CHAPTER 6
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH
A WHEELCHAIR CANNOT BE HIDDEN. For Cara Liebowitz, a twenty-eight-year-old disability activist with cerebral palsy, her wheelchair is an obvious mark of difference, one of many such contrasts that began early in life. An individualized educational program. Having to leave the classroom “five minutes early so I wasn’t trampled.” Constantly being pulled out of lessons for physical therapy. Sexuality, too, is not the same for Cara as for her abled peers. “Nobody sees me as sexually attractive anyway,” she says. Nobody, Cara tells me, thinks that a disabled woman in a wheelchair could be interested in having sex.
There exists no perfect, ironclad formula for understanding how sexuality and health interact, but that hasn’t prevented people from believing an elegant but incorrect statement: people who don’t want sex are sick, and people who are sick—that is, mentally or physically disabled or different in some way—don’t want sex.
To outsiders, Cara, who identifies as ace, seems to confirm this mistaken belief. To people in the disability and asexuality communities, however, Cara is a contradiction. Her identity has put her at odds with both groups, each of which is marginalized in a different way with regard to sex. The disabled community has spent a long time fighting the idea that disabled people are, or should be, asexual. The ace community has struggled for as long as it has existed to prove that asexuality has nothing to do with disability.
A disabled ace woman complicates both these political agendas, and it is perhaps in a situation like this that the questions of legitimacy and in-group loyalty are most acute. Both communities are well-meaning, but the groups “toss you between each other like a hot potato,” says Cara, who knits while we Skype and wears a black shirt that says PISS ON PITY, “and you can’t really find a place where you belong.”
This is complicated territory, so let’s first unpack the idea that people who don’t want sex are sick. Doctors in the West have been worried about the “problem” of low sexual desire since at least the thirteenth century, when Pope Gregory IX wrote about the issue of frigiditas. Back then, frigiditas was considered a male problem similar to impotence, says scholar Alison Downham Moore, coauthor of Frigidity: An Intellectual History, in an interview. Frigidity wouldn’t switch to being a more female-focused problem of psychological desire until the nineteenth century, and it’s “a bit of a mystery” why that change happened, she adds.
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.1 (In the DSM-5, the disorder is split into male and female forms, but let’s stick to general HSDD to keep things simple.)2 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.
With a diagnosis like this in the books, it’s no wonder that asexuality is widely considered a sickness to be cured. Long-ago treatments for frigiditas, like rubbing wine on the genitals,4 seem laughable now, but the DSM enjoys the authority of modern medicine and the heft of the modern scientific establishment. Though the concern over low sexual desire would probably still exist if the DSM disappeared tomorrow, the existence of the HSDD diagnosis legitimizes and amplifies these worries. The officialness of the DSM encourages others to ask aces, and aces to ask ourselves, if we’re sure we’re not sick and if we’re sure we shouldn’t be cured.
And how the pharmaceutical companies would love to sell us a cure. The symptoms of HSDD are not uncommon, especially among women, who are primarily the ones diagnosed. One 2008 study of 31,000 women found that 10 percent could fit the diagnostic criteria.5 Combine this with fears for relationship maintenance—not to mention the message that sex is necessary for a healthy life6 and that being healthy is an individual moral duty7—and the company that has a fix is a company that will be rich.
The list of attempts to create libido-boosting gadgets for women is exhaustive and clever. (Little word exists on treatments for men, partly because sexual stereotypes mean that people are not as comfortable with the idea of boosting men’s desire.) Companies have tried to target hormones; Procter & Gamble created a testosterone patch to treat low sexual desire in women, but the US Food and Drug Administration rejected it due to safety concerns.8 Companies have tried to target the genitals by creating products like the EROS clitoral therapy device, a vibrator-like gadget designed to improve blood flow to the clitoris and external genitalia.9 It is still around but never became popular. And companies have tried to target the brain. Viagra manufacturer Pfizer spent eight years studying three thousand women to determine whether the same drug that made men stiff would make women want sex. It didn’t, and Mitra Boolel, who was then leader of Pfizer’s sex research team, told the New York Times that the researchers were changing focus from a woman’s genitals because the brain was the crucial sexual organ in women.10
In the past five years, the FDA has twice approved new libido-boosting drugs for women that act on the brain. In 2015, the FDA said yes to Addyi, a failed antidepressant11 that was repackaged and remarketed as the “pink Viagra.”12 Addyi was supported by a pharmaceutical-funded campaign called Even the Score, which is prime example of feminism being used to sell dubiously successful products. Even the Score argued that it would be feminist to approve the drug because it focuses on women’s pleasure, never mind all the complications: Women had to take the pill daily, couldn’t consume alcohol while taking it, and experienced side effects including nausea and fainting. After all that, it created only half of one more “sexually satisfying event” per month.13 Happily, Addyi failed, though not neccessarily because of an objection to desire drugs.14 Poor effectiveness, drugmaker dysfunction, and the ban on drinking ultimately made it an unattractive option.
