Understanding Asexuality

Sex is undoubtedly an important aspect of our culture. From the media to your closest friends, everyone is constantly engaged in an ongoing discussion about sexual activity, with questions such as ‘what’s your magic number?’ ‘when did you last get laid?’ and, of course, ‘what are you into: men, women, or both?’.

But does anyone ever ask whether you might be into neither?

How would you respond if someone told you that they are, by choice, not engaged in sexual relations with either gender? What if someone told you that they don’t experience feelings of sexual attraction at all?

As I don’t identify as ace[1] myself, when my housemate told me that she is asexual, I was quite confused. I’m 21 years old and I had never previously met someone who does not experience feelings of sexual attraction towards anyone else. So when the opportunity arose to learn more about it during Leeds University Union Asexuality Awareness Week, I was keen to develop my own understanding of what asexuality is, and, more importantly, what life is like for someone who identifies as asexual in today’s society. The talks I chose to attend were titled ‘Asexuality and Mental Health’ and ‘Asexuality in Fiction’ and what follows is my experience of how I learnt what it is like to identify as asexual (and how brave people are for doing so), what asexuality means to other people, and how factors surrounding asexuality can lead to issues with mental health...

[Mis]Understanding Asexuality

Although most of us would simply define asexuality as “someone who does not experience sexual attraction”, there’s actually a lot more to it than that. Nowadays, most of our generation understand that sexuality exists as part of a spectrum, a diverse range of preferences. We now know that there is a lot more variation than just categorizing everyone as gay or straight. As is evident from the AVEN[2] triangle, this fluid spectrum exists for aces aswell, as they can identify anywhere in the grey area between the black and white  binaries.

This was news to me. I thought that asexuals existed solely in the black space of asexual aromanticism, but in fact they too can fall in love, and experience romantic attraction and intimacy without sexual desire. Of course, they might be aromantic too, preferring to form and maintain platonic friendships, but many aces do have committed, loving relationships with people from either or both genders.

Another false assumption is that asexuality equals celibacy. Although the two can and do sometimes overlap, celibacy is deliberate abstinence from sexual intercourse (for example, as part of a religious belief system), whereas asexuality is a lack of sexual attraction. Asexuality is not a choice, just like homosexuality isn’t, as you can’t help how you feel - or don’t feel - towards others around you.

This can be extremely isolating. Just as gay men feel awkward in social situations where expectations of masculinity and ‘lad’ culture manifest in the sexual pursuit of women, aces can feel awkward in any social situation where sex is being explicitly discussed or pursued. Though many members of the ace community may engage in non-genital sexual activity, such as hand holding, kissing or cuddling their partners, they are told by others and the media that this is wrong, as it is ‘unnatural’ or ‘abnormal’ to enjoy intimacy without desiring further sexual activity. 

To give some common examples, here’s some challenges that asexuals regularly face from family, friends, and even medical professionals:

Partner: How do you know if you haven’t tried it? If we’re not having sex, then we’re clearly just friends.

Medical professional: Were you abused as a child? Do you have a history of mental illness in the family, such as depression, which could lower your sex drive? Are you on any medication at the moment? Have you considered that you might have a hormone imbalance?

Confused friend: You just haven’t met the right person yet, that’s all.

Concerned family member: How can you be happy if sexuality isn’t a part of your life? What about grandkids?

The media: Sex is integral to any healthy relationship! It’s necessary, and amazing, and everyone should be doing it! 

For more information on the damaging assumptions that asexuals are tired of hearing, check out this insightful YouTube video, directed by swankyivy, an avid YouTuber aiming to abolish misconceptions about asexuality through her hugely popular channel.

From being totally sex-averse to grey-A (someone who experiences sexual attraction once or twice in their lifetime), asexuality ranges widely, and cannot be tied down to just one all-encompassing definition. For an understanding of this from the point of view of someone who identifies as grey-A themself, check out Dealing Aces:  Life as a Twenty-Something Asexual, a fantastic blog post written by Emma Simpson, who ran Leeds University Union Asexuality Awareness Week. 

Asexuality and Mental Illness

How would you feel if you were told that your sexuality, an integral part of your identity, is non-existent? What would you do if everyone was constantly trying to ‘fix’ you, assuming that something must have gone wrong to make you this way?  Would you start to believe them?

