Book summary “Ace Voices”: summary

Introduction

You live in a society that treats sex and romance as mandatory milestones for a successful human life. When you do not experience sexual attraction or romantic attraction, you might internalise deep shame and feel broken. Mainstream culture offers you no vocabulary to describe your internal reality, leaving you isolated in a world obsessed with coupledom.

Asexuality and aromanticism challenge foundational societal structures, inviting you to discover freedom, deep non-romantic intimacy, and community outside compulsory sexuality and romance.

Eris Young examines the vibrant landscape of asexuality and aromanticism in "Ace Voices". You will explore how community-built language, intersectional identities, and diverse relationship models offer liberating alternatives to conventional expectations.

The book answers several vital questions about this experience:

• How do you overcome internalised shame and find your voice?
• What do microlabels and community history reveal about a-spec identity?
• How do you navigate sex, friendship, and family outside traditional norms?

1. Visibility and the Weight of Shame

Writing about asexuality often triggers impostor syndrome and internalised shame stemming from lifelong societal messages that treat sex and romance as fundamental human requirements. You may hesitate to explore these topics because you absorbed fear from a world that views relationships as compulsory.

Biomedical science and sexology have historically pathologised asexuality, transforming natural human variation into a clinical disorder that requires a cure.

In the 1950s, sexologists William Masters and Virginia Johnson established the human sexual response cycle based on a narrow sample of heterosexual married couples. Consequently, asexuality was classified as hypoactive sexual desire disorder. Today, medical institutions often treat a-spec individuals with drugs, therapy, or hormone treatments regardless of whether they feel any distress.

Interviewee RK was offered therapy by a nurse when getting a contraceptive implant replaced simply because, as a woman in her 30s, she had never undergone a cervical exam.

Asexuality and aromanticism challenge foundational societal structures, including capitalism, monogamy, the nuclear family, and heteropatriarchy. The existence of happy individuals who have no interest in marriage, conventional romance, or producing children undermines the traditional myth that the nuclear family is the essential bedrock of society. Because refusing socially dictated roles threatens the status quo, a-spec people are frequently rendered invisible or dismissed.

The importance of visibility

Visibility and finding community are vital for a-spec individuals to overcome internalised shame and recognise their experiences as valid rather than broken. Discovering that a-spec identities exist lifts the heavy psychological burden of feeling defective. Without media representation or accessible role models, many people spend years assuming their lack of attraction stems from mental or physical illness.

Interviewee LH described finding out about the community as soul-shaking relief that lifted years of self-imposed pressure and shame.

Standard sex education programs reinforce the assumption that everyone naturally desires coupledom and sex, which can inadvertently push young a-spec people into unwanted relationships. School sex education and abstinence-only programmes universally assume that teenagers will eventually seek sexual partners. This creates social pressure and obligation that can lead young, uneducated a-spec individuals into uncomfortable or potentially dangerous situations because they attempt to force themselves into normal dating patterns.

Interviewee AB agreed to date a close male friend simply because she thought it was the normal thing to do, eventually realising she was aroace after experiencing intense discomfort at age 20.

Popular representations of asexuality often overlook marginalised groups, creating additional barriers for Indigenous, rural, and non-white a-spec individuals. Mainstream a-spec visibility is heavily centred around urban environments and internet access, creating an invisibility feedback loop for those living on reservations or in rural areas with poor connectivity. Furthermore, if visible role models do not share your cultural background or disability, it becomes much harder for you to see yourself in the community.

At a 2021 AceCon panel, North American Indigenous journalist Johnnie Jae highlighted that many Native American communities lack reliable internet connectivity and rely instead on alternative communication forms like radio.

Movements focusing on diverse human faces rather than text definitions help prove to a-spec individuals that they belong to a vibrant and varied community. Activist Yasmin Benoit created the hashtag movement to showcase real faces from diverse backgrounds, countering the predominantly white and faceless depictions found online. This helps bridge the lag between learning an abstract clinical word and actually claiming it with pride.

Yasmin Benoit did modelling shoots for publications like Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, and Glamour to increase public representation for Black aroace individuals.

2. Who Are We and Microlabels

A-spec vocabulary is collaboratively built by community members as a radical act of defiance against amatonormativity.

Mainstream society operates under compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity, assuming you are always driven by coupled romantic love. To counter these expectations, community members develop precise neologisms and microlabels. Most terms used on the asexual spectrum have emerged over recent decades through online forums and social media platforms like AVEN, Tumblr, and Reddit. Scholar Erica Chu notes that this non-hierarchical development creates transparency and plurality.

The popular term demisexual was coined in 2006 by an AVEN user named sonofzeal.

