What does it mean for a work of fiction to be ‘asexual’?

First, a primer on what asexual means in contemporary queer usage: An asexual person does not experience sexual attraction. Asexual describes an orientation, in the same word family as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual.

Asexuality does not describe behaviour.

Asexual does not mean: celibate, without sexuality, without love (though it may also mean some of these things to some people).

One stand-out show from contemporary pop culture always gets a mention whenever asexuality in media comes up: You guessed it! Good old Todd from Bojack Horseman.

We’re slowly getting a few more examples — I appreciate Drea’s storyline from Josh Thomas’s Everything’s Gonna Be Okay. As an Autistic creator, Josh Thomas understood that asexuality is well-repped in the Autistic community, so it’s only natural a story like this would include it.

Bojack Horseman and Everything’s Gonna Be Okay are both examples of on-the-page (well, on-the-screen) asexual representation. Asexual characters discover they are asexual. These stories educate the audience and spread awareness and acceptance.

Inevitably, such stories tend towards the pedagogical. The pedagogical (teaching) aspects of story sacrifices the excitement and interest of narrative drive, slowing down the plot. ‘Explainer scenes’ take away from the main business of popular fiction— entertainment.

I can well imagine, creators of any mainstream show don’t want to make this sacrifice. Yet any TV show or film featuring asexuality is still obliged to describe and define the term somehow. Asexuality remains the invisible orientation, though I would argue asexuality is now better described as the illegible orientation — many people have heard the word but still get the definition wrong.

For most of my Gen X life there has been zero (0) on-the-page representation of People Like Me (aspec, agender), so I’ve gotten pretty adept at reading asexual allegory into things that I like, otherwise known as head-canoning.

Every time I experience aphobia I’m going to headcanon another beloved character as aspec

— feverdreamsandlucidnightmares

A TAXONOMY OF ASEXUAL STORIES

Let’s divide Asexual stories into categories:

1. On-the-page rep — Bojack Horseman, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay
2. Off-the-page rep — One or more characters are clearly aspec but neither the character — nor the author of the work — seem to know this, perhaps because the media was made last century or earlier e.g. the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, SpongeBob SquarePants or the original Sherlock Holmes, until that muppet Steve Moffat got a hold of the franchise and declared that asexuality is too boring to be shown in a story.
3. Asexual Allegory — A story speaks to aspec experience. Chances are, there are zero aspec characters on the page — though ideally there would be — but the themes and ideology of the story line up with broadly shared asexual (or a-spectrum) experiences.

BROADLY SHARED ASEXUAL EXPERIENCES

1. A main character feels like the outsider in any social situation
2. A character learns to stop trying to be someone else and embrace their true self
3. Any story which interrogates chrononormativity: the expectation that certain things happen to people at certain times in their lives e.g. partnering up, having sex, settling down…
4. Finding satisfaction and pleasure outside romantic and sexual relationships — most commonly, in stories, this means finding a tight network of friends. (‘Found family’ narratives.) But the ‘found joy’ could be pleasure in anything at all — hobbies, career-related, social activism, whatever.

As you might deduce at this point, allegorically asexual stories have a lot in common with allegorically Autistic stories. (I write here about overlaps between the two communities.)

In fact, there is nothing specifically asexual coded about numbers 1 and 2 on that list. Pretty much every book I devoured as a kid featured a main character who felt like an outsider. Feeling like an outsider and learning who you are are pretty universal human experiences.

I haven’t done a peer reviewed study on this, but a huge swathe (perhaps most?) popular narratives feature a main character who learns to become more like their true selves (whatever ‘true self’ means) by the end of the story. I’m talking about specifically Western stories. Cultures most heavily influenced by USA culture tend to be big on Freedom. (I include my own cultures in this — Aotearoa-New Zealand and Australia.) Other cultures are less concerned about personal freedom than we are, with more focus on finding one’s place within a community.

In Western stories, when a main character fails to achieve this major life goal, that’s when we call the story a tragedy. Most stories are not tragedies. Most characters do find freedom of some kind — namely, freedom to be oneself.

However, for queer (and also neurodivergent) characters and audiences, ‘finding oneself’ means something a little different. Whereas The Common Man (TM) goes from childhood to adulthood to maturity in a fairly expected progression (from self-centred to finding place in community, from scared to brave and so on), queer and Autistic audiences must first, very commonly, learn to unmask.

