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

by Angela Chen

For them, a word like “hot” could indicate a physical pull of the type Jane had described. For me, “hot” conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure.

Another thing you need to remember, and something that, for some reason, has never really occurred to you before: You can ask things of others too. You can ask them to compromise. It is not always you who have to.

Not experiencing sexual attraction doesn’t prevent aces from experiencing aesthetic attraction, which means finding someone beautiful without that beauty being a sexual motivator.

Aesthetic attraction can guide romantic attraction, or the feeling of being romantically interested in or having a crush on someone.

Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.

Asexuality is about embracing variation and avoiding the language of disorder, even if being asexual can be inconvenient. I, and most aces, simply do not believe that there is anything wrong with low desire or lack of sexual attraction. We do not believe that there is any moral obligation to work on increasing sexual desire. Wanting sex should not be a requirement of health or humanity.

Straight people are rarely treated like they’re close-minded for knowing their sexual orientation, but aces are assumed to be unsure and always on the brink of finding the person who will change everything.

True sexual liberation means having many choices—no sex forever, sex three times a day, and everything in between—that all feel equally available and accepted, and that all can lead to happiness if they are right for you.

After learning about asexuality, he knows that he could have said no forever, and that saying no didn’t make him a bad person. New information paints the relationship in a different light and makes him think that the yes he gave before was compromised.

So coercion looks like being told that you would have sex if you really loved someone. It feels like being afraid to see your partner because you don’t want to keep denying them sex.

Aces can and do feel pressured to have sex with strangers, but it is within relationships that the guilt can be strongest and setting boundaries the most difficult. Within relationships, the desire to have sex and the desire not to have sex are so often treated unequally because of the common belief that entering a relationship requires giving up a measure of consent.4

Every no is good enough, and that goes for every person.

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.

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.

Formal precautions are wise, but consent cannot always be perfectly hashed out beforehand. Desires can be hard to predict and frequently change in the moment. Nothing is foolproof, but, ultimately, true consent is an attitude of respecting what the other person might want to do with any part of their body at any time. It is the mindset that it’s not okay to progress unless there’s approval, but that approval (and disapproval) can be signaled in the moment and in many forms.

Thinking of consent as a shifting process makes it easier to understand how it might work in long-term relationships, for aces and allos and everyone. Consent matters after ten years just as much as after ten days, but it rarely looks the same after a decade as it did on the third date.

Now, I found myself becoming strangely essentialist, wondering again if this was who I truly was and feeling bad, and then feeling bad because I should know better than to feel bad. That’s a one-two punch all too familiar to me.

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.