Do Ace Stories Contribute to Compulsory Sexuality?

This post is a submission to the February Carnival of Aces, hosted by Writing for Life with the theme “Representation in Fiction”.  However, it was actually inspired by another post written for the same carnival: “Totally Baffled, in an Asexual Way (or, my review of ‘Let’s Talk About Love’)” by Perfect Number.  As such, it was written in a bit of a rush and isn’t my most well-written or well-thought-out piece.  I hope it still has value.

---

Once, during my time teaching English in Japan, I was doing some kind of lesson planning that involved talking about the cultural differences between Japan and Canada.  If you’ve ever been to Japan (or, possibly, even if you haven’t) you know that one of the important rules of Japanese society is “no shoes in the house”.  It gets drilled into you as soon as you arrive: when you enter someone’s home, the first thing you do is take your shoes off.  So, in my lesson planning, this seemed like a natural thing to mention.  Japanese people take their shoes off indoors, while Canadians…

Wait, what?  I don’t wear my shoes in the house!  Why on earth would I do that???  I’d get the floors all dirty!  The whole point of shoes is that you put them on when you want to go outside and take them off when you come indoors!  How is that unique to Japan???

Okay, I need to nuance that a bit.  It is true that the “no shoes in the house” rule is a lot laxer in Canada and depends a lot on a) the whims of the homeowner, b) what kind of flooring they have, and c) how dirty your shoes are.  In dry weather I have frequently walked over hardwood and tile flooring to get from the front door to the back door without bothering to take my shoes off.  Conversely, Japanese people tend to take their shoes off in public buildings (church, the doctor’s office, the laundromat) where Canadians wouldn’t think to.  So, “Canadians wear their shoes indoors” isn’t an entirely inaccurate sentence.  But it is a gross over-simplification of reality.

That’s the problem that can crop up any time you talk about the characteristics of a group.  Any statement about the people in one group implies a converse statement about the people outside of it.  And the asexual community is no exception.  Any statement about the asexual community – “Asexuals don’t experience sexual attraction”; “Asexuals don’t have sexual desire”; “Asexuals aren’t interested in sex” – indicates something about allosexuals: “Allosexuals do experience sexual attraction”; “Allosexuals do have sexual desire”; “Allosexuals are interested in sex”.  Those statements aren’t bad in themselves, but they can too easily turn hyperbolic: “Allosexuals are sexually attracted to everyone”; “Allosexuals want sex all the time”; “Allosexuals are obsessed with sex.”  In short, we can fall into the trap of characterising allosexuals as everything we are not.  I’m not saying that always happens.  But it is a danger we always have to be on guard against.

This is not a new observation, of course.  But it is something I was reminded about by Perfect Number’s recent review of Let’s Talk About Love by Claire Kann.  The gist of the review is that Perfect Number feels “baffled” by the main character’s attitude towards dating.  Alice is resistant to dating because she is asexual, and she believes anyone she dates will expect sex.  Perfect Number finds this strange, because Alice is only nineteen, and the idea that nineteen-year-olds in dating relationships would expect to have sex doesn’t fit with Perfect Number’s own personal experience.

Now, Perfect Number’s experience is only one person’s experience, and it would seem that Alice’s experience is very different.  But it is a reminder that people exist in different social situations with different expectations about sex, and when an author chooses to portray a character in a certain kind of social situation, that’s only one of the situations that could be portrayed.  Alice exists in a situation where sex between nineteen-year-olds is normal and expected.  But she could just as easily have existed in a different situation.

Personally, I didn’t have an issue with that element of Let’s Talk About Love.  What I remember of being nineteen is that sex between people my age was considered pretty normal.  Then again, a lot of that perception was based on things I heard or saw in the media, rather than my first-hand experience.  In real life, I’m pretty sure a lot of people my age were having sex, but I’m also pretty sure a lot of them weren’t.  So the amount of pressure Alice feels to have sex seems reasonable to me, but it’s also possible that that’s due to my faulty perception of reality.

What did bother me in the book was the way Alice’s allosexual friends are portrayed.  Her best friend is very sexual, which is not a problem in itself, but sometimes gets taken to ridiculous lengths, like when she ditches Alice at a house party to go have sex with her boyfriend.  Presumably, at some stranger’s house… in some stranger’s bed?  Ew.  And when they have a fight about it, the friend’s response is basically, “I can have sex with my boyfriend whenever and wherever I want!”  That’s a pretty entitled attitude, but, from what I remember, the book portrays it as normal and justified.

Why grant sex so much importance in an ace story?  In the comments to Perfect Number’s post, Siggy makes a point that I think is very important: “stories might choose to portray compulsory sexuality at its worst, in order to heighten conflict.”  What I take from that comment is that the way sexual norms are portrayed in this kind of story isn’t just a question of reflecting reality; it’s also about creating conflict and contrast with the ace protagonist.  And if your goal is to create a contrast with asexuality, then your portrayal of sexual norms can easily become exaggerated or simplistic.  That might make for a better story, but you shouldn’t necessarily trust it as reality any more than you’d trust a Japanese-written story where urban Canadians all walk around their apartments in hiking boots!

And here’s where this really becomes a problem: If you write stories where sex is portrayed as very important, you’re contributing to a culture of sex being very important.  If you write stories where most characters are having lots of sex, you’re reinforcing the idea that most people should be having lots of sex.  And if you have an asexual character who bucks these norms, then you risk implying that only asexuals can buck these norms and that allosexuals should be totally okay with them.

In other words, it’s all too easy to write an ace story that ends up reinforcing compulsory sexuality.

This relates strongly to a drum I’ve been banging for a while now: that the sexual norms that oppress aces also oppress allosexuals, and that we should therefore be trying to dismantle them for everyone.  It’s not enough to simply say, “Hey, we’re asexual; we play by a different set of rules!”; the rules themselves need to change.  But, until I read Siggy’s comment, I’d never thought about how that principle might apply to storytelling specifically.  Now that I have, I’m beginning to think about ace storytelling differently.  I’m realising that, as aces, when we tell stories (as Kann does) or critique them (as I do), we need to think about more than just whether the stories portray ace characters or characters with ace-like qualities.  We also need to think about the culture and society those characters exist in, and whether they are represented in a way that supports or challenges toxic sexual norms.

You could argue that portraying allosexuals as sex-crazed is justified because that’s how allosexuals are portrayed in other media, and that’s definitely a fair point.  Growing up with shows like Friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I got used to the idea that all teens and twenty-somethings are having lots of sex.  It doesn’t seem fair to criticise ace media just for replicating common tropes.  But when those tropes are erotonormative, it’s worth recognising them and at least asking, “As an ace writer, should I be using this trope, or do I want to challenge it?”

I’m not saying that Let’s Talk About Love is a bad book for presenting society and allosexuals the way it does.  I honestly believe its representation of those things does reflect reality – at least the reality some people experience.  And I’m certainly not saying all asexual media should be sanitised and sex free and ignore the very real sexual pressure that aces (and allos) experience.  But it’s important that not all ace fiction look like this.  It’s important to show different sides of society, some of which may be less sex-focused or have different sexual values.  It’s also important to show a diversity of allosexual characters, including ones for whom sex is of minimal interest.  To some extent, Let’s Talk About Love scores well on this by having an allosexual character who is ultimately fine being in a sexless relationship with an ace partner.

Bottom line: there are many different asexual experiences and even more different allosexual experiences.  Simply presenting society as un-ace-friendly and allosexuals as sex-crazed might be easy, but it risks reinforcing dangerous stereotypes and hurting both aces and allos.