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

by Angela Chen

That’s the strange thing about this orientation and all the misconceptions it carries. It is possible to be ace and not realize it, to see the word and still shrug and move on. Definitions are not enough; one must plumb deeper.

Sexuality is everywhere, and in every place that sexuality touches society, asexuality does too.

“It’s the first time I heard, ‘You can just not have sex,’ and that was incredibly freeing, because as a kid you hear the talk about this big scary thing that’s going to happen and how you’re going to want it, and that’s just terrifying, absolutely terrifying.”

For them, a word like “hot” could indicate a physical pull of the type Jane had described. For me, “hot” conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure.

It was so easy to never have sex, I thought. It was the default state and it took real effort to do anything else. What could have compelled her to take such risks? Now I understood why it hadn’t been so easy. Our experiences had been fundamentally different but not in a way obvious enough to make me question them.

Learning about asexuality provoked a shock of recognition and I wanted to honor that.

This is a book that centers ace experience. Aces today are not concerned with how to have sex, but we are not anti-sex either. We don’t ask people to stop having sex or feel guilty for enjoying it. We do ask that all of us question our sexual beliefs and promise that doing so means that the world would be a better and freer place for everyone. I hope that ace readers see themselves here and feel understood. I hope that non-ace readers also recognize parts of themselves and gain concepts and tools to help them puzzle out their own confusions around how to be in the world. We are all still figuring it out.

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.

Asexuality is not an “internet orientation,” and the internet did not lead to the invention of asexual people. People had identified as asexual for decades before and in the 1970s bonded over asexuality in self-published work and zines.3 The people already existed; the internet helped facilitate these discussions at a scale and volume that had not been possible before.

To explain asexuality and what it means to not experience sexual attraction, aces must define and describe the exact phenomena we don’t experience. It requires us to use the language of “lack,” claiming we are legitimate in spite of being deficient, while struggling to explain exactly what it is we don’t get.

Aces don’t experience this. 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.

when any two things often go together, people wrongly assume that they must always go together.

Sexual attraction, then, is horniness toward or caused by a specific person.

It’s an umbrella that covers different, diverse, and sometimes inconsistent experiences, including ones that don’t perfectly hew to the “lack of sexual attraction” definition.

Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts.

Sexuality is more than sexual orientation, and attraction is more than sexual attraction, yet humans can act as though sexual interest is the only reason we find ourselves compelled by others.

In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich argued that heterosexuality is not merely a sexual orientation that happens to be the orientation of most people. Heterosexuality is a political institution that is taught and conditioned and reinforced.

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.

Wow yeah

The label of asexual should be value neutral. It should indicate little more than sexual orientation. Instead, asexual implies a slew of other, negative associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken. These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel.

Aces do not comply and so are dismissed and told that our experience is depression or delusion or childish innocence, and that we cannot play with the big kids. We are not quite right, or not quite worthwhile—made in the shape of a human but with faulty wiring and something lost,

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.

Liberated sexuality—that is, sexuality free from social shaming—can look like promiscuity or it can look like celibacy.

White upper-class women, less affected by racism and classism, are also less likely to see the need for a broader vision of feminism that emphasizes these concerns and, therefore, are more likely to center this narrow vision of sexual liberation as female liberation.

Explicit lyrics and content about desire are not a problem, but that this type of content can dominate or be relentlessly pushed in young, liberal, queer spaces is. Dominance of any one idea can be harmful. It can skew the lesson.

“I’m like ‘I want you to stare at me, but I don’t want you to fuck me, and they have nothing to do with each other,’” Selena continues. “And then allos are so funny because they just insist that those have everything to do with each other.”

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 greater fight is to have everyone realize that there does not need to be “normal”—there only needs to be what we are comfortable with and the ability to decide what we like to do with our bodies and our stories and our lives.

Just as with asexuality, the possibility of change should not justify disbelieving what someone says is their experience or being overly concerned that they might miss out on a part of life they currently don’t want.

It is connection and personal fulfillment that count, not received ideas of what different types of relationships should look like or which forms of relating are superior.

Asexuality begins to feel like a twisted, reverse version of the scarlet A, a modern brand that now stands for ace and alone.

“Asexuality is just a different way of seeing on what terms we want to be with one another. It’s a way of getting very honest about how humans see each other and the different ways that we place value on relationships,”