Ace Quotes

“The ace world is not an obligation. Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“It seems that the message is ‘we have liberated our sexuality, therefore we must now celebrate it and have as much sex as we want,’” says Jo, an ace policy worker in Australia. “Except ‘as much sex as we want’ is always lots of sex and not no sex, because then we are oppressed, or possibly repressed, and we’re either not being our true authentic selves, or we haven’t discovered this crucial side of ourselves that is our sexuality in relation to other people, or we haven’t grown up properly or awakened yet.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Difference can be a gift. Being ace can mean less interpersonal drama and more freedom from social norms around relationships. It is an opportunity to focus more on other passions, to be less distracted by sexuality, to break the scripts, to choose your own adventure and your own values.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“The label of asexual should be value neutral. It should indicate little more than sexual orientation. Instead, asexual implies a slew of other, negative associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken. These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“An undirected sex drive isn’t a quirk of ace experience; it’s another way of saying “being horny,” which can afflict anyone because horniness does not need to include sexual attraction. Imagine a gay man with a high sex drive surrounded by women. It is possible for him to feel horny and want to get laid even if he’s not interested in anyone around him.

Sexual attraction, then, is horniness toward or caused by a specific person. It is the desire to be sexual with that partner—libido with a target. To use a food metaphor: a person can feel physiological hunger, which would be like sex drive, without craving a specific dish, which would be more like sexual attraction.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“The truth of the gender inequality in sexual freedom, and the importance of teaching women to honor their sexual desires, has distorted into the belief that female sexual liberation only looks like one thing—and that’s the opposite of what women’s lives looked like before. Overcorrection doesn’t solve the problem. It only redistributes the shame and the stigma.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Aces aren't a puzzle with a missing piece. Everyone is their own full puzzle.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Loving another person should never mean forfeiting bodily autonomy.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“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.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“It is a failure of society if anyone needs to say “I have a partner” to turn someone down, and it is a failure of society if anyone needs to invoke a sexual orientation to avoid unwanted sex because saying no doesn’t do the job.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Harmful, consensual sex happens and people should be allowed to speak freely using those terms. Those who have been harmed by sex deserve support regardless of whether they consented. Everyone should acknowledge the other side too, that we can hurt someone even if we did not mean to and even if we checked in and tried to do due diligence.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Within relationships, the desire to have sex and the desire not to have sex are so often treated unequally because of the common belief that entering a relationship requires giving up a measure of consent.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“I like it when people give me attention! I like being interesting! And these are all things that our societal narrative attaches to sex,” Selena says. For allos, sex is so natural an explanation for behavior that other reasons, such as wanting to dress creatively for its own sake and wanting to be seen just to be seen, can be hard to fathom. “I’m like ‘I want you to stare at me, but I don’t want you to fuck me, and they have nothing to do with each other,’” Selena continues. “And then allos are so funny because they just insist that those have everything to do with each other.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Instead of letting labels like romantic and platonic (or friend versus partner) guide actions and expectations, it is possible for the desires themselves to guide actions and expectations. More effective than relying on labels to provide instruction is skipping directly to asking for what we want—around time, touch, commitment, and so on as David Jay wrote—regardless of whether those desires confuse hardline ideas of what these two categories are supposed to look like. When the desires don’t fit the labels, it is often the labels that should be adjusted or discarded, not the desires. If everyone is behaving ethically, it doesn’t matter if a relationship doesn’t fit into a preconceived social role, if it feels neither platonic nor romantic or if it feels like both at the same time.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“A simple platitude, “Rape is not sex” cannot take into account all these subtleties and instead leads people to wonder how to process a consensual, negative experience and how they’re allowed to feel afterward. It doesn’t provide a way to think about how much force (physical, cultural, or emotional) is necessary for the designation of rape and how to think about the meaning of coerced sex that falls just shy of that mark. If you said yes but your body language didn’t seem particularly enthusiastic, then is it not rape but sex, which is good? Then why didn’t you feel good? Did you forfeit your right to have regrets and your rights to feel bad and to claim harm?”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“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.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Relationships should always be a game of mix and match, not a puzzle that you have to perfectly snap into, or a Jenga tower that will collapse as soon as you try to wiggle one block out of place. Customizability is the best part, yet most people try so hard to make their relationship stick to its premade form, a one-size-fits-all shape. Many people don’t take advantage of their own freedom.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“It is already taken for granted that sexual desire doesn’t need to include infatuation or caring. One-night stands and fuck-buddy arrangements are all explicitly sexual and explicitly non-romantic. The opposite conclusion—that for some, infatuation never included and never turns into sexual desire—is harder for people to accept, at least in the West.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Another thing you need to remember, and something that, for some reason, has never really occurred to you before: You can ask things of others too. You can ask them to compromise. It is not always you who have to.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Ace men tell me that people of all genders assume that they are secret incels who hide behind a made-up identity. Such is the trap: Even when a man doesn’t want sex, he can be lumped in with the men who will kill in their desire to have it. Men cannot be simply uninterested; there must always be something else at work.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Finally, as this vision of sexual liberation dominated the feminist platform, not having sex—or only wanting vanilla sex or only having sex within the confines of monogamous, heterosexual relationships—becomes a sign that someone is allied with backward, conservative political beliefs. Sexuality, which is already a maturity narrative where sex leads to adulthood, then becomes a political maturity narrative as well, an evolution in thought and practice. An imaginary line runs from “immature,” both sexually and politically, to “fully realized.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“The charmed circle illustrates the existence of a hierarchy of sex acts. Inside the charmed circle is everything that is socially acceptable, which traditionally means monogamous, married, vanilla, heterosexual sex in private. Outside these borders would be, for example, promiscuous sex, group sex, and so on. The charmed circle represented the conservative, rigid status quo.

