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

by Angela Chen

Zii Miller, a trans man in Florida who grew up in Europe, did not have to contend with either compulsory heterosexuality or purity culture. However, when he told his mother about being ace, she blamed America, believing that her son would be different if the family had stayed in France. There, Zii would have been exposed to so-called healthy, open sexuality, instead of America’s Puritan values and discomfort around bodies. American values, she thought, had caused him to be repressed. The United States had made her child weird.

Isn’t it sad that people are having less sex and that a one-night stand now seems like a waste? Isn’t it pitiful to be playing video games instead of feeling sexual pleasure? Shouldn’t we be worried that people don’t care about sex anymore? For truly passionate people, sex—the pursuit, the experience—is always better than a movie, a book, a game. The loser of today has three computer screens and no sex drive.

The result is that anyone who isn’t sexual enough or sexual in the right way becomes lesser. 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.

Sex sells, and sex makes other things easier to sell.

Surveys of the ace community show that far more women identify as asexual than men—about 63 percent versus 11 percent,

Men are taught that they are not men, and therefore not deserving of respect or status, unless they can sleep with as many women as possible.

“as far as these fraternity brothers are concerned, the ideal masculinity is hypersexual, promiscuous, and heterosexual.”

nearly 60 percent of millennial men said that they feel pressure to join in when others are talking about women sexually.

“A male virgin can effectively be locked out or outright shamed.”

incels, or involuntary celibates: misogynistic, usually heterosexual men who are angry at women for not having sex with them.

“Some people just can’t wrap their heads around” a man not wanting sex,

he wondered whether he would feel less alienated if he were gay but not asexual.

Beliefs about the voracious nature of male sexuality are so strong that they can lead ace men to doubt their gender identity. One ace man I interviewed said that he initially wondered whether he was trans because he knew that women were supposed to be the ones uninterested in sex.

he especially didn’t want to be female, not when being female meant having to shave and wear particular clothes and be hit on by guys.

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.

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.

The subreddit r/incel had about forty thousand subscribers before being banned for inciting violence.

If sexual frustration were the only problem, incels could try to pay for sex. Yet, many incels refuse to “debase” themselves by going to sex workers. They divide women into the blonde, large-breasted Stacys, and the Beckys, plain women who commit gender crime by refusing to accentuate their femininity, Squirrell explains. Incels scoff at Beckys, hoping to score exclusively with Stacys because Stacys alone are the sexual currency that will lead to admiration. It’s about the status.

I am no incel apologist. Many people feel unattractive and undateable without believing that others owe them sex or resorting to murder. Still, it’s undeniable that the rage of the incels is connected to cultural expectations around men and sex, and that the same is true of the alienation of ace men.

male sexual stereotypes remain so strong that voluntarily celibate aces are sometimes conflated with incels.

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.

If sex is a gift from God and wonderful if you do everything right, what does it mean when you do everything right and the sex disappoints time and time again? Where does that leave you?

Years of Hunter’s life had been spent wondering what was wrong until he learned about asexuality from an Instagram bio, yet it’s not uncommon for ace activism to be considered a nuisance and a joke.

It is a failure of society if anyone needs to say “I have a partner” to turn someone down, and it is a failure of society if anyone needs to invoke a sexual orientation to avoid unwanted sex because saying no doesn’t do the job.

he had put sex on a pedestal and thought himself wrong for not loving it,

he had sex out of insecurity.

Rejecting one form of social programming makes it easier to start questioning everything else.

TWO WEEKS AFTER I TURNED TWENTY-TWO, I asked my friends to take me to a bar and help me pick someone up. A request like this was unprecedented. I did not drink, I did not go to bars, and I avoided so much as holding a person’s hand.

But I hadn’t told my friends about my insecurities. I hadn’t told them that I felt so old-fashioned and backward for only wanting sex if it came with love.

Nothing could stop my suspicion that Henry was lying when he said that sex without love was common and that he could have sex with others without becoming emotionally entangled.

I needed to live up to the goals I had set for myself: to be modern instead of old-fashioned, a good feminist who lived out my beliefs, and to not be repressed.

“Repressed” is the opposite of “liberated.” An insult. In culturally liberal circles, the sexually conservative woman is often considered to be sexually repressed—and the sexually repressed woman is a symbol of a time before freedom. She is uptight and in denial, white-knuckling her way through life. She is the perfectly coiffed fifties housewife, lacking the ease of liberated counterparts who are in touch with their bodies and secure with their place in the world. The sexually repressed woman is an object of pity and a reminder of the importance of progress. She is embarrassing.

The words used to describe women who didn’t have sex (celibate, abstinent, pure, chaste) seemed either clinical or moralistic in a way I disdained.

she hears from women who believe that “not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”

My ideas about the humiliation of repression and the meaning of liberated sexuality did not come from nowhere. For so long, women have been encouraged to deny our sexual needs and instead serve the needs of men. Our worth is tied to sex. We are sexualized until we are too old, yet shamed and policed for being sexual ourselves, prevented from exploring what we desire or are allowed to desire—and this is doubly true if the women in question aren’t straight.

Feminists have never all agreed with each other and feminist attitudes toward sex have never been static.

Having sex is cool; not having sex is less so. Sex is not only a commodity for men to buy. Women can now participate, too, conspicuously consuming sex to show off and also to be able to say that this consumption is empowering because we are using our power to have the same rights as men. Female horniness is to be cultivated.

Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall in the blockbuster show Sex and the City, is one iconic representation of this modern, sex-positive woman. She’s a high-powered publicist, ambitious and confident, with some of the funniest and best lines in the show. An unapologetic sexual libertine, Samantha talks a big game about her many affairs and calls herself a “try-sexual,” as in, she’ll try anything once.

If having sex were merely cool, this would have bothered me little. However, sex had also become feminist and this I cared about. Through a subtle series of twists, like in a game of telephone, sex for liberal women has become more than a way to enjoy ourselves or even prove that we’re desirable. Conspicuous consumption of sex has become a way to perform feminist politics.

The charmed circle illustrates the existence of a hierarchy of sex acts. Inside the charmed circle is everything that is socially acceptable, which traditionally means monogamous, married, vanilla, heterosexual sex in private. Outside these borders would be, for example, promiscuous sex, group sex, and so on. The charmed circle represented the conservative, rigid status quo.

On one end is our old friend, the sexually repressed woman. She is heterosexual, probably a Republican, maybe a WASP. She is blonde and stays at home with her kids and clutches her pearls when she’s not clutching a cross. On the other end is a woman who is down for anything: threesomes, polyamory, kink, sex clubs. She has multiple orgasms and multiple partners and wants to abolish ICE.

The politically conservative are often also sexually conservative, at least in their public personas.

The first thing Chris said was that asexuality wasn’t real. It was an idea made up by misogynistic men to keep women from being sexually liberated. Chris knew this because he was a worldly professional, a writer who could name-drop artists and liked to talk about Freud. She was his shy, anxious neighbor, a teenager who looked up to him and had attention deficit disorder to boot. Her opinion would not matter here.

Being asexual means you can’t have passion, he’d say. If you don’t have passion, you can’t write. Therefore, if you don’t have sex, you can’t be a writer. Identifying as ace means you’re brainwashed by the patriarchy and you need to work harder to fight that. Otherwise, you can’t be a feminist, and you certainly can’t be an artist.

men have long used shame to control women.

women aren’t free unless they have sex—with

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.

Patriarchal control is often responsible for women not enjoying sex. It is not always responsible.

Political gatekeeping based on sexuality also alienates feminists for whom sex is not the priority.