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

by Angela Chen

The answers look different from the ace perspective—and this book tries to match one with the other. To do so, I interviewed nearly a hundred aces, both over the phone and in person. I asked questions about attraction and identity and love. The answers they provided were rarely simple, as my own experiences have not been simple, as no one’s ever are.

This affords aces the ability to observe the rules of society from an outsider’s vantage and with an outsider’s insights. Aces draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts—around definition, feeling, action—that are often hidden and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller. Aces have developed a new lens that prioritizes what is just over what is supposedly natural.

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.” For Lucid, the reaction was even stronger. Being exposed to sexual images and comments provoked a physical response that felt like eels squirming and writhing. The eels lived in different parts of Lucid’s body: one in the gut, one along the spine. Accompanying them would be an instant fight-or-flight response, complete with nausea, heart pounding, and freezing in place.

a Dear Abby column syndicated in the Maui News.2 New England ACE asked when it would be necessary to disclose their orientation to dates. Abby responded that there was no obligation to tell others right away,

Over and over, I could feel my emotions spinning out of control as I acted in ways I knew were wrong but felt powerless to stop. My panic manifested in constantly trying to break up, so afraid was I of being left. During the nonstop fights, I waved my hand and gave as reasons any number of issues that never directly included the words fear or insecurity. I could neither say that I was afraid nor admit how much I cared.

He was gone, but my mind continued to wrap itself around the endless conversations we’d had about why an open relationship was necessary: Henry saying that men would always want to stray because it was natural, that clinging to monogamy was old-fashioned and that I could defeat that desire if I really tried, just a little bit harder.

I understood for the first time that 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. Being repulsed by sex can be a fairly obvious indication of the lack of sexual attraction, but a lack of sexual attraction can also be hidden by social performativity or wanting (and having) sex for emotional reasons—and because the different types of desire are bound together so tightly, it can be difficult to untangle the various strands.

The world is not a binary of aces and allos. It is a spectrum, with people like Lucid further from the allo end and people like me closer to it.

Much of this knowledge was created through informal means, which is why I explicitly cite and quote from bloggers. Tenured scholars are not the only people who produce knowledge or who deserve credit for their expertise.

These things are distinct, but—and this will become a running theme in this book—when any two things often go together, people wrongly assume that they must always go together.

In addition to these three main types of attraction, aces also discuss touch attraction or sensual attraction, emotional and intellectual attraction, and more. The separation of attraction into smaller and smaller components challenges us to think more about the building blocks of desire. The specificity of language can force us to look more closely at what we want and what leaves us cold.

For the most part, aces are considered part of the LGBTQ+ community, though some people disagree and think that cis heteroromantic aces should not be considered queer.

The lesson that real men have a lot of sex is responsible for the experiences of two seemingly opposite groups. One group, of course, is ace men. The other is the incels, or involuntary celibates: misogynistic, usually heterosexual men who are angry at women for not having sex with them.

For now, though, male sexual stereotypes remain so strong that voluntarily celibate aces are sometimes conflated with incels. Ace men tell me that people of all genders assume that they are secret incels who hide behind a made-up identity. Such is the trap: 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.

MacKinnon and Dworkin might not have thought of themselves as sex negative, but their work certainly did not focus on the liberatory possibilities of orgasm. With titles like Sexual Harassment of Working Women and Woman Hating, their books focused less on the pleasure of sex and more on the ways that sexuality could be used to harm. The very basic argument was that unequal power dynamics are the backdrop to heterosexual sex, always, so true consent is almost impossible to achieve.

For feminists like Ellen Willis and Susie Bright, the MacKinnon-Dworkin approach encouraged a sexual conservatism that did not serve women. In a landmark 1981 essay titled “Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?” Willis struck back at the attitudes that, as she put it, “tap into the underside of traditional femininity—the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims.” Bitterness was not the same as an actual solution, and the doom-and-gloom hyper-focus of sex negativity pushed women to “accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men’s sexual freedom as a substitute for real power.”

I dislike both these caveats and the fact that I am tempted to use them. “I’m X but Y” always throws someone under the bus. “I’m a girl, but one of those cool girls” emphasizes the default view that girls are not cool. “I’m ace, but I’m kinky and not celibate” is an insult to those who are vanilla or celibate.

Celibacy can be eroticized because the supposed restraint implies a rich appetite underneath. After all, Eve was the woman who took a bite out of the apple. It can be interesting to be a lusty broad with a hearty appetite that she is denying. It is not interesting to have no appetite at all. That’s just nothingness.

I got exactly what I wanted, I wrote in my journal right after my one-night stand. I was in control the entire time, and I still have Henry, whom I love dearly. I got what I wanted then, but, of course, the decision looks different now, years later. I wish now that I had wanted something else, something other than to always be in control, something other than to push Henry away, something other than to use sexuality to prove myself.

