250. Why Do We Have Sex? Asexuality with Angela Chen

It's the beginning of a new school year, and also classroom sniffles and sneezes that go along with it.

From home to school and back, stock up with Kleenex ultra-soft tissues.

Start the school year off the right way by preparing for the messes that come with it.

You don't want to be caught without a tissue on hand to help.

Kleenex ultra-soft tissues are soft and absorbent to stand up against runny noses, to keep you and your family clean and comforted as the school year starts.

This to school season, make sure to get the classroom essential that teachers and students can rely on.

For whatever happens next, grab Kleenex.

I think that I know more than anyone on this entire planet that having the right therapist to talk to can make a life-changing difference.

That's why I think ALMA is so cool.

Alma connects you with real therapists to understand your unique experience.

You can use their directory to search for someone who specializes in the areas that matter most to you, whether that's anxiety, relationships, or anything else.

And what stands out to me about ALMA is that 97% of people seeing a therapist through Alma say their therapist made them feel seen and heard.

You know, I love that.

That level of connection isn't something you can get from scrolling through online advice or following social media.

It's about finding someone who truly understands your journey and is dedicated to helping you make progress.

Better with people, better with Alma.

Visit helloalma.com slash hardthings to get started and schedule a free consultation today.

That's hello ALMA.com slash hardthings.

They've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

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 is 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.

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 kind of opened up a whole new world.

Angela, thank you so much for being here with us and for all of your work.

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 one specific experience.

So good to hear.

Thank you.

Shout out to my marketing team.

Yes, they nailed it.

Thank you, Zach.

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.

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 kind of 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 never occurred to me that I might be ACE because I thought I knew what asexuality was.

I saw the definition, you know, 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, 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?

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 in an open relationship because we were long distance at the time.

And I was not okay with it.

And 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, you know, that can happen to anyone of any orientation.

You know, that's not an ace thing.

Yeah, it's like that falls into my spectrum as well.

So I raise that that up deeply.

Exactly.

But there was always a part of me that was trying to understand, you know, it felt like something was missing my understanding.

It wasn't just, oh, you know, everyone gets insecure.

That was true, but it felt like I wasn't getting it.

And I became obsessed for years with, you know, why did this relationship fail?

And what could I have done?

I just felt like there was a piece of the puzzle.

And then.

I think it must have 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, you know, I just, I couldn't handle the thought that he would just be sexually attracted to everyone.

He would always be thinking about it and always wanting to sleep with them.

And this friend goes like, well, you know, that's just 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.

And I should back up and say, you know, 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, you know, there's something there.

You should, you know, be working on it.

But that conversation made me think, you know, why was it that I was.

having sex with my partners and enjoying it.

And like, what was actually driving me?

Was it sexual attraction?

And that's when I started, you know, kind of 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.

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, you know, someone in my high school was pregnant and I was just, how could you get pregnant?

Not in a shamey way, but just like, it's so easy to not get pregnant.

What would make you do that?

Or even, you know, I said when I had crushes in high school, like, if they want to have sex with me, yes, I would do it.

But in my own life, when I was thinking about, you know, what would I want from them?

What's the kind of relationship?

Sex wasn't a huge part of it.

But because, as I said, I was always talking about who had a crush on and who was hot and so on.

Like my inner experience was different, but the words were the same and the behavior kind of looked the same too.

So I think that's what took me such a long time to be like, oh, something about how I experience the world is different.

It's so interesting because it's like we're 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

as 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.

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, you know, translate in my mind and be like, you said, like, he wants to have a deep love connection with the person at a bar.

So much of all the A stuff, it's, you know, it's about sex and it's about society, but it's also about language who 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.

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, I 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 like, 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?

There are so many other reasons.

I mean, you're 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, you know, not in a sexual way, but in a like, oh, there's going to be some drama and 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, you know, it's because I want to feel love for my partner.

I think that one's socially acceptable.

Yeah.

You know, 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, you know, there's still some puritanical ideas around that.

And part of it is because I think many of us deny our emotional needs.

You know, 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, like, I do feel this, I do feel that.

And some of these are ugly and some of these, I wish they aligned more with my self-image, we felt more accepting of that, we could be more honest about our own motivations.

And then your first question, or the first part was about, you know, if you've never experienced something, how do you know you've never experienced it?

And I think that's what drives people crazy.

