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

by Angela Chen

I never think about sex involuntarily and could be celibate for life with little trouble—line

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.

“I wanted sex on an intellectual level. I wanted everything that sex was supposed to bring me.”

“We’re whole people who just lack that ‘driving force’ and it’s understandable in the same way that it’s understandable that someone doesn’t have ‘crafts’ as their driving force.”

He wouldn’t initiate anymore, but she could always tell him when she wanted sex and he would be happy to please her.

I believed all of the assumptions embedded in this archetype of the woman who doesn’t embrace sex: that she is prudish and prim, that she hasn’t done the proper work of liberating herself from shame, and that she is politically conservative too. None of this aligned with my goals. 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. The words used to describe women who did (free, empowered, bold) I liked and wanted to apply to me.

Transgressive sex becomes a political act against patriarchy; its opposite, submission to patriarchy.

“You can have sex or you can watch Netflix and I’m going to pick Netflix.” Certain sexual activities did feel pleasurable, but the pleasure didn’t seem to come from sexual attraction. It felt good in the same way that brushing your hair or stretching a hamstring feels good, so it seemed right to identify as “somewhere on the ace spectrum.” Ace identity matches what she knows of her life.

“I THINK I AM IN FRIEND-LOVE WITH YOU,” says the narrator of a comic of the same name, written and illustrated by Yumi Sakugawa and published in Sadie Magazine in 2012.1 “I don’t want to date or even make out with you. Because that would be weird,” the comic continues across a series of panels, but the narrator does want: the other person to think they are awesome to spend a lot of time hanging out Facebook chats after midnight to email weird blog links to swap favorite books to @reply to each other’s tweets to walk to their favorite food trucks

I want to be close to you and special to you, the way you are to me, but I do not want to be sexual with you, this comic says. I want to be emotionally intimate with you and I want to be in love with you, but not in that way.

Romantic feeling, according to people around the world, typically includes: infatuation, idealization, wanting physical and emotional closeness, wanting exclusivity, wanting your feelings to be reciprocated, overthinking the other person’s behavior, caring and being empathetic toward the other person, changing parts of your life for them, and becoming more obsessed if they don’t like you back.15

When I fear the consequences of saying no more than I fear the consequences of saying yes When I feel not just an absence of desire but an absence of desire for desire When I hope that by saying yes, you will stop bothering me, or think that if I say no you’ll only keep on trying to persuade me

Unwilling means believing you have to have sex with someone because you love them, even if doing so harms you.

Acts are more sequestered, not part of a domino effect that ends up requiring something that a person does not want to do.

Sexual incompatibility can be challenging precisely because it is connected to so many emotional needs that, when unfulfilled, create distance and dissatisfaction. These can include everything from the desire to get to know a new person to the desire to use someone else’s desire as a barometer of your own self-worth.

she finds other people’s sexual desires and sexuality endlessly fascinating. “It’s so intellectually stimulating and that’s fun for me,” she says. “It’s a game, like, okay, if I do this and this and this, what happens? What about that? It’s kind of taking apart the person and seeing what they’ll do and what makes sense, and what pleases them.”

ADHD hyper focus, then done

The biggest difference is that it usually requires much more effort for sex to feel good for aces compared to allos and much less awkwardness for sex to feel boring or uncomfortable. To return to a food metaphor: Imagine the difference between eating when ravenous and being full but willing to share a snack. 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.

Sex isn’t repulsive, but it’s a hobby other people have that Zee doesn’t care for, like bowling. “If you have someone who loves to go bowling all the time, that’s great,” they say, “but I’m not the kind of person that wants to go bowling more than maybe once every couple of years, and I’m not going to buy the shoes for it.”

took a fair bit of reorienting and negotiation,”

Intimacy for them looks like a lot of cuddling, hand-holding, “being close without necessarily having to be unclothed.”

It’s easy to say that sex is important and it’s harder to be vulnerable enough to say that sex is important because a lack of sex creates fear and insecurity.

We initially had so much sex that I started wondering if I was really ace. Then we started having less sex.

I wanted to obscure the truth for Noah. I felt protective, worried that if people knew this about me, that they would feel sorry for him,

For most of her life, Anna didn’t know what she wanted. Her family knew what she was supposed to want, and told her. Her religious leaders knew, and told her. The confident women she dated knew, and told her. Anna listened. She looked around and noticed what others wanted and tried to imitate them. Many of us learn to desire by watching other people desire.