PRIDE: Asexual People Can Have Sex and That’s Good for Everyone

Hello. I’m asexual. I’m also non-binary. I tend to settle on “queer” when it comes up in conversation to cut through the chatter.
Good, now we’re caught up.
Asexuality is one of those things people just really really really struggle to understand. So much so that even some of my fellow aces gatekeep it into this hyper-exclusionary, narrow band that ignores the fundamentals of human biology. And that’s not surprising. How do you cognitively understand the lack of something?
Here’s where we can start.
Who you’re attracted to, who you physically are or aren’t having sex with, what arouses you at a physiological level, the desire both conceptually and practically to have sex, and the physical act of sex itself as an independent activity are all discreet but interconnected things.
Allosexual people choose to have consensual sex when they don’t really want to all the time. Yeah, sometimes it’s sex work or the pressure of social coercion within a relationship, and that’s it’s own conversation about the existential nature of consent. Sometimes, though it’s a couple trying to conceive, and you have to get to it when the timing is correct no matter how you feel in the moment. Scheduled intimacy is a very common recommendation from sex therapists that many couples feel they genuinely benefit from.
Allosexual people choose to have consensual sex with people they aren’t sexually attracted to all the time. Sometimes individually, sometimes as a vector of gender. There are bunch of poor conservative Christian people out there who “suffer with the sin of same-sex attraction” married to people of the opposite gender. Historically, there were probably a lot of lavender marriages that produced offspring. We’ve been marrying as a business contract way longer than marrying solely for love and attraction, and all those marriages produced kids. Every day there are people out there who are so desiring of sex, as an act, that they’re perfectly willing to do so with someone who doesn’t tick all their boxes. A woman can make out with another woman at a party, and no one blinks an eye when she maintains that she’s still straight. Whatever the moral or ethical implications, we accept that all of these things happen without much push-back.
In terms of the actual physiological act of sex, you can sit someone down, have them read a book to occupy their mind, then manually stimulate them into climax with toys. It was a whole art project. You can look it up. And developmentally, we engage in adjacent behaviors to self-soothe well before we’ve developed the intellectual ability to label our sexualities.
If a person chooses not to or currently isn’t sexually active, that doesn’t erase their allosexuality. If a person is in a monogamous sexual relationship with an “opposite gender” (for lack of a better word) partner, we’re supposed to be at a point where that doesn’t erase their bi- or pansexuality. Some people are totally fine engaging in a kink they’re not particularly into because their partner likes it.
Obviously, as mentioned above, we have to leave room to talk about the complexities of coercion. No one should be forced to or feel like they have to do something they don’t want to do. That’s a whole different conversation. This is about acknowledging the vast complexities of human experiences around sex as an act and sexuality as an identity. That people are allowed to make the choices that make the most sense for them in that moment without having to stand in front of some kind of grand sexuality inquiry.
An asexual person will describe being sex-repulsed, and people will be shitty with them about it. An asexual person will say they’re neutral on sex and don’t mind having it with their partner…and people will be shitty with them. There’s no getting away on either side. Where it gets frustrating is that I see way too many self-identified asexual people being among those shitty people in the latter case (compared to the former).
Because everyone here is struggling to understand that all these component parts can live separately and that people, individually, are extremely complicated.
There is a post on r/actualasexuals, right now, that says “What’s The Point In Identifying As Ace If You Have Sex? (Vent)”
The point is to have the language to set expectations within relationships (if that’s something you want to have) and navigate the world easier.
To say, “hey, I value lifelong partnership, and maybe even want kids, but I’m never going to feel sexual attraction to you because I just don’t feel it at all. I’m willing to have sex because the act itself is kinda fun for a lark and it’s the easiest way to procreate, but here’s what that looks for me in all the gory details. Is this something we can work around or is it not? Thank you for your time.”
To be able to create a world where you’re not broken for being asexual, you just think differently and hey, we have a word for that. It’s cool.
And I can hear the echo of “well now you’re just saying sex-repulsed aces should engage in compromise sex.”
Please go back and see where multiple times I explicitly wrote that no one should feel like they have to engage in sexual acts they don’t want to.
If a straight woman turned to a gay man and said “you should have sex with me because gay men exist who have/had sex with women,” we wouldn’t be blaming the theoretical gay men in question. Their circumstances are their own. We’d call out the straight woman for being weird.
If you’re a sex-repulsed ace person and someone pushes at your sexual boundaries because they heard some ace people out there in the world have sex sometimes, that person is an asshole. That’s completely agnostic of whatever other ace people are or aren’t doing in their bedrooms.
We cannot eat each other from the inside.
We tend to turn sexualities into communities. That way we can kick people out of that community when they don’t meet the right parameters. But sexualities aren’t a community, at their most basic. They can create communities, and you might find new labels that fit you better through the years. But sexuality is an indelible element of who you are as a person. Your individual relationship with sex as an act you perform is a whole other thing of which sexuality is only one vector.
If we can use asexuality as a template for that dichotomy, that helps everyone have a healthier, more nuanced relationship with sex as a biological function.