Angela Chen on Asexuality

 

At fourteen, I came across the word “asexuality” the same way most people do: online. I read the words prominently displayed on asexuality.org, the website of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN): “An asexual person is a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” Asexuality, I learned, is a sexual orientation, just like homosexuality and pansexuality and heterosexuality are sexual orientations. A person who is homosexual is sexually attracted to the same gender; a person who is asexual is sexually attracted to no one.
 
All of this made sense. Growing up in Silicon Valley had helped me develop a healthy appreciation for alternative lifestyles and I was pleased that my latest Wikipedia rabbit hole had taught me something new about the world and about other people. I had no trouble believing that asexuality was normal, healthy, and valid, and that these asexual people, or aces, were entitled to long and happy lives without the rest of us pointing and laughing. But learning the term did not change how I viewed myself. I misinterpreted “a person who does not experience sexual attraction” to mean “a person who hates sex” — and so I, personally, could not be asexual.
 
That notion seemed laughable. I spent middle school and high school gossiping about crushes; the idea of sex held great promise. Even through college, there was little reason to suspect I might be ace, only that I might be neurotic, shy, and arrogant. 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. For me, “hot” conveyed an admiration of excellent bone structure, no different from admiring a particularly striking painting. Their sexual encounters were often motivated by libido. I didn’t even know that I lacked a libido. I was a little curious about sex because everything — books, television, friends — told me it felt fantastic. But I was very curious about what it would be like to be desired and to be loved. That was the real root of my longing.
 
Then, Henry. Henry and I met when we were twenty-one. After our first conversation, I wrote “BE STILL MY FUCKING HEART” in my journal, just like that, in all caps. That conversation took place over the internet, he in Texas and I in California. We fell in love anyway, over emails and chats and hours of talking.
 
I wouldn’t meet Henry in person for nearly a year. A few months after that would be the last time I saw him, but the aftershocks of our relationship would stretch into the future far beyond the amount of time we had actually spent together. Henry will always be one of the ways that I mark “before” and “after” in my life—not just for learning about asexuality, though our relationship provided the impetus for me to do so, but also for understanding romantic love and the obsessive pain of loss.
 
First love always feels like a miracle. That I fell in love with someone far away, someone I had met believing nothing could happen other than friendship; that we needed to coordinate our lives to be together; that what we felt inside really did change outer reality—all of that made this moment in time, this person, feel even more extraordinary.
   
Our investments marked the relationship as special, and the seriousness of our plan became evidence of the seriousness of our feelings, testaments that our tie went beyond vanity and was more than infatuation. In this, I remain sure, we were not wrong. Nothing then or since has shaken my belief that no matter how excruciatingly immature we might have been, at their core the feelings were both rare and very real.
 
Texas and California are far away, but it was senior year of college and everyone’s lives were about to split open anyway. The deal was that we would both move to New York City after graduation. I would take a journalism job and he would go to graduate school. But when Henry was not accepted into any universities in the area, he chose to attend a school in the South and pushed for a five-year long-distance open relationship.
 
I was not equipped to handle this proposed arrangement — I, so untrusting and wary of vulnerability that I had written this to myself in my journal: ‘’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.’’
 
I should have said no, but I was afraid of losing him. So I made a mistake and said yes.
 
Before Henry headed to the South for graduate school, he arranged to be in New York for the summer, ostensibly to take language classes but in reality to be with me. Without having yet met in person, we agreed to find a place together. The months we would spend together already seemed painfully short compared to what we had expected; there was nothing else we wanted so much, so why waste time on commutes?
 
That summer was painful and there are many reasons we did not work out. Sex was not one of those reasons — not exactly. Our strange courtship might have created problems in many other areas, but we found each other beautiful and I enjoyed having sex with Henry. It felt intimate, like I was special to him and privy to an experience that others were not. It gave me the feeling I had always wanted: not sexual pleasure, but the thrill of specialness.
 
Sex itself did not cause problems, but my fear of a specific aspect of sexuality did.
 
Though we were functionally monogamous during those months, the prospect of five years of an open relationship terrified me, and the fact that Henry wanted to have sex with others was hard to take. Convinced that Henry would fall in love with someone else after sleeping with them, any mention of sexual attraction — his or anyone else’s — prompted tortured projections of abandonment.
 
    Soon, dread of an uncertain future overshadowed the safety I had in the present. I wanted to be strong and wanted to run away in equal measure, and that produced the toxic cocktail that ruined the time we did have together. 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.
 
One day, on the way home from work, I passed a flower shop and on a whim bought red carnations for Henry. When I arrived home and he asked me where I’d gotten the flowers, I became overwhelmed by the prospect of admitting to a kind, spontaneous gesture. I said that I had taken the flowers from someone at work and thought they’d look nice on the dining room table.
 