Now there’s Vyleesi, a brain-targeting solution for women that the FDA approved in 2019.15 Vyleesi doesn’t have as many restrictions as Addyi, but it does require women to give themselves a shot in the stomach or thigh forty-five minutes before they think they want to have sex. It also causes nausea and it is once again unclear whether the drug works well. In total, taking Vyleesi didn’t result in more “sexually satisfying events” in a statistically significant way.16 That may be enough for the FDA, but it’s not enough for a skeptic like me. Despite demand for a libido-boosting drug and despite desperation on the part of pharmaceutical companies to create this drug, no safe and widely effective libido booster exists. When there is, everyone will know, believe me. Pharmaceutical companies will make sure of that.
Medical authority can be powerful even when it is imaginary. Doctors encourage aces to ask ourselves if we’re sick and doctors also diagnose and make declarations without caring at all what an ace person might think. Perhaps nothing better captures the attitude that asexuality is a delusion of the unwell than an episode of the popular medical drama House titled “Better Half”—an hour of television so notorious among aces that it is colloquially known as just “that House episode,” accompanied by a grimace.
Dr. Gregory House is, famously, not a sensitive man. Upon hearing about a coworker’s asexual patient, his first response is to ask whether the woman is a giant pool of algae or extremely ugly. Luckily, the showrunners correctly intuited that people will think an ugly ace woman is lying to spare her pride and gave the patient all the markings of conventional female attractiveness—long blonde waves, curves clad in a clingy pink sweater—to deflect this very question. All these serve to signal that when a woman is blonde and pretty, asexuality simply is not possible.
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.”
As it turns out, House is two for three, and he doesn’t even need to refer to the DSM to be right. The woman is not dead, but she is also not asexual. She is pretending to be asexual because she loves her asexual husband. The twist is that her husband isn’t asexual either. His lack of sexual desire is caused by a brain tumor that can be easily treated, meaning that with the quick intervention of science the two can soon enjoy the heterosexual married sex that is their due. House wins his money and congratulates his coworker on having brought these patients to his attention and therefore “having course-corrected two people’s wildly screwed-up world views.” As he says, it’s “better to have schtupped and lost than never to have schtupped at all.”
First aired in 2012, “Better Half” remains one of the most high-profile depictions of asexuality on a major show. For many, it was their introduction to this “wildly screwed-up” orientation. Even today, when I tell people I am writing a book about asexuality, many allos will mention the episode, adding sheepishly that it confused them then and that they are still sort of confused now.
Any regular viewer of House knows that the character’s arrogance is a feature of the show, not a bug. He is not supposed to be nice and no one expects him to spend much time worrying about other people’s feelings. But House is supposed to be brilliant and authoritative, a genius who sees through the other, lowly people and calls them out on their bullshit. Smug aha moments are amusing when he is an expert in obscure signs of gold poisoning, but less so when his assumptions contribute to the idea that asexual people cannot be trusted to tell the truth of our own experiences. As such, the target of House’s incredulity reveals the extent to which compulsory sexuality is accepted. House isn’t real, but the people who wrote this episode are and they thought it was okay to approve this storyline, playing right into the idea that aces and the ace-adjacent need to be disabused of their notions. A brilliant doctor says so, therefore the rest of us should listen up and be suspicious. In his world, which is our world, asexuality does not exist; it is either lie or sickness.
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 1994.17 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.18 Since 2013, the DSM has included this so-called asexual exception.19
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 people20—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.
The features that truly separate psychiatric sickness and asexual orientation are not the amount of sexual attraction or any biological marker or whether someone feels distress. Most of the differences are social, explains ace researcher Andrew Hinderliter in a paper on the topic.21 HSDD and asexuality have separate intellectual origins, separate approaches, and separate interpretations.
