Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex / Angela Chen / 2020
I picked up this book because it's a bestseller at @undertheumbrellabookstore and I'm curious what "outsider" insights Chen might have about contemporary Western sexuality. The most useful aspects of this book for me personally were the histories of asexual organizing, the delightfully fuzzy inquiry into the differences between romantic love and friendship love, the nuanced conversation of the pressures and totalizing narratives of the sex positive movement and the needed contributions of sex negative thought, including its discussion of the grey areas of consent.
That said, much of the rest, felt too 101 for me. A solid chunk of the personal narratives felt absurdly reactionary to cisheteronormativity, giving the impressions that some of the individuals built the majority of their lives around reacting against stereotypes as their primary personality. This, in turn, flattened who they were as complex people and made them not less empathetic, but definitely more embarrassing as people. It gave the impression that people were building their personalities against whatever the social order wanted for them rather than having desires and imaginations emerge organically.
Occasionally, Chen lost credibility for me by sounding like an alien. Oftentimes, trans people have the most insightful takes on gender, and perhaps I was silly for assuming that an Ace intellectual might have the most insightful takes on sexuality. One standout example is when Chen assumed everyone had the same negative reaction to the Naked Attraction show as utterly unsexy. She comes across as unaware of how aroused most allosexual men are by visual stimuli. Understanding masculinity seems to be a real shortcoming of this book as a whole. Another standout example is the amount of time Chen spent comparing and contrasting Ace men to incels. I understand many people may assume Ace men might be incels, but one paragraph or even maybe one line about Ace men not being incels would've sufficed. The amount of time spent on the disentangling felt hurtful and unnecessary. The juxtaposition itself is insulting. I'm also stunned and frustrated that the book didn't bother really unpacking the stigma against virgins because even if it's not a huge conversation in Ace circles, it's deeply relevant to conversations about compulsory sexuality. Though interesting and informative at times, I felt like I would've been better served by a book written by a more insightful author. 2.5/5