Why Do We Have Sex? Asexuality with Angela Chen
October 17, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Hello Pod Squad, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We are delighted to tell you that today we have Angela Chen with us. Angela Chen is a journalist and editor. She’s the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex, which was named one of the best books of 2020, this is not surprising, it’s so damn good, by NPR Electric Literature and Them. Her reporting and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, Paris Review and more.
Glennon Doyle:
And I will tell you that I did start reading her work to understand asexuality better, and what happened is that I began to understand myself and everyone that I know better, and what sexuality is in general better, and it just opened up a whole new world. Angela, thank you so much for being here with us and for all of your work.
Angela Chen:
Thank you so much for inviting me, and I’m glad that the subtitle did not lie, because I do think asexuality is about desire and society and the meaning of sex, and not just no one specific experience. So, good to hear. Thank you. Shout out to my marketing team.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, they nailed it.
Angela Chen:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
They nailed it. They nailed it. Angela, can we start off with your experience of growing up and having crushes and never, ever considering that you might be ace? And take us to the moment in your early 20s when you were in your first significant relationship and you realized that other folks might have a different understanding of sex in their lives than you did?
Angela Chen:
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people don’t have this experience, but I think my experience is very similar to the experience of people who read my book and say, “Oh, I didn’t think I was ace until I read this.” So, yeah, growing up I had a lot of crushes. I had a very clear aesthetic type, like the Robert Pattinson type. All my friends knew what I liked. I had a very strong crush for a couple of years in high school, and it just never occurred to me that I might be ace because I thought I knew what asexuality was. I saw the definition, someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction. But I wasn’t repulsed by sex. I had people that I wanted to date, people that I felt very strongly toward. I had butterflies in my stomach and if they wanted to have sex with me, I would definitely say yes. So, given all of that, how could I be ace?
Angela Chen:
Fast-forward and near the very early beginning of my 20s, I had my first significant relationship, as you said, and this person wanted to be an open relationship because we were long distance at the time and I was not okay with it. I said yes, anyway, this I think happens a lot when you’re in your early 20s and don’t know better. And the open relationship, just, like all the jealousy and envy and insecurity just made me really, really mean. And that can happen to anyone of any orientation. That’s not an ace thing.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, it’s like that falls into my spectrum as well, so I understand deeply.
Angela Chen:
Exactly. But there was always a part of me that was trying to understand. It felt like something was missing my understanding. It wasn’t just, “Oh, everyone gets insecure.” That was true, but it felt like I wasn’t getting it. I became obsessed for years with why did this relationship fail and what could I have done? I just felt like there was a piece of the puzzle.
Angela Chen:
And then I think it must’ve been over two years after that relationship ended and I was still obsessing over it. It was very embarrassing to be so stuck. I was talking to one of my friends and I was telling the story again and I was like, “Oh, I couldn’t handle the thought that he would just be sexually attracted to everyone and he would always be thinking about it and always wanting to sleep with them.” And this friend goes like, “Well, that’s how it is, but you learn to manage it. It’s not like it’s life-ruining, it’s just attraction.” And I really remember that moment being like, “It’s just sexual attraction? What does that mean? Have I experienced that?” And it was this moment where for the first time I was like, “Maybe I haven’t experienced that.”
Angela Chen:
And I should back up and say, by that point I was in a second serious relationship and I’d never had any, what you might call sexual problems like libido stuff or inhibition, it was all very smooth in that area. So it wouldn’t be the kind of relationship where you would say, “Oh, there’s something there. You should be working on it.” But that conversation made me think, why was it that I was having sex with my partners, and enjoying it and what was actually driving me? Was it sexual attraction? And that’s when I started diving into the ace world and realizing that my understanding of what sexual attraction is got totally tangled up with all of these other things that come bundled up with it.
Angela Chen:
And once I realized that I don’t experience that much sexual attraction, I’m somewhere on the ace spectrum, other parts of my life started making sense to me. But I remember someone in my high school was pregnant and I was just like, “How could you get pregnant?” Not in a shaming way, but just like, “It’s so easy to not get pregnant. What would make you do that?” Or even I said, when I had crushes in high school, if they want to have sex with me, yes, I would do it. But in my own life, when I was thinking about it, what would I want from them? What’s the kind of relationship? Sex wasn’t a huge part of it.
Angela Chen:
But because, as I said, I was always talking about who I had a crush on and who was hot and so on, my inner experience was different, but the words were the same and the behavior kind of looked the same, too. I think that’s what took me such a long time to be like, “Oh, something about how I experience the world is different.”
Amanda Doyle:
It’s so interesting because it’s like we are doing these episodes on Enneagram and all the behavior from the outside looks the same, but the key difference in what makes us different is our motivation for the thing. You had experienced sex exclusively and inextricably linked with a deep love connection, and it gave me so much compassion for you because it was as if you were seeing your boyfriend want to have sex with other people. And you were saying, “What my boyfriend wants is a deep love connection with random people at the bar.” And of course that was crushing for you because it was your definition of what that meant.
Angela Chen:
Exactly. But because I didn’t know that’s what it meant, we were just talking past each other where he was like, I just want sex. And it’s something about just like didn’t compute and it would translate in my mind would be like you said, he wants to have a deep love connection with the person at a bar. So much of all the ace stuff, it’s about sex, it’s about society, but it’s also about language, and what we’re comfortable talking with and how we talk to other people and why we talk past each other, which I learned the hard way.
