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

by Angela Chen

It gave me the feeling I had always wanted: not sexual pleasure, but the thrill of specialness.

When he talked about how everyone was sexually attracted to everyone else all the time, I could not understand attraction as anything but how I experienced it: emotional yearning—love, really—overpowering and overwhelming, a disaster for our relationship if targeted toward anyone but me.

I had strong, complicated feelings around romance and sex but lacked the language to express them.

Sexual attraction is so often conflated with sexual drive and other types of attraction.

(As a side note, it’s important to clarify that neither sexual attraction nor sex drive are the same as physical arousal.

Ace is so broad that academics are still arguing over how best to define asexuality for the purposes of research, since a study that includes self-identified aces will likely return different results than a study that only includes celibate aces.10

“My friend said, ‘I feel like other people put out a certain energy when they want to attract someone,’” Shari remembers, “and I still don’t have any idea what this energy is.”