Desire Looks Different for Everyone
Most of what we hear about desire assumes it works the same way for everyone. It arrives, it builds, it wants something. Songs, films and a lot of well meaning advice are written on that assumption, so anyone whose experience looks different can end up wondering what's wrong with them. Usually the answer is nothing.
Today marks the start of Ace Week, which runs from October 25 to 31 this year. It began in 2010, when an organizer named Sara Beth Brooks started what was then called Asexual Awareness Week, and since 2013 it has run every year as a one week international campaign. I wanted to use it as a reason to write about something I think more people deserve to understand: what asexuality is, what it isn't, and why it says something true about desire in general.
What asexuality actually means
The simplest definition comes from AVEN, the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, which David Jay founded in 2001. An asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction. That's it. It doesn't say anything about whether someone loves, dates, touches, marries or feels pleasure. It describes one specific thing that doesn't happen, the pull toward another person in a sexual way.
People often shorten the word to "ace," and you'll see it used as an umbrella for a whole range of experiences. That range matters, because asexuality is not a single fixed point.
A spectrum, not a switch
Some people under the ace umbrella describe themselves as gray asexual, or gray ace. They might feel sexual attraction rarely, faintly, or only in certain circumstances. The term is intentionally loose, because the experience it describes is loose too. It sits in the space between asexual and allosexual, the word for people who do experience sexual attraction.
Others describe themselves as demisexual. For them, sexual attraction can appear, but only after a strong emotional bond has formed with someone. It doesn't show up for a stranger across a room. It may show up after months of closeness, or not at all.
I find these words useful even beyond the ace community. They give language to something many people have felt and never had a name for: that attraction can be rare, conditional, slow, or absent, and still be a legitimate way of being a person.
Attraction is not the same as everything else
One of the most helpful ideas I've come across here is that sexual attraction and romantic attraction are separate. Someone can be asexual and deeply romantic. They can want a partner, love holding hands, plan a life with someone, and still not feel sexual attraction toward them. Someone else might feel neither, or feel romantic attraction toward people of one gender and not another. The combinations are personal.
It's also worth separating asexuality from celibacy. The psychologist Anthony Bogaert, at Brock University in Canada, made that point clearly. Celibacy is a choice about behavior. Asexuality is an orientation, a description of how attraction works or doesn't work for someone. A person who chooses not to have sex may feel plenty of attraction. A person who is asexual may or may not have sex, for their own reasons, and neither choice changes the orientation.
How many people are we talking about
Bogaert is also the researcher most often cited on this question. In 2004 he published a study in The Journal of Sex Research using data from a large national survey of adults in Britain. A little over one percent of the people who answered said they had never felt sexually attracted to anyone.
One percent can sound small. But it's a lot of people, and it's only one way of counting. A survey question like that can't capture gray or demisexual experiences, or people who had never heard the word and didn't know an answer like that was allowed. I'd read the number as a starting point and not as the full picture.
What this teaches the rest of us
A few days ago Ramon wrote about why desire changes over time and why that's normal. His point was that desire is not a straight line, and that it can follow closeness instead of leading it. Reading about the ace spectrum pushes that idea further. Desire doesn't only change over time. It also takes completely different forms in different people, and some people live full, warm, intimate lives without sexual attraction being part of the picture at all.
I think that's freeing for everyone. If there is no single correct amount of wanting, then there is no reason to measure yourself against one. Whether you feel a lot, a little, sometimes, or not in that way at all, what matters is that you understand your own experience and that the people around you respect it.
A few things worth keeping in mind
If someone tells you they're asexual, believe them. It isn't a phase they need to grow out of, a problem waiting for the right person, or a reaction to something that happened to them. Questions are fine when they come from curiosity and care. Trying to talk someone out of their own experience is not.
If you're reading this and some of it sounds like you, there's nothing you need to decide today. Labels can be helpful, and plenty of people find comfort in them. They can also wait. It's enough to notice what's true for you right now. AVEN has forums and resources where people think it through together, if you'd like company while you do.
Room for every shape
At Black Pantera we talk a lot about sensual energy, and I want to be careful with that word. For us it means the ability to feel present in your body, to notice texture, warmth, breath, the way a moment lands on you. Ramon wrote more about it in what sensual energy is and why it shapes your confidence. It doesn't require sexual attraction, and it isn't a measure of how much anyone wants anything.
Some of us feel desire often, some rarely, some in ways the old stories never described, and some not in that way at all. If Ace Week does one thing, I hope it's this: that fewer people grow up thinking their way of feeling needs fixing.