Desire disorders come from the medical field of sexology, while the exploration of asexual identity has been rooted in queer studies and social justice discourse. Desire disorders are about top-down medical knowledge, with doctors being the ultimate authorities in diagnosing a disorder. Aces encourage personal exploration, emphasizing that people must decide for themselves if they are asexual. I have told others that their experience as described to me lines up with the experiences of other asexual people. I have never “diagnosed” someone as asexual or insisted that they must identify this way.
Most importantly, the difference lies in what people believe about the implications of having low sexual desire. Disorders of desire are about seeing difference and calling it a problem. 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.
Going further, ace activist CJ Chasin criticizes the idea that people should accept being asexual (or having low desire) only if they can’t be made more sexual. It’s a common idea, even among ace-friendly researchers and therapists and aces ourselves. “But would you say this to someone who was lesbian?” Chasin asks. Would you say, If she can be made straight, we’ll do that, but if she can’t be turned straight, we’ll help her accept that she is gay? “I would argue that it shouldn’t matter if someone can be changed; we need to be unpacking the expectation that people should be changed, that it’s better to want sex, that we should only accept an asexual identity if people can’t be otherwise,” Chasin continues. “It’s the same with trans and nonbinary people; I reject the idea that we should accept people who are trans as whatever gender only if they can’t be cis. That’s nonsense.”
Chasin is right that nobody should feel pressured to be more sexual regardless of whether that is possible. Still, personal choice is important and if a safe and widely effective libido-boosting drug existed, I would not try to ban people from accessing it—though it should be used only after plenty of education and sold without using the language of “cure.” As sexologist Barbara Carrellas told The Outline, a drug like Vyleesi should be marketed as a pleasure-enhancing device, not as a fix for a medical problem.22
I am not categorically against diagnoses either. Diagnoses can provide community, as well as the insurance codes necessary to access specialized treatment. As it stands, however, the most helpful treatment for HSDD is usually plain old therapy, not any special pill. It is difficult for me to see the purpose of a diagnosis that is not very likely to connect you to useful services but that is likely to reinforce the idea that you are medically unwell.
Were I to start identifying as an allo woman with HSDD tomorrow, the main difference would be that I feel worse about myself. I could be prescribed Addyi or Vyleesi, but that process takes time and money and the drugs likely won’t work. I could learn more about HSDD, but many online materials focus on how devastating the condition is, which does little to help an anxious mind that already worries about every imperfection. The HSDD diagnosis is of little use when an alternative and more affirming way of thinking exists, which can mean identifying as ace or simply thinking that having low sexual desire is not a sickness. Rejecting a medical diagnosis doesn’t mean being forced to be happy about a situation, either. Again, it is possible to be distressed by something—plenty of aces are distressed about being ace—without the cause of that distress being a problem in itself.
Many aces were once allos diagnosed with a disorder (and prescribed hormones off-label) before they learned about asexuality and decided that they were fine as is. A change in perspective is all that is necessary to switch from one to the other, from sick to well, disordered to different. Indeed, criticism that HSDD is a social construct is far from new and the social nature of the division is borne out by research too. According to one 2015 study that compared self-identified aces with allos diagnosed with a desire disorder, in general, aces had less sexual desire than the HSDD-diagnosed group but felt better about themselves.23 That’s a pretty fuzzy distinction, which is unsurprising because fuzziness has always been a feature of the DSM.
Throw together some criteria, approve it by vote, and anything can become an official psychiatric disorder—which means that the manual has long been a mirror for biases that would horrify many people today. Fifty years ago, a man who wanted to have sex with other men would have been classified as mentally disordered, and this would have been supported by the DSM’s entry for homosexuality, which wouldn’t be fully dropped until the 1980s.24 Today, a man who has little interest in partnered sex is still considered to have a psychiatric disorder. Both diagnoses arise from narrow-mindedness.
While aces have been fighting the idea that we’re sick, disabled people have been trying to prove they’re not asexual. To represent those who believe that people who are sick don’t want (or shouldn’t have) sex, I present six words: Three generations of imbeciles are enough. The legendary Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote this phrase, shocking in its bluntness, in 1927 to support the right to forcibly sterilize the “unfit.”25
The “imbecile” in question, Carrie Buck, was the middle of these three generations, the child of a woman who failed to meet standards of respectability. At a young age, Carrie had been taken away from her mother, Emma, and sent to live in the home of the more distinguished John and Alice Dobbs. When Carrie was seventeen, she was raped by the nephew of her foster parents. The resulting pregnancy put John and Alice in a socially delicate position. To save their nephew, they decided to sacrifice Carrie—marking her as “feeble-minded” without evidence and though she was of sound intelligence and had never had trouble in school—and place her in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.