Collaborative language building

Asexuality is not a modern internet invention. Asexual people have identified as such for as long as sexual orientations have been categorised, appearing historically alongside lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy. Early archive photos from the 1970s feature feminists displaying signs that include asexual alongside bi and lesbian. In 1981, an ace woman wrote to the feminist magazine Heresies expressing concern that asexuals lacked representation in the LGBT movement.

Statistical surveys reveal how many people claim specific orientation labels. For example, 65 per cent of 15,131 respondents in the 2020 Ace Census identified as asexual.

Defiance through microlabels

Imposed clinical and taxonomic language has historically been used by outsiders to pathologize you. Medical professionals have converted variations in desire into diseases through diagnostic manuals, robbing individuals of bodily and sexual agency. Terms like frigid and hypoactive sexual desire disorder have historically been used to control people who do not love according to societal expectations.

Visibility activism often pressures marginalized groups to present simplified narratives to outsiders. So-called gold star aces, who are asexual and in committed heteroromantic relationships, are often presented as counter-myths to prove that asexual individuals can still love. This assimilationist strategy can marginalize aromantic individuals who do not form romantic connections.

The words you use to describe your orientation can shift based on social context and safety. SS found that using demisexual in public led people to assume she was open to future sexual contact, forcing her to switch to grey-asexual so her boundaries would be respected.

Many a-spec individuals desire committed, highly intimate connections that are not romantic in the conventional sense, creating a new category called a queerplatonic relationship. AB described her first relationship as queerplatonic, consisting of close friends who spent time together, cuddled, and occasionally kissed without romantic intent. This term was coined in 2011 by dreamwidth users Kaz and Meloukhia, also known as S.E. Smith.

3. Coming Out and the Queer Community

Coming out as a-spec is a repetitive process intersecting with queer history and the pressures of compulsory sex positivity.

Unlike visible queer identities or those requiring overt pronoun changes, a-spec identities do not naturally surface in everyday conversation. This creates a double-edged sword: you can pass for allo to gain certain benefits, but it also makes community visibility much harder. Because people struggle to believe in invisible traits, you often face disbelief and must repeatedly explain yourself to family members and others who assume an allosexual default.

HD reported coming out to parents multiple times only to be told she would grow out of it and later finding the conversation conveniently forgotten when marriage or family expectations arose.

Before coming out to others, you often experience a necessary internal lag in accepting your own identity due to a lack of representation and internalised aphobia. Cultural narratives and narrow representation that ties ace identities exclusively to normative couple relationships make it difficult for you to see yourself. Yasmin Benoit experienced a significant lag between discovering asexuality and claiming the word for herself until she met enough other asexual people to gauge what the community was actually like.

Tensions in queer spaces

Western advice to completely cut off unaccepting family members fails to account for non-Western contexts where intergenerational trauma and survival obligations shape family dynamics. Jules, a panelist from Vietnam, explained at the AceCon East- and Southeast Asian Aces panel that Gen Y carries the burden of caring for parents who survived the Vietnam war, making the instruction to just leave family impractical and culturally detached.

Identity labels are tools used to describe present feelings rather than permanent verdicts, and trying on multiple labels is a normal part of self-discovery. EF described feeling like a fraud when moving from identifying as gay to lesbian and finally to aroace, fearing people would think they were just going through a phase or lying.

A-spec identities are fundamentally intertwined with the broader LGBTQ+ community, sharing a deep historical connection and overlapping political goals. Pastor Carl Schlegel advocated for legal equality for homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and asexual people in New Orleans in 1907.

Radical sex positivity within LGBTQ+ spaces can create an exclusionary environment that alienates a-spec individuals. The author described feeling deeply alienated and choosing to leave a post-Pride gathering when the conversation turned exclusively to graphic discussions of kink and sexual preference, fearing the prospect of being singled out and having to out themselves.

4. Intersectionality, Gender and Disability

Ace-spectrum identity is highly intersectional, meaning an individual's experience of being ace or aro varies significantly based on other facets of identity such as race, culture, and gender.

Early a-spec language and internet spaces were predominantly white and Anglophone. The visible face of the community became disproportionately white. This led to the perception that asexuality is a white phenomenon and caused discomfort for a-spec people of colour.

Yasmin Benoit started the hashtag #thisiswhatasexuallookslike because she had never met another Black a-spec person until attending an in-person LGBT Pride event.

Racialisation deeply impacts how a-spec individuals experience their identity. Historical stereotypes weaponise human sexuality to maintain the status quo. Scholars like Ianna Hawkins Owen trace how American chattel slavery established tropes of the hypersexualised Black person versus the pure, restrained white person. These modern stereotypes lead others to disbelieve Black a-spec individuals or dismiss their boundaries.