Henry eventually had enough and broke up with me, rightly, in the fall.
 
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.
 
Henry’s statements created a new, gut-deep fear of anything related to flirting or sex or romance. When my roommate started watching old seasons of Scandal, a glance at the protagonists kissing in some dark hallway sent me to my room with the door shut. If anyone tried to hold my hand on a date, I drew back immediately. I had never liked being touched by strangers, but, clammy and cynical, I now actively feared it. I missed Henry terribly and now believed that every relationship would end either in betrayal or with the other person feeling trapped.
 
One evening, nearly two years after I had last seen Henry, I found myself telling my friend Thomas about how badly everything had ended. By this point, I was well-practiced at reciting the events. I was obsessed with them, convinced that people couldn’t understand me without knowing about Henry and convinced that I couldn’t understand myself unless I could answer the question of why we failed—which to me was the same as the question of why I behaved the way I did when I knew better. So many people had heard this story, but Thomas couldn’t understand why I had been so worried that Henry might be attracted to someone else and leave me.
 
 “I get being jealous,” Thomas said, “but not your worry that he couldn’t control himself at all. Being sexually attracted to other people happens to all of us.”
 
“I know, and that’s what terrifies me,” I said. “It’ll happen to everyone and then someone will always be fighting this desire and wanting to cheat, even if they don’t cheat. That seems miserable.”
 
“I mean, yes,” he said. “Sort of. But also, not really. I’m sure you’ve been sexually attracted to someone that you’re not dating, but it’s often just attraction. Physical. That happens all the time and you manage it. For most people, it’s not some horrible thing you can’t deal with, though I guess it can be. Almost all the time it’s no big deal. We all learn to deal, you know?”
 
I didn’t know. Nothing he said sounded familiar.
 
I had never experienced “just attraction,” a physical impulse—only emotional desire for closeness that manifested physically. I wanted sex with someone only when I was already prepared to change my life for them, so I did not believe Henry when he claimed that wanting sex with others did not have to threaten me.
 
When he talked about how everyone was sexually attracted to others all the time, I could not understand attraction as anything but how I experienced it: emotional yearning—love, really—overpowering and overwhelming, a disaster for our relationship if targeted toward anyone but myself. It sounds illogical now, and like incredible naivete, but for me, desire for love and desire for sex had always been one and the same, an unbreakable link. I had been curious about sex but had never wanted to have sex with any person before Henry.
 
Talking to Thomas prompted me to question why statements he took for granted were revelations to me. I wondered what else I did not know that I did not know about sexual desire. ●
Beacon Press
 
Excerpted from Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Beacon Press, 2020).
 
 
How I Discovered My Own Asexuality Without Knowing It. By Angela Chen. BuzzFeed News, June  25, 2020.

“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.
 
“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
 
to find the best hole-in-the-wall cafes together
 
to have inside jokes
 
but all “in a platonic way, of course.”
 
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. Just as saying woman doctor implies that a doctor by default is male, clarifying this feeling as friend-love implies that love—the real thing, the romantic thing—is for sex. In truth, Sakugawa’s descriptions of platonic friend-love are similar to what many aces would call nonsexual romantic love.
 
Nonsexual romantic love sounds like an oxymoron. Almost all definitions of the feeling of romantic love—separate from the social role of married partners or romantic acts like saying “I love you”—fold in the sexual dimension. People might not be having sex, but wanting sex is the key to recognizing that feelings are romantic instead of platonic. Sexual desire is supposed to be the Rubicon that separates the two.
 
It’s not. Aces prove this. By definition, aces don’t experience sexual attraction and plenty are apathetic or averse to sex. Many still experience romantic attraction and use a romantic orientation (heteroromantic, pan-romantic, homoromantic, and so on) to signal the genders of the people they feel romantically toward and crush on.
 
Intuitively, it makes sense that people can experience romantic feelings without sexual ones, and few are confused when I define romantic orientation as separate from sexual orientation. The understanding breaks down once someone asks what it means to feel romantic love for someone if wanting to have sex with them isn’t the relevant yardstick. How is that different from loving a platonic best friend? Without sex involved, what is the difference people feel inside when they draw a line between the two types of love? What is romantic love without sexuality?
 
 Once again, this isn’t a question only applicable to aces. Allosexuals (allos, for short) might feel infatuated with a new acquaintance or be more attached to their best friend than to any romantic partner, yet they can deny the possibility of romantic feeling because of the lack of sexual attraction. Allos can wave their hand and say, “There are people I want to sleep with, and I don’t want to sleep with you, so it’s only platonic.”
 
