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

by Angela Chen

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.

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. Make no mistake: Sex is political, and its meaning is always changing.

People experience distress over many conditions not because the condition itself is a problem, but because prejudice makes their lives harder.

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.

Sakugawa’s descriptions of platonic friend-love are similar to what many aces would call nonsexual romantic love.

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.

“Queerplatonic” is an attempt to develop more precise language to fit the range of roles that people can occupy in our lives, roles more varied than the few words available. Social labels provide information; they are signals and instructions.

It has become a shorthand stronger than best friend, a gender-neutral way of saying “soul mate” or “the one I trust most.” “You’re my person” isn’t tied to official romantic relationship status.

Conversations about emotional commitment are uncommon, and if you don’t know where you stand, you don’t know your place. In a QPP, these questions have been tackled already, their answers cocreated. It became possible to voice opinions and preferences on a more even ground. Everything became freer.

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.

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.”

Before, when he was working from the premise that there are good reasons to refuse sex and bad reasons to refuse sex, he was experiencing what the philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “hermeneutical injustice,” or the harm caused by being denied crucial information.

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.

If you have to say yes sometimes, better to say it to a partner, because sex is supposed to be good when you’re in love. 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.

Aces say, over and over, that it is not morally correct to automatically privilege the preferences of the person who wants to have sex. If one person wants to have sex just as much as the other person wants not to have sex, the desires are equal, and one should desire not trump the other.

Kink, in the popular imagination, is all about sex, sex, sex; kink for aces can be about everything but. It is about power and emotion, role-play and interesting sensations and about getting away from the pressures of sex, sex, sex. In fact, kinky aces say that community norms help them negotiate consent in a supportive way that leaves more room for saying no.

In the kink community, everything is negotiated (or at least is supposed to be) beforehand. “In a scene, I can say, ‘I don’t care if you get hard, I don’t care if you get wet, as long as you don’t expect me to do anything about it, or only do certain things about it,’”

Nonverbal communication in particular is important because social pressures can make it hard for some to speak up and verbally say no. “I’m autistic and people are always telling me that 95 percent of communication is nonverbal and tell me it’s important to make efforts to understand that,” says Lola Phoenix, a writer in London. “And then when it comes to consent it’s suddenly like, ‘Why didn’t they say something? No one is a mind reader!’ That’s really hypocritical.”

Yet when groups as diverse as the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Thonga of South Africa, and the Trobriand Islanders first encountered the act, they perceived it as disgusting instead of a mark of affection.4 Today, romantic kissing is still not a universal human act.

You get to realizing that your life partner realistically needs to be so many things and sex doesn’t have to be at the top.” Rarely does a perfect correlation between sexual chemistry and relationship quality exist (or last), and the people with whom Alptraum has been most sexually compatible haven’t necessarily been those that were the best for the relationships she wanted. “For me, there’s a baseline of pleasure and there are so many other things about a person that makes them worth it,” she says.

One funny thing: At most of the kink parties Selena went to, no one was doing anything that seemed to her to be sexual. People would say, “I’m tying someone up, that’s sex,” but much of the time it didn’t seem to feel sexual and nobody could explain how this made sense. Was tying someone up really sex, or was it a rope and some trust? Selena didn’t care about sex, but she did love rope, so it was unclear what exactly was happening here, and what she actually wanted. Intimacy, as it turns out. Selena cared about intimacy, and kink was a way for her to be intimate with others. 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.

I love this so much

Being questioned really did help me refocus my attention on what I truly wanted to feel, not on the goal that seemed like it would get me there.

Questioning your goals helps to find the right /alternative paths towards acheiving that goal. Instead of going by a traditional script

At the end of the day, goal factoring is really just goal questioning. Cassie will ask about the client’s definition of ace and their definition of sex, what else is going on and what purpose everything holds. Who’s in the room here? they’ll ask. You’re in the room, I’m in the room, but who else is speaking?

When people stop viewing sex as the end-all be-all of an encounter, when sex loses its dominance as the most important and intimate thing that could happen, when it becomes feasible to ask directly for what is desired, more ways of relating and connecting become clear. “I’m starting to suspect that the greatest insight the ace spectrum has for sex therapy isn’t identity labels,” writes Anagnori, the ace blogger and therapist, “but making therapists re-examine their assumptions, and expanding their ideas of what ‘intimacy’ and ‘pleasure’ really mean.”

I didn’t particularly care about the physical feeling of sex, but I craved the thrill of being, specifically, sexually desired. I didn’t experience sexual attraction myself, yet I wanted others to have that desire for me. The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I have always known that I want to be sexually desired because I want emotional reassurance and a sense of my own power. Sexual desirability is one of the greatest assets that a person can have, a form of privilege and protection that makes it easier to move through life itself, a quality that people can covet even if we don’t feel the symmetrical desire toward others.

James has sometimes told past partners that he’s willing to have sex but “you have to understand that while I get intimacy out of it, the actual form is for you.” Partners don’t like this, just as they don’t like willing consent.

I know people are suspicious of emotional desire for sex because they like to ask me whether it feels good when non-repulsed aces have sex. The question stems from curiosity, but also from worry that the lack of sexual attraction means that all sex is automatic pity sex, endured instead of enjoyed. The answer to the question of whether sex feels good for aces is sometimes yes and sometimes no, just like with allos. Many people, ace and allo alike, don’t feel a spontaneous desire for sex, but they start to feel that mental wanting once (consensual) physical touch is initiated and their body becomes aroused. This process, called responsive desire, is a slow warming-up, an “I know I’ll get into it once I start.”15 It’s common and often at the core of willing consent. Sex can feel good on a physical level without attraction; I’ve heard it described as “superior masturbation.” For others, the fact that the appeal is emotional or intellectual does not diminish its power.