The author's friend CW, a Black woman who identifies as ace, frequently has her asexuality dismissed or challenged on dating profiles by people assuming she must conform to hypersexual stereotypes.

In communities with histories of genocide or forced population reduction, an a-spec person's unwillingness to have children can be met with accusations of undermining community survival. Marginalised ethnic and Indigenous communities often place heavy reproductive pressure on members to rebuild populations after historical atrocities. This makes it difficult to simply opt out of family-building institutions.

Johnnie Jae noted that within Indigenous North American communities facing extreme population threats, refusing to have pandemic babies can lead to heavy accusations of contributing to their own genocide. Here, Indigenous North Americans accounted for less than 2 per cent of the US population before the pandemic, and under 1 per cent following it.

Religious traditions like Christianity place high value on marriage, procreation, and celibacy as a sacrifice. They create an ambivalent or conflicting environment for a-spec individuals. Religious frameworks often assume sex is a universally human drive. They view celibacy as a holy penance rather than an innate orientation, which leads churches to treat a lack of sexual interest as a rejection of divine plan.

Interviewee CD sought to join a convent after abuse made her feel unsuited for marriage. She found that Catholicism's high regard for virginity provided a single-sex community that suited her.

Gender and neurodivergence

There is a strong correlation between a-spec identity and gender-nonconforming or nonbinary identities, as both groups exist outside major societal norms. Without the scripts of binary gender and compulsory heterosexuality, many a-spec individuals experience a form of gender apathy. They find traditional gender categories and social constructs completely illogical.

The author notes that nearly half of the respondents to their original Google survey and roughly 42 per cent of 15,123 respondents to the 2020 Ace Census listed something other than a binary man or woman, compared with the estimated 0.3 per cent of nonbinary people living in the USA in 2021. Meanwhile, 70 respondents out of 160 on the author's Google survey indicated something other than a cisgender man or woman, matching 63 per cent listing a feminine gender and 11 per cent listing a masculine gender. Similarly, the 2020 Ace Census showed 61 per cent of respondents wrote a feminine gender and 17 per cent wrote a masculine gender.

The apparent statistical gender imbalance within the a-spec community, where more feminine people openly identify as ace than masculine people, is driven by visibility and societal pressures rather than biology. Society ties a man's gender performance to an active, aggressive sexual drive. Asexuality becomes a potentially dangerous space that threatens a man's status. Consequently, asexual men remain largely invisible.

Joy Behar expressed public disbelief during a 2006 television interview with AVEN founder David Jay, stating she could understand a woman being asexual, but not a man.

Biomedical pathologisation has historically misidentified asexuality and disability as illnesses. This led to shared marginalisation and the exclusion of disabled a-spec individuals from both mainstream and disability communities. Because disability activist movements have long fought to assert that disabled people experience sexual desire just like anyone else, the existence of disabled asexuals can face friction and misunderstanding within disability advocacy spaces.

Interviewee CD noted that for over a decade, her PTSD and childhood sexual abuse covered her asexuality, leading her to assume she was simply frigid rather than inherently a-spec.

There is a notable overlap between neurodivergence, particularly autism and ADHD, and a-spec identity, largely characterized by a mutual willingness to discard restrictive social norms. Autistic individuals often process social interactions literally and logically. This can filter out unwritten social rules and expectations regarding romance and sexuality that allistic people automatically follow.

HI noted that viewing the world in logical terms filters out illogical social norms. She suggested that if an identity existed, autisexual might describe her orientation better than standard terms.

5. Friends, Family and Found Networks

Consciously cultivating friendships and found family challenges the toxic relationship hierarchy of mainstream culture.

Mainstream culture enforces a strict relationship hierarchy that places romantic and sexual partnerships at the top. Society teaches that close relationships must evolve from childhood friendships into adult romance. This system treats friendships as secondary and temporary stages of life.

An interviewee named AB expressed heartbreak over losing friends who started dating. Those friends abruptly demoted the platonic bond to an unimportant priority. A-spec individuals often experience anxiety that alloromantic friends will neglect them after settling down. AQ shared the pain of feeling like friends accord less attention to platonic bonds once they get married.

The value of friendship

Building networks of found family through intentional friendships provides sustainable emotional support.

Nurturing multiple friendships functions like a diverse garden. You gain varied sources of mutual care that are much more robust than expecting a single romantic partner to fulfill every need. The author realized that moving countries and building a busy career risked eroding important friendships unless active effort was made to nurture those relationships.

