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

by Angela Chen

The word alone was an answer that made perfect, immediate sense. Lucid was clearly asexual but hadn’t known that there existed a label for this experience. Few do, because it is so widely assumed that everyone is allosexual (or allo), the term for people who do experience sexual attraction. In other words, allosexuals are people who aren’t ace.

I understood for the first time that it is possible to lack the experience of sexual attraction without being repulsed by sex, just like it is possible to neither physically crave nor be disgusted by a food like crackers but still enjoy eating them as part of a cherished social ritual. Being repulsed by sex can be a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction, but a lack of sexual attraction can also be hidden by social performativity or wanting (and having) sex for emotional reasons—and because the different types of desire are bound together so tightly, it can be difficult to untangle the various strands.

Lucid’s story is easy for people to accept; mine, less so. Lucid’s sex repulsion—the eels, the nausea—seems very different from the experience of allos, so people think that’s what asexuality should be like. My experience, on the other hand, might sound typical for a less sexual person in a sexual society, not like anything out of the ordinary or anything that requires a separate identity label.

It does not make room for asexuality, even though Kinsey knew about asexual people. During the thousands of interviews that he conducted, Kinsey had come across people who didn’t fit onto his line—who, in his language, had “no socio-sexual contacts or reactions.”2 Faced with data that didn’t fit this theory, he didn’t revise his line to make it more multidimensional. Instead, Kinsey marked these people into a separate category called X and carried on. Heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual dominated, while Group X was mostly forgotten. 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.

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, 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. And just as people have different sex drives, they also experience different levels of sexual attraction. Some aces have a libido and some don’t, but we all share the lack of sexual attraction, and most of us have low desire for partnered sex.

To my mind, sexual orientation is one part of sexuality, but so much else—kinks and fetishes, aesthetics and fantasies—can fill those borders. So much room can be available in which to explore the boundaries of sexuality beyond the heaviness of orientation.

If the phrase compulsory sexuality sounds familiar, that’s because it borrows from the poet Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality. 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.1 Compulsory heterosexuality is not the belief that most people are heterosexual. It is a set of assumptions and behaviors—that only heterosexual love is innate, that women need men as social and economic protectors—that support the idea of heterosexuality as the default and only option. It makes people believe that heterosexuality is so widespread only because it is “natural,” even though, as Rich writes, “the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.”2

One more time: sex is political. The questions of who deserves pleasure and what is considered transgressive and the very definition of sex are political. The meaning of sex and feminism and liberation is different for poor women and women of color, disabled women, and women of faith. Wealthy women with many partners are more likely to be considered liberated, for example, while working-class women with many partners are more likely to be considered trashy. Queer women have to deal with homophobia, the stigma of hypersexuality, and fetishization. Trans women are shamed and their gender identities are denied. All this can make it difficult for women to express their sexualities at all.

That doesn’t mean every sexually indifferent woman is repressed. Patriarchal control is often responsible for women not enjoying sex. It is not always responsible. 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.

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. Liberated sexuality—that is, sexuality free from social shaming—can look like promiscuity or it can look like celibacy. And because liberated sexuality exists in many forms, there is no reason that being sexually conservative must mean being sexually repressed and no reason that being sexually conservative must prevent one’s political radicalism.

All these perspectives deserve consideration. I, for one, am not pro-sex. I am not sex-positive or sex-negative. I am pro-pleasure, which does not need to include sex at all, and I am pro-sexual choice—real choice. It is not enough to say that everyone should only do what they want. That’s a bromide that anyone can parrot and it ignores the ways that society pressures us to want certain things. Back it up. Show us examples of powerful, enviable women who are openly indifferent to sex, secure in that decision, and not constantly challenged by others. Don’t reinforce the new charmed circle with comments about how polyamory is more evolved than monogamy, or look down on vanilla sex. Stop assuming that sexual behavior must be linked to political belief or that horniness is an interesting personality trait. That’s closer to what I mean by real choice.

The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian group that existed in the 1970s, would have understood what Selena was expressing. Their famous Combahee River Collective Statement coined the term “identity politics” and discussed the ways that multiple identities overlap. The Combahee members observed, as many would after them, that “major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Racial oppression is difficult to separate from class oppression and from gender-based or sexual oppression because they are experienced simultaneously and “the synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives,” resulting in, for example, “racial–sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual.”4 Asian men and Asian women share a race but not a gender, and sexuality is mediated by both, so the experience of identity and sex for, say, me and for one of my male cousins can be very different. Scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw addressed this phenomenon when she coined the term intersectionality in a 1989 law article that pointed out a major weakness in anti-discrimination law: it only acknowledges a single axis of oppression.5

The question of who gets to be ace versus who is considered deluded or naive matters beyond the borders of each specific community. The details of why some groups find it harder than others to accept asexuality, or be accepted as ace, reveal the outlines of how sex and power and history have combined.

Representation not only reflects, but actually changes reality.

It’s hard if you confirm a stereotype and it’s hard if you violate a stereotype and it’s hard if you think you’re violating the stereotype only because you hate it so much.

The legendary Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote this phrase, shocking in its bluntness, in 1927 to support the right to forcibly sterilize the “unfit.”25

Not all aces have been welcoming of people like Cara. Members of the ace community, especially in early years, rejected disabled aces completely, insisting that they would delegitimize asexuality and make it impossible to prove that asexuality is not related to (or caused by) disability and sickness. Even the efforts to add the asexual exception to the DSM ended up being subtly ableist by focusing on how happy aces are. “Rather than challenging stigma against both mental illness and asexuality, it seeks instead to rid asexuality of the stigma of mental illness,” writes Wake Forest gender studies scholar Kristina Gupta. “Such normalizing tactics may come at the cost of intersectional analyses and coalitional possibilities.”

A person’s heterosexuality isn’t considered fake if they were abused as a child, yet childhood abuse is often the automatic culprit for asexuality.

So aces become afraid, closing ranks and excluding everyone who ventures too far from the gold-star ideal, who might raise too many questions and bring the rest of us down. The tally of requirements adds up, creating a long list of criteria that very few people can fulfill. In the desire to be respected, people become ableist and prejudiced, straining to present ourselves as happy and healthy when it should be fine to be ace and unhappy and unhealthy, like all the unhappy and unhealthy straight people out there.