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

by Angela Chen

It was always clear that my beliefs—that an aro-allo woman was independent while an aro-allo man was a fuckboy—were gendered stereotypes I should disavow.

Because he’s male, people will say he’s “just a horny guy” and a monster, he tells me, even though he really does care about others. “The friendships I have, I try to hold that close,” he says. “Human connection is important and I think there are way more people who crave human connection than crave romance, if that makes sense.”

Romantic love within marriage confers privileges that other forms of devotion cannot, including over 1,100 laws that benefit married couples at the federal level.

Therefore, the legal and social privileges of marriage should be extended to all mutually consenting adults who wish for them.

so long as we restrict marriage to romantic and sexual partners we will ensure amatonormativity.” Reforming marriage law by abolishing it altogether or extending marriage-like rights to friends (to small groups or networks) is one way to eradicate discrimination.

Hermeneutical justice is a structural phenomenon. It is about marginalized groups lacking access to information essential to their understanding of themselves and their role in society—and these groups lack this information precisely because they are marginalized and their experiences rarely represented.

People post the same question on sites like Quora13 and MetaFilter,14 wondering how far their obligations extend.

You can give a no with zero caveats in each and every situation, full stop. You can say no if someone loves you and you love them back. You can say no for the rest of your life. Loving another person should never mean forfeiting bodily autonomy.

Aces say, over and over, that it is not morally correct to automatically privilege the preferences of the person who wants to have sex. If one person wants to have sex just as much as the other person wants not to have sex, the desires are equal, and one should desire not trump the other.

The higher-desire partner has the right to know what to expect and they’re not in the wrong for leaving because of sexual reasons.

ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT: When I want you When I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes OR saying no When saying no means missing out on something I want WILLING CONSENT: When I care about you though I don’t desire you (right now) When I’m pretty sure saying yes will have an okay result and I think maybe that I’d regret saying no When I believe that desire may begin after I say yes UNWILLING CONSENT: 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 COERCED CONSENT: When you threaten me with harmful consequences if I say no When I feel I’ll be hurt if I say yes, but I’ll be hurt more if I say no When saying yes means experiencing something I actively dread

It’s not just that someone can negotiate, but rather that negotiation is the standard, so people feel less hesitant for trying to do so.

The more trust there is, the less explicit negotiation may be necessary, and evaluating the amount of trust between two partners beforehand and how both felt afterward can be more fruitful than evaluating whether one person should have said something else.

How much time did they really want to spend together? What types of physicality and touch were okay and what didn’t do it for one or the other or either? Did they want to have sex? Georgia’s answer to the last question was yes. Selena’s answer to the last question was no.

Aces, however, don’t cluster in geographical enclaves or have our own long-established dating traditions. The numbers aren’t on our side, either. Keeping in mind the official statistic that aces are about 1 percent of the population1—not to mention that being asexual isn’t usually the most important factor in romantic compatibility—most end up entering the wider dating pool and trying to make a relationship work with an allo partner.

Why do we need Cosmopolitan to tell us how to do it, when we far more rarely see guidebooks for how to digest and how to breathe?

Relationships should always be a game of mix and match, not a puzzle that you have to perfectly snap into, or a Jenga tower that will collapse as soon as you try to wiggle one block out of place. Customizability is the best part, yet most people try so hard to make their relationship stick to its premade form, a one-size-fits-all shape.

The Mediated Intimacy scholars quote from sex advice books that tell people that they “owe it to themselves” to leave if there’s no sex and to declare the lack of sex a deal-breaker.9 Other problems can be endured but sexual problems, apparently less so.

The logical implication of these messages about the necessity of sex is that asexuality is an existential threat to any hope of a lasting relationship.

I do believe that certain aspects of relationships, like mutual respect and trust and kindness, are essential rights. I don’t believe that a great sex life always needs to be part of this list.

for a long time, I just didn’t want an ace partner. I didn’t particularly care about the physical feeling of sex, but I craved the thrill of being, specifically, sexually desired. I didn’t experience sexual attraction myself, yet I wanted others to have that desire for me.

The hypocrisy is not lost on me. I have always known that I want to be sexually desired because I want emotional reassurance and a sense of my own power. 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,

The answer to the question of whether sex feels good for aces is sometimes yes and sometimes no, just like with allos. Many people, ace and allo alike, don’t feel a spontaneous desire for sex, but they start to feel that mental wanting once (consensual) physical touch is initiated and their body becomes aroused.

Gender studies scholar Ela Przybylo is the one who showed me Awkward-Rich’s poem, which she used herself in her book Asexual Erotics, an academic exploration of intimacy beyond the carnal.

Difference can be a gift. Being ace can mean less interpersonal drama and more freedom from social norms around relationships. It is an opportunity to focus more on other passions, to be less distracted by sexuality, to break the scripts, to choose your own adventure and your own values.