Institutionalizing Carrie was not particularly hard to do, explains journalist Adam Cohen in Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck.26 The changing racial demographics of this era stoked the fear of the wealthy whites in charge. Eugenics, or the idea that society could be improved if the unfit were banned from reproducting,” appeared to be a perfectly rational solution to the perceived threat of a world overrun by the unworthy. It was an idea championed by top thinkers, taught at Ivy League universities, and it was even the subject of a song called “Love or Eugenics” that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote as a Princeton undergraduate. (“Men, which would you like to come and pour your tea / Kisses that set your heart aflame / Or love from a prophylactic dame?”) “Unfit,” however, could mean anything that powerful people didn’t like. It could simply mean “not privileged.” For example, studies by top researchers suggested that up to 98 percent of prostitutes had “subnormal” intelligence.27
Following her commitment to the Virginia State Colony, Carrie would become the plaintiff of Buck v. Bell, representing the agrument that no person should be sterilized against their will. The case made it to the Supreme Court. To Holmes, Carrie—young, unwed, supposedly promiscuous and mentally deficient—represented a vision of America that could not be allowed to continue, and so he ruled in favor of eugenicist John Bell, the superintendent of the colony. There was only one dissenting opinion, so Carrie was sterilized. The case was cited by the Nazis as they developed their own eugenics program.28 The ruling has never been overturned.
Many who learn about Buck v. Bell for the first time are horrified that the Dobbses lied about Carrie’s intelligence, but it does not matter whether she was actually “feeble-minded.” Forcibly sterilizing her violated her bodily autonomy and the case would have been just as horrendous if she truly had an intellectual disability or epilepsy. Buck v. Bell is one of the most harrowing Supreme Court decisions, a continual reminder of the strain of eugenicism in the history of the United States.
People with disabilities are one of the groups that the world assumes to be asexual or tries to make asexual, never mind their own thoughts and desires. “Desexualization is a process that separates sexuality from disabled bodies, making it irrelevant to and incompatible with them because disabled people are supposedly undesirable in society and because disability is believed to lead to sexual incapacity,” writes gender studies scholar Eunjung Kim, who has done important research on disability and asexuality.29
The desexualization of disabled people may seem to disprove compulsory sexuality, but it actually reveals a nuance of the way it works. Compulsory sexuality is the belief that it’s “normal” to be lustful. The flip side is that groups that are already perceived as less than “normal”—like older people, people who are autistic, Asian men, the racist stereotype of the mammy, or disabled people—are desexualized, considered sexually unattractive to others, and assumed to have no lust of their own. Beautiful abled women may be told to remain virginal and shamed into chastity, but their bodies are still considered objects of desire, used as props in movies and to sell beer. The bodies of those with physical disabilities, however, are seen as deviant and ugly—and disabled people are considered to be eternally childlike and not ready for sex—so the idea of disabled people having a sex drive is repulsive. As disabled academic Tom Shakespeare told The Atlantic, images of disability and sexuality tend to show disabled people either as “perverse and hypersexual,”30 as Carrie supposedly was, her sexuality so dangerous that she needed to be sterilized, or asexual.
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.31 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,32 and people with disabilities often start dating later than their abled peers.33
Stereotypes aren’t the only obstacle preventing disabled people from exploring their sexualities. The bodies of disabled people are treated like objects and burdens by an unkind medical system, says Cara, the ace disability activist with cerebral palsy. At medical appointments, nurses, doctors, and therapists flung her legs around. She went through physical therapy and surgery and has scars. “I think disabled people, especially those who grow up with their disability, are not taught that our bodies can be a source of pleasure,” Cara says. “It’s a process every day to figure out how I’m going to do things and I do things differently than your average person. At least twice a day, I’m like, ‘Why do I even have a body?’”
Similarly, Jo, twenty-eight, says that being in constant pain from a young age means she didn’t have the same connection to her body that other people did. (Jo is one of the eleven disabled aces that University of Glasgow sexuality researcher Karen Cuthbert interviewed for a study on what it’s like to manage these two identities.34) “Maybe that had something to do with how I view other people’s bodies or physical interaction in general,” Jo tells Cuthbert. A woman named Erin—who has joint hypermobility problems that come with “weird sensory issues”—says that sometimes she wonders if there’s simply a disconnect between her mind and body and that’s why she doesn’t want to engage with anyone sexually.
