first step toward healing.

ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT: When I want you When I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes OR saying no When saying no means missing out on something I want WILLING CONSENT: When I care about you though I don’t desire you (right now) When I’m pretty sure saying yes will have an okay result and I think maybe that I’d regret saying no When I believe that desire may begin after I say yes UNWILLING CONSENT: When I fear the consequences of saying no more than I fear the consequences of saying yes When I feel not just an absence of desire but an absence of desire for desire When I hope that by saying yes, you will stop bothering me, or think that if I say no you’ll only keep on trying to persuade me COERCED CONSENT: When you threaten me with harmful consequences if I say no When I feel I’ll be hurt if I say yes, but I’ll be hurt more if I say no When saying yes means experiencing something I actively dread27

The process of consent should be more like developing a friendship than signing an employment letter. Friendship takes many different forms and is not given by one person to the other. It is mutual and reciprocal and created over time. We don’t assume that if someone says yes to getting coffee that they’ll also say yes to attending an amateur improv show or that both people need to know (or can even know) beforehand exactly how the friendship will change and grow. We don’t think that being open to friendship means someone is obligated to be a friend forever, or that others are equally enthusiastic about every part of friendship.

In the sexual realm, even basic acts can signify very different things. Remember the masturbation paradox and how it’s odd that aces who masturbate are considered to lack a sexuality? Some of the aces who masturbate consider it sexual, but others don’t. To them, masturbation is like any other bodily quirk, no different from scratching an itch on the arm.

Similarly, the concept of sex itself is constructed. The word conjures up images of penis-in-vagina penetration, even though that’s a limiting way to think about sex and the many other ways of having sex and being sexual.

Society teaches what sex is, how to have sex, how much sex to have, how to feel about that sex, and what a good sex life is. It provides sexual scripts and rules to follow. Sex advice books, which frequently push the narrative of sex as a primal act,6 socialize us too. They teach what sex means for relationship health and what types of sex are good and bad—and in doing so, amusingly, disprove their own claim about sex as an immutable drive. If sex is completely natural and biological, why does anyone need this industry of sex experts at all? Why are there sex manuals dating back centuries?7 Why do we need Cosmopolitan to tell us how to do it, when we far more rarely see guidebooks for how to digest and how to breathe?

Romantic relationships without kissing aren’t normal in American society, insofar as normal means common. Sleeping in separate beds or living apart or swinging aren’t normal. All these choices face stigma because of the power of normal, but normal and widespread matter far more in relationships than they should. Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.

Relationships should always be a game of mix and match, not a puzzle that you have to perfectly snap into, or a Jenga tower that will collapse as soon as you try to wiggle one block out of place. Customizability is the best part, yet most people try so hard to make their relationship stick to its premade form, a one-size-fits-all shape. Many people don’t take advantage of their own freedom.

Sometimes, as in the case of Kendra, the Black ace writer, everything else can be great and someone just doesn’t want to have sex.

Intimacy and sex are not the same. Intimacy can be in service of sex or sex can be in service of intimacy, or they can be completely separate. People were mixing up intimacy and sex, just as they mixed up sex and what they want from sex. Sexual desire is frequently about ego and not libido. In this, there is an opportunity.

Reality is rarely this neat or linear. Sex can be boring and impersonal, while a brush of the hand can be thrilling. One person can feel close to another from far away and the same person can have penetrative intercourse and not feel much of anything. Touch doesn’t have to be a hierarchy, and sex doesn’t have to be the only, or even the best, way of achieving intimacy.

The things people do from choice are meaningful and the effort that they take is a sign of a great love, even if they’re not pushed by an uncontrolled, intense physical passion. Few things are more romantic than someone trying hard because they want to make you happy. That is what this is.

Communicating honestly and openly—in a way where both people feel free and able to talk—is uncomfortable and painful. It’s unfair too, because it’s easier for some people to speak up than others. But a life of being understood without any uncomfortable conversations does not exist for anyone. Talking and listening are the only sure ways to make intentions clear.

We are rarely surrounded by many types of people who represent many visions of life, free to pick the one that fits best. If you don’t know who you are or what you want, the world will decide for you. It will show you a couple of options and tell you those are the only ones.

She did fantasize about a world without sexual intensity and sexual surveillance, where she didn’t have to meet with bishops who would ask whether she masturbated and questioned her about other sexual inclinations. The lascivious jokiness of “we know what you want” felt uncomfortable when she knew she didn’t want it at all.

Fuck the bishop meetings

“There’s not a known structure, but I’ve spent my whole life letting other people define these structures and trying to fit into what they experience the structure of a relationship to be.” It’s better to accept the questions without demanding answers, to exist in the “open-ended lived experience” of the moment, one where she can just be.

When allo writers ask Julie for advice on creating ace characters, she warns them not to write the character “like a ‘typical’ person but without the sex part.” Aces aren’t a puzzle with a missing piece. Everyone is their own full puzzle.

The path toward asexuality forced them to reject the idea that two people who were close should automatically try to date and have sex, as if that were a superior way of relating.

Being asexual can provide these powerful new perspectives, but the frameworks have limited power when they are still so hidden. Learning about and claiming asexuality can be transformative, but the world won’t be a safe and positive place for aces—or for anyone—until compulsory sexuality itself is dismantled. We do not dismantle compulsory sexuality by waiting for each person to catch up and then starting over again. We do it by fighting for structural change.

Diversity of ace experience is a strength, and diversity of other types of experience and identity will only be more so.

These are also the rewards of working toward ace liberation, because compulsory anything is the opposite of freedom. Ace liberation is a complicated term. Asexuality is not inherently politically progressive. Not everyone who is asexual identifies as politically progressive, and that does not make their asexuality any less legitimate. But the goals of the ace movement are progressive, and the potential of the ace movement is greater than aces being more visible in the culture and more important than aces proving that, except for this one thing, we’re just like everyone else. As CJ Chasin, the activist, has said, aces push the envelope. Once it is okay for aces to never have sex, it becomes more acceptable for everyone else who isn’t ace too. Ace liberation will help everyone.

The meaning of sex is always changing and the history of sexuality is complex. Compulsory sexuality and asexuality have changed across time and place; they can, and will, change again.

The goal of ace liberation is simply the goal of true sexual and romantic freedom for everyone. A society that is welcoming to aces can never be compatible with rape culture; with misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia; with current hierarchies of romance and friendship; and with contractual notions of consent. It is a society that respects choice and highlights the pleasure that can be found everywhere in our lives. I believe that all this is possible.