Glennon Doyle:
To get the language thing down. So what you’re saying is that there are lots of reasons to have sex, and most of us think the reason we have sex is because of sexual attraction. In fact, there’s a million other reasons that we have sex with each other. So what I’m hearing you say is, “Since I’m having sex with my partners and everyone else assumes that I am not asexual, but the reason I am engaging in sex is different than this sexual attraction that allo people experience.” How do you know you’re not experiencing it if you’ve never experienced it? This is what is. So how do you even figure that out? And what are some of the other reasons that we all have sex, that for some reason don’t like to talk about? When I think about all the sex in my life, I would say that 5% of it has been because of sexual attraction. So what are the other reasons?
Angela Chen:
There are so many other reasons. I mean, you are bored, you’re lonely, you feel bad about yourself and it’s going to make you feel better about yourself. You want to feel closer to someone. You want to have something to do. It feels juicy, not in a sexual way, but in a like, “Oh, there’s going to be some drama. I can tell my friends about it.” Yeah, there’s so many reasons for it, but I think there is kind of this hesitation to talk about all the other reasons, and it’s okay to talk about, “It’s because I want to feel love for my partner.” I think that one’s socially acceptable, “I have sex for that reason.” But the other reasons, it’s like, “Because I’m bored,” that doesn’t sound right. I think part of it is because there’s still some puritanical ideas around that. And part of it is because I think many of us deny our emotional needs.
Angela Chen:
I think we don’t want to think of ourselves as someone who, “I feel bad about my body,” and we feel like we shouldn’t have that. We shouldn’t try to fix it in some way. Now, do I think sex is the right answer to many of these needs? Absolutely not. It can complicate things. There’s many answers, but I think part of the reason we feel that shame is because of a discomfort with all of the other needs that we have. I think if we felt more comfortable acknowledging, “I do feel this, I do feel that,” and some of these are ugly and some of these I wish they aligned more with myself image, if we felt more accepting of that we could be more honest about our own motivations.
Angela Chen:
And then, your first question or the first part was about if you’ve never experienced something, how do you know you’ve never experienced it? And I think that’s what drives people crazy. I talked to a lot of aces, and you really get stuck in this kind of spiral. We were like, “Okay, but what about that one time? Was that sexual attraction or was that just like, I like the way they touch me, in a sensual and a non-sexual way, et cetera, et cetera.” So I think for me, the way that I realized it now is I just talked to a lot of my friends who experienced a lot of sexual attraction and to a certain point it was like, “Okay, I think we’ve talked about this enough.”
Angela Chen:
And what was especially helpful was hearing them talk about sexual attraction to strangers, because I just don’t really experience that. It’s one thing if we’re talking about partners, it just gets so complicated. But I would have friends who would say, “That guy is not even good-looking.” That girl annoys me, and yet I feel physically drawn to her from the moment we met.” Or I think once I read a review of Magic Mike, and then the author was talking about, “I came home from that movie feeling so aroused,” and I was like, “What is going on?” For me, a lot of it was talking to people in detail about their experiences, not what I was doing when I was in high school, which is, “Do you think he’s hot?” “Yeah, I think he’s hot.” “Do you think she’s cute?” “Yeah, I would date her.” Not that kind of abstract high level thing, but what are you feeling in your body? What are you thinking?
Glennon Doyle:
And the word, “Hot” gets to that. When I read that part in your book, I was like, oh wait, hot. Okay, so when your friend says that person’s hot, the reason we call it hot is because attraction can feel like heat in your body. So, “Hot” probably got that because I feel something spicy. You can tell if someone’s hot, but to you it’s not something that’s happening in your body. It’s like a set of characteristics that you’re like, “That person is objectively attractive?”
Angela Chen:
Yeah, that’s the easiest way for me to tell. It’s not bodily. It’s just like, oh, I like looking at them. I also like looking at, well-designed interiors.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s hot.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s good. Big on that. Angela, I remember really trying to figure this out in terms of queerness and I had a conversation with a friend where she was like, “So were you queer before? Were you always queer? Were you whatever?” And I was like, well, I don’t know. I’ve always thought that women’s bodies are way more beautiful and that men’s bodies are gross, but everybody thinks that. And she was like, “No, they don’t. I don’t. I actually like men’s bodies.” And I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? That is absolutely amazing.” That’s like, you slowly figure out that other people might be experiencing something that you haven’t, forever, and things slowly start to make sense.
Angela Chen:
That’s exactly it. I mean, for years my friends would just roast me. They would be like, “Angela can’t tell if someone’s flirting with her. A guy put his hand on her knee and she scooted back politely to give him more space. She was in his space.” And some of it was just awkwardness. I don’t want to over-hype it, but then after a while, these things started to make sense. So many of the ways in which I saw the world made sense and the conversation you had about not everyone thinks that, so many ace people have said the same thing, was that where they would just talk about, “I want to do that person.” And then it would be like, “Oh wait, you actually want to see them naked?” It’s not just a fun colloquial, it’s not just a flip, ironic meme. So I think that’s happening a lot in many areas to many people all the time.
Amanda Doyle:
Mm-hmm. Can we just land one piece of it? Because this really clicked it for me when you were referencing the analogy of, it’s the difference between being hungry and craving a hamburger for people who are like, “I sort of get what you’re saying, but I sort of don’t.” How does that analogy play out in all of this?
Angela Chen:
Yeah, so I think I was trying to explain the difference between kind of libido and sex drive and sexual attraction because that’s another thing we often collapse, but if you think about it, you can be straight and have a high sex drive and a low sex drive, those aren’t the same. So libido is basically, it’s just a feeling horniness in your body. You want to have sex, you want to have an orgasm, et cetera. But I think sometimes you get that feeling, and then you look at the people around you and you’re like, “Absolutely not.”