Such questions aren’t only limited to physical difference. Steff, who is twenty-two, told Cuthbert that she had assumed she didn’t care about sex because she was on the autism spectrum. “I blamed my lack of interest in intimacy on my Asperger’s,” she says. “If I did not have Asperger’s I think I would have suspected I was asexual a lot sooner.”35
It makes perfect sense that in response to all this—misguided and malicious beliefs, disrespectful doctors, and true violence sanctioned by the highest court in the United States—the disabled community would insist that people with disabilities have the same sexual desires and deserve the same sexual rights as the abled. The group Yes, We Fuck! has created a documentary focusing on disability and sexuality.36 Podcasts like Andrew Gurza’s Disability After Dark discuss the same topic.37 The 2012 movie The Sessions, about a disabled man working with a sex surrogate, has brought attention to the issue, as have continuing political debates over the practice.38
Notably, disability scholars Maureen Milligan and Aldred Neufeldt claim that asexuality among the disabled is largely a myth, and a self-defeating, self-perpetuating one at that. “Physical and mental impairments may significantly alter functioning, but do not eliminate basic drives or the desire for love, affection, and intimacy,” they write.39 Milligan and Neufeldt argue that while people with disabilities might have fewer opportunities to have sex, that doesn’t mean the desire itself is absent. The problem isn’t the amount of desire, it’s what other people think about their amount of desire and how defeating the whole situation can be.
Keenly aware of how she’d be perceived by abled people, Cara assumed she was a straight woman until her twenties. After she started dating, Cara began to wonder whether that was true. Sex wasn’t upsetting or bad but, as she says, “You can have sex or you can watch Netflix and I’m going to pick Netflix.” Certain sexual activities did feel pleasurable, but the pleasure didn’t seem to come from sexual attraction. It felt good in the same way that brushing your hair or stretching a hamstring feels good, so it seemed right to identify as “somewhere on the ace spectrum.” Ace identity matches what she knows of her life.
Not all aces have been welcoming of people like Cara. Members of the ace community, especially in early years, rejected disabled aces completely, insisting that they would delegitimize asexuality and make it impossible to prove that asexuality is not related to (or caused by) disability and sickness. Even the efforts to add the asexual exception to the DSM ended up being subtly ableist by focusing on how happy aces are. “Rather than challenging stigma against both mental illness and asexuality, it seeks instead to rid asexuality of the stigma of mental illness,” writes Wake Forest gender studies scholar Kristina Gupta. “Such normalizing tactics may come at the cost of intersectional analyses and coalitional possibilities.”40
That’s hard. At the same time, Cara can also feel like she’s a “bad disabled person” because she doesn’t want to fuck. “I do feel sometimes that I’m just bowing to stereotypes,” Cara adds. “You know, ‘Of course the girl in the wheelchair doesn’t want to have sex because who’d want to have sex with her?’” As to where her asexuality “came from,” there’s no perfect answer to that either. Some disabled aces do have the clarity of separation and of knowing the two are not related. For Cara, though, it remains unclear whether she is ace “just because” or whether cerebral palsy somehow played a role. “Is it because I was a little sheltered as a kid?” she wonders. “Did nobody ever teach me about those things?”
There exists a vision of the perfect ace person, one who never needs to ask themselves these questions. The gold-star asexual, also called the unassailable asexual, has no doubt at all about their identity. (The term, coined by the blogger Sciatrix in 2010,41 is similar to the term gold-star lesbian, meaning a lesbian who has never had sex with a man.) The gold-star asexual will be the savior of us all, the one who can prove that asexuality is legitimate simply because there is not a single other factor that could have caused their lack of sexual attraction.
Cara is not a gold-star ace. Disability is an automatic disqualification, perhaps one of the biggest ones. The other enormous disqualification is being a survivor of sexual abuse or sexual assault. “For a long time, a lot of the most dominant voices in the asexual community said over and over, ‘I was not abused, I was not traumatized,’ because there’s such a desire to distance oneself from abuse or trauma being a cause of asexuality, as that would mean asexuality is a problem that could be fixed or cured,” KJ Cerankowski, a professor of gender studies at Oberlin College and coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, tells me. “The result is that people with sexual abuse or trauma histories—who aren’t sure how that relates to their asexuality—are dismissed.”
