114 | Angela Chen on Asexuality in a Sex-Preoccupied World

Sexuality is, and always has been, a topic that is endlessly fascinating but also contentious. You might think that asexuality would be more straightforward, but you’d be wrong. Asexual people, or “aces,” haven’t been front and center in the public discussion of gender and sexuality, and as a result there is confusion about such basic issues as what “asexuality” even means. Angela Chen is a science journalist and an ace herself, and she’s written a new book about asexuality and how it fits into the wider discussion of sex and gender. Precisely because sexuality is so taken for granted by many people, thinking about asexuality not only helps us understand the issues confronting aces, but the meaning of sexuality more broadly.

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Angela Chen received a B.A. in comparative literature from UC San Diego. She is a contributing editor at Catapult magazine, and her writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and elsewhere. Her new book is Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

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0:00:01 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. We live in a world where there’s increasing understanding of, and hopefully acceptance of, different varieties of sexuality and gender orientation and gender expression, not just the usual boy and girl getting together, getting married, having two-and-a-half kids. We’re increasingly happy with homosexuality, with bisexuality. Hopefully, transgender people are being more and more accepted as time goes on, although we’re certainly not there yet.

0:00:34 SC: So what about asexuality? What about people who do not foreground sexual desire in their lives in the way that everybody else does? This is an idea that most of us have heard of, but maybe are not too familiar with. Asexuality, it turns out, can span a wide variety of manifestations from people who are very romantic and even have fulfilling sexual relationships with their partners, to people who are completely repulsed by the idea of having sex. And it’s interesting not just to understand those people and their needs and how they can flourish in this world, but how the rest of us, when we’re telling stories or organizing society more broadly, take for granted the idea that whatever your sexual orientation is, sex is something that you will want to have and it’ll be a success story when it’s going well for you.

0:01:26 SC: So today’s guest is Angela Chen. She is a science journalist and she is asexual herself, or ace as they say in the business. And she’s written a new book about this called Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex. It’s interesting, if nothing else, just to reflect on the centrality of the idea of sex in our lives and how we think about our lives. So I like just the idea that coining a term, adding some vocabulary to the way that we conceptualize the world changes the way we think about it in an important way, and asexuality is an example of that, but I think the lessons here are broader, so let’s go.

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0:02:29 SC: Angela Chen, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:02:30 Angela Chen: Thank you so much for having me.

0:02:33 SC: I think asexuality, which we’re going to be talking about, which you have a new book coming out… Why don’t you tell us the name of your new book so that everyone can go out and buy it?

0:02:41 AC: It’s called Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex.

0:02:47 SC: Ace, by the way… Congratulations on that. It’s a good label for a sexuality or some sexual preference. Ace is a good word, right? You did well in the label.

0:02:56 AC: Right. I actually prefer it far more than I like the word asexual, which to me still sounds very clinical.

0:03:02 SC: Yeah, clinical or judgy or something like that, right?

0:03:05 AC: Yeah.

0:03:06 SC: I think this is one of those cases where the word asexual is probably something where people hear it, and even if they’ve never been exposed to it before, they think they know what it means. And from reading your book, I know that maybe you don’t know, maybe we don’t know what it means. So let’s just start at the beginning and you can explain to us a little bit about what it means to be asexual or ace.

0:03:28 AC: Absolutely. I really think that, with all due respect to the people at the beginning who were building up the asexual/ace movement, I really think that there were some issues of semantics here, because when you hear the word asexual, you think without sex, but it’s actually a huge umbrella that encompasses so many people, so many experiences, including people who have positive sexual experiences. So I completely understand why people would say things like, “Wait, why would you call someone who does have sex asexual? That doesn’t make sense.”

0:04:00 AC: So all this to say, I have a lot of sympathy for all the confusion around the term. The usual definition, the official definition is someone who is asexual, they don’t experience sexual attraction. And that sounds simple enough, I think, until you start thinking about all of the things that we get confused with sexual attraction and all of the baggage around that term. I first came across the term asexual when I was 14, and I came across the correct term. And immediately I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Glad to know that there are people out there like this. Let me move on with my life.” I didn’t think I was asexual, and I wouldn’t think about it again for another 10 years and after I’d had two romantic and sexual relationships.

0:04:47 SC: Well, yeah, so I think that from the word asexual, it would clearly follow, it would seem to follow that you don’t have sex. But one of the major lessons right from the part of the book is that there are asexuals who do have sex, even who enjoy it, but there is this desire versus attraction dichotomy, which I thought was fascinating.

0:05:08 AC: Right, exactly. I think it’s easy often to first explain asexuality in terms of what it is not. It doesn’t mean not having sex. We have a word for that. That’s celibacy. It means not experiencing sexual attraction. And I think a lot of people when they think they don’t experience sexual attraction, that means they’re disgusted by sex, they’re repulsed by sex. But the tricky thing is, that’s not the case either. I don’t actually like using food analogies, but they’re really convenient, so I’ll have to use one here, if you’ll excuse me. So I think most of us, we have foods that we like and that we crave, and then we have foods that we just don’t like and they don’t taste good and we would never eat them. And then there’s foods in the middle where you don’t really care so much for the particular pie or something, but because it’s a part of a routine, it’s something your mother made every Sunday, it has all of these emotional, social interactions, you desire it in that way.

0:06:02 AC: And I think that’s the experience of a lot of people who are asexual. Where they don’t feel sexual attraction, they don’t crave sexual intimacy with other people for physical reasons, but there might be emotional reasons and social reasons and they’re bored or they want to feel attractive, and that’s kind of where all the nuances start to come in.

0:06:22 SC: Yeah, and I get the impression that it’s part of the expanding our horizons a little bit and understanding that there are spectra, there are continuous versions of all of these different things is that there are asexuals who are repulsed by the idea of sex. And there are others who are into it when they’re in love with somebody. And there are others who, like you say, don’t really care one way or the other but are willing to go along.

0:06:45 AC: Right. There is this huge spectrum of experiences. And in the same way where people who aren’t asexual, who are called allosexual, it’s not like people who are allosexual want sex all the time either. It’s never a binary; people’s desires shift. So with asexuality, there’s this huge range of experiences. And it can be so hard to separate the reasons why you might want to have sex with someone. Is it “just” physical? Quote-unquote just. Is it emotional? Is it boredom? And that’s where a lot of the tricky parts come in.

0:07:18 SC: Yeah, I once wrote a blog post in one of my more daring moments about the gender tesseract, where I said there’s at least four different dimensions on which we can talk about people’s biology, people’s sexual identity, people’s sexual attraction. And I realized and I said at the time, I’m sure I’m missing things, and I think that the amount of sexual attraction was definitely something that I’m missing. But they’re all independent, right? I mean, there are gay asexuals and hetero-asexuals.

0:07:50 AC: Exactly. There are people who are asexual, and like you said, they’re attracted to the same gender or all genders. And sexual orientation I think doesn’t have to be the same as romantic orientation, that’s one of the distinctions that people who are asexual make. You might not be sexually attracted to anyone, but you might still feel that romantic attraction, that crush, that emotional desire, and that is what we call romantic orientation.