Instead of realizing that the problem is the very existence of the charmed circle, liberals simply reversed it. Now, much of what was on the outside has become charmed and elevated.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“If we believe that people shouldn’t have unwanted sex with strangers and that strangers are not entitled to sex, we should believe that people shouldn’t have unwanted sex with partners and that partners, no matter how loving or good, are not entitled to sex either.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Others think that the bases track neatly onto emotions so that holding hands is a little bit intimate and kissing more intimate and having sex the most intimate thing of all. Reality is rarely this neat or linear. Sex can be boring and impersonal, while a brush of the hand can be thrilling. One person can feel close to another from far away and the same person can have penetrative intercourse and not feel much of anything. Touch doesn’t have to be a hierarchy, and sex doesn’t have to be the only, or even the best, way of achieving intimacy.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Well-meaning guides usually point out that sexual norms are too rigid and that everyone would be happier if we stopped worrying about having sex exactly like everyone else. However, almost no books go on to say that it’s okay if someone doesn’t want to have sex at all. Constrictions need to be loosened, but not too much. The underlying assumption is that sex in relationships is imperative and everything else—the amount of sex, the number of partners, the positions, the toys—follows from that axiom.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Control of sexuality is a classic tool of domination, used by men against women, by white people against people of color, by the abled against the disabled—or, to cut a long list short, by the powerful against the less powerful. It can be expressed in many ways, like rape as a form of political conquest or slave owners marrying off their slaves and splitting families apart. It can look like enforcing purity rules only for women, perpetuating racist sexual stereotypes, or assuming that some groups have no sexual desires at all.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“Picture whiteness as a neutral backdrop, a white wall. It is easier to paint a white wall light blue than it is to paint a dark green wall light blue. The dominant media is filled with images of many types of white people; white people, for the most part, have the freedom to be anything they like. People of color need to scrub away the dark green—racial stereotypes and expectations—before determining whether we are really ace.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“It’s easy to say that sex is important and it’s harder to be vulnerable enough to say that sex is important because a lack of sex creates fear and insecurity.”
― Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex