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3.5 stars

This is an interesting book that tackles a lot of topics related to asexuality in relatively few pages. There’s the question of what being asexual means: the asexual community describes it as not feeling sexual attraction in a physical way, but that doesn’t necessarily make people averse to having sex. There are several chapters on how different groups of people experience asexuality differently: men face intense social pressure to have sex and assumptions that they always want it, which is less true for women, unless like the author you’re worried about your feminist creds and feel like failure to have casual sex makes you insufficiently “liberated.�� There’s a chapter on race, and how people feel differently about identifying as asexual when they tend to be stereotyped as hypersexual or not sexual at all. There’s an interesting chapter on disability, and how both the disabled and ace communities are wary of people being both, because disability activists have spent a lot of time pointing out that they’re not asexual while asexual activists have spent a lot of time pointing out that they’re not disabled. (Though, there’s a DSM entry—“hypoactive sexual desire disorder”—which is essentially asexuality, and whose criteria apparently about 10% of women would meet. Under pressure from the community, an “unless you identify as asexual�� disclaimer was added, which as the author points out makes little sense.)

Also, there are topics that affect everybody viewed from an asexual perspective. Sexual consent becomes a complicated issue that can’t simply be boiled down to enthusiastic consent or nothing. There’s interesting material parsing out differences between love, romance, and sex, which our society tends to conflate—it was interesting reading this alongside Surpassing The Love Of Men (largely about romantic friendships not involving sex), as both books argue that our society is overly obsessed with sex, only validating non-familial relationships as truly meaningful if it is involved. Chen even has a term for this: “compulsory sexuality,�� or the belief that everyone experiences lust unless there’s something wrong with them. But people can identify as asexual while still wanting romance, and in fact those urges aren’t always so much in lockstep for anyone as society often assumes.

I found this a very interesting and worthwhile read, raising lots of issues worthy of thought and consideration. However, it’s not a perfect book. Chen comes across as a bit of a stereotypical young person, assuming her own mundane experiences will be more interesting to others than they actually are, and seeming to worship at the alter of identity labels. (She’s also very eager to prove she’s not a prude, like “not a prude�� is some kind of badge of honor.)

However, she does include an interview with a researcher expressing a different view, that the proliferation of labels, like “demisexual�� (for people who only feel sexual attraction once they’re emotionally involved), can give rise to the false impression that this is an abnormal experience. “It’s a little dangerous,�� says the researcher, who has found that most college students want a relationship while believing most others just want sex. “It’s buying into the hookup culture idea that everyone should feel one way, that everyone wants casual sex and if you don’t, it’s distinct enough that it’s part of your identity.�� Indeed.

Chen does emphasize that people aren’t required to incorporate particular labels into their identity, and that how people experience sexuality can change over time. I suspect most people like her, who might not feel sexual attraction but are perfectly happy to have sex, would not consider this fundamental to their identity (evidently, most of the 10% of women mentioned above do not, or asexuality would be more visible than homosexuality), though in her case the label seems to bring something positive to her life. And maybe many of those 10% of women are out there feeling inadequate and would benefit from it too.

I also found myself arguing with Chen’s media criticism, though it’s not a terribly important part of the book: how is Lord Varys a positive representation of asexuality, for instance? He mutilates children, and anyway I suspect the writers just assumed all eunuchs to be necessarily asexual without putting much thought into it. Later, in making the valid point that our media overwhelmingly represents romance as the pinnacle of human existence, Chen just throws out a bunch of seemingly arbitrary, non-romance-related criteria and then says “find me a book that meets all that!”—I’m unclear why books that include sexual assault or that are sci-fi or fantasy should be excluded from consideration here. That said, while my media exposure is different from Chen’s, I absolutely agree with her general point that fiction overemphasizes romance and that asexual characters are vanishingly rare and positive portrayals even more so. I can only recall encountering two explicitly asexual characters in my reading: an unpleasant shut-in of a minor character in Eligible and the dry-as-dust narrator of Banner of the Damned, both featuring parched emotional lives. EDIT: I remembered a third, the monk from The Pillars of the Earth, who’s the most positive example in this paragraph. However, as with Varys, his asexuality seems like a cop-out of the “this character can’t have sex so let’s just say he doesn’t want it so we can move on�� variety: Follett later wrote that as a non-religious 20th-century-dweller he just couldn’t get excited about a “faith vs. lust�� inner struggle and so decided to short-circuit the whole thing.

Overall though, I did find the book worth a read. It could be useful for anyone interested in exploring their own feelings about sex and relationships, whether asexual, hypersexual or somewhere in between, or just for those interested in considering our society’s views on sex and romance in a new light.