0:08:16 SC: And is it something where if… So let’s say you’re a straight ace, so you might be romantically attracted to someone of the opposite gender. And then is it more likely you would want to be sexually involved with them also, or is that just up in the air?

0:08:31 AC: I think it can vary. I think that if you’re heteroromantic, you’re a straight ace, and you are romantically involved with someone, I think that can… For some, that can increase your willingness or your desire to have sex with them. For others, you might be a straight ace, and you’re sex-repulsed, and that doesn’t change at all, whether you’ll want to have sex with someone or not.

0:08:55 SC: And I… Again, I’m going to… A lot of my questions are going to be like, “I think what I understood is this, am I right, or am I wrong?” So the idea that… What are the distinctions between being ace and being allo? Is allosexual, is that the opposite?

0:09:09 AC: Yeah.

0:09:09 SC: So is… That for allosexuals, there’s just something called, you know, free-floating sexual desire, you would like to have sex, and you’re not sure with who, or you don’t have any target in mind. And that’s the kind of thing that doesn’t exist for aces.

0:09:29 AC: Yeah, I think that it’s all about having the target. So we… People can have different libidos, and that’s not attached to sexual orientation. You can be gay and have a high libido or be gay and have a low libido. And you can be ace actually and have a sex drive. You can have that feeling inside your body where you just desire sexual release. But what’s different is that aces don’t have that toward a person. Sometimes you can be allosexual, and you can just have… Feel sexually frustrated, and it’s not toward a person. And I think most people have experienced that. But sometimes you can be allosexual, and it is prompted by a person, or it’s caused by a person.

0:10:07 AC: Whereas for aces, even those who do have a libido, and not all aces have a libido, but for the ones who do, there’s never a desire to get other people involved. I think one person I spoke to described as not feeling any different than having an itch on her arm. There’s an itch on her arm, she’ll scratch it and just take care of it herself. Why would she ask someone to come over and scratch the itch on her arm? It’s just a different way of thinking and experiencing the world.

0:10:33 SC: Okay. Good. I get it. I was actually wrong, so I’m glad that you clarified that. We’re going to get the clinical stuff out of the way first so people know the ground that we’re walking on here. How well is this understood, the phenomenon of being ace? Is this something that psychologists and sexologists have been studying for a long time?

0:10:51 AC: I don’t think this is well-understood even now. So there is some clinical research on it. And I think the clinical research on it is growing. But one problem is, as we said, the word asexual is so broad. And therefore when you’re doing research, if you pull in all these people from… That are all asexual, but have such different experiences, some are sex-repulsed, some have sex, some have a sex drive, some don’t, then I think that will really muddy up your results, right? And that will have consequences for what we can know.

0:11:25 AC: I think another issue when it comes to sexology is that for a long time, we just had this bias that everyone naturally has a sex drive, experiences sexual attraction. And if you don’t, then it means that it’s some kind of disability, or there’s something wrong with you, or maybe you’re a victim of sexual assault or trauma. And because of that, so much of the research in this area has been gone through that lens, instead of seeing it as just another part of human variation.

0:11:51 AC: So that’s one reason that it hasn’t been… Those are some reasons that it hasn’t been very well understood. I think it’s been better understood when it comes to looking at it in a more sociological sense rather than a medical sense. But even then, even though the orientation has been around for 20 years, in some ways it really flies under the radar still.

0:12:11 SC: Yeah, no, it absolutely does. One of the things… This is skipping ahead a little bit, but one of the things you talk about in the book is the representation of aces in fiction and popular culture, which is basically almost nothing, right? There isn’t that much.

0:12:25 AC: Absolutely. Usually when there are aces, they have a very specific stereotype. For male aces, if they’re not explicitly ace, it’s usually a character like Sherlock Homes, someone who is extremely rational, and he has better things to worry about than sexuality. With women, there’s often these tropes of people who are quirky, and that’s why they’re not interested in sex, so they’re childish. And a lot of the representation in pop culture, it’s on the fringes. It’s not really… It’s not like major literary fiction, for example, you’ll see it a lot in YA, or you’ll… YA being young adult. Or you’ll see it a lot in science fiction. It’s almost never discussed in what we consider really mainstream or almost prestigious forms of pop culture.

0:13:14 AC: And I think the effect that has on it is that it can make the orientation itself seems like it’s on the fringes and seem like it’s something that’s for children, or something that’s not part of normal everyday life.

0:13:27 SC: Todd Chavez being the obvious shining counter example here, right, on Bojack Horseman.

0:13:33 AC: Yeah, Todd Chavez. And the thing is, I know that the showrunners for Bojack Horseman actually reached out to someone who was part of an ace group in Los Angeles, and they asked her to consult and asked her some questions about asexuality. So they definitely were trying to do their due diligence, and Todd has done so much for the ace community. Because of Todd, because of explaining and debunking some of these misconceptions, there are more ace people in the world. I know someone who discovered that she was asexual because she actually was writing an article about how the asexual community reacted to Todd. It’s actually very meta. In the case of writing this article, she realized, “Oh, I didn’t think asexuality meant this, but this applies to me.” But even with Todd, he’s kind of like a hapless, childish character. He’s literally a cartoon. It’s still a little bit on the edges of culture.

0:14:24 SC: But you didn’t mention Zonker Harris from Doonesbury. Would he qualify?

0:14:29 AC: I am not familiar with that. I have to say, I’m not the best at… I just am not familiar with that.

0:14:36 SC: Yeah, I thought of it only after reading your book, and Zonker… So if you’re not familiar with Doonesbury, Zonker’s been a character who’s been around since the ’70s. And while everyone, like the Doonesbury cast has sort of grown up slightly and had relationships, and everyone else is sleeping around and everything, he never has. And I think in more recent years, it’s become a topic, and people have asked him about it and he’s like, “I don’t believe there’s any such thing as sex. I think it’s just a myth you people are joking about to me.” But he’s a bit of a sort of otherworldly character anyway, and he’s never been explicitly labeled like that in the comic.

0:15:14 AC: Yeah, that’s really interesting, because there’s a lot of discussion about the importance of explicitly labeling characters. You know, oftentimes, if you want to make a character that’s gay, you don’t have to have them say, “I’m gay.” You can just show them with someone of the same gender. But with asexuality, if someone is single, then most of the time you just assume they’re allosexual and just happen to be single. But I think in the case you just mentioned, because he says… He makes these comments about asexuality, I think that’s one way in which he doesn’t explicitly have to say it, but that still comes across, in my reading, at least, from what you’ve just said.

0:15:48 SC: No, it does sound like it. I wonder… I’m not sure how much credit to give to Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist, but maybe he knew people like that or something. Or maybe it was just an accident, and he just never came up with a good story line. The intent of the author is always hard to figure out. But I also do want to get on the table, you tell this wonderful/horrible story about the infamous House episode, which is probably a more typical representation of asexuality on TV.