Asexuality can often be harmfully misconstrued as the result of an underlying mental illness. As demonstrated above by the typical responses of a medical professional, many people assume that asexuals do not experience sexual attraction as a result of a serious underlying issue. In the eye-opening Netflix documentary (A)Sexuality, in an interview with a professor from the University of British Columbia, she admits that she believed that asexuality was a result of repression or mental trauma, so decided to conduct a research study to investigate her hypothesis. The results of the study showed that the asexual sample did not express increased signs of mental illness compared to their sexually identifying counterparts, and thus she concluded that their asexual identities were not a result of any kind of mental issues.

Yet denying that asexuality exists as a legitimate identity in its own right, and rendering that person invisible in the eyes of society, can be incredibly detrimental to an asexual person’s mental wellbeing. Asexuals may start to internalise societal discrimination against them, believing they are ‘broken’ or ‘abnormal’, and need to be ‘cured’ or ‘fixed’.  From flippant, ignorant comments such as ‘but everyone loves sex!’ to extreme circumstances of ‘corrective rape’, an asexual individual is at risk of having issues with mental illness as a result of harsh societal prejudices.

So during this session, we did some roleplaying activities in order to address how an ace person might ‘come out’ to a family member, or simply convince an oblivious individual that it is a valid sexual orientation. For example, to friends and family, the best way of describing it is to ask them how they know what their sexual orientation is. During this roleplay activity, I was asked by my partner ‘do you like women?’ to which I instantly responded ‘no’. ‘But how do you know if you haven’t tried it?’. The same goes for not liking the idea of sex. You just know. 

[The Lack of] Asexuality in the Media

It is undeniable that asexuality is barely represented in the media. Apparently it’s just not as exciting as a male and female friend getting drunk and having a spontaneous one night stand, then struggling to reconcile their obvious feelings for each other, only to end up falling in love and living happily ever after, as is the plot for almost every romantic comedy ever made.

Therefore, due to a gap in the media industry of any kind of education or representation surrounding asexuality, those who identify as ace often suffer coercion from family, friends, and the media to have sex, as we are collectively taught that this is what we, as humans, are meant to do. Constant peer pressure to have sex when you do experience feelings of sexual attraction is bad enough, but imagine being asexual, with people constantly asking you why, and trying to change you to fit a role of how they – based on media stereotypes -  think you should be.

Whilst there have been some rare instances of asexuality in the media in the depiction of characters such as Sherlock Holmes, Dr Who, and Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, none of them openly identify as asexual, negatively implying that it is something that should remain hidden.

This talk was led by a man called Tab Kimpton, who one day decided to read Fifty Shades of Grey for a laugh, and, in his words, “got so angry I cried”. This led to the creation of his fantastic comic Shades of A, based loosely on E.L. James’ disturbing kinkfest, about an asexual protagonist who is content with being just the way he is. 

What next?

It is vital for us to understand that asexuality is not a choice, any more than our own sexual identities are. In the same way, it is also not a dysfunction: it is not something that can be ‘cured’, ‘fixed’, or altered, just as a gay man cannot control his romantic and sexual feelings towards other men. We as a society have thankfully shed the prejudices of our past by acknowledging homosexuals as legitimate and equal beings, and now recognize that being gay is neither a crime nor an illness, and we must step up and do the same for the asexual community.

The first step towards this is recognizing that it exists. 1 in 100 people identify as asexual, so, though we might not be able to fully understand it, we should be talking about it and acknowledging for ourselves and others that it is a thing. Asexuality Awareness Week has left me feeling both hugely inspired and a little bit guilty about my former lack of knowledge, and I am so glad that I now have a much deeper understanding of what it’s like to identify as ace, and now hopefully you do too. But let’s not limit this increased understanding to just one week: let’s banish societal prejudices for good, and recognize that asexuality is a valid sexual orientation every single day.  

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1 Slang for asexual

2  The Asexual Visibility and Education Network, an online asexual community founded in 2002 by David Jay, an American asexual activist. Often described as “the asexual facebook”, it currently has 35,000 members, which is more than the amount of students at University of Leeds.