Dismantling society’s narrative about compulsory sexuality

IN A SOCIETY obsessed with sexuality, what does it mean to be asexual?

The world has become more open about discussions of what it means to be queer. But even in queer communities, which fight against culture’s oversexualisation of queer bodies and lives, sex remains a linchpin of the conversation around liberation.

In Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, journalist and science writer Angela Chen uses interviews, research and experience to offer a framework that loosens stigmas about relationships, emotion and sex in a culture that operates on “compulsory sexuality”.

That term, borrowed from Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, is one Chen uses to describe “the belief that lust is universal and to be otherwise is to be abnormal”.

The idea that sex is the ultimate connection between two people and the narrative that sex is a sign of maturity almost always go unquestioned.

A person who has no desire for sex, even if they are in a monogamous romantic relationship, is regarded as somehow broken under compulsory sexuality.

Even the most progressive feminist and queer spaces almost always centre sexual liberation in their narratives.

But, Chen writes, we have a lot to gain from “thinking more critically about whether these stories (are) true and, if so, what they might imply about how we connect sex and politics and power”.

“Because sexual variation exists,” Chen continues, “there is no universal vision of liberated sexuality.”

The population of ace people is thought to hover around 1%, but, Chen writes, “because there are so many misconceptions about what it means to not experience sexual attraction and so few positive examples of aces in popular culture, I suspect the number may be much higher”.

How can asexuality and the ace perspective challenge the biases of compulsory sexuality and relationship hierarchies?

This is the central question of the book, and Chen expertly and beautifully nudges the discussion forward.

For many, this will be an introduction to the concept, and there is a bit of 101 here, but it will also be a balm – and a learning experience – for