Top Quotes: “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex” — Angela Chen

“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.

Lucid’s reactions weren’t predictable or intuitive, not as simple as explaining that talking about sex caused a little repulsion while watching sex scenes on TV caused more. An in-depth discussion of a sex act might be worse than an image of a naked body, but it was hard to say why. Such physical reactions were obvious to others, and all this made Lucid a target for a particular flavor of bullying; kids yelling sex jokes at them and “essentially using my sex repulsion against me.””

“”Finding the word asexuality was such an explanation of things that had already happened to me,” Lucid says. “It’s the first time I heard, ‘You can just not have sex,’ and that was incredibly freeing, because as a kid you hear the talk about this big scary thing that’s going to happen and how you’re going to want it, and that’s just terrifying, absolutely terrifying.””

“The notion that I might be asexual seemed laughable. I found Adrien Brody attractive and Channing Tatum less so and had a vulgar sense of humor, full of sex jokes and sly insinuations that made my more proper friends blush. I spoke of longing and listened intently to stories of sexual adventures, and never did it occur to me that my friends and I might be using the language of desire differently. 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. Their sexual encounters were often motivated by libido; I didn’t even know that I lacked a libido.”

“Reading more, 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 indi cation 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.

“”People who have never felt sexual attraction do not know what sexual attraction feels like, and knowing whether or not they have ever felt it can be difficult,” writes ace researcher Andrew C. Hinderliter in a 2009 letter to the editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Yes, exactly.

Sexuality as allos experience it was completely foreign to me, and realizing this in my midtwenties recast much of my life. The switch that turned on for others at puberty had never flipped for me. During this time, most people started masturbating, had wet dreams or sexual fantasies, and became hyperattuned to touch and physicality the smell of hair or the sight of an exposed shoulder. For some, these developments happen a little later. For others, like me, none of it happened at all. I had grown taller and become moody but did not one day look around and start noticing bodies, let alone start wanting anything from them. My crushes as a teenager, though intense, were little different from the ones I had earlier in life, based on aesthetic attraction and thinking a person clever. Even in fantasy, they never progressed beyond the point when someone I liked said I was worth dating.

Asexuality explained why I had been so perplexed when a high school classmate got pregnant. It was so easy to never have sex, I thought. It was the default state and it took real effort to do anything else. What could have compelled her to take such risks? Now I understood why it hadn’t been so easy. Our experiences had been fundamentally different but not in a way obvious enough to make me question them.”

“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.”

“During the thousands of interviews that he conducted, Kinsey had come across people who didn’t fit onto his line — who, in his language, had “no socio-sexual contacts or reactions.” Faced with data that didn’t fit this theory, he didn’t revise his line to make it more multidimensional. Instead, Kinsey marked these people into a separate category called X and carried on. Heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual dominated, while Group X was mostly forgotten.”

“I have the British television show Naked Attraction to thank. Though eagerly described to me as a “naked dating show,” it is not, as one might suspect, about two people going on a date while naked. It is better.

It is a game show. One lucky person looking for love stands on the stage, faced with six neon-colored tubes arranged in a half-circle. Inside each of these tubes is a naked person of the gender the main contestant prefers. Round one: The neon screens lift from the ground up to show everything from the waist down. Nothing is blurred out or obscured. It’s all penises and vaginas.

The contestant walks around the circle, peering into each tube and commenting on various bodily crimes (gray pubes, “not standing confidently enough”) while the camera zooms in on the genitals. The owners, likely desperate to exploit any possible advantage, sometimes sway their hips back and forth to appear more enticing or at least appear to have a personality. Sometimes, all the genitals are displayed side by side in a colorful graphic that resembles an “every body is beautiful” diagram for children about to face puberty. Finally, one person is eliminated.

Round two: The screen lifts up further and reveals the body up to the neck, the better to judge chest hair or breasts. More discussion, another person eliminated. The other rounds include face and voice (which is mostly about accent and class), and then the contestant gets naked too, picks the winner, and the two go on a date without ever having had a full conversation.”