0:16:14 AC: Right, absolutely. So in the episode, there is a woman who says that she’s asexual. And then one of the characters says this to House, and House says something like, “She’s definitely not asexual. Plenty of people don’t have sex, but the only people who don’t want sex are sick, lying, or dead.” And the entire storyline is just him… Well, one of the side storylines is him trying to figure out whether there’s a medical reason for her lack of interest in sex. And this of course being the show House, there is. So she’s not asexual. She’s pretending to be asexual, because her husband is asexual and she wants to be with him. But then the other twist is that her husband isn’t even asexual. He apparently has some kind of brain tumor that can be easily fixed, and once they fix that, then they’re just going to be two happy, allo people.

0:17:05 AC: I think to this day, and definitely before Todd Chavez on Bojack, that was probably the most mainstream, high profile depiction of asexuality in which House, someone who’s supposed to be really smart and knows everything and sees through the stuff that no one else can see through, is essentially declaring that asexual people are sick, lying, or dead. And he’s right, at least in the context of the episode.

0:17:31 SC: Did they actually… I never saw that episode in particular, I’ve seen other episodes. But did they use the word asexual, or did they just talk about the impossibility of people not wanting to have sex?

0:17:40 AC: They used the word asexual. At the very beginning, the woman is… Sorry, at the very beginning, I think they’re talking about birth control or something, and then one of the doctors says, “Every method is available.” And then she says, “I’m asexual.” And she even goes into this little spiel saying, “It’s not celibacy. It’s an orientation.” So it’s very explicitly about asexuality, not just low sexual desire or not wanting to have sex.

0:18:05 SC: I ask that because one of the points that came across from your book… So as a non-asexual myself, but someone who is just fascinated, I had a lot of philosophical resonance with your book, because a lot of it is about the right way to categorize things in the world. And you make the point that just the existence of the word asexual, the fact that there is a category, suddenly can set off bells of recognition in your brain. It made me think of when Susan Cain came out with that book on introverts, and suddenly people could say, “Oh, it’s not just that I’m a weirdo who doesn’t want to go to parties every night. I’m an introvert. I have a label. Now, I’m okay.”

0:18:46 AC: Absolutely. I think in many ways, a lot of my book is about language and the ways in which we don’t talk on a specific enough level. So early in the book, I talk about my own experience. And growing up, I didn’t fit this mold of what it looked like to be asexual. I was not repulsed by sex. It seemed very interesting to me. As a teenager, I would talk about crushes with my friends. Even to myself, there didn’t seem to be anything different, and it was only much later that I realized that we were using the same words, but we meant different things. When they said, “Oh, he’s hot,” they were feeling… I think they were experiencing something sexual. They were feeling that physical pull, and I would just mean… Oh, I would say, “Oh, he’s hot.” I had aesthetic preferences, but it wouldn’t be… It wouldn’t feel physical.

0:19:34 AC: But we don’t talk like that, we don’t get into the nitty-gritty, there’s so many generalities. And so it can be so hard to figure out exactly what your experience is and how it can be different from other people. But yeah, with the word asexual I think once you know the word then you know how to search for it and that’s where it leads you to all these resources. It’s a lot like a lot of the experience I had with the science journalists where you’ll be looking for the name of the discipline, you’ll be like, oh, I know there’s something that’s kind of like chemistry and kind of like physics and then once you realize oh, it’s material science, there’s an entire field like that, then that’s when you learn so much and you know where to go and who to talk to you, but before that you’re just googling things like what is something that is like similar to chemistry and like physics, you know.

0:20:19 SC: Right, yeah, it could be very hard if you don’t have that vocabulary and it’s related… You just brought up another closely related thing, which is the idea that you don’t necessarily appreciate that other people are seeing and thinking about the world in a very different way. It made me think about, do you know about aphantasia?

0:20:38 AC: Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that, because an earlier draft of the book actually used that exact analogy.

0:20:44 SC: Oh, good, so explain to us the analogy, it’s great, I think.

0:20:46 AC: Right, so I use the example… So at one point there was some engineer who wrote this viral Facebook post about aphantasia and he was talking about how he was 30 years old and had just discovered that other people can see images in their mind but he couldn’t, and he would say when people would say imagine a beach he would think about the idea of a beach, he didn’t realize that other people were actually seeing images in their head. And what’s funny is I actually have a very weak visual imagination myself, so this, it holds in many ways. And yeah, so there is that philosophical aspect to it, like what I said, what other people are saying, sexy or hot, what do they mean, how would you know that they don’t mean what you mean if there’s not glaring differences. The way we use language is shared, it’s so hard to know what’s the same and what’s different.

0:21:37 SC: Yeah, the fact that you could have… There were even visual artists who have aphantasia and they never realized that people were not being metaphorical when they said visualize an apple or something like that. And our culture is just besotted with the language of sexuality and desire and lust and libido and I don’t know, you tell me, but growing up ace, was that something that you thought you did appreciate and didn’t realize until later they were talking about something different?

0:22:09 AC: Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, there was no indication at all that my experience was different in any way and, if anything, as a kid I was kind of cheeky, I had kind of a raunchy sense of humor. And this reminded me of the story of a woman that I interviewed and she grew up pretty religious in a small town in Oklahoma and she and her friends were atheists from a young age and they would go to church and they would sit there and do whatever, but they would kind of look at each other and roll their eyes, like we’re performing this but no one really believes in this. And then later it was the same for her with sexuality, where people would say, oh, he’s so hot, and then she would play along and she’d be the first person to make a joke about it, like a naked Greek statue that they’ve learned about in history class, you know, but for her she always thought it was the same thing. She was like, oh, we’re just performing this, but no one really cares.

0:23:01 AC: And then she said that once… Her best friend I think when they were 16 had sex for the first time and they were talking about it and this woman was like oh, was it horrible, did it traumatize you, and her friend was like, no, no, it was good or mediocre, at least, it wasn’t traumatizing.

0:23:19 SC: Right, it’s your first time right.

0:23:21 AC: Right, and it was the first time she realized that she had thought that everyone was in on the joke but everyone else actually experienced that being a big deal.

0:23:31 SC: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s amazing. So to go back to the clinical side of things, to that House episode reminds us that we have a long history of classifying deviations from the norm as mental disorders or somehow disabilities and I forget, is asexuality essentially still in the DSM, as something that we would try to treat and cure?

0:23:55 AC: It is. The DSM seems to change quite a bit but the diagnosis that most closely matches is Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, though it’s in the latest version since split up into male and female forms. And essentially, some of the criteria sound just like asexuality, it’s lack of sexual interest, lack of sexual fantasies, it basically, it really… There’s nitty-gritty stuff but in general it lines up and so you can make a very strong argument that asexuality is in the DSM. The funny thing is that in the late 2000s a task group recommended that there be an exception, that you couldn’t be diagnosed or shouldn’t be diagnosed with this disorder if you identified as asexual. And I think that was an interesting move toward acknowledging sexual variation, but to me it still seems kind of philosophically confused.