You know, I talk to a lot of aces and you really get stuck in this.

kind of spiral and you're 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 non-sexual way etc etc um so i think for me the way that i realize it now is i just talked to a lot of my friends who experience a lot of sexual attraction and to a certain point it was like okay i think we've talked about this enough and what was especially helpful was talking was hearing them talk about sexual attraction to people that to strangers because i just don't really experience that you know it's one thing we're talking about partners it just gets so complicated but you know i would have friends who would say you know that guy is not even good looking um that girl annoys me and yet like i feel physically drawn to her from the moment we met or i think once i read a review of magic mic and then the author was talking about, you know, 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, you know, do you think he's hot?

Yeah, I think he's hot.

Do you think she's cute?

Yeah, I would date her.

You know, not that kind of abstract high-level thing, but, you know, what are you feeling?

in your body.

What are you thinking?

And the word hot gets to that.

When I read that part in your book, I was was like, oh, wait, hot.

Okay.

So, 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, like, hot probably got that because I like 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.

Yeah, that's the easiest way for me to tell.

It's not bodily.

It's just like, oh, you know, I like looking at them.

I also like looking at, you know, well-designed interiors, you know,

kind of like

on that.

That's amazing.

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, were you whatever?

And I was like, well, I don't know.

I've always thought that like women's bodies are way more beautiful and that men's bodies are like gross, but everybody thinks that.

And she was like,

no, they don't.

I don't.

Like, I actually likes 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.

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.

You know, a guy put his hand on her knee and she scooted back politely to give him more space.

She was in a space.

And some of it was just awkwardness.

You know, I don't want to overhype it, but then after a while, these things started to make sense.

Some 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, you know, I want to.

I want to do that person.

And then it would be like, oh, wait, you.

you actually want to see them naked.

You know, it's not just like a fun colloquial show.

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.

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?

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, like you can be straight and have a high sex drive and a low sex drive, those aren't the same.

So libido is basically just like a feeling horniness in your body, you know, like 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.

You know,

forget it.

You'll save that for later.

Yeah, you know, like, yes, I have the horniness in my body, but not with you and not with you, you know?

And then, so that's kind of like the hunger.

And, you know, what do people do?

They watch porn, they masturbate, or sometimes they decide, okay, fine, you.

So, you know, many, many choices there.

But then the sexual attraction is 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, your eyes, your arms, your.

hair, like 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 sex 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, like, you know, 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?

Like, 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.

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, you're feeling sexual and you masturbate.

And you describe that as the most pure sexual act.

Can you explain that?

It's so pure because it's just sex, you know, it's just the sensation and then the release and then, you know, whatever implements, there's very little social aspect.

You know, know, of course, you know,

masturbation, social construction, 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, you know, I want to feel good about myself.

Like so many other elements beyond sex start seeping into it when it enters the realm of sexual attraction.

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.

How would you like to feel calmer, think clearer, and sleep better, all in just two minutes?

Meet Truvega Plus, a handheld device that uses gentle vagus nerve stimulation to help calm your body's stress response.

In just two minutes a session, Truvega helps shift you out of fight or flight and into a more relaxed, balanced state.

By naturally supporting your body's nervous system, you can quiet mental chatter, ease anxious feelings, and promote deeper, more restful sleep.

So you wake up feeling refreshed and clear-headed.

There are no pills, no side effects, just safe, clinically backed technology developed from decades of neuromodulation research.

Ready to try it out?

Visit Truevega.com and use code WCDHT25 at checkout to receive $25 off your purchase.

Take action today and upgrade to feeling better every day with TrueVega.

Visit Truevega.com and use my code WCDHT25 to receive $25 off your purchase.

Feel calmer and sleep better with Vega.

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're 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.

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, you know, when we talk about sex drive or libido, it's usually like a drive and it's just like 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.

Like for me, it is very, very interpersonal.

I basically don't think about sex, but if I start having sex with someone that I, you know, feel very close to, then I start wanting it.

So it's for me, it's like, it's not a drive.

It's almost like my sexuality doesn't have a container, doesn't have a shape.

It takes the shape of the relationship but so rarely do we talk about things in this kind of way it's just you know it's a drive it's a motor it's a need it's an appetite but there's so many other you know this is language again so many other metaphors and concepts that we can use to better understand all of this that makes a lot of sense that like brings very true to me and like being a serial monogamous, I've never been attracted sexually to strangers.

I know, I always thought you were lying, but now I don't after Angela's work.

Yeah, and it's really an interesting thing to think about.