As convenient as it is that allos can use sexual desire to distinguish the categories, this is also a constricting way to evaluate the world, and allos can seem as bewildered by their feelings as aces. For them, emotional intimacy and excitement can be confusing or nonsensical if they don’t include sexual attraction. Many allos have shared with me their puzzlement at feeling like they were in love with friends despite no sexual attraction on either side. The writer Kim Brooks published a long essay in The Cut puzzling over how it could be that she has obsessive relationships with women despite being straight. Of her college roommate she writes, “the relationship was never sexual, but it was one of the most intimate of my young adulthood. We shared each other’s clothes and beds and boyfriends.”
 
Aces know that sex is not always the dividing line that determines whether a relationship is romantic. We take another look and say, “Maybe you’re in love with your friend even if you’re not sexually attracted to her.” 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. Asexuality destabilizes the way people think about relationships, starting with the belief that passionate bonds must always have sex at the root.

 For 16-year-old Pauline Parker, June 22, 1954, was “the day of the happy event.” She wrote those words in neat script across the top of her diary entry, marking it as a much-wished-for occasion. “I felt very excited and ‘the night before Christmas-ish’ last night,” she wrote underneath. “I am about to rise!”

 The happy event would take place as Pauline hoped, though the long-term consequences would not be what she intended. Later that afternoon, Pauline and her friend Juliet Hulme, age fifteen, took Pauline’s mother for a walk through Victoria Park in Christchurch, New Zealand.  As the three went down a secluded path, Juliet dropped a stone. When Pauline’s mother bent down to pick it up, the two girls bludgeoned her to death with a brick inside a stocking, taking turns bludgeoning the woman to death and smashing her face almost beyond recognition.

 The teenagers had met a couple of years before, when Juliet—beautiful, wealthy, and from a high-class British family—was then new to the country. Pauline was less comely and less moneyed; her father ran a fish store and her mother a boardinghouse. The two became inseparable, often lost in their own rich fantasy world. The bond was threatened when Juliet’s parents decided to send her to live with relatives in South Africa. Pauline could come along if Pauline’s mother would allow it, but everyone knew that this suggestion would never be approved. For the girls, the only way forward seemed to be the brick and escaping to a new life in America.

 From the murder to Heavenly Creatures, the Peter Jackson film it inspired, to the lasting fascination the case holds today, Pauline and Juliet have never been able to dispel the suspicion that they were having sex. Juliet has denied that the two were lesbians, but her denial means little in the eyes of a world that believes only specifically sexual love could inspire that type of mutual obsession. This belief—that platonic love is serene while intense, passionate, or obsessive feeling must be motivated by sex—is common. It does not track with reality.

 If you don’t believe aces who say that passionate feelings can exist without any sexual desire, believe University of Utah psychologist Lisa Diamond, who says the same thing. (Diamond refers to the feeling of “infatuation and emotional attachment” as “romantic love,” so I will too here.) 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.

 It is already taken for granted that sexual desire doesn’t need to include infatuation or caring. one-night stands and fuck-buddy arrangements are all explicitly sexual and explicitly non-romantic. The opposite conclusion—that for some, infatuation never included and never turns into sexual desire—is harder for people to accept, at least in the West. The story is different elsewhere. Historical reports from cultures in Guatemala, Samoa, and Melanesia describe how these close, nonsexual relationships were acknowledged. Sometimes honored with ceremonies such as ring exchanges, these relationships were considered a middle ground between friendship and romance and were often simply called “romantic friendship,” Diamond tells me.

 In these cultures, marriage was often more of an economic partnership than a love match. The marital and sexual bond was not automatically assumed to be the most important emotional relationship, unlike in current Western culture. Romantic friendships were not considered a threat to marriage and it was easier for people to believe that a nonsexual relationship could be as ardent as a sexual one. Romantic friendships were passionate on their own terms because passion is possible in many types of relationships.

 Excerpted from Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Beacon Press, 2020).

 

Let’s Rethink How We Talk About Love, Intimacy, and the Absence of Desire. By Angela Chen. LitHub, September 18, 2020. 

When we think of what makes a person or group of people “queer,” a common understanding is their having a sexual orientation and/or gender identity that separates them from the heterosexual, cisgender majority. But what about asexuals—those folks who don’t experience sexual attraction toward others? Are “aces” part of the queer community, too? In this month’s episode of Outward, Slate’s LGBTQ podcast, the crew tackles that question with Angela Chen, a journalist and asexual activist who’s just written a book on the subject: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. A portion of the discussion is transcribed below. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 
 Rumaan Alam: One of the subjects of your book is an artist named Lucid Brown, who describes coming across a letter to Dear Abby from an asexual reader. And they describe seeing this letter in the newspaper at age 13 and then stealing the newspaper from the dining room table. This felt really, really familiar to me as someone who was once a gay teen reading the tea leaves of the culture for some validation of the self. I’d love to hear you talk about the tension or the complication around understanding ace identity as fitting under the queer umbrella.
 
