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.”
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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.”
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 physical disabilities reported very similar levels of sexual desire as a control group of women without disabilities. 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, and people with disabilities often start dating later than their abled peers. 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?’”
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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.”
That’s hard. At the same time, Cara can also feel like she’s a “bad disabled person” because she doesn’t want to f***. “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?”
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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. 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,” 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,” 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 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.
Excerpted from Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen (Beacon Press, 2020). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press. Available from Amazon or Bookshop.