Amanda Doyle:
You’re like, “Forget it. I’ll save that for later.”
Angela Chen:
Yeah, you know, like, “Yes, I have the horniness in my body, but not with you and not with you.” So that’s kind like the hunger. And what do people do? They watch porn, they masturbate, or sometimes they decide, “Okay, fine, you.” So, many choices there. But then the sexual attractions, like the craving a hamburger, it’s like that feeling toward a specific person. Maybe there’s a generalized sense of arousal, but it’s like, oh, you, your eyes or your arms, your hair, that’s doing something to me. And I think that’s what many people don’t understand. It can be so nuanced is that some aces don’t have a libido and they don’t experience sexual attraction. And some are sexually repulsed, I should say that some aces, they do have a libido, but it’s just not towards someone. One person I remember interviewing, they would say, “Imagine you have a mosquito bite on your arm and it itches and you want it to not itch, but why would you ever ask someone else to come over and scratch your arm for you? Why is that necessary? You can just do it yourself. Why would, like, that’s weird.” And I think when this person said that to me, it really made it click.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, that makes perfect sense. So sexual attraction is a libido with a target. You said if you have a mosquito bite and you’re going to itch it, so the equivalent is you are sexually aroused or you’re feeling sexual and you masturbate, and you describe that as the most pure sexual act. Can you explain that?
Angela Chen:
It’s so pure. It’s just sex, it’s just the sensation, and then the release and then whatever implements. There’s very little social aspect, of course, masturbation’s social construct, et cetera, et cetera. But setting that aside, it’s like you in your room alone presumably. Whereas when you get into sexual attraction, when you get into other people, that’s not just pure sex, that’s everything else we talked about before. That’s, “Oh, I’m bored.” That’s, “Oh, that person is attractive to me.” That’s, “Oh, I want to feel good about myself.” So many other elements beyond sex start seeping into it when it enters a realm of sexual attraction.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. I love that you pointed out in the book there’s such impure things that can enter, for example, a lot of sex is just to create bonding with your own gender. Like men who have sex as a reason to go back and talk shit with their people to create social hierarchy. There’s a lot of things that enter the non-pure sex.
Amanda Doyle:
I think that understanding sex and sexuality in the hunger and the hamburger was so liberating to me personally, because it was like, I think there’s probably whole swaths of people including myself, who only understand their sexuality interpersonally. And so, the idea that the interpersonal piece follows from the internal piece, if it exists at all, is a really powerful place to be because it’s like, no, my sexuality is between me and me. And sometimes, I may invite other people into it and sometimes I may not. But I think that’s kind of a really big deal because it’s so foundational and there’s a lot that gets complicated, especially as socially constructed, when you are in relationship with other people, especially, typically women where I’m disconnected from my own sexuality because I am so focused on pleasing you, or looking normal, or doing it the right way or whatever the hell it is. That, to understand that foundationally as it is you with you, is a really big lesson from all of this for me.
Angela Chen:
Yeah, and I think it’s hard for people to own that. And I think the ways we think about sexuality, there’s so many other frames and models, I think usually we talk about sex driver libido. It’s usually a drive and it’s just a motor that runs, and if it doesn’t get released somehow, then it just gets stronger and stronger. And that’s never been the case for me. For me, it is very, very interpersonal. I basically don’t think about sex, but if I start having sex with someone that I feel very close to, then I start wanting it. So for me it’s like not a drive. It’s almost like my sexuality doesn’t have a container, it doesn’t have a shape, it takes the shape of the relationship. So rarely do we talk about things in this kind of way. It’s just it’s a drive, it’s a motor, it’s a need, it’s an appetite, but there’s so many other, this is language again, so many other metaphors and concepts that we can use to better understand all of this.
Abby Wambach:
That makes a lot of sense. That rings very true to me. And being a serial monogamous, I’ve never been attracted sexually to strangers.
Glennon Doyle:
I know I always thought you were lying, but now I don’t after Angela’s work.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. And it’s really an interesting thing to think about my whole life, I’m like, “Oh, I was interested in that person because of the relationship.” And then that’s when the sexual attraction really does develop. It wasn’t beforehand as strangers. I don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
That’s interesting. Abby and I were on a walk recently and we were talking about how we should be having sex more and we were walking down the street and she said, “Do you want to have sex more?” And I said, “I want to want to have sex more.” And so when I read your epigraph that said, “For everyone who has wanted to want more,” that moved me. Is that a longing? First of all, is the beginning of the discovery of asexuality wanting to want more? And do you stop wanting to want more when you understand your sexuality more? And then, my second part of the question is how does all of this kind of blow up the idea of compulsory sexuality and how we’re all living in this rigid idea of what it should be?
Angela Chen:
I think a lot of people anywhere on the spectrum can want to want more because of compulsory sexuality. The idea that all of us are sexual, whether we’re having sex, we should be wanting sex, we should be thinking about sex. So that’s not necessarily an ace thing. So many people have said, “I’m not ace. But yeah, at times in my relationship I wish that I didn’t have a mismatch. I wish that I wanted more, so my partner would… And I would have smoother sex in the bedroom.” So there’s that. And I don’t think learning about asexuality is the end of wanting to want more, but I think it’s the beginning of understanding why you want to want more or understanding one of the reasons.