The biggest difference is that it usually requires much more effort for sex to feel good for aces compared to allos and much less awkwardness for sex to feel boring or uncomfortable. To return to a food metaphor: Imagine the difference between eating when ravenous and being full but willing to share a snack. People can enjoy eating when they’re not hungry, but when the food itself is not satiating hunger, the social aspects need far more care and have to be just so. Not being desired in the right way feels frustrating, and stepping away from this story takes work. But desire of other kinds can be just as heady, its grip just as hard to shake. Willing consent and other forms of emotional desire can be a gesture of caring, a starting point from which to explore and have fun too. 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. A switch in perspective requires elevating emotional desire for sex and seeing work as romantic. It also requires everyone paying attention to what we want emotionally instead of just physically and finding new (or other) ways to fulfill those needs.

For Zee, sex goes from “vaguely amusing” to “deeply chore-like” after the first two weeks of a relationship. Sex isn’t repulsive, but it’s a hobby other people have that Zee doesn’t care for, like bowling. “If you have someone who loves to go bowling all the time, that’s great,” they say, “but I’m not the kind of person that wants to go bowling more than maybe once every couple of years, and I’m not going to buy the shoes for it.”

The two are in an open relationship, but that isn’t a panacea. The person who wants sex can have sex with someone else, but confusion and resentment can still develop, and conversations about desire and need and want are necessary to remain close.

insight fallacy, or the mistaken belief that understanding a problem will solve it. As Zee said, knowing about asexuality was a first step but not a quick fix. It did not prevent Zee from feeling that their partner was entitled to sex with them.

There is no guarantee that being able to name and recognize scripts will solve the problem and save the relationship. However, not talking does guarantee that the scripts will retain their power. Talking may not be sufficient, but it is necessary.

therapists and other experts told me this obvious piece of advice over and over again, and the more that I learned, the more I realized just how much no one wants to do it. People will pay money to avoid talking.

Communication is key but often avoided lolz

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.

Selena is still with Georgia and has found other partners as well: a man named Daniel with whom she’s in a dominant/submissive relationship, and some people that she and Georgia both date. She has sex with some partners and not others. It all depends on the person and the context. “I think something that continues to strike me through all these relationships is how non-important sex can be, and how awesome it can be, but how insignificant it is compared to all of the other things,” Selena says. “I see sex as one of several hundred intimate things you can do, and just like every other one of the intimate things, it has its pros and cons and it’s certainly nowhere near the highest on the list. I prefer hair pulling over sex any day of the week, but that doesn’t mean I dislike sex if it’s done right. If it’s bad sex and no one knows how to do it, that’s not as enjoyable; it’s like getting whipped by someone who doesn’t know how to use a whip.” She’s grateful to have had those early conversations with Georgia and for the chance to learn all this about herself and others. She knows now that the people in the relationship get to decide how important sex is, and whether this is a challenge they can handle, and what they really care about in life and love. For Selena, sex can be unnecessary or it can be a way to enrich the relationships. It is never the goal.

Many of us learn to desire by watching other people desire.

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. As so many people throughout this book have said, 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.

this is so true!!

It’s especially difficult to reject scripts when it’s unclear what they should be replaced with or when we haven’t seen others do the same.

This is why visibility and community matter

Maria was trying to remember who she had been before all those other roles took over. Maria had asked herself where she had left off, with whom she had last felt like Maria first and foremost. You, Maria told Anna. You were the last person I was myself with. I felt the need to talk to you because talking to you was connecting with my old self.

“I didn’t understand this experience and I was doing something without an anchoring place in me that I wanted. I didn’t feel a sense of self around sexuality,

The sensations were happening to her with no narrative, no structure or container that helped the bodily experience mean anything.

Without a place for asexuality in the culture, those who love her were distressed about her asexuality in a way that they never were about her being trans.

The relationship has energy and intensity, and sometimes Anna asks herself whether it’s sexual or romantic and then decides no, probably not. “I cannot figure that out,” Anna tells me. “But also, I’m more and more okay with not knowing” and not forcing herself to figure it out. “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.

The experiences of aces do more than outline the constrictive structures caused by compulsory sexuality. They can also reveal, or at least give permission to embrace, other forms of eroticism and other ways of living that may be just as fulfilling.

Audre Lorde. In “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde defines eroticism as “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual.” The erotic is an inner resource, a vitality. It is a force that compels us to be close to each other, one that “forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them and lessens the threat of their difference.”

Such a definition of the erotic, as a profound force greater than the sexual, is crucial to how aces think about all that life has to offer, and Awkward-Rich’s poem is a powerful way to reclaim this different form of eros. Awkward-Rich’s list of “things I like more than having sex” is familiar to many aces. The twist is the lack of shame when elevating other activities. It is a manifesto, not an apology.

Being ace can mean less interpersonal drama and more freedom from social norms around relationships.

Asexuality also helped Zee build more intimate friendships, unburdened by the subtle expectation of sex. 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. The ace perspective offered a celebration of other types of intimacy.

The goal, at least to me, is that one day neither the DSM criteria nor asexuality-as-identity will be necessary. It will be easy to say yes or no or maybe—to sexuality, to romantic relationships—without coercion, without further justification, without needing a community to validate that answer. Sexual variety will be a given and social scripts will be weakened; sex will be decommodified. 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.