Angela Chen: I think that’s a delicate question. I have a line in the book that’s a little bit of a throwaway line, and maybe I should have elaborated on it more, where I say that today, overall, asexuality is accepted as part of the queer umbrella, of the broader LGBTQ+ umbrella, but it feels conditional in many ways. I think there is a discussion around whether people who are ace and heteroromantic—romantically attracted to the opposite gender—should be considered queer. I believe that aces are queer, but I wanted to point out that in some ways, this is not a simple question. I think that there is this understanding, this idea that because asexuality in many ways is invisible and invisibility gives you this form of protection, it feels like you don’t need to come out. It feels like if you’re on the street with your partner, many times, you are not going to be a target in the same way. In many ways, being asexual doesn’t require feeling like you need to hide yourself in the way that has been the case for the other identities in the queer umbrella.
 
And so I think that there is that discussion: Where does asexuality fit? What connects people in the queer community? What does that mean? There is also this question of resources and a feeling of scarcity. So every ace activist has always said, “We don’t want to take resources away from people who are trans or people who are homeless. It doesn’t seem like this competitive thing to us.” We’re not saying we’re the most oppressed, but we feel like we are in many ways outside of heteronormative, straight culture, and we want to build coalitions and we want to be part of that.
 
But despite that, I think many aces, especially heteroromantic aces, struggle with feeling queer enough. Almost every hetero ace I’ve spoken to has said, “Oh, I completely support all other hetero aces identifying as queer if they want, but I feel afraid because I feel like am I taking away from the struggle?” So I think these discussions around gatekeeping, what actually connects the community, are very, very much alive here. And also I want to mention, of course there are people who are ace and biromantic. There are people who are ace and nonbinary trans. So, the ace community itself is very diverse and there is a lot of cross-cutting identities.
 

Bryan Lowder: In the book you introduce the term “compulsory sexuality.” We know that the term “compulsory heterosexuality” comes from Adrienne Rich, but can you explain how this other term builds on that?*
 
Angela Chen : Absolutely. I think it’s just the idea that everyone who is “normal” wants sex and desires it. The example that I always think of is a person I interviewed, someone named Hunter, who grew up in this religious environment, and he is hetero. He is only attracted, romantically attracted to women. So he fulfills the compulsory hetero part of going through heterosexuality, but it was sexuality itself. Even though he’s attracted to women, he wasn’t super into sex, and that made him feel like there was something wrong with him. That everything he had been taught about how good sex was and how you were only an adult if you loved sex and how you’re only a real man if you loved sex, that really made him feel like he was broken.
 
I think that is an easy way to understand that. And there’s so many other examples, like low sexual desire is medicalized. The FDA is trying to sell and approve drugs for low sexual desire. And of course, that’s telling you that there’s something wrong with you. Or for women again, if you say that you’re not that into sex, oftentimes very well-meaning people will say, “Oh, you just need to free yourself from shame. You need to, like, be in touch with your true self and throw off the chains of patriarchy”—which is definitely true sometimes. But sometimes you’re just not that into sex and it doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you or that your life is going to be worse if that’s not a source of pleasure for you.
 
Listen to the full conversation with Angela Chen on the podcast.
 
Slate, September 16, 2020.
 

Do Asexuals Belong Under the Queer Umbrella? Slate , September 22, 2020.

We all know that there’s an “A” in the LGBTQIA+ acronym, and no, it doesn’t stand for “ally.” It stands for “asexual,” or ace, and it’s a branch of the queer community that is too often ignored or even erased. Like all labels, it means different things to different people, but on a most basic level it refers to people who don’t experience sexual attraction. What does this mean? That’s what writer and science journalist Angela Chen, who herself identifies as ace, explores in her new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (out now from Beacon Press).

 The crux of society’s difficulty with accepting asexuality is, Chen argues, because compulsory sexuality is ingrained in societal narratives about mental and physical health, politics and liberation, and interpersonal relationships. Compulsory sexuality posits that sex is a primal human need, ties sex to maturity, and places sex in relationship hierarchies. Even in the queer community, though we hate to be oversexualized by the straights, we often sexualize ourselves and each other. And while queer sex is indeed liberating for allosexuals (or those that do experience sexual attraction), so is the ability not to have sex. Chen argues, through a fantastic blend of nuanced and clear-eyed reporting, research, and personal reflection, that true liberation requires the dismantling of compulsory sexuality.

 them. sat down with Chen to talk about relationships, sexuality, consent, and the possibilities and limitations of labels and language.