“Surveys of the ace community show that far more women identify as asexual than men — about 63 percent versus 11 percent, according to the most recent numbers — likely in part because asexuality is a greater challenge to male sexual stereotypes. Men are taught that they are not men, and therefore not deserving of respect or status, unless they can sleep with as many women as possible.”

“Cherished as he is, Todd is not a perfect solution. For one, Bojack has ended, and so have Game of Thrones and Shadowhunters. There are now zero asexual characters on primetime television, according to the GLAAD Media Institute, which tracks queer characters in television and started including asexual characters a few years ago.”

“Toni Morrison, who knew as much as anyone about the power of stories, once proclaimed that from her perspective there are only Black people. “I stood at the border, stood at the edge, and claimed it as central,” she said. “Claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.” The first time I heard that line, I was very still for a long time. Of course Ton Morrison knew about racism and how white people think Black people are supposed to be. No matter. For a Black author to center Black people and not write for the white gaze should not be at all extraordinary, yet it felt like it was.”

“Today, people who insist that low sexual desire is a form of medical dysfunction have a convenient ally in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnosis in the US. Since 1980, the manual has included a diagnosis that was once called “inhibited sexual desire disorder” and, after changing names a few times, it is now most commonly referred to as hypoactive sexual desire disorder, or HSDD.”

“So what is the difference between HSDD and asexuality, or even HSDD and a “normal” level of low desire? Over the years, several attempts have been made to separate the two. One is the criteria of “distress” that was added to almost all DSM diagnoses in 1994. The idea is that people who have low desire and feel bad about it have HSDD, but people with the same symptoms who feel okay about themselves don’t. Then, in 2008, ace activists created a task force that recommended to a DSM panel that patients not be diagnosed with a desire disorder if they identify as asexual. Since 2013, the DSM has included this so-called asexual exception.

Both of these clumsy attempts to separate the medical problem of HSDD from unproblematic low desire are unsatisfactory. People experience distress over many conditions not because the condition itself is a problem, but because prejudice makes their lives harder. Gay people and trans people generally have worse mental health than straight cis people — not because being gay or trans is a sickness, but because bigotry causes distress and takes a toll on mental health. The same is true for aces. As for the asexual exception, its existence requires twisting the mind in strange ways. Saying that someone has HSDD unless they identify as ace is like saying that someone who experiences same-sex attraction has a psychiatric condition unless they happen to identify as homosexual. Having the exception is better than not having the exception, but experiencing same-sex attraction, or no attraction, is not a sickness regardless of which words one might use to describe the particular experience.”

“Many abled people assume that physical disabilities take away sexual desire, but that’s not always the case. One study of nearly a thousand women found that these women with physcial disabilities reported very similar levels of sexual desire as a control group of women without disabilities. Those who are intellectually disabled or autistic are desexualized too, assumed to be too pure or naive to experience sexual desire. As a result, disabled kids are frequently excluded from sexual education due to a reflexive belief that it won’t be relevant to them, and people with disabilities often start dating later than their abled peers.”

“Diamond theorizes that the two can be separate because they serve different purposes. 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. Romantic love can be more expansive than sexual attraction because heterosexual sexual attraction, while usually necessary for producing kids, is not required for. successful co-parenting. To use ace lingo, sexual attraction and romantic attraction don’t need to line up.

Diamond first noticed this conflation of passion and sex when interviewing women about how they became aware of their sexual attraction to other women. “So many [women] would tell these stories about having a really strong emotional bond to female friends when they were younger, and they’d be like, ‘So I guess this was an early sign,’ she tells me. Close female friendships do frequently use affectionate, quasi-romantic language that can confuse burgeoning sexual desires. Sometimes though, the story can be more complicated, and Diamond, an expert in sexual fluidity, began questioning whether passion must always equal secretly sexual.

If sexual desire were necessary for romantic love, kids who haven’t gone through puberty wouldn’t have crushes. Many do. Surveys show that children, including ones too young to understand partnered sex, frequently develop serious attachments. I had elementary school crushes and so did many of my allo friends. Adults have gone through puberty but their sexual desires don’t always dictate their emotional ones either. In one study Diamond references, 61 percent of women and 35 percent of men said they had experienced infatuation and romantic love without any desire for sex.”