Angela Chen:
So there’s a lot of reasons you could want more purely as I just said, for interpersonal reasons. It doesn’t have to be because of shame, because you feel like you’re broken. But to me, so much of asexuality, I really kind of think about it as a philosophy, almost. People do get very caught up in the, what does it mean in your body? And that’s important, but I think what’s so valuable about it is all these ideas about if you don’t want more right now and you can change later, what does that mean for you and your life? If you don’t want sex right now, and if you don’t have a good reason for it. Because societally it’s okay to not have sex if you’re on your period, or if you have a headache or something, that’s a good reason. But if you just don’t want it, and you can’t point to something external, if it feels like the problems coming within the house, within your body, what does that mean for you? What does that mean for how you relate? What does that mean for how you create intimacy? What does that mean for how you think of your relationships? And the typical answer is, “Oh, you’re sick. There’s something wrong with you. You’re never going to find a partner. You’re going to be forever alone.” And then ace folks are really trying to push back against that.
Angela Chen:
So I think that’s what I find so valuable about it as a philosophy, regardless of why you identify as ace, and whether you identify now and you might not in the future or you identified before and don’t now, these ideas that are challenging, that one very strong story that basically links our sexual attraction to all of these other things about what we want and can get in life. I think that’s enormously powerful, because I think so many people are just stressed out about it all the time.
Abby Wambach:
Mm-hmm. And just to go on and talk a little bit more about the story of us walking on the street the other day, I think what we kind of talked about, I was of the same mind, like, I want to want it more. And then when you have two people who want to want it more and there’s no push or desire to actually get the sex to actually happen, one of the things that we decided is we were talking about, well, why? Why is it important that we have sex?
Glennon Doyle:
Because it’s not about closeness for us, so there’s no way we could be more intimate or close to each other-
Abby Wambach:
We’re super intimate, we spend so much time together, we are obsessed with each other and it’s just this one thing. We’ve been together for seven years, sex goes up and down, I guess. But one of the things that we talked about that I think is probably really prevalent in your work is this idea, well, if you don’t want it from me, then maybe you’re going to want it from somebody else. And I wonder if that’s true in asexuality language and philosophy-
Glennon Doyle:
Is that part of compulsory sexuality?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Is that the shame if I don’t do it, someone else will do it?
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Angela Chen:
I think so. Yeah, I think there’s just this idea that you can never be enough, unless you’re having sex and unless you’re providing specifically great sex. There’s so many articles about there about how important sex is, and how to trap him, and keep her with just the right sex so that it’s going to overwhelm their rational faculties. I think that’s a general fear. I don’t know if that’s an ace fear, but I think that’s something that hits especially deep for aces, the feeling that because of this part of our lives, our experiences or preferences, we’re just not going to be able to offer as much as other folks.
Angela Chen:
And the truth is all of us are unable to offer many things-
Amanda Doyle:
Correct.
Angela Chen:
Board game nights and I don’t like them, that is also something I can’t offer you, but because sex is so elevated and it’s important to many people, but also it’s important is reinforced over and over again, if you can’t offer the specific vision of that, that feels so much worse than saying, “I’m not going to go to your D&D group. I’m not going to go climbing with you.” It’s a totally different category.
Glennon Doyle:
Totally.
Amanda Doyle:
Another part of the philosophy that I got from your work that I found just universally applicable are these two ideas of, the idea that this is who I am, and this is what I offer, and it happens not to include this thing in the typical way, and that is totally enough and unapologetically so, from Aristophanes, to generations of women with the, “I have a headache” meme, it is this kind of ingrained posture of apology or excuse that it’s like we have to somehow operate from a place of apology for not wanting the thing or excuse for not delivering the thing as opposed to just being like, “That’s fine. That’s exactly what it is, and I offer so much, and that’s the end of the story.”
Amanda Doyle:
I just found that so liberating. And also this idea that we have this one bucket called, “Passion,” and the only thing allowed in the bucket is sex. Whereas your book talks about why this one thing? There’s as many passions, and excitements, and interests as there are people, but yet we hold this one up super high. Why does this one get the gold star and all the other ones don’t?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. What is the answer to that?
Angela Chen:
Well, I’m always going to blame everything on compulsory sexuality.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, great.
Angela Chen:
But what you said reminded me of, I think for a lot of people, certainly for me in early relationships, you’re like, “This one thing is what I need the most. I need someone who reads a lot of books. I need someone who likes the same movies.” And then after a while you’re like, “Okay, that person read so many books, but we could not have a conversation that’s not going to work.” And what you realize over time is that one thing is never just enough, whatever that one thing is. And I think we accept that broadly, but again, there’s that focus on that bucket of passion, that bucket of, specifically sex that needs to be there, and what if we just treated it this way we treated all our other needs. It can be more important for some, and less important for some, and it doesn’t have to be shameful if it’s less important for some.
Angela Chen:
And what you said about without apology, I think that’s really powerful stance too, “Here I am, here’s what I offer, here’s what I don’t offer,” but it doesn’t have to be kind of like a take it or leave it. It’s kind of like the beginning of a discussion where it’s, “Can we make this work? I offered these things. That’s off the table. This is a gray area. If we have enough trust, maybe that’s possible. Here’s what I love.” I think a lot of ace people are stressed out, especially folks who are sex repulsed or have partners with much higher libidos, there is that stress, and I always say, it shouldn’t be, “You are wrong because you want too much sex and you’re right because you want little sex, and that’s what women are supposed to be like,” or it’s about, can we make it work? Can we dig down to what our passions are in many areas and see if we can make it work without that feeling of shame and without that feeling of blame either?