 Sarah Neilson : How did you grapple with the limitations and possibilities of language while you were writing this book?

 Angela Chen : In many ways the book is about language. It is about, what does the word asexual mean? Which is not really apparent. When people are confused about asexuality, there's a part of me that's enormously sympathetic, because I understand why semantically it would be confusing to include people who do have sex and do have positive sexual experiences under the umbrella of asexual. And many parts of the book are about the fact that language hides specific experience. Early in the book, I talk about how I never realized I was asexual because I never realized that when I would say that someone was hot or attractive to me, that I might be using the same words, but that my experience wasn't the same — because they sounded enough alike there was no way for me to probe deeper.

 I tried to be very careful when talking about language in the book, especially in the section that's about romantic or platonic attraction, because language is tricky. Every time I wrote the word platonic or about sexual desire versus sexual attraction, I questioned what I meant.

 Something else I thought about a lot was the role of language in centering ace experience. One thing that I initially wanted to do was to not say when people were asexual and only say when people were allosexual [people who experience sexual attraction], because we accept this idea that being allosexual is a default. I thought it would be interesting to try to assume that everyone is ace unless otherwise noted. But what I found is that it just didn't work. I found that it became confusing for my readers, and it became confusing for me. Maybe there was a way I could have made it work, but that to me was a lesson in showing that, even if you have the best intentions around language and you think about language pretty carefully, you are in some ways limited by society and structure.

 I would love to say that tomorrow we would have an entirely new language that all of us would understand. We would have a new definition of platonic and romantic. We would decouple sex and romance. But it's not going to happen tomorrow. I think it's going to happen in a series of small discussions and people disagreeing and then eventually a consensus will be built. And all of that takes time.

 SN : You mentioned the section about romantic versus platonic. In that section you write, “‘Platonic’ and ‘romantic’ are types of feeling while ‘friend’ and ‘romantic partner’ are social designations, and the latter molds to the former.” You also use the phrase "queering the social border" to describe broadening of possibility within relationships. Can you talk about that phrase and the reckoning between interpersonal emotions and societal categories?

 AC :

 Language tells us how we're supposed to feel. I think the best way to think about that is to make it concrete. Like the term queerplatonic. As I write in the book, for some people, queerplatonic relationships feel unique. They feel different from how you would feel toward a friend or romantic partner, but for other people, queerplatonic is a tool of language that allows us to let go of so much of the baggage and expectations that we have for specific linguistic roles like friend or partner. There are so many different roles that people can have in our lives, but we really have a very narrow number of words for them. And they really feel, to me at least, inadequate.

 Relationships are so different in so many ways, but they're all encapsulated by the same words, and whether we like it or not, I think we all have ingrained expectations of what a friend is supposed to be and especially what a romantic partner is supposed to be, what we're allowed to ask for and what we should expect to receive. And so queerplatonic I think is a way to get rid of that, because right now I don't think we have that many assumptions of what a queerplatonic relationship is. For most people, it's a very new concept. It kind of resets and lets you start from a new place.

 I think that's so freeing because otherwise people spend so much time wondering, do my emotions fit this category? Do I care about my friends too much, and therefore maybe there's something “more than friendship” there? Or if I don't want to see my romantic partner every day, is that inappropriate somehow for this romantic relationship? Labels can be really comforting because they give us some guidance and stability and instructions, but oftentimes we all try to fit our feelings into the labels instead of trying to fit them to the relationship and what actually works for the other person.

 SN : I really liked the chapter where you wrestled with the idea of consent and a “good enough” reason to say no to sex. Can you talk a little about that section and the ways in which consent is not always as simple as yes or no in a society that operates on compulsory sexuality?

AC :

 Compulsory sexuality is the idea that all normal people want and desire sex, that everyone has this baseline level of sexual desire. If you assume that everyone has that baseline, then when they say no for seemingly no reason, then it seems like they're being mean to you or they're being withholding or they are denying you something, right? Because if the reasons are like, I'm sad or you're not a good partner or things are stressful, those seem like good reasons. But if you can't point to what seems like a good reason, then compulsory sexuality makes you think, they don't love me or they don't care about this relationship, and that could create all kinds of relational problems. But the truth is not everyone has that baseline of sexual desire. And for many people they don't want to because they don't want to.