0:24:50 SC: Well, exactly, and it raises questions that honestly I think are difficult to answer, at least for me. There are such things as mental disorders, but we have this history of classifying, like I said, all sorts of just deviations from accepted behavior, even if they’re completely harmless. Obviously, being gay for a long time was in that classification. And so how should we decide like when people are perfectly fine and living their lives and everything is okay versus when we should treat them and try to fix them in some way?

0:25:25 AC: I feel like these ideas should be separated. So the reason that I thought that asexual exception doesn’t make sense is because to me it’s like saying that if you identify as homosexual then you’re fine, but if you happen to experience same gender, same sex attraction then you have a disorder. You know, it seems like this viewed semantic thing. To me I think that it’s fine to have low sexual desire and not experience sexual attraction, that’s not a deviation. And I think that in many cases, if you’re that, even if it’s fine, maybe it’s okay to change it. Maybe it’s okay to want to enhance it for your relationship or for for various reasons.

0:26:08 AC: I’m really big believer in bodily autonomy. And I’m not necessarily against diagnoses, but I think in this case, when there’s been a long history of pharmaceutical companies trying to sell libido-boosting drugs, most of them not successful, when the language is so stigmatized, when it’s presented in a way that seems like you have to fix it, like, it’s this objective fact that there’s something wrong. I think that should be addressed.

0:26:38 SC: And like you say, we’re in a culture that valorizes sex a lot. I mean, at the same time as we’re slightly titillated and made uncomfortable by talking about it, the… It’s clear that the default is to think that wanting sex is good, having sex is good, being good at sex is good, and having a high sex drive is good, and where does that come from? Are we… Is one of the lessons of the Ace movement that that was just a sort of mistake all along to think that way and we should be more open?

0:27:12 AC: I think the situation is complicated. Everything you described exists, but it also exists alongside slut shaming and sexual repression is real, and people’s sexualities are controlled. So these things exist in different pockets, they exist in the same pocket. Obviously, I’m not trying to deny that purity culture also exists. I think there’s a lot of different causes of this kind of culture. I think evolutionary psychology in a way is, like, people often say, “Oh, we evolved to have sex. It’s so natural,” even though I don’t personally find that a very compelling reason to do something just because we might have evolved to do it, but people do say that as one reason.

0:27:52 AC: Another reason is simply, “I think sex is titillating, and sex sells.” And there’s so many ad campaigns around the idea of sex equals vitality. And so it compounds and it’s all around us. With the Ace movement, I don’t think aces are interested in de-sexualizing everything. Aces obviously don’t hate people who have sex, we’re fine with that. It’s more the idea that there’s a real imbalance. And I… At least from… Speaking from me, I think the answer is just more messages of different kinds, you know? I don’t want to stop people from talking about how much they love sex, but it’s so skewed. Can we have more messages from the other side? Can we have more representation in fiction and pop culture? So multiplicity of messages, I think. So it’s not… In many ways, I don’t think it’s a mistake that society is sexualized. I think for many people, it’s joyful. It’s just, there needs to be more than one way.

0:28:50 SC: Yeah. I mean, it made me think in some ways, on the philosophy side of things of a podcast interview I did with Laurie Paul, about transformative experiences. And her idea was you try to be rational about choices you make, but some of those choices will actually turn you into a different person whose preferences are different. And she likes to use the example of being a vampire, you might not want to be a vampire, but once you’re bitten and turned into a vampire, you like it. But it’s clearly a metaphor for things like having children or going to graduate school or something like that, but… And she doesn’t have any easy answers. But the point is, so if you’re someone who doesn’t have sexual desire, that’s one thing. And then there’s another thing is, do you want to have sexual desire? Like, are you… Do you want it because you think that that would be good and it’s like learning a new musical instrument, or do you want it just because society is telling you that you should want it?

0:29:41 AC: Absolutely. And I think that’s something that almost all ace people struggle with at some time, especially at the beginning of realizing they are asexual. And I think this comes up a lot in discussions about libido-boosting drugs, you know? Is it a violation or a betrayal of who you are if you take those? Is that… Will that mean that you are giving in to the societal pressure that definitely exists? And the answer… I mean, I don’t have a perfect answer, I think it’s very complicated. And I think the only thing that people can do is, first of all, on a macro level, try to release some of the massive pressure to be more sexual, but then on a personal level, you make your own decisions.

0:30:23 AC: For some people, maybe their orientation is not that important to them, and the relationship is more important to them, for example. For other people maybe they think, oh, this is a part of who I am. This is my identity. I don’t want to change that. And that’s totally fine too. I think people should be able to make their own decisions, essentially. Even though we are all… Not all, but even though most aces are disadvantaged by these societal pressures I mentioned.

0:30:51 SC: Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, I’m very much in favor of people making their own decisions. On the other hand, we all know people are terrible at making their own decisions, but I can’t think of any better system than letting them do it.

0:31:01 AC: Neither can I, you know? And I think there’s so many parallels. Many years ago, I wrote this piece for Aeon, the magazine, and it was about anti-love drugs, and it kinda touched on similar topics. And one thing I pointed out was, for example, women who get breast implants, oftentimes, that’s because of these really narrow beauty societal standards that I think we should all get rid of, right? Like, I don’t think… I think it’s a good thing to get rid of societal standards. At the same time, I think it would feel weird to ban women from being able to get breast implants.

0:31:32 SC: Right.

0:31:33 AC: I don’t think it’s a perfect analogy, but I think some of the same questions are there, and it’s not an easy question to answer.

0:31:40 SC: Do we have any idea of how many people are ace?

0:31:45 AC: It’s complicated. The number that is thrown around all the time is 1% and it’s based on a survey from more than a decade ago by now. But like I said, because there’s so many confusions about what it means to be ace, I think the number honestly is much higher. You know, earlier in life, I would never have put asexual as my sexual orientation on a form. In many places that is not even available as a sexual orientation on many forms. Many people don’t know what it means, so how can we know whether that’s you or not?

0:32:17 SC: Right. But and is it… [chuckle] just trying to get the nomenclature right. Is it an orientation, is that right? Because it’s different than being gay or straight.

0:32:25 AC: It is a sexual orientation, yes.

0:32:30 SC: Okay. Can it be temporary? Can people go through phases of being asexual and then come back? Or is it something that we should think of as more deeply rooted and whether your libido comes and goes is a different thing?

0:32:45 AC: That’s an interesting question, and I think one that is still being discussed, and not just with asexuality but with many sexual orientations. I think most people think of sexual orientations, whether it’s being gay or being straight or being asexual, as this deep thing in which it’s who you are and it’s how you’ve always been, it’s who you are deep down. Whereas I personally think it’s much better to think about sexualities in a much more fluid way. If someone is gay and then later they’re with someone of the opposite gender, I don’t think that means they were never gay or that that period of their lives was fake somehow.

