Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

I bought this book awhile ago before I really started introspecting heavily, but only recently got around to reading it when I’ve been more into reading about asexuality and romantic norms. Overall I’m glad that I read this book and read it at this specific time in my personal and intellectual journey.

• I think that if I read this too early in my journey of asexuality I would not have been able to engage with it as deeply. I think that the language is pretty accessible, but not all the content itself is accessible because it does require a lot of reflection and introspection about social messaging and other things like that.

I’m not sure what her intended audience was for this book when she wrote, but in my mind, I think that asexuals further into their journey or open-minded allosexual people would benefit from reading this book.

• To me, this books seems not entry level but a mid-level book of sorts for asexuality. It is not about figuring out whether or not you’re ace, but more about doing the work to unlearn certain ways of thinking about sex/asexuality.
• I think non-asexual (allosexual) people who are also interested more generally in Relationship Anarchy or de-centering sex can benefit from this book because while our senses about asexuality, the subtitle of the book is really the main focus where Chen is examining sexuality in society through the lens of asexuality.

I think that Chen did her due diligence with research and engages with philosophy and academic thought wherever possible while also doing a great job of incorporating actual ace experience that she collected via interviews.

• The only miss that rubbed me the wrong way was when she seemingly bulldozed past a lot of scholarly work about rape when she rejected the notion that rape is violence and not sex. She wants to say that rape is a type of (bad) sex which is not exactly a controversial opinion, but still not one to be taken for granted.
• She seemed to suggest that inherent in this feminist rallying cry is the idea that sex is good and anything that is bad/violent isn’t sex. I don’t think that this is (obviously) inherent at all and I think is a misunderstanding about what the rallying cry and conceptual engineering around sex is. Chen can obviously hold whatever argument she wants and that’s not my point, I just felt like it was intellectually dishonest.

I had heard of the relationship escalator, but I really liked how she connected that with the sexual bases metaphor that is so common. I had never really thought of it like that and made me think about how bases seems to frame relationships as a game in that it seem a little bit more adversarial, like you’re winning or earning sexual bases.

I really liked how vulnerable she was about her own experience and I think that her experience and her opinions show throughout the book which is great. It is important to note however that a lot of her opinions are informed from her perspective as an Asian woman who identifies as asexual, and who has low sexual desire and engages in sex for emotional reasons. This is a very specific perspective or standpoint to be speaking out of which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it can sometimes be harder to relate as someone who doesn’t share all of those characteristics.

I really liked the the call for ace liberation at the end of the book. I think it is easy to think about asexuality as a personal problem that you have to figure out in order to live your life, but really the fact that you have to do that in the first place is a result of social forces that can be changed.