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

by Angela Chen

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.

sexual attraction is not sex drive.

Simply put, sex drive (or libido) is the desire for sexual release, a set of feelings in the body, often combined with intrusive thoughts. It can come out of nowhere and for no obvious reason and not be about anyone.

Sexual attraction, then, is horniness toward or caused by a specific person. It is the desire to be sexual with that partner—libido with a target. To use a food metaphor: a person can feel physiological hunger, which would be like sex drive, without craving a specific dish, which would be more like sexual attraction.

neither sexual attraction nor sex drive are the same as physical arousal. People can have random erections or be aroused during medical exams with no libido or attraction involved.

When sex is a commodity, having and flaunting sex becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, used to signal that we are not passionless, uptight, boring, and robotic but instead have the financial and social capital to be hip and fun and high status and multiorgasmic.

Surveys of the ace community show that far more women identify as asexual than men—about 63 percent versus 11 percent, according to the most recent numbers12—likely in part because asexuality is a greater challenge to male sexual stereotypes.

The lack of the right kind of sexual behavior is a barrier to connection, so men’s talk and behavior can be less about wanting sex than it is about wanting friends.

“I’m not a ‘non-crafter’; I’m only asexual because there’s a word for it and because people have an objection to me not wanting to have sex. If they didn’t, my life would not have involved very much of talking about it,”

Sex wasn’t upsetting or bad but, as she says, “You can have sex or you can watch Netflix and I’m going to pick Netflix.”

Scientists spent a long time trying to find the “gay gene,”43 yet the same amount of effort has not been spent trying to find the straight gene. Straightness is considered the ideal, so people rarely bother to wonder whether that’s nature or nurture, even though it’s both and even though straightness, as Adrienne Rich made clear, is often conditioned instead of chosen.

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.