Healthy friendships offer an unconditional form of love. They lack the obligations, transactional nature, and cultural baggage often found in romantic relationships. LH, a grey-asexual person, maintained a long-standing, explicitly sexual friends-with-benefits arrangement. It provided a safe, pressure-free environment to learn the basics of sex without romantic ties.

Navigating family expectations

Family relationships are frequently fraught with expectations regarding reproduction and traditional lifestyle milestones. Biological family members often have a personal stake in maintaining familial networks and legacy. They enforce social values around marriage and childbearing that conflict with your identity.

Ria, a Filipino AceCon panellist, described a long struggle trying to convince her family-driven parents. She wanted to remain independent and did not want a traditional family support system. Out of nearly 40 people spoken to in depth by the author regarding important relationships, 18 mentioned family as one of their most important connections.

Reflect on your support networks using these steps:

• Think about the non-romantic and non-sexual relationships in your life, what you get from them, and how they nourish you.
• Think about the friendships in your life, what you uniquely get from each person, and whether they feel transactional or obligational.
• Think about the ways your relationships with each of your close friends differ from one another.
• Reflect on a time when a friend prioritized a romantic partner over you and how it made you feel.

6. What Is Love and Split Attraction

Other languages possess words for nuances of love and connection that English lacks, helping to reveal the spaces between conventional categories. The author examines terms across different cultures, such as the Dutch gezelligheid for comfortable togetherness, the Turkish ciğerpare for someone as close as part of your body, and Japanese koi no yokan which goes further than love at first sight by acknowledging the quixotic nature of falling for a stranger.

History and literature are filled with intense, committed bonds that resist conventional language, showing that non-nuclear relationship models have historical precedents. Writer Iris Murdoch and philosopher Philippa Foot shared a passionate, long-term friendship that involved deep commitment and intimacy without strictly adhering to social norms.

The split attraction model and diverse intimate dimensions reveal spaces between conventional romance and friendship.

Within the a-spec community, the split attraction model is widely used to separate sexual orientation from romantic orientation. While it helps validate experiences where sex and romance do not align, critics argue it can sometimes reinforce rigid categorization or imply that a disconnect equates to personal pathology or lack. Interviewee RH discussed experiencing shame due to societal narratives around having sex without romance, highlighting how allonormative ideas can contribute to aphobia.

The split attraction model

Many a-spec individuals find romantic attraction difficult or impossible to define, frequently confusing it with platonic, sensual, or aesthetic forms of connection. Interviewee JK stated a preference for sensual attraction over romantic impulses, while LG described light adult crushes that quickly fade.

In her essay Radical Identity Politics, Erica Chu points out that society categorizes people based on sexual object choice or orientation toward specific genders. She suggests rethinking this system by focusing instead on a person's orientation toward partnered sex or non-sexual aspects like intimacy and sensuality. Erica Chu's framework proposes grouping people by whether they seek out partnered sex regardless of gender, or whether they desire physical intimacy in any form.

Because standard categories fail to capture the reality of many a-spec experiences, terms have been created to describe in-between forms of attraction or to reject the utility of romance as a distinct category entirely. Interviewee CF found the term alterous attraction to describe deep connections that are more than friendship but lack a desire for romance, while KL used wtfromantic.

7. Attitudes Toward Sex and Boundaries

A-spec individuals hold heterogeneous attitudes toward sex ranging from indifference to repulsion and active enjoyment.

A 2020 study by Hille et al. published in the Journal of Sex Research surveyed 1,093 asexual, greysexual, and demisexual participants. The findings revealed wide variation in sexual histories and attitudes, showing that many a-spec individuals have had sex or are open to it depending on the context.

Sex ambivalence and repulsion

Many asexual individuals possess a libido and may masturbate, yet view partnered sex with total indifference. They often find that relationships lacking a sexual focus free you from performance pressure, cheating concerns, and conflict. Interviewee LL noted that her relationship is not based on sex, viewing it merely as an occasional activity that makes them sweat.

Sex-repulsed individuals may actively choose to avoid sexual media, conversations, or physical contact. Interviewee CD described being thoroughly repelled by genitalia and finding the changes her body undergoes during physical stimulation to be unsettling and disturbing. While a common misconception is that asexuality is simply the result of past trauma, interviews reveal that the vast majority of sex-repulsed individuals have no traumatic history accounting for their orientation.

Consent and kink overlap

Some asexual individuals actively enjoy sex for the intimacy it brings, relying heavily on trust, communication, and enthusiastic consent. Interviewee BH shared that having sex helps create intimacy and deepen relationships, provided there is prior communication and respect for boundaries. Because a-spec people consciously navigate their relationship structures outside conventional social scripts, many find refuge in kink philosophies. Interviewee SS explained that using safewords allows her to immediately stop sexual activity when her libido fades and transition safely into aftercare.