 That's very hard for many people to accept. I've spoken to many aces, both for the book and privately, and they say there's this sense that they can't say no forever. Maybe they can say no this time. Maybe they're on their period and they can say no. Maybe it's long distance, but there's the sense that they at some point they owe sex to their partner. And I simply don't believe that's true. And I think most aces do not believe that is true. If we think that no one should have unwanted sex with a stranger, we should also believe that no one should have unwanted sex with a partner, even if their partner is great. And of course you always have to caveat by saying the partners are allowed to have their own boundaries. I think it's fine if the partner says that not having sex is a deal breaker for them, but that's their personal deal breaker. It's not that the lower-desire partner is broken. I think many people, not just aces, feel coerced and like they are not allowed to say no, that no alone is not a good enough answer.

 SN : Because sex is, as you write, part of a maturity narrative, I as an ace person sometimes feel infantilized, and worry that I’m seen as a “safe” or “innocent” person. Do you have thoughts like that? What kind of things do you do to combat that internalized acephobia?

 AC :

 Yes, I definitely do have experiences like that. And I've talked to a lot of people who have had similar experiences. For example, I was recently writing an article about a three parent family in which it's basically a straight couple who are co-parents with someone who is asexual. And when I was telling people of the article, a lot of people were like, "Oh, that sounds so great. I'm too jealous to be in a poly relationship, but it would be great to have this asexual third." And there was nothing really wrong with saying that, but something about that rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed very infantilizing, like this person could never be a threat. And I think implicit in that idea that this person could never be a threat is the idea that sexual infidelity or sexual jealousy is the greatest threat that there could be. Not that we should be threatened by others, but it's funny how aces are often infantilized, even though aces who are not aromantic can still be an emotional threat.

 But there are many interesting ways in which I think being asexual has affected how other people see me. I noticed that my friends tend to talk to me about sex less than they used to. And sometimes when they do they'll preface it by saying something like, we don't have to talk about this, if you're uncomfortable. A part of me will be like, we've been friends for longer than I've identified as ace. We used to talk about sex all the time in college in graphic terms. I'm not different. I'm not made uncomfortable by sex just because I identify differently. I'm not any more repulsed by it than I used to be.

 I was just talking to someone else who said that after coming out as asexual, she thinks her allo female friends take her advice more seriously, like she somehow now has more objectivity when she speaks. I think that's really fascinating. So all this to say is, yes. I think the asexual label can change how people view us. And it bothers me a little bit.

 I don't know if I have any tips for how to solve that. It's just something that I'm aware of. And when I'm aware of it, I just try to remind myself that I am the same person, and I'm not any less mature than I was before no matter how people's reactions to me might've changed.

SN :
 
You write about people’s lack of vision and imagination when it comes to creating a more equitable society around sexuality. Where is your vision and imagination around creating equity and justice right now? What do you see ahead, what are you working toward?
 
AC :
 
One thing I want is ace discourse to be part of the culture, part of the language in a way that so many other things have become part of the language. In recent years we have become much more comfortable talking about various types of privilege, for example, or talking about racial inequality. And while I'm definitely not trying to make parallels, I want ace ideas and concepts to seep into the discourse in the same way, so that people can have discussions using this alternate point of view or so that when ace people want to talk about these things, it doesn't require a 30 minute Ted talk in which you lay the groundwork for all of your ideas. I think that once we have a language and we have the framework and we have the thoughts, then we'll be able to really get to the next level, because right now we're not there. Right now many of the ideas that I bring up, maybe they sound a little bit academic, even though I think that they're very relevant to many people and not just to ace people.
 
On another level I think asexuality should be normalized in sex ed. It should be on census forms. It should be something that people learn about in order to be a therapist, especially sex therapists. I think that ace perspective should be brought to discussions when it comes to medicine and the medicalization of sex and the way that narrative of “broken” is used to sell various libido boosting drugs. I think representation is important. I would love to see ace characters who aren't used purely educationally. Characters who have complex storylines.
 
Read Me: Angela Chen’s Ace Challenges Us All to Reframe How We Talk About Sex. By Sarah Neilson. Them ,  September 15, 2020.

In case my job title of "sex and relationships reporter" isn't a clue, I'm a sexual person. Since coming of age, I've thought about sex, watched sex (either pornographic or simulated in mainstream media), talked about sex, written about sex — and, as you can assume, had sex.

 I can't say whether my interest in sex is more or less than the "average" person — whatever average even is — but I do know for certain that I'm allosexual. An allosexual is someone who experiences sexual attraction and is the counterpart to an asexual, someone who does not experience sexual attraction.

 While I've known about asexuality for awhile, I only learned of the term "allosexual" from the new book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by journalist Angela Chen, out Sept. 15.

 In Ace, Chen doesn't just describe allo and asexuality. She explores the nuances of desire and passion and how we as a society have created a hierarchy of love, where romance is considered superior to friendship. Chen examines how our culture isn't just one of compulsory heterosexuality — the assumption and enforcement of straightness — but one of compulsory sexuality at its core, the assumption that everyone wants sex whether straight or not. What's more is that she frames asexuality through an intersectional lens, pointing out the ways the ace movement has been whitewashed and dismissive of disabled people.

