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

by Angela Chen

Beliefs about the voracious nature of male sexuality are so strong that they can lead ace men to doubt their gender identity.

One of the most alienating things as a demisexual is to have my sexuality called into question my whole life because I don’t exhibit the expected behavior.

Incels, on the other hand, are desperately interested in sex. Incels have also absorbed the lesson that real men have sex with women, but they lack the sexual expertise needed to participate in the rites of masculinity. For this I have sympathy. Exclusion and social rejection are painful, and in fact, the first incel website was started by a woman who wanted to create a supportive community for the lonely.20 Incels, however, are not merely lonely. They are also entitled, and here my sympathy ends. Instead of questioning the narrative of masculinity that prioritizes sexual conquest, incels lean into it, misusing evolutionary psychology to make themselves more miserable and falling into reductionist theories about genetic fitness and how the purpose of men is to impregnate as many women as possible.

For now, though, male sexual stereotypes remain so strong that voluntarily celibate aces are sometimes conflated with incels. Ace men tell me that people of all genders assume that they are secret incels who hide behind a made-up identity. Such is the trap: Even when a man doesn’t want sex, he can be lumped in with the men who will kill in their desire to have it. Men cannot be simply uninterested; there must always be something else at work.

The truth of the gender inequality in sexual freedom, and the importance of teaching women to honor their sexual desires, has distorted into the belief that female sexual liberation only looks like one thing—and that’s the opposite of what women’s lives looked like before. Overcorrection doesn’t solve the problem. It only redistributes the shame and the stigma.

the rhetoric that female sexual apathy is always caused by repression is to forget that there have always been many ways to want sex and have sex. It is to be a victim of what Rubin, the anthropologist, called “one of the most tenacious ideas about sex,” that “there is one best way to do it, and that everyone should do it that way.”14 This belief is wrong when only heterosexual, monogamous sex is accepted. It will still be wrong in a world where only heterosexual, monogamous sex is not accepted. People may realize that they enjoy certain acts, but there is a difference between addressing desires that are already there (or exploring to see what you might like) and going searching for what must be there. It is true that many women are inhibited and perhaps do not yet know it. It is not true that inside everyone unwilling to try a threesome is a freak desperate to let her flag fly. Perhaps there is no flag. The assumption of a ubiquitous, voracious libido ignores the reality of sexual variation. The idea that there always exists some secret sexual self to liberate only makes sense if you believe that we are all the same deep down—that everyone wants the same things, only some of us don’t know yet that we get off on being flogged. Because sexual variation exists, there is no universal vision of liberated sexuality. The personal is political, but what’s best for each person may be different.