A-spec voices offer practical wisdom emphasizing that sex is never an obligation and that honoring personal boundaries is essential:

• Never feel pressured to try sex if you do not want to.
• Do not try to act and look like you are into sex when you are not.
• Experiment with different types of condoms individually to find what feels comfortable.
• Allow for proper warming up to prevent pain and discomfort during sex.

8. The Future of Relationships and Joy

Conventional society frames relationships as a zero-sum game where platonic bonds must always lose out to romantic-sexual partnerships. Queerplatonic and non-monogamous models dismantle this assumption by validating diverse forms of deep commitment.

Queerplatonic partnerships, polyamory, and relationship anarchy offer liberating blueprints for a-spec joy and wholeness.

Alternative relationship structures

Queerplatonic relationships are committed, deeply emotional, non-romantic partnerships that challenge conventional boundaries between close friendship and romance. These relationships were coined in 2010 through online community discussions initiated by a user named Kaz and expanded by Meloukhia in 2012. They offer intense closeness, domestic sharing, or co-parenting without adhering to standard romantic or sexual scripts.

SE Smith and their local queerplatonic partner function like a couple, sharing deep emotional intimacy and constant contact while bending traditional relationship rules.

Ethical polyamory allows a-spec individuals to have multiple connections, relieving the pressure for a single partner to fulfill every emotional and physical need. SKW maintains a polyamorous partnership where both individuals can date others if they meet someone special, avoiding the expectation that one partner must cover all needs.

Relationship anarchy rejects predefined social scripts and builds every intimate connection from scratch through active communication and mutual negotiation. The term was coined in 2006 by Andie Nordgren to avoid assuming what a relationship should look like. Jo Ross-Barrett makes up handouts containing definitions and FAQs for potential new partners to establish expectations and communicate desires clearly from the start.

Cultivating joy and solitude

Society conditions you to believe that being single or uncoupled represents a failure and that a romantic partner is required to feel complete. Embracing a-spec joy means unlearning this pressure and celebrating your unique way of experiencing the world.

Grace B Freedom describes grey demi asexuality as an embodied state of fullness, focusing on aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional attraction rather than a lack of desire.

Solitude is a vital, self-affirming practice that helps you center yourself and maintain your identity outside of relationships. The author used long walks in the woods and bike rides to the beach during pandemic lockdowns as essential routines to cope with stress and figure out their selfhood.

Experienced community members emphasize self-acceptance and clear communication:

• Give yourself space and be patient with yourself.
• Communicate clearly with your partner about how you are feeling.
• Treat anything less than an enthusiastic yes as a no thank you.

10 Key Ideas

1. Mainstream culture triggers deep shame and impostor syndrome by treating sex and romance as mandatory milestones for a successful life, while historical biomedical science has pathologized asexuality as a clinical disorder.
2. Visibility and finding community are vital for a-spec individuals to overcome internalised shame and recognise their experiences as valid rather than broken, countering the invisibility enforced by standard sex education and lack of diverse representation.
3. A-spec vocabulary, including microlabels like demisexual and queerplatonic relationships, is collaboratively built by community members as a radical act of defiance against amatonormativity and imposed clinical language.
4. Coming out as a-spec is a repetitive process intersecting with queer history and the pressures of compulsory sex positivity, often complicated by internalised aphobia and non-Western family survival obligations.
5. Ace-spectrum identity is highly intersectional, meaning an individual's experience varies significantly based on race, culture, gender, neurodivergence, and the weaponisation of historical stereotypes or reproductive expectations.
6. Consciously cultivating friendships and found family provides sustainable emotional support and challenges the toxic relationship hierarchy of mainstream culture that prioritises romantic partnerships above all else.
7. The split attraction model separates sexual orientation from romantic orientation to validate experiences where sex and romance do not align, although it can occasionally risk reinforcing rigid categorisation.
8. A-spec individuals hold heterogeneous attitudes toward sex ranging from indifference to repulsion and active enjoyment, often relying on enthusiastic consent, clear communication, and kink philosophies to honor personal boundaries.
9. Alternative relationship structures like queerplatonic partnerships, polyamory, and relationship anarchy offer liberating blueprints that dismantle zero-sum romantic paradigms and validate diverse forms of deep commitment.
10. Embracing a-spec joy means unlearning the societal pressure that frames being single as a failure, practicing solitude as a vital self-affirming tool, and celebrating unique ways of experiencing the world through self-acceptance and clear communication.