 Ace is an illuminating look into the asexuality spectrum that I'd recommend to anyone, allo or ace. It's a read that won't just teach you about asexuality, but it will also position you to ask your own questions of desire and love and passion.

 

Mashable: What inspired you to write Ace?

 Chen: I wrote this book because I had started to identify as asexual and because asexuality is so misunderstood, it's one of those things that you have to go searching for to understand. If you're straight, you don't have to search to discover what heterosexuality is. Asexuality is very much hidden.

 When I started to think about identity and what it meant about my life, I couldn't find much about asexuality. Everything I found was either in an academic anthology — which is great, but not that accessible — or it was on Tumblr, which is also great but not mainstream. It was a subculture and by definition, not that available.

 I'm also a journalist. I was a journalist before I identified as asexual, so [this] felt like something I could do because I knew how to report and had connections. It just felt important to me because learning about asexuality really clarified so many things in my life personally. Also, when I was talking to my friends who are asexual and I would tell them what I learned, it seemed interesting and important to them, too. It helped them think about their own lives and their own relationships and what desire felt for them versus romance versus sex, and I want everyone to have those conversations.

 I really don't think that the ace lens is only valuable if you happen to be asexual — just like if you're straight, there's so much value in learning about queerness. I wanted to make that more accessible.

 Mashable : I completely agree. I've had friend breakups from years ago that I still think about and beat myself up for it. I wasn't dating this person, why am I still upset about this? The chapter in Ace on romantic and platonic love was really helpful to see that platonic love is legitimate love and the hierarchy [that romantic love is superior] is fictional.

 Chen : Absolutely. Last night I was watching the new NXIVM documentary. Have you watched?

 Mashable : I haven't.

Chen :

In the second episode, one of the first people to leave the sex cult talks about how she reached out to someone who also left and she said something like, "I reached out to her because I didn't know intellectually what I was looking at, I knew how I felt." When I was watching this, I felt like that's such a good metaphor for the experience of learning any kind of new lens. You know how you felt — you have these confusing feelings that don't make sense. And then once you have intellectual grounding, all of a sudden your life makes so much more sense, or your feelings make so much more sense. I think that's really powerful.

 Mashable :

That does make a lot of sense. Going back to what you said about Tumblr, the site was definitely like that for me, too. People on Tumblr would describe what I was feeling as a bisexual person. Do you think that's still the case for Tumblr as a source of learning, or do you think the internet has moved on? I looked at the asexual tag on TikTok today and there's over 200 million views. For teens today, what resources do they have?

 Chen :

Tumblr, TikTok, the internet remains a huge resource. There was a study where a huge portion of people first learned about asexuality on Tumblr, and I think that continues. But it's a bit of a double-edged sword. You learn so much on Tumblr and TikTok and Twitter and because of that, asexuality is often considered to be this kind of "internet orientation" in the same way that everything that teen girls do is seen as stupid. Everything that has a huge following on various corners of the internet is seen and dismissed as something just for young people and not worthy of the mainstream. That's part of what I wanted to do with the book — there's so much more about asexuality than in my book, but I hope that asexuality will reach people who are not in these places.

 I think that there's a lot of ageism issues with that. The average age of someone who's asexual is quite young, and even after we published excerpts of my book a few months ago, people who are older — in their 30s — reaching out to me saying, "I thought I understood what asexuality was but I didn't really and this really spoke to me... I didn't feel connected to the culture." The internet culture of asexuality is very specific and if you're not a part of it, you just don't vibe with it. I think asexuality can be so much broader than that; the thoughts don't have to be connected to an aesthetic or a vibe.

 Mashable :

 While I was reading Ace, I felt a sort of kinship [as a bisexual]. In the broader LGBTQ community, I sometimes feel like I don't belong. With terms like gold star [lesbians or asexual], there's a certain wanting of being an archetypal example of what you "should" be. As the queer community is essentially counterculture, being counterculture to the counterculture is a weird place to be in. What are your thoughts on this? Is education like your book the answer to, say, a gay person not wanting to date someone who's bisexual, or someone who's aromantic [has no interest or desire for romance]?

 Chen :

You're right, there's so much gatekeeping in so many ways. Even in the queer community, I think there's a lot of misconceptions and questions about whether aces should be part of the queer community.

 I don't have an easy answer. People will sometimes say to ace people, "What kinds of discrimination have you suffered? It's so easy being ace." There's these misconceptions about what the ace experience means from people who are allosexual and some other people who may be queer but not asexual. In the end, I think there's a lack of understanding about specific experiences.