“In his book Romantic Love in Cultural Contexts, Karandashev reviews the social science literature and lists the most common criteria that people claim divide the two feelings. 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.

It all sounds reasonable enough, but when I read Karandashev’s list to Leigh Hellman, a queer ace writer in Chicago, they point out that every emotion that supposedly differentiates romance can be found in other emotional settings. Sensitivity, attachment, and caring are part of any healthy relationship. People who are polyamorous have multiple romantic partners without the desire for exclusivity. Infatuation might be the factor that aligns most closely with widespread ideas of what romantic love feels like, yet it’s common to idealize a new acquaintance or feel possessive when a best friend becomes close with someone else, and romantic love doesn’t automatically turn platonic once early energy wears off.

“I can be jealous, I can experience adoration and devotion toward my friends, all these intense qualifiers that we usually put toward romantic love,” Leigh says. “In past relationships, I was like, ‘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?’”

“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.

It is, as Fricker uses in one example, if I knew about the concept of postpartum depression, my experience would have made more sense and I’d have felt less guilty and not blamed myself so much. It is, in another classic example, If I had known about the idea of sexual harassment, I could have more easily interpreted and explained what was happening. Hermeneutical injustice is present in stories like the one that James shared, which is itself a template for experiences that I have heard again and again from aces.”

“I blamed my ex for a while — why did he push it when I said no so many times before? Why did he enjoy it when I was clearly disinterested? but that didn’t feel quite right. I said yes multiple times, and people can’t read minds. So then I was back to blaming myself. Perhaps if I truly felt so strongly that I didn’t want to have sex, I would have said no every time. But that doesn’t encapsulate the pressure and feeling of brokenness that I felt — the unspoken social norm that because I didn’t have a “good” reason to “deny” him, saying yes was a given. The problem is that I was left with no way to explain my hurt. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been a big deal: he said yes, I said yes, therefore everything was consensual. The problem is, had I known about asexuality, I would have said no. It felt like a wrong had occurred, even though there was no one to blame. And that is hermeneutical injustice.”

“Lawmakers in the state of Virginia didn’t make it possible for someone to be prosecuted for spousal rape until 2002. During that debate, Virginia politician Richard Black made a speech against criminalizing spousal rape, arguing that it would be impossible to prove that rape had happened when the husband and wife are sleeping in the same bed and “she’s in a nightie.” Today, several states still treat spousal rape and non-spousal rape dif-ferently. In all these circumstances, the message is that it’s not really rape when it happens in the context of a relationship.”

“Compulsory sexuality lurks behind the popular slogan “Rape is not sex, it’s violence,” an idea popularized by the feminist writer Susan Brownmiller in her groundbreaking 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. The book, which brought the problem of rape into national consciousness, argued that rape was often symbolic, motivated by desire for control instead of desire for sex, and is a way for men to control women and keep them in “a state of fear.” The publication of Against Our Will helped kick off a wave of anti-rape activism and laid the groundwork for modern understanding of rape culture, supporting the claim that victim-blaming arguments about a woman sexually tempting the rapist are nonsense.”

“Aces say yes to sex we don’t really want. So does almost everyone else. In one 2005 study, 28 percent of women said their first sexual experience was consensual but not exactly wanted.” In another study of 160 college students in relationships, more than a third reported having consented to unwanted sex within a span of two weeks.”

“One useful tool is a framework created by sex researcher Emily Nagoski, author of Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, and amended by aces. Nagoski suggests using the categories of enthusiastic, willing, unwilling, and coerced consent, although the last two are consent mostly in the extremely literal sense that someone did not yell out “no.”

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

Nagoski’s model is better than “no means no,” which assumes that someone is saying yes unless otherwise stated.”

“Human physiology provides “a set of physical possibilities unlabeled as to use or meaning,” writes sex researcher Leon-ore Tiefer in her 1995 essay collection Sex Is Not a Natural Act. Culture – like books and movies and what parents say and what we see everyone else doing – then teaches a story to attach to these sensations. Individual psychology and context also play a part. A beating heart and sweaty palms can be interpreted as anxiety or excitement. In one famous psychology experiment, men were asked to walk across either a swaying bridge or a sturdy bridge. All were approached by a pretty woman who asked them to fill out a survey and told them to call if they had any questions. The men on the swaying bridge were more likely to call the woman, because they interpreted their physical fear from the surroundings as attraction to the researcher. Sensation plus story.