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm. Why do we have compulsory sexuality? Just the idea that we should all be having sex. We should all be thinking about sex all the time. Sex is the most important thing. If you don’t have a good sex life here, all your relationships are going to fall apart. That is the water we’re all swimming in. Even when we say to people, “What is your sexuality?” That’s what we ask, which just in that question is assuming a lot. That everyone has a sexuality. We don’t walk up to people and say, “What is your artistic expression?” We don’t know. Everyone’s not an artist in that question. We assume everyone has a sexuality. We also assume that sexuality is just based on orientation. Because when we say, “What is your sexuality?” If someone were to say, “Nature, gentle,” that’s not people’s answer. It’s very narrow. So this water we’re swimming in, why do we have it?
Angela Chen:
I think there’s a lot of different reasons. I think sometimes in some cultures that are very, very focused on traditional marriage and having kids, oftentimes you need to have sex to have kids, and so I think that’s part of that. I think another part of it is just sex sells. It is kind of titillating, because we have made it taboo, and forbidden, and because it can create drama and can create intrigue that is enormously… It is something many people are thinking about all the time, and so there’s a lot of incentives to have people thinking about it more, and thinking that there’s something wrong with us, so that we can buy more books on how to be better in bed. So there’s a wide, wide variety of reasons.
Angela Chen:
But your question about asking people what their sexuality is, I think about that all the time. I think I have kind of a complicated relationship with the ace label. Because I’m definitely somewhere on the ace spectrum. I’ve always said the word, “Asexual” specifically doesn’t really resonate with me because I think it’s a little bit, if I were bisexual and people kept calling me gay, I think it doesn’t make room for some of the nuances in my experience, and also, since I published the book, I was with the long-term partner and I’m not with them anymore, and then now I’m dating and so on first dates I’m always like, “Okay, did they Google me or did they not? How do I know that they Googled me? Do I get ahead of it? Do I just”-
Glennon Doyle:
Do I assume foreknowledge before this date or do, I? Right, right.
Angela Chen:
Yeah. I think my relationship with labels is complicated. I think on a society wide level, we need them because we need protections and we need ways for ace people and queer people to find each other. On my individual level, I think there’s much more room for fluidity, and part of me just thinks, why do you need to know what my sexuality is unless you want to have sex with me? And then someone might say, “Well, maybe they do want to have sex with you and they want to know if you’re available.” And then I would say, “Well, why don’t you try to get to know me and then we can talk it out?” I think it’s just a word or a series of questions that is bearing too much weight. We hear something, we make all these assumptions, whether they’re gay or bisexual, there’s stereotypes with everything or misunderstandings. I’ve been thinking, I do identify as ace, but if I didn’t identify as ace, I don’t think I’d want to identify as allo either, so it’s just like, what is sexuality? Why are you asking?
Glennon Doyle:
I feel you.
Angela Chen:
Yeah. Maybe let’s talk more, right?
Abby Wambach:
For the listener, can you explain what allo means?
Angela Chen:
So allosexual is the opposite of asexual.
Glennon Doyle:
So what I love about you is so many things, but one of the things is it feels like you’re obsessed with finding the right word for things, which is most of my life I’m obsessed to find. And then my last step is to reject whatever word I’ve narrowed it down to. It’s really important to me to have the right words, and then no words are ever good enough at the end. We know that ace people have been forever. In your work, you point out the Kinsey Report had a group they just called X and they disregarded.
Angela Chen:
Kinsey scale, yeah.
Amanda Doyle:
Too complicated.
Glennon Doyle:
Too complicated, right. So that was asexual people as we know now. Was it important for you to identify with that label? Why is it important? Because it’s almost like you had to find it and now it’s too narrow, but why? Why did it matter to you?
Angela Chen:
I think because the experience of my first relationship, it left me with so many of those questions and finding the label and finding people who are thinking about these things and thinking about questions that they were hazy in the back of my mind, and then they snap into place because someone on a blog is writing about them. It felt like such a service to me, that I felt it matched my experience in many ways, and it felt important to me, and everything’s about the philosophy I really admire. So yes, I think it was because it was a service, and that’s why I identified with it.
Angela Chen:
And now I think I know a lot about asexuality, and having written the book is making my life slightly more complicated in my personal life. So I’m feeling more fluid too, and I think that’s okay. I think sometimes people will ask me, before the book came out, after the book came out, “What if one day you don’t identify as ace? Will you regret writing the book?” If tomorrow I did for some reason decide to identify as allo, I would still stand by all the ideas. It’s legitimacy is not based on whether I or any specific person identifies as ace or not, it is about questioning motivations and looking at behavior in a different light. I do think I could pass as allo, but it’s important to me to not do that, because so much of the insight, so much of the experience led me a different way.
Amanda Doyle:
Yeah, what I’m thinking about as I hear you say, attachment to the label meant something, and now distance from the label means something. Your work introduced me to the idea of hermeneutical injustice, and that is this idea that pervades just every area of liberation, which is basically winnowed down. It’s like exclusion from language creation, right? So if you are alienated from language because you weren’t part of creating it, therefore you become alienated from the community that would share the experience of what that language represents, and therefore, you’re alienated from the interpretation of your own life.