Limited representation is a near-ubiquitous problem, but because asexuality already has so little visibility, the consequences are heightened.

“If there was more ace representation, then I probably would have realized I was ace a lot sooner,” Coy, a twenty-seven-year-old ace blogger, told me a few years ago, before Todd came out on BoJack. Coy’s comments are part of the reason I hesitate when asked how many ace people exist.

“It’s impossible to be empowered with one aspect of my identity without also working to be empowered with all of the others,”

Because there is no biological marker for HSDD, the basic criteria sound quite similar to what they might have been when people were worrying about frigidity centuries ago: persistent lack of sexual fantasies and sexual interest.3 It sounds like asexuality.

“that House episode,”

House then bets his coworker one hundred dollars that he can find a medical cause for this woman’s supposed sexual orientation. “Lots of people don’t have sex,” House says, but because sex is the fundamental drive of the species, “the only people who don’t want it are either sick, dead, or lying.”

First aired in 2012, “Better Half” remains one of the most high-profile depictions of asexuality on a major show.

Buck v. Bell

The gold-star ace is beautiful so as to deflect accusations of being a bitter incel. They can’t be religious because that would mean they’re just repressed. They do not masturbate and have no history of sexual problems. Maybe they have tried sex before but, after that, never, ever changed their mind about being ace or felt the slightest bit of sexual curiosity. (Bonus points if they’ve been in committed relationships before.)

Scientists spent a long time trying to find the “gay gene,”43 yet the same amount of effort has not been spent trying to find the straight gene.

Each person should explore who they are and what they want and how all that might change. That goes for people who identify as ace too. There should be freedom to not identify as ace if it doesn’t serve you, freedom to be ace and still be curious about sex, freedom to identify as ace and then change your mind.

Everyone should be free to figure themselves out, but no one should take from this freedom the idea that being ace is wrong and that they have to keep trying to find a different answer.

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.

Questions about the definition of romantic love are the starting point for aces to think about love and romance in unexpected ways, from new, explicit categories beyond friendship and romance to the opportunities (legal, social, and more) of a world where romantic love is not the type of love valued above all others.

Sexual desire tricks us into spreading our genes, while romantic love exists to make us feel kindly toward someone and willing to cooperate for long enough to raise those exquisitely helpless creatures known as babies.

There is the desire to have sex. There is infatuation. And there is emotional intimacy and caring,

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,

I am saying that people think of romantic and platonic love as two distinct categories, but, frequently, there is overlap and no clean separation, no one emotional feature or essential component that makes a relationship one or the other.

Romance is higher on the hierarchy of importance and is portrayed as more interesting and essential. Casual phrases like “just friends” and “more than friends” relegate friendship to something less special and less whole. Frustration over the devaluation of friendship is not new; the term QPP

The bond between queerplatonic partners is not sexual, nor does it necessarily seem romantic to the people in such a partnership. Some people feel differently about their queerplatonic partner than about either a friend or a romantic partner. For others, a queerplatonic partnership is less about a unique feeling and more about acknowledging each other’s importance in a way that is rare for relationships that aren’t explicitly romantic.

The queer part is not about genders, but about queering that social border.

The QPP was about being vulnerable and boldly asking for something back, about that intense relationship and the security of explicit validation that Leigh had often thought they wanted.

Taylor told their mom about Leigh. Leigh called Taylor their partner in queer spaces and “my really good friend” in situations where partner might bring up questions that would take too long to answer.

The looseness of friendship and lack of official obligation is a delight for many, but as a general rule, people tend to treat casually that which is less important.

Queerplatonic partners take a type of relationship that is usually taken lightly and decide that it is important enough to merit unusual and potentially awkward conversations.

More effective than relying on labels to provide instruction is skipping directly to asking for what we want—around time, touch, commitment, and so on

If everyone is behaving ethically, it doesn’t matter if a relationship doesn’t fit into a preconceived social role, if it feels neither platonic nor romantic or if it feels like both at the same time.

Demi Lovato had a similar message: “You ain’t nobody ‘til you got somebody.”

Elizabeth Brake calls this undeserved elevation and centrality of romantic love amatonormativity, from the Latin word for love, amare. She coined the term in her book Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law to describe the assumption that “a central, exclusive, amorous relationship is normal for humans.” Not simply normal, but preferable. Not only preferable either, but ideal and necessary—better

I found it easy to sympathize with nearly everyone I interviewed.

Yet, the one group I felt knee-jerk skepticism toward were men like David, who are aromantic but not asexual. I am a woman who has spent a decent chunk of my life listening to friends’ horror stories about men, many of them jerks who wanted nothing but sex.