Like my whole life, I'm like, oh, I was interested in that person because of the relationship.

And I was then that's when the sexual attraction really does develop.

It wasn't beforehand as strangers.

I don't know.

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?

Like, do it, 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?

I think a lot of people, anywhere on the spectrum, can want to want more because of compulsory sexuality.

You know, the idea that all of us are sexual, like whether we're having sex, we should be wanting sex, we should be thinking about sex.

So that's not necessarily an ACE thing.

Like so many people have said, you know, I'm not ACE, but yeah, at times in my relationship, I wish that I didn't have a mismatch with you.

I wish that, you know, 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.

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 you know if you don't want more right now and you know 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 right it's okay to not have sex if you're on your period or you know you have a headache or something that's a good reason but if you just don't want it you can't point to something external if it feels like the problems coming from 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, you know, there's something wrong with you, you're never gonna find a partner, you're gonna be forever alone.

And then ACE folks are really trying to push back against that.

So I think that's what I find so valuable about it as a philosophy.

You know, regardless of why you identify as ACE, whether you identify now and you might not in the future, or you identified before and don't now, like these ideas that are challenging this, like 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.

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, because I was of the same mind, like I want to want it more.

And then when you have two people who want to 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 why.

Like, why is it important that we have sex?

Because it's not about closeness for us.

So there's no way we could be more intimate.

We're super into each other.

We like spend so much time together.

We are obsessed with each other.

And it's just like this one thing, you know, 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 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.

Is that part of compulsory sexuality?

Like, is that the shame?

Like, if I don't do it, someone else will do it.

Yeah.

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, you know, 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, our preferences, we're just not going to be able to offer as much as other folks.

And the truth is, all of us are unable to offer many things, you know,

board game nights and I don't like them.

You know, that is also something I can't offer you.

But because sex is so elevated, um, and

it's important to many people, but also its importance is reinforced over and over again.

If you can't offer the specific vision of that, that feels so much worse than saying, you know, I'm not going to go to your DD group, you know, I'm not going to go climbing.

It's a totally different category.

Totally.

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 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.

I just found that so liberating.

And also this idea that like 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?

Yeah, what is the answer to that?

Well, I'm always going to blame everything on compulsory sexuality.

what you said reminded me of, you know, 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.

Like, I need someone who reads a lot of books.

You know, 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 the way we treated all our other needs?

You know, 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.

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 a kind of like a take it or leave it.

You know, it's kind of like the beginning of a discussion where it's, you know, can we make this work?

I offer these things, like 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 know, you're wrong because you want too much sex and you're right because you want little sex.

That's what women are supposed to be like.

Or it's about, you know, how can we, 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?

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?

Because 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?

I think there's a lot of different reasons.

I mean, I think, you know, sometimes in some cultures that are very, very focused on, you know, 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.

Like it is kind of titillating, like 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, you know, 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.

But, you know, your question about asking people what their sexuality is, I think about that all the time because 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 like if I were bisexual and people kept calling me gay.

Like 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 a long-term partner and I'm not with them anymore.

And then now I'm dating.

And so, you know, I always, on first days, I'm always like, okay, did they Google me or did they not?

How did they not Google me?

Do I do I get ahead of it?

Do I just do I assume foreknowledge before this date?

Or do I right?

Right.

Yeah.

I think my relationship with labels is complicated.

I think, you know, on a society-wide level, we need them because we need protections and we need ways for, you know, 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 someone might say, well, maybe they do want to have sex with you and they want to know, you 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 up.

I think it's just a word or a series of questions that like is bearing too much weight.

You know, we hear something, we make all these assumptions, whether they're gay or bisexual.

There's stereotypes with everything or misunderstandings.

you know, 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 aloe either so it's just like what is sexuality why are you asking i feel you

yeah maybe let's talk more right for the listener can you explain what aloe means so allosexual is opposite of asexual

What does the future hold for business?

Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers.

Bull market, bear market.

Rates will rise or fall.

Inflation, up or down.

Can someone please invent a crystal ball?

Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite, the number one AI cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform.

With one unified business management suite, there's one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions.

With real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data.

When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next.

Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities.

I highly recommend it.

Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com/slash hardthings.

The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/slash hardthings.

Netsuite.com/slash slash hard things.

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.

Too complicated.

Too burglar.

Too complicated.

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?

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, you know, 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, you know, 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.

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, you know, I'm feeling more fluid too.

And I think that's okay.