0:33:21 AC: I think people go in and out of different sexualities throughout their life. For the purposes of research, I think many people used to have this requirement that asexuality was lifelong, that it wasn’t caused by anything else, that it was not related to disability or sexual trauma. But I think that it’s actually more helpful to think of it as a fluid thing and that people can go through periods of being more and less asexual. And again, on a more macro level, I think it’s pretty clear as people grow older, they’re more likely to go through phases of being asexual.

0:33:55 SC: Yeah, yeah, sure. And it does raise, once again, this difficult philosophy problem having to do with identity. On the one hand we want to say our identities are important. They shape who we are, how society looks at us, and things like that. On the other hand we want to say, and I should be free to change it and still be someone who I am. And so I think that in many ways… Tell me what you think, but I think that in many ways society is becoming gradually more comfortable with both acknowledging identity and letting it be a little bit more slippery than it would have been in a more rigid past.

0:34:27 AC: I hope so. I think that in many ways, and this is just me speaking for myself, asexuality developed as a response to all of these societal pressures to be sexual, what I call compulsory sexuality. If these pressures didn’t exist, then I think there would be much less need for people to find community, to have this sense of shared culture, to use the asexual label. So I personally think… My dream is that one day we don’t have this DSM entry that corresponds to asexuality, but we also don’t need asexuality as an identity because you can just say whatever you want and people won’t doubt you and you won’t need this community to validate your choices because you won’t be so much on the fringes. So I hope society is moving in that way, and I think that’s the way I’d like society to move in.

0:35:18 SC: I guess another thing to be clear about is there would be a difference between being fully and happily and self-actualized as an ace, versus just having your sexuality repressed away. Both of those things are possible, I take it, but they’re different things.

0:35:34 AC: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is something that comes up a lot when we’re talking about gender, specifically with women. Of course, there’s this trope of the sexually repressed, sexually conservative woman who has been shamed into being repressed, and I think that happens for a lot of people and I think that’s a shame. I also think that sometimes people who are sexually conservative, it’s not because they’re repressed, it’s just because that’s how they are. And so it’s important to acknowledge that both exist and that both people might need different things, and that we can just be respectful of what each might need.

0:36:09 SC: Maybe it’s time to move into more… Having the clinical stuff out of the way, we can be a little bit more personal about it. What is it like, either from your perspective or from the many people who you interviewed for your book, what is it like to discover that this is an identity that you have and to wonder what you’re supposed to do next when in a society that is just not built for you?

0:36:29 AC: It’s really different. There’s one person I interviewed who really fits the mold of how the media portrays asexuality, meaning they felt from an early age that they were different, they hated the idea of sex, they were freaked out by it, and then one day they discovered asexuality from a Dear Abby column. And they said, “Immediately this word made sense. There’s other people like me out there. I don’t have to have sex one day if I don’t want to, even though people are always telling me that I’m going to want it and that I’m going to become a different person.” And so there are people like that who really embrace it because it shows them that the way that they felt different isn’t bad, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, that there’s other people like them out there and they can find support.

0:37:12 AC: There’s also people, and I think I personally fall more into this category, where it just brings up a lot more ambivalence. And ever since I have been promoting the book and I published an excerpt, people have been reaching out to me and saying, “I’ve never seen asexuality described the way that you described it, even though I knew about the term and the orientation. I’m thinking whether I might be asexual and I have so many complicated, ambivalent feelings about it.” On the one hand, I think it’s a relief because there’s a feeling of recognition that, oh, these things I felt that might be weird, that’s still there.

0:37:45 AC: But on the other hand, if you didn’t feel that strange or different growing up, which I didn’t, then I think you can get saddled down with the baggage. One minute, you’re just an allo person who maybe has some “strange” experiences with sex. The next minute you have to think, “Is this a whole identity?” And there’s all of these perceptions about what it means to be asexual. Like we talked about, the word, it’s associated with being prude. Are you a prude? Are you repressed? Are you not vital because you live a sexless or possibly sexless life? It can bring a lot of baggage and a lot of complication too.

0:38:26 SC: Yeah, but I like the fact that you’re bringing up the fact that it might be different than coming out as gay or something like that, or trans, where there may have been much more strongly all along some feeling that you didn’t fit into the category you were supposed to. Whereas being ace can kinda creep up on you. You can have a raunchy sense of humor and feel everything is okay, and it’s suddenly there’s a whole new conceptual world that opens up.

0:38:56 AC: Absolutely. And I think it’s interesting because the question of coming out can be different too. For aces, I think that it often can feel unnecessary sometimes, not for everyone, of course. But when you tell your parents, for example, that you’re asexual, it does feel inappropriate almost I think, in a way that’s not true. Because when you talk about sexual attraction, I think it feels like you’re talking about your sex life in this very direct way. And so I’ve talked to people who say, “I feel strange about coming out. I don’t think I… Or I didn’t… ” If they might be gay, for example, “I didn’t feel weird about coming out as gay, but I work in a conservative place and it really does feel like I’m trying to talk to my co-workers about my sex life in a way that’s not true for other orientations.” So there’s these strange nuances there.

0:39:49 SC: And another thing, just to let people know, it’s perfectly possible for an ace to be in a loving romantic relationship with an allosexual person. But maybe there are difficulties there. But there are difficulties in all relationships, so it’s the kind of thing you gotta learn to work through.

0:40:07 AC: Absolutely. Of course there’s difficulties there. And one thing that I think about is that, as you mentioned, there are serious difficulties in every relationship, money, kids, who’s going to take care of the parents, that kind of thing. But sexual difficulties really have a stigma around them, almost. I feel like many people feel comfortable talking to friends about money troubles or how are we going to raise the kids, but there seems to be something pathetic and sad about having sexual difficulties or a sexual mismatch, even though that is so common. And it’s, I think, very rare for two people to have the exact same level of libido forever. I think oftentimes, sexual incompatibility is framed differently. I think many people are taught to expect you’re going to have differences of opinion when it comes to homes and parents, but there’s not these conversations about is it okay to have sexual incompatibility if other things that are more important, or is that settling? There’s a shame around that.

0:41:10 SC: So in your research, have you found a lot of successful examples of relationships between aces and allos?

0:41:17 AC: I think it depends on what you mean by successful. I suppose the short answer is yes. I don’t think these people are any less happy than allo couples. I think it can be much harder, honestly, for aces to be in relationships with allos. I think there can be a lot of pressure. And I think, especially for people who at one point didn’t know that they were asexual and so there was a lot of pressure, “You’re the low desire partner. Why do you have this problem? Why won’t you fix it? It’s your responsibility to fix it.” There was a lot of that kind of dynamic in the relationship, which I think is unfair because the incompatibility is from both people.

0:42:00 AC: If both people had the exact same level of desire, whether it was high or low, it wouldn’t be a problem. So therefore, it should be a shared problem with shared responsibility instead of it all going on the lower desire partner. And so especially for people who didn’t realize for a long time, there was this feeling of frustration and guilt and shame, and people can still have that even after they realize that they’re ace. So I have found a lot of examples. I think everyone that I found has really had to become very good at talking to people about difficult subjects, which in the end is a good life skill for any long-term relationship.

