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

by Angela Chen

THERE IS NO ONE ASEXUAL (OR ACE) STORY and no book can capture all of ace experience.

WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich (or at least middle class), and democratic.

I considered myself lucky to have such an uncomplicated sexual history.

the language of sexual drive did not quite make sense to me.

aesthetic appreciation, a desire for emotional and physical closeness, a certain possessiveness.

Asexuality, I learned, is a sexual orientation, just like homosexuality and pansexuality and heterosexuality are sexual orientations. A person who is homosexual is sexually attracted to the same gender; a person who is asexual is sexually attracted to no one.

Growing up in Silicon Valley had helped me develop a healthy appreciation for alternative lifestyles,

I hadn’t had sex yet, but the idea held great promise.

It is possible to be ace and not realize it, to see the word and still shrug and move on.

Since I assumed I wasn’t asexual, asexuality seemed irre...

The woman who ordered blood tests in high school because she was convinced that her lack of desire for sex was a symptom of serious illness.

Disabled aces can have trouble fitting into either community, wondering where their disability ends and their asexuality begins,

Everyone wonders how to separate friendship and romance when sex is not part of the equation.

I thought I was a straight woman, like almost all my friends and a good portion of the population.

not understanding the appeal of kissing or why anyone would care.

feeling excluded from sexuality entirely and watching others participate.

Different aces have different tolerances.

Many sex-repulsed aces say that their reaction to the idea of sex is disgust, “as if you told a straight person you were into bestiality.”

Being exposed to sexual images and comments provoked a physical response that felt like eels squirming and writhing.

Many aces assume they are gay before wondering whether gay is the correct descriptor.

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.

But I was very curious about what it would be like to be desired, to be loved by someone that I desired too, desired wholeheartedly in a way that hadn’t been the case with my high school ex. That was the real root of my longing.

First love always feels like a miracle.

dread of an uncertain future overshadowed the safety I had in the present.

I wanted to be strong and wanted to run away in equal measure,

I could feel my emotions spinning out of control as I acted in ways I knew were wrong b...

why an open relationship was necessary: Henry saying that men would always want to stray because it was natural, that clinging to monogamy was old-fashioned

I didn’t know. Nothing he said sounded familiar. I had never experienced “just attraction,” a physical impulse—only emotional desire that manifested physically.

for me, desire for love and desire for sex had always been one and the same, an unbreakable link.

sexual attraction and sexual behavior are not the same and that one does not necessarily limit the other.

asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction while celibacy is the lack of sexual behavior.

The world is not a binary of aces and allos.

Asexuality is not an “internet orientation,” and the internet did not lead to the invention of asexual people.

asexual was a word from high school biology, used to describe organisms that clone themselves without sex.

Sexual attraction is so often conflated with sexual drive

Thinking about a penis inside me doesn’t interest me.

Like anyone, aces can be assholes, so somebody out there is probably using the concept of demisexuality to slut-shame.

Not experiencing sexual attraction doesn’t prevent aces from experiencing aesthetic attraction,

“Almost everyone looks the exact same to me in terms of attractiveness, except Matt Bomer. He’s pretty.”

Aesthetic attraction can guide romantic attraction, or the feeling of being romantically interested in or having a crush on someone.

People who don’t experience romantic attraction toward anyone are called aromantic, or aro.

I identify as biromantic and don’t experience sexual attraction to any gender,

People think about sex even if they don’t want to? What makes one person sexually attractive on that visceral level and not another? Allos can even be sexually attracted to people they find ugly? What?

That aces can point out contradictions around sexuality and language does not mean we need to solve them or that we are capable of doing so.

“I’m not lying because I’m a Christian.”

Despite its emphasis on purity culture and the importance of abstinence, religion is not entirely free from compulsory sexuality or the belief that lust is universal and to be otherwise is to be abnormal.

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 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.

Generally, heterosexual married sex is celebrated far more than unmarried sex, more so than gay sex or kinky sex. The world has not encouraged sex for those who are poor or for people of color.

In queer subcultures where heterosexuality is not enforced as strongly, compulsory sexuality can be expressed as the expectation that gay men be hypersexual or the worry by lesbian women about supposed “lesbian bed death.”