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

by Angela Chen

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.