0:42:35 SC: Yeah, [chuckle] that’s true. And we can imagine various strategies and compromises that such couples might want to choose to pursue. But I take it that it’s at least easier to imagine aces just being aces who are interested in romantic entanglements to find them with other aces.

0:42:56 AC: It is, in theory. I think in… And it is, in theory, and there are some ace dating websites out there. I think in practice, as anyone knows, sexual orientation is not the most important factor in compatibility. And most aces I know actually do try to date allos and see if there’s a way to make that work.

0:43:14 SC: Oh, that’s interesting. Is that just because there are more of them or is there something about that they actually find attractive?

0:43:22 AC: I think it’s mostly because there’s just more of them. I think there really aren’t that many aces out there, and so you’re… And not only that, but we don’t… Aces are all spread out, right? So it’s not like you have… We all live in the same place, or it’s not like we have geographical enclaves. And because of that, I think it’s just you’re surrounded by allos. In many ways, sometimes you just don’t have a choice.

0:43:44 SC: And are there aces who don’t even want to just have a partner relationship at all? They’re just introverted and perfectly solitary and also perfectly happy even though society is going to be judging them all along.

0:44:00 AC: Yeah, there are, and this is something that’s separate but related. So these people are called aromantic. So you can be heteroromantic or biromantic, we talked about the sexual orientation. Or you can be aromantic. And not all aces are aromantic, obviously, many want and have romantic relationships. And actually, not all people who are aromantic are asexual either. It was interesting, I interviewed for the book someone, a man, who is aromantic, but he’s not asexual. And there was a whole lot of baggage that came with that too, especially because of his gender. So… Yeah, there are definitely aces who are aromantic.

0:44:35 SC: People just thought that he was being… Yeah. They thought he was just being an operator, but he actually… We should, if we’re being accepting of other ways of living, other modes, it’s perfectly possible someone can enjoy and like having sex in a perfectly good faith, good natured friendly way, but just not be interested in a partnered romantic relationship.

0:44:56 AC: Exactly. And he said that that’s what he wanted to do. And he really cared about his partners, but he just was not interested in romance. But because of all these ideas that only sociopaths and serial killers aren’t interested in romance, that if you’re not interested in romance, you just can’t love or have no morality. I think that caused a lot of pain for him.

0:45:14 SC: You mentioned the idea of a Boston marriage, which I’d never heard of before, but apparently it comes from Henry James. And yeah, I think that you… I might be misremembering, but I seem to think either you or one of the people you interviewed said like, “We should bring back the institution of the Boston marriage.”

0:45:30 AC: Right, so that was someone that I interviewed, and a Boston marriage is essentially these devoted partnerships of women living together, and it comes from a Henry James novel, and some of these women, I think, were lesbian, but not all of them. And so one of the people I interviewed did say that that’s what she wanted because this woman was aromantic and she had a lot of fears about what was going to happen to her for the rest of her life. Because if you’re aromantic and people always ask you, oh, who’s going to take care of you when you’re old? What if you’re all alone? And in practice, this often can be what happens. Her best friend who she’d lived with for years had moved out to live with her boyfriend and other of her friends were getting married. And she was having this realization that, “I’m aromantic and I’m not going to be the one who’s going out to live with a partner, but my friends are all going to partner up,” and it felt like she was being left behind. And so she really wanted to see the normalization of many different types of partnerships and friendships that were devoted and that were treated with just as much respect and a sense of permanence as we treat romantic relationships.

0:46:40 SC: I think that there are, it seems to me, a lot of depictions in fiction of couples, especially older, two women living together, and very often, as basically functioning as partners, although not romantic partners. And the implication, either explicitly from the author or inferred by the audience is, well, they’re really lesbians, they just don’t want to say so. But this is another mode, again, that you could be in, that they could actually be friends and partners in the old-fashioned sense of the word partners, like managing the house and the finances and so forth without that romantic attachment.

0:47:16 AC: Right, and I think what a lot of people say is that and they can feel just as strongly toward each other and be just as devoted toward each other, even if it’s not romantic. It doesn’t mean that, it’s not that friendship is automatically less devoted than romance, though there are many different factors that conspire to make it so.

0:47:34 SC: You mentioned that aces are thin on the ground and therefore, it can be hard to find a like-minded partner. Has the… And you also said that the idea of the orientation sort of is 20 years old, which is obviously very, very young. Has the internet and social media communities played a huge role in this self-recognition?

0:47:56 AC: Absolutely. So aces have existed, or rather, people who we today would describe as asexual, have existed for a long time. People will say Tesla was maybe ace or Andy Warhol was possibly ace. But before the internet, I think it was just hard for like-minded people to get together on a mass scale. So it was really in the early 2000s that people started finding communities and discussing their lives and even describing what asexuality meant. Asexuality didn’t have to mean “a person who doesn’t experience sexual attraction.” That’s a definition that people made up and agreed on, and it could have been another way. Maybe if things had gone differently, I would say that I’m non-sexual and my book would have a different title.

0:48:42 AC: That would be confusing because celibacy is not the same, but yeah, the internet has really had a huge effect. And it’s been both good and bad. On the one hand, it’s facilitated a lot of ace activism, connecting people with each other, the usual good parts of the internet. On the other hand, because of the history of asexuality and because of how new, relatively, asexual activism still is, it’s often derided as this internet orientation for people on Tumblr. And I think that, in many ways, makes it seem less accessible or less legitimate, which is a shame because there are, I’m sure, many people who are not on Tumblr and not very online who would benefit from learning more about asexuality and how aces view the world.

0:49:27 SC: The birth of a new social movement, large or small, is… It’s kind of like childbirth. It’s a beautiful miracle, but it’s also very messy and painful. Are there huge ongoing controversies within the community that are roiling people’s emotions and very dramatic? Or is it more or less a successful story of people coming together and going, “Ah, yes, we’ve found each other.”

0:49:51 AC: I think any community will always have ongoing discussions. I think in the earlier years of the community, there was a lot of gatekeeping. There’s still gatekeeping, but particularly, in earlier years, it’s a lot of discussion that if you’re disabled, you can’t be asexual because the idea was people already thought that asexuality was related to some kind of medical illness. And people were trying so hard to fight that impression. And so it felt like getting far away from anything that could taint that was good.

0:50:22 AC: And the same for survivors of sexual assault. There was an idea that oh, if you were sexually assaulted, then obviously, that caused it. You can’t be asexual. And I don’t think that did the community any services because it just cut people off, and it was not inclusive, and I don’t think it was healthy. And nowadays, there’s many, even within the ace spectrum, there’s a lot of gatekeeping about what makes you ace enough. I think there’s actually a lot of discussion within the larger core community about the extent to which you are queer if you are asexual and straight. And I think that you are, but I think that’s not entirely a settled question.

