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

I talked about this earlier this month, but I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading through Ace and responding to it as I go. Now that I’ve finished the book and Ace Week is here, I figured that I should give a more formal review of the reading experience.

Let me just say: wow this book was amazing. Having spent several years in the ace community and reading about it, I thought that I would not learn a ton from the book, maybe just see the same ideas presented in a different way. I sure was wrong. Every single chapter was written so incredibly well, and with new ideas presented all the time that seemed to flip everything about sex and relationships on its head.

A running theme throughout the book is how language shapes our experience. The way we discuss relationships changes how we perceive them and what we expect out of them. How we navigate describing our identity comes to shape who we are. Our use of the word “erotic” is now entirely sexual when originally, it just meant anything pleasurable. Chen goes through these instances as they appear and picks them apart to question them. She flips several concepts on their heads in the process, for me the most impactful one was about consent. Consent is far more nuanced than a simple yes/no, yet no one ever talks about it as such. What if we restructured those ideas? Would we possibly be better at communicating then? Probably.

Stand out chapters were (all of them tbh) the chapter on compulsory asexuality, race and asexuality, disability and medicalization, romance, and consent. Which I know is just about half the book but they were all really good and each deserves to be highlighted.

I also particularly enjoyed how Chen does not shy away from talking about her own experience. We hear about a number of previous boyfriends as well as her current one. And about her own experience with her sexuality, how she discovered asexuality and learned to accept it. It definitely brought humanity and personality to the book, as well as complementing all of the interviews she quotes from with different experiences from many people. Primarily this is a book about people, and they all shine through, including the author.

This book was incredible, I hope that there are more like it in time. We definitely need more people to be writing, thinking, and studying asexuality if we want it to be more accepted.