In the sexual realm, even basic acts can signify very different things. Remember the masturbation paradox and how it’s odd that aces who masturbate are considered to lack a sexuality? Some of the aces who masturbate consider it sexual, but others don’t. To them, masturbation is like any other bodily quirk, no different from scratching an itch on the arm.

Kissing is another example of the slipperiness of the sexual. In most Western cultures, kissing is considered a non-negotiable step on the road to a romantic relationship. Yet when groups as diverse as the Mehinaku of Brazil, the Thonga of South Africa, and the Trobriand Islanders first encountered the act, they perceived it as disgusting instead of a mark of affection. 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.” Kissing can be a learned act,not something done by everyone around the world and throughout time.”

“According to the 2013 National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL), a major survey in the United Kingdom that comes out every decade, among those in relationships in the past year, about one-fourth reported not having the same amount of sexual interest as their partner.”

“Fighting compulsory sexuality does not mean that everything must be desexualized but rather that the rights of the other side must be prioritized too. It means, as Wake Forest scholar Kristina Gupta writes, “challenging the unearned privileges that accrue to sexual people and. sexual relationships and . . . eliminating discrimination against nonsexual people and nonsexual relationships.” It means resisting pharmaceutical companies that sell desire drugs by using the language of sickness. Creating more books and movies with diverse ace characters and themes. Teaching therapists and doctors not to assume that a lack of sexual attraction is a sickness (while also not holding ableist beliefs about sickness). Getting rid of amatonormativity in marriage law. Asexuality should be discussed in sex education, which can be as simple as teaching students that never developing sexual attraction is fine. The ace perspective on consent must be a universal concern.

Ace activism has been growing over the past decade. The first Asexual Awareness Week took place in 2010, organized by Sacramento-based activist Sara Beth Brooks. Sara Beth had been engaged in her early twenties but knew she didn’t want to have sex with her then-fiancé, a situation that landed her in therapy and taking hormones to increase her sex drive. The hormones didn’t work. One night, while googling ways of ending a wedding ceremony without kissing (Maybe we could fist-bump?”), she came across AVEN and stayed up all night reading and crying. It changed her life.”

“Today, Brian Langevin, executive director of the nonprofit Asexual Outreach, coordinates a national network of local ace and aro community groups and provides resources and trainings to schools and LGBTQ+ organizations. Langevin also developed the Ace Inclusion Guide for High Schools, a tool for teachers, student leaders, sex educators, and other school staff. Meanwhile, Sebastian Maguire legislative director for New York City council-member Daniel Dromm – and one of the only out asexual people in politics – helped pass legislation that adds asexuality as a protected category in the city’s human rights law and includes asexuality as an option on survey forms.”

“When David’s friends Avary and Zeke married in 2014, they asked him to play a role similar to that of an officiant. David had met Avary, a nonprofit founder, at a social impact conference four years earlier. Both were obsessed with the question of how to build better communities and had long talks about what that work might look like. Through her, David came to know Zeke, an expert in energy and climate science, someone who started diving into public climate data sets for fun and wound up at the forefront of the field. “I felt so much professional and intellectual alignment with them,” David says of this thoughtful pair.

Though David moved to New York from San Francisco, where he had met Avary and Zeke, the three remained close, and he ended up flying back a few times a year to visit. During one visit in 2015, Avary and Zeke told David that they were thinking about starting a family. “We really want people to be involved,” they told him, “and we want you to be involved most of all.”

It was to be an unconventional plan: a cohabitating, co-parenting arrangement with three people. David was not part of Avary and Zeke’s marriage, but he would be part of their family – a parent just as equally, and legally too, because three-parent adoption is legal in California. On New Year’s Day in 2017, Avary learned that she was pregnant.

That May, David moved back to California and in with Avary and Zeke. He attended the birthing classes and was in the delivery room when Octavia, or Tavi for short, was born in August. All four live in a beautiful home near San Francisco’s Panhandle Park, with a lush, plant-filled backyard.”