0:51:02 SC: People do like their gatekeeping. That’s much more universal than sexual desire, let’s put it that way.

0:51:06 AC: Right, right.

0:51:07 SC: There are no A gatekeepers out there in the world. So from the experience of this movement, are there lessons or advice for the rest of the world? I think probably most kind-hearted people, once they hear that there are people who are asexual, will be favorably disposed to them, but are there common mistakes that people make in talking to aces that we could do better to avoid?

0:51:34 AC: I think in terms of just talking to aces, obviously, don’t say things like, “Oh, you haven’t found the right person,” or, “Oh, should you go to the doctor?” Anything that sounds like you would think that asexuality isn’t real, that’s pretty basic. But in terms of lessons for the rest of the world, I think there are a lot. I think a weakness of many people, broadly, is that people think that a community doesn’t have lessons for them if they’re not part of the community. But even if you’re not asexual, I think really questioning what exactly is sexuality? What is sexual attraction? Because it’s actually extremely hard to define.

0:52:11 AC: And then one of the funny things is being an asexual person, you always feel like you have to, your identity is based on not experiencing something. But because you don’t experience that thing, then it’s hard for you to say what you don’t experience. That’s another quirk of language that comes up with this whole topic. But I think it’s good for everyone to think closely what is the difference between being aesthetically attracted to someone and being sexually attracted to someone, or being emotional attracted to someone. I think there’s a lot of things to think about regarding consent in relationships and these invisible inequalities regarding, like we talked about earlier, how the lower desire partner is the one who is supposed to do all the work and “fix” themselves. And there’s a lot to think about regarding the ways in which we prove romantic relationships, and often at the expense of platonic relationships.

0:53:00 SC: And so, just to be super duper clear, there’s no problem in being an ace and looking at somebody and going, “Oh my goodness, that person is very hot.”

0:53:08 AC: No, there’s no problem at all.

[chuckle]

0:53:11 SC: Very good. But this is why the philosophical implications were fascinating to me, because it becomes clear that we have this tendency to package characteristics or identities. And there’s this ideal of love and romance that goes along with not just sexual desire, but also friendship and sharing the household and things like that. But in principle, these are all different, and figuring out exactly how to divide up the different ways and acknowledging that in principle any of them could be perfectly fine is a little bit of philosophical spade work we all have to do.

0:53:47 AC: Exactly. And sex and desire are simply so symbolic. Thinking about, for example, books for children, sexuality is usually introduced as a way to signal that you are no longer a child. This is how you pass the gate and you are no longer innocent and now you can sit at the adults’ table. And what child doesn’t want to not be a child and to know what everyone else knows? Sexuality is when you are chosen and loved by someone other than your parents for who you are. If you want those things, of course, and most people do, then how do you know whether you want to be an adult or you actually just want sex? Basically, I think the big, big lesson of the book and of asexuality is that sex is coupled with so many things, and it doesn’t have to be so, and you can decouple them but it’ll take a lot of work, but I think all of us will be able to learn something from interrogating that more closely.

0:54:42 SC: Well, you use the phrase “compulsory sexuality,” and especially in regards to stories and culture and novels and films and stuff like that. The idea that if you’re telling a story, there has to be a romantic sexual component to it.

0:55:00 AC: Absolutely. And at one point, I write about my attempts to find a story, again, that’s not YA or science fiction or something like that, in which there wasn’t a major romantic plot point in which love or the pursuit of romantic love or the pursuit of it or dating wasn’t part of it. And I did find examples of that, but all of those were of a different genre. So they might be literary, but they were Holocaust novels or they were war novels or they were about rehabilitation. They weren’t just what you’d typically call a general literary fiction novel. Compulsory sexuality, and the same with romance, is so embedded that many of us don’t notice it at all, and I think that limits the way we think about the possibilities. Like, do I really want romance and sex, or do I just want to feel some excitement?

0:55:50 SC: Yeah, when I was reading that section of your book, I thought, well, what about mystery novels? There are mystery novels where there’s not any relationship front and center. But then I got to the point where you say, yes, the exceptions are all in other labeled genres. And I always wondered what qualified a story as a genre story, and maybe the answer is genre stories are stories that do not foreground sexuality in some way.

0:56:18 AC: That’s funny, I never thought about it that way. And the question of genre is this big question that I don’t necessarily feel qualified to answer. Intuitively, we know. It’s crime fiction, horror fiction. Yeah, but maybe you can flip it around and it’s something that… It’s a story that grounds something besides love and a middle class life.

0:56:38 SC: Yeah, yeah, something like that, the package. That’s the idea that we have this set of expectations and they’re the norm against which we judge everything else. And I take it that this is part of what you hope happens, is that there’s more variety, more diversity of experiences reflected in our stories and our pop culture.

0:57:00 AC: I think so. And I think that there are many people who find it easy to fit into expectations of romance and sex. And it’s easy and it feels natural, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s actually optimal for them. And so I think that branching out would be helpful even if you haven’t felt like you were strange or marginalized or different.

0:57:19 SC: Yeah, I’m also interested in this idea of representation and role models because as a scientist, most of my colleagues are men, clearly. Mostly white, some Asians, very few African-Americans or anything like that. Very few gay people, although there are some. And the idea that when we think of what a scientist is, we have a certain view in mind. There’s this famous study, not really a study, but a thing that was done where they asked some children to draw a scientist and they all looked like Einstein. Then they took them on a field trip to Fermilab and they met the physicists and afterward they asked them to draw a scientist, and they were all this diverse crowd. It could really change people’s lives, especially young people, to see people like them out there, either on the TV screen or the movie screen or represented in the pages of a book.

0:58:10 AC: Absolutely. And I think it was powerful for me too, though I am far from being a child. When I was first writing the book, and even now, I have ambivalent feelings about being ace. And I think that’s part and parcel of any kind of identity, especially one that’s lesser known. But as I report in the book and I met people who were both ace and unburdened by the things that bothered me, it helped me. I met people who are ace and they just didn’t care if other people might think that they were crude or boring or lacking in vitality or any of those circumstances. They just said, oh, well, I’ve always been different, and just this was just another way I was different, and I didn’t really think about it. And for me, who tends to be a little self-conscious and worries about what other people think, even having that very specific representation in someone I was interviewing, made a difference.

0:59:01 SC: Right. Yeah, and it is going to be difficult because you make… I guess you make this point subtextually when you’re talking about Todd Chavez in BoJack Horseman. And you mentioned that the episode in which he is sort of, is most centred on him being asexual is not the funniest or most dramatically interesting one because it has to function as a pedagogical documentary, as well as a comedy cartoon show. He’s explaining very earnestly what it means. And that’s going to make it hard in the early days to tell the compelling stories that we hope will eventually come.

