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

by Angela Chen

What I didn’t know was what it felt like to want sex without a specific person in mind. To think about sex at all when I was alone. To feel any physical urge for sex distinct from wanting the emotional intimacy it created.

Let’s take, for example, the question of how much sexual desire a person is supposed to have. How much is too little?

“I mean, yes,” he said. “Sort of. But also, not really. I’m sure you’ve been sexually attracted to someone that you’re not dating, but it’s often just attraction. Physical. That happens all the time and you manage it. For most people, it’s not some horrible thing you can’t deal with, though I guess it can be. Almost all the time it’s no big deal. We all learn to deal, you know?”

Yet the word asexual by itself would be pointless if it only described an experience and did not connect me to people who helped make that experience legible. Asexuality has always been a political label with a practical purpose, and the more important reason I identify as ace is because it has been useful for me.

This is such an articulate way of describing sexuality and labels, and their practical use politically

A shared vocabulary makes ideas more accessible while a lack of language can render an experience illegible. It can isolate.

Ace is so broad that academics are still arguing over how best to define asexuality for the purposes of research,

I identify as biromantic and don’t experience sexual attraction to any gender, yet I am ultimately more averse to sex with women than with men. All these caveats sound complicated, and they are, but they are also more accurate than painting myself with a broad brush.

I’m only asexual because there’s a word for it and because people have an objection to me not wanting to have sex. If they didn’t, my life would not have involved very much of talking about it,” she says.

There was “little to no prominent affirmation of non-desire in sex positivity and a lot of suggestions on how to ‘fix’ yourself.”10 It was taken for granted that every woman would love sex, if only she could figure out how.

My most feminist, sexual friends tell me of instinctively slut-shaming themselves, though they also know they have done nothing worthly of shame.

It is cause for celebration whenever anyone is, to the best of their ability, making their own choices free from pressure—and also working to change the social and political structures that will let everyone else have that same sexual freedom, and freedom of other kinds, too.

‘Do I actually want a romantic and sexual relationship, or do I just have a really intense platonic love for someone and I wanted to have some sort of validation that I was significant in your life the way you are in mine?’”

I am, however, curious about what would happen if everyone more carefully considered the distinction we make between friendship and romance, and the way we treat them differently and why. Many people are hesitant to say “I love you” to friends, much less ask, “How do you feel about time? What are we to each other?”

Criteria based on sex made sense when the main purpose of marriage was to merge fortunes and produce children, but today, as Baggini points out, marriage is more about a match of devotion than a match of trade.

The balance between willing and unwilling can be delicate, but distinguishing the two is imperative. “I’m not horny, but I’m glad to have sex to feel closer to my partner” and “I’m not horny, but I said yes so you’d stop pressuring me” both have elements of being consensual but unwanted. Neither is a perfect yes or a perfect no. Nagoski’s model marks them differently, making room for the exceedingly common experience of maintenance sex, or sex for the sake of a relationship.

Today, romantic kissing is still not a universal human act. In one 2015 study, anthropologists surveyed 168 cultures and found that fewer than half of them engaged in what they called “romantic-sexual kissing.”

“I’m starting to suspect that the greatest insight the ace spectrum has for sex therapy isn’t identity labels,” writes Anagnori, the ace blogger and therapist, “but making therapists re-examine their assumptions, and expanding their ideas of what ‘intimacy’ and ‘pleasure’ really mean.”

I didn’t particularly care about the physical feeling of sex, but I craved the thrill of being, specifically, sexually desired.

Sexual desirability is one of the greatest assets that a person can have, a form of privilege and protection that makes it easier to move through life itself, a quality that people can covet even if we don’t feel the symmetrical desire toward others.

insight fallacy, or the mistaken belief that understanding a problem will solve it.

The point of sex was not just to have sex. It was to know that she could inspire sexual desire in others. Sex was connected to who she was and who she needed to be. Sex held different meanings for Anna and Meredith, and it did not seem like the difference could be reconciled.