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

by Angela Chen

Disabled aces can have trouble fitting into either community, wondering where their disability ends and their asexuality begins, and whether finding that border should matter.

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.”

“It’s the first time I heard, ‘You can just not have sex,’ and that was incredibly freeing,

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.

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 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.

Sexuality of any kind never exists in a vacuum. It is not broken down easily but is affected by biology and culture, by our emotional state and mental health, by race and class and gender and the passing of time.

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.

When sex is a commodity, having and flaunting sex becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, used to signal that we are not passionless, uptight, boring, and robotic but instead have the financial and social capital to be hip and fun and high status and multiorgasmic.

Surveys of the ace community show that far more women identify as asexual than men—about 63 percent versus 11 percent, according to the most recent numbers12—likely in part because asexuality is a greater challenge to male sexual stereotypes.

“Because the sex never clicked, there was always this feeling that I was still infantile,”