0:59:37 AC: Right, and there’s a lot of issues with this any time I think you want to have asexuality represented. So books and representations don’t exist in a vacuum. So if you have someone who, for example, is disabled and asexual and you explicitly label them as asexual, if people don’t bother to learn more about the umbrella of asexuality, I think they’ll just assume that all disabled people are asexual or vice versa. It’s very hard to have representation, both because you have to… Well, the pedagogy, but because you don’t know how much you can trust because it’s not quite in the culture yet.

1:00:13 SC: And there are also, as you bring out in the book, all sorts of issues about intersectional identity issues where it matters whether you’re black or Asian or white, or gay or straight or trans or cis or whatever. That’s over and above whether you’re ace or allo. That’s going to come into the mix of defining who you are and what stories you’re going to want told about yourself.

1:00:35 AC: Yeah, I think being ace, because there’s this assumption that everyone is sexual, that’s what gives us our lifeblood, I think everyone’s always questioning oh, am I actually asexual? Have I, am I just shy? Am I actually asexual or am I just scared of the people that I conceivably could be interested in. But if you are not white or if you are not cis, then there’s all these other questions of identity related to that. I interviewed a woman who was black and asexual, and I should mention that the asexual community is fairly white, and she said that she started thinking she was asexual. And then she went and saw that everyone else was white, and she was like, oh, am I actually asexual? Or do I just hate the fact that there are these racist stereotypes of black women as hypersexual? Is this my real “natural orientation” or is just some kind of reaction against racism? And because there weren’t that many black aces, it was hard for her to find someone to discuss this with. So all these issues really compound.

1:01:40 SC: And there is… You’re touching on the sort of causality or even the free will aspects of it. Is it even a valid question to ask: Do I feel this way because of some essential notion of who I am versus causal factors that made me this way? It’s not at all clear that there’s any difference to be distinguished there.

1:02:00 AC: I think the way that I think about it is that it is good to question why you might be some way because it might be that you are this way because you’ve been shamed into being uncomfortable with sexuality. And if shame is what is impeding your life, then I think it’s good to work through that and discover asexuality and be happy. I think, so I think it’s good for everyone to question. And I also think it’s not good when people become so fixated on asexuality that it becomes a cause for anxiety. There was one person I interviewed who said, who, though she was asexual, likes to… Had a friend with benefits. And after every time she fooled around with this person, she would just be worried and being like, “Oh, am I actually asexual?” And my answer…

1:02:49 SC: Am I a bad asexual?

1:02:51 AC: Yeah, my answer to that would be, you know, first of all, you can figure that out on your own. But even if you discovered you weren’t asexual, that’s fine, too, you know? You don’t need to be in this community forever. It’s complicated, but I don’t feel like… I don’t want identity to become this really rigid thing where you’re afraid to explore things you might enjoy because you might discover you’re not asexual. So that’s one part of it. I think the problem to me isn’t that people question, but the questioning only goes in one direction. The assumption is that you are deluded if you think you’re asexual and so you need to always be questioning. Whereas, there’s almost, I’m pretty sure, no questioning… Sorry. Whereas, there’s very little questioning of allo people whether they might be asexual. So it’s the asymmetry, again, that bothers me when it comes to these questions of causality.

1:03:39 SC: No one is ever shocked when they find out that someone is allosexual. That’s not something that is immediately referred to the DSM for diagnosis. But at the end of the day, we want to let people live their lives if they’re not hurting other people. Most of this advice stems from that general principle, is it fair to say?

1:04:00 AC: Yes, absolutely.

1:04:03 SC: And the, so the last thing I wanted to ask you about, because this is a different kind of episode than we usually have on Mindscape, the book that you wrote is a different kind of book than most of my guests have written, those who have written books. And you mention yourself in the book that there were times that it was hard to write, maybe not made you sad, but at least the level of honesty is a little demanding. And you’re a science writer by training, was this a different kind of experience for you? Are there lessons there for other people who want to talk about their experiences?

1:04:39 AC: It definitely was. Like we said, I’m a science writer, and though this book is personal in that I talk about my life and I talk about my relationships, there was some resistance in some ways to writing this book, because what I like to talk about is science and technology and biotech. I’m not a very natural, in some ways, writer to explore sex and gender. And it was difficult because… It’s not just that the self-disclosure was difficult, because I write essays and so I’m used to self-disclosure. It was the fact that I always wanted to manage other people’s perception of me. And I talk about this defensiveness. I don’t want to be seen as a killjoy, I don’t want to be seen as this really disapproving person.

1:05:23 AC: So even as I was writing a book about why these feelings were unfair, I felt them anyway in the process of writing the book. So eventually, I think I just had to realize that if you’re going to write about yourself, in some ways you have to throw yourself under the bus, you have to stop managing other people’s perceptions, because that’s going to make you pose too much and care too much about looking good, and then you’re not honest and then it’s PR. It’s PR for yourself and it’s not useful. So I had to go through some of that in the revision process.

1:05:58 SC: Or you can just be a theoretical physicist and never reveal anything about yourself in your writing as a professional. That’s a much more comfortable route, I’ve found. [chuckle]

1:06:06 AC: If only that route were available to me.

1:06:10 SC: Well, there you go. But the other thing, I guess, I already said this is the final thing, but this came up while you were just talking, there aren’t that many books about asexuality and you’ve written one. And it is a topic that, for the people who are involved, is very personal and very intertwined with who they are. Did you feel some sort of pressure to get it right and be a good champion for the people? That’s something I don’t feel myself when I’m writing about quantum mechanics or the Higgs boson.

1:06:42 AC: I felt enormous pressure. It’s a double-edged sword because if there were hundreds of books on asexuality out there, of course it’d be less likely that a new book would have been sold and published. But I think that when you’re one of the first ones, and this book is still one of the first ones, there is, as you say, that pressure and that manifests in many ways. So even in the way the book is written and the topics. I knew I couldn’t write a book about asexuality without talking about race, without talking about disability because there were none out there and it had to, in some ways, be a little bit more academic and more broad. And because it had to be broad, there were these fascinating tangents that I couldn’t talk about and that ended up on the cutting room floor.

1:07:24 AC: And I definitely did feel a sense of responsibility to the people that I interviewed. I’m critical of parts of the asexual community writ large in the book, but the people that I spoke to were all so open and I really worked carefully with them to make sure… I fact checked really carefully and I was paranoid about getting everything right because I don’t see this as a gotcha book. I’m not revealing, I’m not proving something bad about asexuality. We’re not there yet. Maybe one day there will be a gotcha book about asexuality, but here, yes, I did feel that pressure. Not necessarily to be a champion, because I think it’s okay to be ambivalent and to have questions and to be critical, but to try to show as diverse a landscape as I could.

1:08:12 SC: Well, if my experience with the public discourse is anything to go by, I’m sure people will hear about your book, read it, understand what you’re saying and compliment you on your intelligence and discernment. So I wish you luck with that process of recognition.

1:08:25 AC: Thank you, I look forward to that. I hope it’s true.

1:08:28 SC: I’m sure it’ll be true. Angela Chen, thanks so much for being on The Mindscape Podcast.

1:08:33 AC: Thank you again for having me.

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