Amanda Doyle:
For example, sexual harassment, there was no word for it. People just thought this was weird and terrible stuff that was happening to their lives. Then there’s language for it. People understand. They connect with other people with that experience. Now they can interpret their life better. “That is what’s happening to me.” Same with postpartum depression, whatever. Fill in the blank with anything. With this idea that the ultimate goal is being able to interpret your life and understand your life, and maybe when you do, your need for that language becomes lessened because the language helps you to describe the thing, that helps you find the community that is experiencing the thing, which then helps you understand your life. But once you understand your life, that language has outlasted its usefulness in a lot of ways.
Abby Wambach:
Wow.
Angela Chen:
That’s absolutely it. I think language is the door. It got me into the door, and then I was immersed in this world, and still immersed, but at the beginning I was just taking all of it in. And then at one point it felt like it was in my cells, and then I thought, “his is in my cells. And I also, I have other things that I want to explore and other things that I want to think about.” And no word, no matter how specific this goes to what you were saying, Glennon, can ever sum up your experience. I talk to a lot of younger aces, and there’s within kind of the ace umbrella, there’s a lot of micro, for very specific forms of sexuality. And many times they’ll say, “I keep going from ace to something else, down, down, down, down. And then at the end I just feel kind of empty.” And I think if there was one word that completely described you and your sexuality so perfectly, that would actually be scary because our sexuality, our experiences are so vast. I don’t want for one where whether it’s ace or bisexual or anything, to actually be able to sum me up because I am changing, and growing, and I don’t want to be fighting with language. I want language to be a set of tools.
Angela Chen:
And so I think many people have had that experience of, the first time you find that idea that really, really gets, you feel that sense of deep relief and then you say, “Okay, I’m going to chase that. I’m going to be understood even more. I’m going to find more of my people.” And then eventually you’re like, “I will never be contained by any word, any idea. I can go beyond ace, I can go beyond this.” And I think that’s actually, for people, that’s scary. That kind of means maybe you’re never going to be fully understood, but that also means you’re always discovering new parts of yourself and other people. I always represent that as a lovely thing and not a, “We cannot understand each other that it’s a human condition”, kind of scary.
Amanda Doyle:
Because now then you’re evolved to a new language.
Glennon Doyle:
So beautiful.
Amanda Doyle:
Right? Because the whole point of the liberation work that you’re doing is like, wait, there’s as many sexualities as there are people in the world, and it is actually batshit crazy that we have this list where we’re like, “I suppose we should all be doing this in this way, this number of times a week at this hour on the clock.” That’s so ridiculous. And so when you can get off that track and be like, “Well, I guess I’ll just go find out what my sexuality is.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, I think it gets scary because you work your way through with language. People are always like, “Oh, it’s an internet thing,” whatever it is.
Abby Wambach:
The new label.
Glennon Doyle:
Then people say that about neurodivergence now. Asexuality. You’re like, no, no, no, it’s always been a thing. But now there’s language and the internet has helped us find each other. The internet is the vehicle that helps us make community. But I think one of the things that’s tricky is when a community finds each other, instead of celebrating in freedom, there becomes a natural desire to make a smaller community out of that group. And then if you continue to change or you continue to explore, this is my experience personally, the people in that group can feel betrayed or abandoned if you expand past whatever that thing is. And that all makes sense to me.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right. And this is why human beings, there’s, I think two types of human beings in the world; those that are not wanting to explore and those that do. And I think it’s so important that we all feel that sense of belonging in whatever kind of label or category we’re going towards or we’re pursuing. And I think that for me, this is why the queer label is so profound, is because it’s very expansive. So you can be so many different things within the one label of queerness.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Can I ask you a question about particular words?
Angela Chen:
Mm-hmm.
Glennon Doyle:
Sometimes it annoys me with language that whenever we are identifying with an identity that is outside the norm, that word that we get always is just the opposite of the norm word. For example, “Queer” great word, love the word, but in itself means different than the norm. Or, “Neurodivergent.” Great word. Love it. But in the word means diverges from the norm. I’m not my own thing. I am something that’s different than the norm. It would be like if all of us, if the four of us identified as women, but we actually called ourselves not men.
Abby Wambach:
Mm-hmm. Oh, that’s interesting.
Glennon Doyle:
Or people used to say, “Nonwhite.”
Amanda Doyle:
“Mendivergent.”
Glennon Doyle:
People used to say, “Nonwhite.”
Amanda Doyle:
Amen.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Like whitedivergent. Call it-
Abby Wambach:
It’s bringing a negativity into identity.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s using the dominant, it’s using the dominant, an asexual like in itself, does it lead with lacking as opposed to something of its own? And if you had a word to describe, if you got to name it, would you change it and would there be something that led with it what it is as opposed to what it’s not?
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Angela Chen:
Yeah. I think about this all the time, and I think people in the ace community have been thinking about this for years because it is just defining yourself like, “I am not this, I’m not sexual.” Which is confusing and in many ways inaccurate. I do think it would be better to lead with something else, but then there’s that question of what that would be because it’s so personal, it’s not like, “Okay, we are not sexual. We’re into couches.” We’re not couchsexual, because again, that idea of particularity-
Abby Wambach:
Oh, we are. We’re couchsexual, I think.
Angela Chen:
All right. Some of us out there are.
Angela Chen:
But yeah, so I would love there to be a different word or a different framework. I don’t know what the exact word would be, even with the philosophy of it and kind of ideas about what we value, what each person values is so different and what intimacy looks like for each person is so different. So I don’t quite know how to square the circle. I see, and I’ve long thought about this problem, but I personally haven’t been able, because I’m very finicky about language, to think of the perfect example that would capture, truly what we are going toward and not just kind of defining ourselves against.