I think, you know, sometimes people will ask me, you know, before the book came out, after the book came out, you know, 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 Aloe, I would still stand by all the ideas.

And, you know, if legitimacy is not based on whether I or any specific person identifies as ACE or not, it is about, you know, questioning motivations and looking at your behavior in a different, in a different light.

I do think, you know, I could pass as aloe, 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.

Yeah.

What I'm thinking about as I hear you say, like 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

like winnowed down it's like exclusion from language creation, right?

So if you 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.

For example, sexual harassment, there was no word for it.

People just thought this was weird shit 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,

you, 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.

Wow.

That's absolutely it.

I think language is the door.

You know, it got me into the door.

And then I was immersed in this world.

You know, I am 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, you know, and then I thought,

this 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, Glendon, can ever sum up your experience.

I talked to a lot of younger ACEs, and there's within kind of the ACE umbrella, there's a lot of micro-labels for very specific forms of sexuality.

And many times they'll say, like, 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 fast.

Like I don't want for one word, 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.

And so I think many people have had that experience of the first time you find that idea that really, really gets you, you feel that sense of deep relief.

And then you say, okay, I'm going to 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 because that kind of means you're maybe you're never going to be fully understood, but that also means you're always kind of discovering new parts of yourself and other people.

I always try to present that as a lovely thing and not a, you know, we cannot understand each other.

That is a human condition kind of scary.

Because now then you evolve to a new life.

So it's beautiful, right?

Because the the whole point of 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.

Yeah, I think it gets scary because you work your way through with language.

You know, people are always like, oh, it's a, it's an internet thing, whatever it is.

Then, you know, people say that about neurodivergence now,

you know, 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 like 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.

That's right.

I mean, and this is like, this is why human beings, there's like, I think, kind of 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 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.

Yeah.

Can I ask you a question about particular words?

Sometimes it annoys me with language that

whenever we are identifying with an

identity that is outside the norm,

that that word

that we get

always is just

the opposite of the norm word.

For example, queer, great word, love that, love the word, but in itself means different than the norm

or like 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,

you know, or like people used to say non-white.

People used to say non-white.

Amen.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like

white divergence.

It's bringing a negativity into

using the dominant.

Asexual.

Like in in itself, does it lead with like 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?

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 am not sexual, which is confusing and in many ways, you know, inaccurate.

I do think it would be better to lead with something else.

But then there's that question of what that would be, you know, because it's so personal.

It's not like, okay, we're, we, you know, we're not sexual.

We're into couches, you know, it's not so, you can't like, we're not couch sexual.

Because again, that idea of particularity, we are, you know, we are.

We're couch sexual, I think.

All right.

Some of us out there are.

Yeah, I would love there to be like a different word or a different framework.

I don't know what the exact word would be because even with the philosophy of it and, you know, 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 kind of the perfect example that would capture truly what we are going toward and not just kind of defining ourselves against.

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?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, lots of people are very emotionally intelligent, but I think that a lot of the ways that I think about relationships and a lot of the way 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, like those are things I think the way I assign weight to things.

At one point, someone was talking about the joke about life ruining sex, the idea that, you know, you have sex with someone so good that, you know, 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, like, 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 like life-ruining conversation.

And for someone else, it might be, I don't know, like 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?

Like the other thing that would make you cut off, foreclose all the other options.

I love that.

I love that.

Life-ruining cooking.

Life-ruining

cleaning my house.

Joke cracking.

Listen, I feel that.

I feel life-ruining coffee making.

Yes, life-ruining conversation.

Yes.

Yes.

Hey, everyone.

I've got to tell you about Viori.

If you haven't heard of them, you're missing out.

And we love this stuff.

I've been living in this stuff for years.

I recently got the performance jogger from their dream knit collection and let me just say it's hands down the softest, comfiest jogger I've ever worn.

I use them for everything.

Viori is an investment in your happiness.

I promise you.

For our listeners, they are offering 20% off your first purchase.

Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at viori.com/slash hard things.

That's vuo r i.com slash hard things.

Exclusions apply.

Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S.

orders over $75 and free returns.

Go to viori.com/slash hardthings and discover the versatility of Viori clothing.

Exclusions apply.

Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

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?

That is the question itself.

So the question itself is not, you know, 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, you know, if it's not helpful, like 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 you know can you play around with this idea like 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 so i think you know the question is not like where is the checklist how do i know and i also get that people want that checklist because you don't want to be intruding and you don't want to, you know, put yourself in a corner.