The gold-star ace is healthy in all ways, between the ages of twenty and forty (since elderly people are assumed to be asexual anyway), and cis, as well as sex positive and popular, write Sciatrix.42 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.) The gold-star ace would never worry, as an autistic woman named Kate did, that she might make asexuality “look bad” if she didn’t appear neurotypical enough. The gold-star ace would not be autistic to begin with. They would always fit in. More than fit in: be beloved.
The obsession with the origin of asexuality, this pressure that makes proving asexuality nearly impossible, comes from—you guessed it—the belief that every person should be sexual, whether that belief comes from the general public or is enforced within a particular community. When a preference or behavior is socially accepted, people don’t care about its origins, even when the origin is similarly influenced by multiple factors. 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. Straightness is considered the ideal, so people rarely bother to wonder whether that’s nature or nurture, even though it’s both and even though straightness, as Adrienne Rich made clear, is often conditioned instead of chosen. Being ace is not considered the ideal, so the cause of this abnormality becomes a point of interest, since understanding whether one could be otherwise is supposed to, as Chasin noted, guide the question of how accepting society should be.
Compulsory sexuality makes asexuality prone to double standards. A person’s heterosexuality isn’t considered fake if they were abused as a child, yet childhood abuse is often the automatic culprit for asexuality. Straight people can start identifying differently without their straightness being called “just a phase,” yet aces—and all others who aren’t straight—have less room to be fluid. Sensitive people who would never tell a gay man that he hasn’t found the right woman think little of saying the same to an ace person. The parent who asks one five-year-old boy which classmate he wants as a girlfriend asks another five-year-old ace or gay boy how they can already know their sexuality. 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.
So aces become afraid, closing ranks and excluding everyone who ventures too far from the gold-star ideal, who might raise too many questions and bring the rest of us down. The tally of requirements adds up, creating a long list of criteria that very few people can fulfill. In the desire to be respected, people become ableist and prejudiced, straining to present ourselves as happy and healthy when it should be fine to be ace and unhappy and unhealthy, like all the unhappy and unhealthy straight people out there.
Exclusion will not work. Those who are determined to dismiss asexuality will find a way regardless, using the DSM or the logic of reproductive fitness or the duty to have children or anything else. The dream of the ace community was to bring together people with shared experience, to help us find each other and create resources and feel okay. Trying to please those who were always going to be naysayers does not bring us any closer to these goals. When ace acceptance is conditional on how closely a person matches the gold-star ideal, anyone who doesn’t fit tortures themselves with doubt. It excludes those who must be included and then makes us question ourselves too.
I have never met a gold-star ace. The gold-star asexual is a fantasy and a false promise. It turns our attention to placating others instead of helping ourselves and chasing the fantasy hurts the real ace people who are here, right now. Holding on to this ideal makes it the norm for people to ask, over and over again, the questions that have been threaded through these chapters: What is asexuality and what is cerebral palsy? What is the influence of patriarchy or the influence of shyness or of being sheltered? What is the result of stereotypes or shame and what is not? How can we feel okay claiming asexuality when so many factors make it easy to doubt? And when are we allowed to stop questioning?
There is a short answer and there is a long answer. The short answer is personal and practical, about what individuals should do next and for how long we should wonder. Most of us will never have the luxury of an airtight answer to these questions, just as we’ll never know how much any of our other preferences were affected by thousands of other factors. Interactions are too convoluted. As Cara and every ace person knows, questioning can be exhausting and futile. Experiences may change on their own later or they may not—so after a certain amount of effort, this work is no longer helpful and acceptance becomes more important.
Harmful social conditioning, whether that be the pressure to wear high heels or the pressure not to cry, is inescapable. The list of lessons to unlearn is nearly infinite but time and energy are not, and a person may decide that the question of sexual desire is not the most important issue for them to challenge and that focusing on other issues will bring greater rewards. All aces should be welcomed into the community. There are no gold-star aces among us, but we are not the worse for it.
The long answer is the societal one, about what must shift on a greater level. It truly is necessary to question the expectations that others hold for us and the purpose and origin of these expectations. 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. For example, Lucid Brown from the first chapter has begun identifying as demisexual after discovering that they do experience sexual attraction, albeit toward a single person. Lucid doesn’t feel sexual attraction for anyone except their girlfriend, but that’s enough for the shift and there should be no angst around the switch.