 Mashable :

 In the book, you talk about your own personal history. Partway through, you mention not wanting to be honest about some of your experiences. How did it feel to share these details about your self-discovery in such a radically honest way?

 Chen :

It made me confront the extent to which I've internalized many forms of acephobia. Like I write in the book, intellectually and morally I believe everything I write, that being asexual is in no way inferior and all of that. But as I was writing the book there were parts of me that were defensive — and of course that's part of my personality, some of which has nothing to do with my identity whatsoever.

 I'd write parts of this and would feel myself wanting to be like, "Oh but you know, I'm not a prude. I like 'WAP'!" I wanted to prove myself before anyone could dismiss me because of what I thought they believe about what it meant to be asexual. So it really showed me the extent to which I struggled to not be defensive, the extent to which I struggled to prove how 'down' I am, so ironically the extent to which I actually believed all of those things emotionally. I didn't, and I don't, intellectually.

 Mashable :

 Several asexual people you spoke with were also members of the kink community. From what I gleaned, there's a lot of emphasis on consent in kink, and there's intimacy in kink. Why do you think some asexual people may be drawn to the kink community?

 Chen :

 One reason is because, for them, it's just interesting. Obviously for some people, kink can be sexual. I'm not saying kink is inherently non-sexual, but I don't think it has to be. People have said they like the dynamics of it, they like the feeling of interesting sensations, the same way some people like the sensation of wearing velvet. It doesn't have to be sexual. They like the emotional dynamics of it even if it's not sexually gratifying to them. There are so many parts of kink that, while they can be sexual, it doesn't have to be for them.

 The other reason many people have said is because they do think that the norms in kink often make it safer for them because there's better consent practices — which is not to say kink is perfect, every person in every culture can improve. But what people have said specifically is that it's encouraged to negotiate beforehand. If you're doing a scene together you're supposed to talk about what's okay and what's not. One woman I spoke to said something like, "I can say, 'I don't care if you get hard, I don't care if you get wet, I'm not going to do anything about it.'" And she felt like she could say that in the kink context. It was okay, it was encouraged, whereas she said that she felt less safe in the vanilla context because it was considered kind of libido-killing to negotiate these things. She would feel like if she stopped them, then it wouldn't be okay and she'd feel pressure. The norms [in kink] felt safer and better for her, even though I think many people have this erroneous assumption that kink is a dangerous place.

 Mashable : What advice would you give someone questioning whether they're asexual or aromantic or both?

 Chen :

The first thing I would say is that it's okay to question. There's so much pressure on aces to be different, like we're encouraged to question too much. We're encouraged to be like, "Oh, I'm not actually ace. I'm just shy, I just haven't found the right person." That's not what I'm saying. But I do think in general questioning is good because all of us change and all of us have different experiences. Don't feel bad for questioning, even though you don't have to question if you feel you already know who you are.

 Give yourself a sense of space. I think it takes people a lot of time to understand this kind of lesser-known orientation and what it might be, and what integrating in the identity might mean for them. One thing that's interesting about ace identity is that everyone always says very specifically: Only you can decide if you're ace. I can't "diagnose" you as asexual and people will often say if this doesn't work for you — if identifying as asexual is harmful for you — then maybe you don't have to do it. I think giving yourself that kind of space is important.

 People have reached out [after reading excerpts] and they'll say things like, "I feel so conflicted. In some ways, thinking about identifying as ace makes me feel so free. In other ways, it just makes me feel kind of bad about myself." And that's okay, too. Most of us have been conditioned to think of asexuality as something inferior — it's okay if you maybe have that reaction. Give yourself the time and the space that you need. You don't have to commit to anything right now.

 Mashable :  What broader hopes do you have for Ace?

Chen :

Many aces know a lot of the basic stuff, but I think it's rare for them to see actual narratives of other ace people. And of course, just because you're ace doesn't mean you necessarily know what it might mean to be an ace person of color if you're white, or to be disabled. There's many intersections and I hope that's illuminating.

 I also really hope it makes people just question and think about themselves as they're reading it, regardless of whether they're ace or not. Some people who've read galleys said, "You know, as I was reading this I started thinking, how do I define desire? Where am I on this ace/allo spectrum? Are there relationships that I thought were platonic but they were romantic but not sexual?" These are questions that people can all think about, especially questions regarding consent which I think is super important.

 I hope that regardless of whatever someone's orientation might be, that they read this and apply it to themselves. Hopefully they can open up and think about the way we combine sex and desire and love and romance. A lot of times, they're all very separate things.

 

'Ace' is the first book of its kind. Here’s why anyone, asexual or not, should read it. By Anna Iovine. Mashable , September 10, 2020.