Glennon Doyle:
What does it bring to you? What are some of the things that, are you, because you’re not that? Do you know what I’m saying?
Angela Chen:
Yeah, yeah. I think lots of people are very emotionally intelligent, but I think that a lot of the ways that I think about relationships, and lots of ways that I communicate, the ways that I value different things in my life, the ways that I’m attracted to people, because it is not primarily based so much on sexual attraction. Those are things I think the way I assign weight to things, I think at one point someone was talking about the joke about life-ruining sex. The idea that you can have sex with someone that’s so good that they would never want to have sex with someone else. And I was kind of saying, “I don’t think that exists for me.” I’m not saying there’s a ceiling on how good sex can be. I’m just saying for me, if there was something that would be so good that I had to date that person, and I couldn’t date anyone else, it wouldn’t be sex, it would be life-ruining conversation. And for someone else it might be, I don’t know, life-ruining, rock climbing prowess. So I think that’s kind of a way to think about it. Why don’t we talk about other ways of ruining our lives? The other thing that would make you cut off, foreclose, all the other options.
Glennon Doyle:
Love that.
Amanda Doyle:
I love that.
Glennon Doyle:
Life-ruining cooking. Life-ruining cleaning my house.
Amanda Doyle:
Life-ruining cheesy joke cracking.
Abby Wambach:
Listen, I feel that. I feel life-ruining coffee making.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, life-ruining conversation. Yes, yes.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
I feel like there’s a lot of people listening who are probably wondering like, “Geez, I’ve never thought of this, but I wonder if asexuality is some part of my journey that I’m having right now.” But maybe prior to this they were like, “Well, I’ve definitely fallen in love a lot. I definitely have had a lot of great sex. I love romance, so I can’t be asexual.” But we know from your work that all of those things can be consistent with asexuality. Have you found any question that people can ask themselves that will help them understand whether they would benefit from exploring this further to understand themselves?
Angela Chen:
That is the question itself. So the question itself is not, “Am I asexual because in X amount of time my sexual experiences were X?” The question to ask is, “What does it feel like when I think about myself as ace, and could it be helpful?” And if it’s not helpful, A lot of people when they first encounter being ace, it can be kind of scary because you still have all those ideas that being ace means X, Y, and Z. But I think there’s such a focus on asexuality as a series of tools. Can you play around with this idea? What would it mean for you if you were ace? What would it mean to identify this way? What might you personally find? What would you feel freed from? Could you find a sense of belonging or do you find maybe it’s not for you? I know plenty of people who, their experiences are definitely very similar to other people I know who are ace, but they don’t identify as ace and that’s totally fine.
Angela Chen:
So I think the question is not like, “Where’s the checklist? How do I know?” And I also get that people want that checklist. You don’t want to be intruding and you don’t want to put yourself in a corner, but I think if we can all step back and be like, nobody’s forcing you to do anything. Is this helpful? How does it make you feel? What do you get if you look aside from compulsory sexuality, if you look at your experiences both in the past and now in the future in a different way, how might that transform your life? I think the question of, “Would asexuality benefit me in my journey?” The question is a question, you know?
Glennon Doyle:
And there’s also the question of, because your work, that’s one to me when I am immersed in it, that’s one question. And then the other one would be, “How is compulsory sexuality affecting me?” Even if I’m not asexual, how is this water that I’m swimming in affecting the way that I express my own needs all the time? How is an ace person’s liberation tied to the liberation of the woman who thinks she has to say she has a headache every night? What is the answer to that question? How are those two people’s liberation tied?
Angela Chen:
It’s the same thing. Maybe one happens slightly more often, but it is the same thing because whether you identify as ace or not, whatever your experience is or not, you should not be feeling like you have to fake a headache to get out of sex. That is what connects them, regardless of whatever identity you use or whatever label you use, the important thing is you should not be experiencing this. That is definitely connecting ace folks to, as you said, generations of people who felt the pressure to do things that they truly didn’t want to do.
Angela Chen:
And I want to say just briefly, because people often ask about ace folks who are dating allo folks, and what is that like? Is there consent there? People can have sex for many reasons, and having sex because you love your partner and you’re willing to do it, that’s different from, “I feel like I need to fake a headache.” So again, many nuances here.
Glennon Doyle:
Right. I go rock climbing, Angela, I go rock climbing sometimes not because I want to, not because I’m attracted, but because-
Abby Wambach:
Oh, actually when we went rock climbing-
Glennon Doyle:
It’s a deepening experience. So I get that. I get that, you do things to, yeah-
Abby Wambach:
There’s some things you do.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s like eating. Everyone can understand and admit that they eat for comfort, that they eat when they feel like shit, and they want to feel better that they eat because they’re having a lot of feelings. Everyone can get that, but suddenly when we talk about sex, it’s like we either have to say, we only do it because we want to, or we’re somehow complicit in this shame coercion game, and we definitely don’t want to say we’re complicit in that. But it’s so true. I think when you just said, “What would it free you from to explore this?” Maybe it would free you from the tyranny of, “You should be having sex,” or, “You should be wanting to have sex, and if you don’t, you better make an excuse and maybe just say headache.” As opposed to just sitting with your partner being like, “Hey, I’m not going to want to have sex a lot of the time, and because it’s important to you, and because it’s important to our relationship, I’m going to do it.” Even that feels freeing to actually-
Glennon Doyle:
Not pretend desire, not fake desire.
