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

by Angela Chen

People can enjoy eating when they’re not hungry, but when the food itself is not satiating hunger, the social aspects need far more care and have to be just so.

If asexuality—which is often conceptualized as a lack—is negative space, we must consider that negative space can be more than an absent image, more than just not having sex. It can be an image in itself, an optical illusion where the picture flips back and forth. Two faces or a vase. A penguin or a man with hair. A woman’s face or a man playing the saxophone. The experiences of aces do more than outline the constrictive structures caused by compulsory sexuality. They can also reveal, or at least give permission to embrace, other forms of eroticism and other ways of living that may be just as fulfilling.