“I think people go in and out of heterosexuality and homosexuality and queerness in various ways, and why can’t that also be true for asexuality?” asks Cerankowski, the gender studies scholar. “There are different circumstances under which people might find themselves identifying with different sexualities, and I do think we have to allow movement and fluidity as we think more complexly about sexual identities.” Age and health, for instance, may factor into sexual identity and experience and “taking this more fluid approach to sexual identity formation does not necessarily negate asexuality if it’s not this essential lifelong thing; there are just different ways of experiencing sexuality.”
Yet fluidity and exploration and unlearning of stereotypes will mean little if the encouragement only ever pushes someone to be more sexual. To get meta for a moment, the work of questioning and the target of the questions (“Am I secretly repressed? Bowing to stereotypes?”) is often also a product of social control and conditioning, just from a different side. If the options asexual and allosexual are equally available—in visibility and in what people believe about what these identities mean—and a person chooses allosexual, that is reasonable evidence that they are allosexual. If the only acceptable option is allosexuality and a person chooses allosexual, it is far more likely that this choice is the result of the shame of being abnormal. People will deny their aceness and explore forever in the hopes of discovering that they are allo after all.
Exploration is impoverished unless it is paired with full societal acceptance of aces. Acknowledgment that all types of people can be ace and that asexuality is simply a different and not inferior way of being is paramount. Furthermore, it is not enough to merely say that it is okay to be asexual. People should actively be encouraged to decide whether they might be asexual and learn about the joys of an asexual life. Only then does exploration lead to more freedom. 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.
It is a moral imperative that both the disabled community and the ace community welcome disabled aces. The disabled community must welcome disabled aces because sexual variation exists and disabled people can be ace, and there is nothing wrong with being ace. The ace community must welcome disabled people because sexual variation exists and ace people can be disabled, and there is nothing wrong with being disabled—and because the power of the ace movement does not depend on purity of origin.
People want to reject asexuality not only because it might be the result of external control, but also because asexuality will supposedly ruin your life. Lack of sexuality means being dried up and tired. In addition to being associated with children, it is associated with being old, because old people supposedly never again feel “the rush of excitement that comes with the first brush of the lips, the first moment when clothes drop to the floor.”44 Others casually talk about their fear that they “will stop being a sexual being any second now” and that losing their sexuality means they will “disappear or evaporate into thin air,”45 which can leave those of us who weren’t particularly sexual to begin with wondering if we have already disappeared, already evaporated. Such comments are understandable; there can be real grief in lacking or losing sexuality. I am sympathetic and do not think these comments should be censored. They still reinforce a particular story that too often is the only story.
The asexual view of the world is important because it presents a rarely seen vision of a happy, asexual existence and says that this is (or can, or at least should be) possible. What is wrong with the message that people should be able to be happy in a variety of circumstances? In a variety of ways? The strength of this vision does not rely on the insistence that asexuality always comes from nowhere or that it is lifelong or never shaped or caused by anything else. Its power comes simply from showing a different life to those who might want it or need it for any reason. The fact that many forms and many causes of asexuality exist does not negate this.
You can be asexual if your disability caused your asexuality, and you can be asexual if sexual trauma caused your asexuality, and you can be asexual if you lose your sexual desire later in life. The asexual community should be there to help in all these cases. You don’t have to be part of the asexual community forever, but the lesson that a happy life for aces is possible, regardless of origin, is one that is important and one that includes you too. It’s for you even if you don’t identify as ace. If asexuality is fine, so is every other form of low sexual desire or so-called sexual dysfunction. Anyone who has any form of desire or attraction lower or higher than “normal” can still be okay. Better than okay.
So many groups are ultimately fighting against the same thing, which is not not having sex but which is instead sexual normativity and sexual control. All these groups have the potential to be allies. The greater fight is to have everyone realize that there does not need to be “normal”—there only needs to be what we are comfortable with and the ability to decide what we like to do with our bodies and our stories and our lives. 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. Context matters, but there will be no sexual act that will is inherently liberatory or inherently regressive, no sexual stereotypes of any kind.
Doing away with compulsory sexuality also means doing away with hypersexualization and desexualization. Many voices are needed. No more being thought strange for not wanting sex, or people being shocked if you do. We should ask people what they want and not be surprised, no matter the answer. And we should tell them that no matter their answer, we will work to make sure that life can be good for all.