But I think if we can all step back and be like, you know, 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 the question, you know?

Yeah.

And there's also the question of, because your work, that's one for to me, when I am immersed in it, that's one question.

And then the other one would be like, 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?

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.

Like 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, like generations of people who felt the pressure to do things that they truly didn't want to do.

And, you know, I want to say just briefly, because people often ask about, you know, ACE folks who are dating aloe folks and what is that like?

Is there, 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.

Right.

So again, many nuances here.

Like I go, I go rock climbing, Angela.

I go rock climbing sometimes.

Not because I want to, not because I'm attracted, but because

it's a deepening experience.

So I get that.

I get that.

You do things to.

Yeah, there's some things you do.

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 like shame coercion game.

And we definitely don't want to say we're complicit in that.

But it's so true.

Like 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 and 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 like actually

not pretend desire, not fake desire.

Or not have to like 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 like if there's two groups watching porn, one's asexual, one's aloe, they're going to have essentially the same levels of arousal.

When we had Emily Nagosky on the pod and she, you know, 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 like firmly in the responsive desire

world

or whether you're asexual?

There's a few ways to think about this.

One is you're mentioning the study about sexual arousal and porn watching.

That was a study, so 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.

Like, 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.

Like 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.

I know this is frustrating, but I feel like the ACE label, it 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, it's, you know, what do you get from thinking of yourself in one way or the other?

You know, 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 like sociological cultural experience.

So it's not like, which one am I really?

It's about, you know, which one do I choose?

I love that.

That's so good.

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?

I love it.

Thank you, Angela.

Your work is so important and wonderful and helped us all understand ourselves better.

I do just have a really quick question.

In terms of like 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?

I mean, I think that's so common.

I don't know if that's, if it's possible.

I don't know if like you are ace or not.

That question is so common.

First of all, I think that happens all the time, definitely before kind of the modern asexual, you know, movement began.

And this kind of goes to the question of, you know, how ace do you have to be to be really ace?

Because the definition of ace used to include the word lifelong, like lifelong lack of sexual attraction.

And that started to get a lot into kind of like the born this way thing.

Yes, or gold star lesbian.

It's like, oh my God, we have to prove ourselves within these communities too.

Exactly.

And now a lot of people do experience less sexual attraction with uto as they get older, or as you say, in kind of long-term relationships.

So then the question is, are they ACE or are they, are they not?

So I think it's not quite the right framing, like, do they become ace?

It's, you know, we're talking about like labels and when they help and when they don't help.

I don't know if like turning ace is quite the right label for this.

It was more like, okay, in the relationship, one person is, you know, has less desire for sex.

Like, who cares?

what the label is?

Maybe they turned ace.

Like that's, you know, a sociological construction anyway.

What needs of mine are not being met?

What am I craving?

What do we do about it?

You know, I think sometimes when we ask this question, like, are you turning something?

Um, yeah, it's like trying to get an easy answer and it's trying to get out of talking

at the ground level.

That's right, talking, yeah.

If you told me yes, they turned ace, like it would mean one thing, but what you really need is to be asking a different set of questions.

That's right.

And maybe turning sometimes means discovered that I have been pretending this whole time.

Yeah, sure.

Turning doesn't mean I woke up and was like, oh my God, I'm the 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.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And then 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 those five times.

Check, check, check, check, check.

We use it as like 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 like we're really doing the things to stay connected.

Because it takes more work and nobody wants more work and you know, it can be fraught and frustrating.

And yeah, anytime that you're moving away from kind of the easy steps, it feels like, oh, why am I, why am I creating more work for myself?

But I mean, that's what the, what the real stuff is happening.

Angela.

The real stuff.

Thank you, Angela.

Thank you, Pod Squad.

Check out Angela's book.

Really freaking good stuff.

Yeah, really cool.

And we'll see you next time.

Bye, Pod Squad.

If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things.

First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things?

Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode.

To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on follow.

This is the most important thing for the pod.

While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful.

We appreciate you very much.

We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine

And I continue

to believe

That I'm the one for me

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks are map The final destination

we lack

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been

And to be loved we need to be known

We'll finally find our way back home

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a heart pain.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem.

Sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue to believe

the best

people are free.

And it took some time,

but I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on that

A final destination

we lack

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been

And to be loved we need to be known

We'll finally find our way back home

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a heart again.

We're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay.

That we've stopped asking directions

in some places

they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do hard

things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we can do

hard

things.