Amanda Doyle:
Or not have to feign excuses for things. In your book, you talk about how asexual folks have the same level of arousal in response to sexual stimuli as allo folks, and that was fascinating to me. So if there’s two groups watching porn, one’s asexual, one’s allo, they’re going to have essentially the same levels of arousal. When we had Emily Nagaski on the pod, and she taught us a lot about responsive desire, which I very much identified with, like, I don’t walk around with this spontaneous cravings for sex all the time, but when I start to have sex, I’m like, “Yes, please. I like this very much.” How do you know the difference between whether you’re just firmly in the responsive desire world or whether you’re asexual?
Angela Chen:
There’s a few ways to think about this. One is you’re mentioning the study about sexual arousal and porn watching. That was the study, of course, it was limited, and there are some ace people who don’t have that. So that’s kind of the easy answer, right? That’s the cop out answer. But the other answer is, let’s take someone like myself. I could see myself as someone who has responsive desire. The ace label also applies. I think it’s a lot about, what does it mean? Some people experience responsive desire, but maybe they still don’t want to have sex, or maybe sex doesn’t mean the same thing to them, or maybe the sexual attraction still isn’t there. I think it’s ultimately a matter of social construction. I think that there are probably some ace people out there who choose to identify as ace and have responsive desire, and there are some people who have responsive desire and don’t identify as ace.
Angela Chen:
I know this is frustrating, but I feel like the ace label can be so fluid that sometimes people even question that specific definition of doesn’t experience sexual attraction. But yeah, it’s a great question and it’s one that I’ve thought about myself, and I think in the end, what do you get from thinking of yourself in one way or the other? You can think of yourself as a person who has a medical disorder that’s in the DSM. You can think of yourself as a person who has responsive desire. You can think of yourself as someone who’s ace. These three people could be having fundamentally the same physiological experience. They might be having a different psychological experience, and they might be having a different sociological cultural experience. So it’s not like, which 1:00 AM I really? It’s about which one do I choose?
Glennon Doyle:
I love that.
Abby Wambach:
That’s so good.
Glennon Doyle:
Isn’t it beautiful that we get to name, and decide, and name ourselves and rename ourselves and rename ourselves as many times as it takes?
Abby Wambach:
I love it.
Glennon Doyle:
Thank you, Angela. Your work is so important and wonderful and helped us all understand ourselves better.
Abby Wambach:
I do just have a really quick question. In terms of being in a long-term committed relationship, can you be a certain sexuality, and have the drive, and have the libido, and then as the marriage goes on, do people, can they become asexual?
Angela Chen:
I mean, I think that’s so common.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t know if it’s possible. I don’t know if you are ace or not.
Angela Chen:
That question is so common, and first of all, I think that happens all the time, definitely before the modern asexual movement began, and this kind of goes to the question of how ace you have to be to be really ace, because the definition of Ace used to include the word lifelong. “Lifelong lack of sexual attraction,” and that started to get a lot into the, “Born this way” thing-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. Or gold star lesbian. It’s like, oh my God, we have to prove ourselves within these communities too?
Angela Chen:
Exactly. And now a lot of people do experience less sexual attraction libido as they get older, or as you’re saying kind of long-term relationships. So then the question is are they ace or are they not? So I think it’s not quite the right framing. Do they become ace? We were talking about labels and when they help and when they don’t help. I don’t know if, “Turning ace” is quite the right label for us, it was more like, okay, in the relationship, one person has less desire for sex, who cares what the label is? Maybe they turn ace. That’s sociological construction anyway, what needs of mine are not being met? What am I craving? What do we do about it? I think sometimes when we ask this question, “Are you turning something?” It’s trying to get an easy answer, and it’s trying to get out of talking.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Angela Chen:
At the ground level.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Angela Chen:
Talking, yeah. If you told me, “Yes, they turned ace,” it would mean one thing. But what you really need is to be asking a different set of questions.
Glennon Doyle:
And maybe, “Turning” sometimes means discovered that I have been pretending this whole time.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, true.
Glennon Doyle:
“Turning” doesn’t mean I woke up and was like, “Oh my God, I’m this thing.” It’s like I slowly understood that I have been performing sexuality in a way that didn’t come from my true desire, and I’m slowly stopping that and letting myself be who I am.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Amanda Doyle:
And not asking the harder questions. I think that’s why we have the highly esteemed, coveted sex bucket. Because it is really easy to look back at the last month of your life and be like, “Okay, we had sex this five times. Check, check, check, check, check.” We use it as an indicia of intimacy. And it’s easy to say, “Look, intimacy, check.” We even call it intimacy. Whereas there’s a thousand different ways, like you’re saying, of the weighing things. Like, did we actually communicate? Did we connect with each other? “When that woman said that obnoxious thing, did you catch my eye the way you should have caught my eye if we really understood each other?” Those indicia of intimacy, we don’t have words for them. We don’t check in on them, we don’t value them. And so we’re like, “Well, I checked our scorecard and we’re doing okay on the intimacy,” because we don’t yet have all the other ways of checking in to make sure that we’re really doing the things to stay connected.
Angela Chen:
It takes more work and nobody wants more work, and it can be fraught and frustrating. And anytime that you’re moving away from kind of the easy steps, it feels like, oh, why am I creating more work for myself? But I mean, that’s what the real stuff is happening.
Abby Wambach:
Angela.
Glennon Doyle:
The real stuff. Thank you, Angela. Thank you. Pod squad. Check out Angela’s book. Really freaking good stuff.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, really cool.
Glennon Doyle:
And we’ll see you next time. Bye, Pod Squad.
Glennon Doyle:
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