Each year on April 6th, the asexual (or “ace”) community and its allies celebrate International Asexuality Day. This is a day to center the identities, experiences, stories, and struggles of anyone who identifies along the asexual spectrum—estimated at just under 2% of the population.
Historically, asexuality has been left out of many popular and scholarly discussions of sexuality. Research has been sparse, and there has been a tendency within the medical establishment to medicalize or pathologize asexuality, treating it as a condition to be cured. Recently, however, AASECT (the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists) made their position clear that “asexual and ace-spectrum identities are not mental, developmental, or sexual disorders” and that “[in] the same way that the field of sexuality has denounced the pathological positioning of homosexuality, sexual fluidity, queer orientations, trans identities, and non-binary identities, sex educators, counselors, and therapists should do the same regarding myths perpetuated about asexuality.” This is a major step forward in the goal of validating and normalizing asexual identities.
So what is asexuality? Put simply: to be asexual is to experience little-to-no sexual attraction toward other persons. Even that simple statement, though, can invite a lot of confusion, so let’s take some time to expand and clarify.
To understand asexuality, it’s helpful to first distinguish sexual attraction from sexual desire. Sexual desire is, quite simply, when we desire to experience and participate in some variety of sexual activity. When we experience sexual attraction, however, that desire is caused by or directed at a person: something about the person leads to us desiring that activity with them. Desire can appear, however, even in the absence of attraction: if you’ve ever sat down at a restaurant and felt hungry as you looked over a menu where absolutely nothing sounds appetizing, then you get the distinction between the two.
Both attraction and desire can be further distinguished from sexual behavior: what we actually do, in terms of sexuality activity. Someone who practices abstinence would have little-to-no sexual behavior, but it’s an open question whether they still experience attraction and desire. Conversely, an adult performer who experiences little to no sense of attraction or desire might still routinely engage in sexual behavior as part of their job. To continue with the dining analogy: if you’ve ever eaten when you’re not hungry, not eaten when you are hungry, or eaten something unappetizing perhaps just because you’re hungry and it happens to be available, then you can see the difference between desire, attraction, and behavior.
Of course, this has so far all been focused entirely on the sexual side of things. According to what’s known as the Split-Attraction Model, though, attraction comes in many varieties: not just sexual, but also romantic, emotional, aesthetic, intellectual, spiritual, and more. These different varieties of attraction might exert some influence on each other, but they can and often do vary independently. Someone might feel sexual attraction toward a person without feeling any emotional attraction, for example, or feel romantic attraction without any aesthetic or intellectual attraction. In addition to distinguishing sexual attraction from desire and behavior, then, we see that we can also distinguish it from all the other varieties of attraction.
So, when we say that asexual persons experience little-to-no sexual attraction toward other persons, that’s all we mean. It doesn’t mean that they don’t experience or feel any kind of attraction, or that they don’t experience sexual desire or engage in sexual behavior. Some do, some don’t. Some aces are kinky, and some are vanilla. Some are monogamous, others not. Some aces enjoy having sex as a way of bonding with or satisfying a partner, just as someone might enjoy giving a partner a massage for the same reasons. Some enjoy sex simply because it feels good, while others find the whole enterprise of sexual activity and contact to be personally aversive or repulsive.
Of course, even those who do find sex to be aversive or repulsive can still adopt an attitude and practice of sex-positivity, through which we validate and destigmatize healthy sexual self-conception and consensual activity among informed, risk-aware adults—including those who choose to abstain from such activities entirely.
Perhaps, having read all of this, you’re thinking: nope, none of this is me at all, I am definitely not asexual. If that’s the case, then another term you might be interested in knowing is allosexual: someone who does experience sexual attraction toward other persons.
Like most things in life, asexuality and allosexuality form a spectrum. Some aces prefer more specific labels, too, to better capture and communicate their experiences and self-conception. Demisexual persons, for example, experience sexual attraction to other persons only after a significant emotional bond has been formed. Those who claim an identity of grey asexual (or “grey ace”) experience a fluctuation between degrees of asexuality and allosexuality, either over time or in different circumstances. We can think of these terms all as lenses that help us better understand and interpret our experiences of the world, of others, and of ourselves—functioning much in the same way that music genre terms help us communicate about the complexities of our musical expression or preferences.
Just as trans persons face the stress of cisnormativity (the cultural assumption that the default identity is cisgender, and that any other way of being is in some way defective, deficient, delusional, or deviant) and sexual minority persons face the stress of heteronormativity (the analogous assumption regarding heterosexuality), persons on the asexual spectrum also encounter allonormativity: the cultural assumption that the default identity is allosexual, and that any other way of being—asexual, demisexual, gray ace, etc.—is in some way less-than or in need of correction. Allonormativity is pervasive, but can be easy to overlook since it is so deeply baked into so much of cultural consciousness. This results in asexual persons facing social stressors ultimately rooted in the same source as the stress faced by other gender and sexual minorities: namely, that of compulsory sexuality of a particular sort, dictated by what kind of person you are perceived to be. It’s this shared struggle, and this shared existence outside of cisheteroallonormative structures, that has led to “asexual” being one of the meanings of the “A” in “LGBTQIA+.”
Allonormativity can kick rocks. From the sex-favorable aces to the sex-neutral or sexual-repulsed aces, to the non-vanilla aces and the non-monogamous aces, to the demisexuals and the gray aces, and to anyone along the broad and inclusive asexual spectrum: your voices, stories, and experiences are a vital and essential part of the full picture of human sexuality. This International Asexuality Day and every day forward, the Sexual Health Alliance sees, honors, and celebrates all aces in all places.
Written Ley David Elliette Cray, PhD, CSC, ABS (she/they), LGBTQIA+ Curriculum Coordinator for the Sexual Health Alliance and founder of Transentience Coaching.