This is a whole extra hurdle, and finding one’s true self tends to become the main part of an Unmasking Story. Any exploration of (sexual or neurotype) unmasking simply requires more time on the page. The character arc — the range of character change — is simply bigger. The starting point is different.

Characters who go through big character arcs make for excellent, character driven stories. Ergo, there is literally no good storytelling reason to avoid stories specifically about asexual people.

WHAT ASEXUAL STORIES ARE NOT

Asexuality describes sexual orientation, not behaviour. But since sexual orientation is interior, and sexual behaviour is exterior to character, it’s easy (and slapdash) for writers to convey — or hint at — asexuality by giving every character a sexual storyline except one, who is thereby asexual coded even if this is not intended by the creators.

Asexual viewers vary widely on how much onscreen sex is craved, accepted or rejected. Within the aspec community exists everyone from the kinkiest of sex workers to the sex repulsed with zero libido and zero interest in any sex related matter. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

WHY STORIES ABOUT SEXUALITY CAN BE ESPECIALLY APPRECIATED BY SOME ASPECS

Many asexuals enjoy seeing sex and/or relationships depicted in fiction— as do most allosexuals — but perhaps our enjoyment is of a different quality. When you don’t experience sexual attraction, it can be gratifying to watch it happen for fictional characters. Some aspecs are able to feel sexual attraction when it happens between fictional characters (cf. aegosexuality). In which case, fictional relationships, including shipping, become especially important for aspecs.

The only times I have felt the sensation of sexual attraction has happened when getting deep into a narrative between fictional characters. I have never felt sexually attracted to a fictional character per se, but can somehow hook into the feeling happening between them.

In line with what allosexuals say about how their normative sexual attraction works: I’m not in full control of this process. I can’t decide that I’d like to feel vicarious sexual attraction (because it does feel nice) and then go seek out something that’ll do that for me. I have to be fully invested in the narrative and the characters, with full access to their interiority. This requires excellent writing. It also requires authors who really know people. Unless writers know how people work, they’ll never fully understand how their own fictional characters work.

I’m glad to have this experience, because I might otherwise find the experience of sexual attraction quite baffling, even as it happens to others all around me. But because fiction exists, I do happen to know what allosexuals are talking about when you describe sexual attraction as a powerful and very clear bodily experience.

Ironically, perhaps, my ability to feel sexual attraction vicariously cements my own identity as an asexual person. Having felt it via immersion in fiction, I can say for 100% sure I’ve never felt that particular intensity in everyday life. (I hesitate before using the phrase ‘real life’, because as I’m trying to explain, the experience of reading good fiction is a very real experience in its own right.)

Point being: Sexuality in fiction can be great for asexuals (at least, the ones who work like me).

Back to my original point: Absence of sex/romance in any given work of media is not what deems a work ‘asexual’.

I’m noticing a worrisome new trend as knowledge about asexuality as a marginalised orientation in need of protection gains wider traction. Our identities are starting to get co-opted by conservative types who, rather than seek to liberate everyone, seek to control and dominate other people and our bodily autonomy. Keep your eyes peeled for conservative commentators who would seek to remove all sexual content from mainstream entertainment. Some of those people are starting to say things like, “Think of the poor asexuals!” echoing how they have always said, “Won’t somebody think of the children!” Just one generation ago they were crying, “Won’t somebody think of the women-and-children!”

Sex repulsed asexual adults do exist, and aspec adults can rely on censor ratings to avoid sex on screen, same as any other adult. Plenty of allosexuals prefer non-explicit sex scenes as well — sex repulsion is not a specifically asexual thing, and I’m actually starting to think that a higher percentage of allosexuals are sex repulsed, in various repressive ways. A disconcerting swathe of (conservative) allosexuals seem mighty repulsed by sex, especially when other groups of people enjoy different types of sex from how they, personally enjoy it.

TAKEAWAY POINTS

1. Asexual adults are adults
2. Asexuals aren’t the only sex repulsed members of a mainstream audience, and may not even be disproportionately repulsed by seeing sex on screen.
3. Asexuality describes orientation, not behaviour.
4. The existence of asexuals in any audience should have absolutely no bearing on creative decisions around how human sexuality is conveyed in a story.
5. Asexuals are fairly rare, but we are at least as common as people with red hair. Think of all the stories you know featuring characters or actors with red hair. Now think of the stories you know featuring asexuals.
6. Asexuality is a something, not a nothing. We deserve to see ourselves on screen. Also, the character arcs experienced by asexuals are permutations of universal human challenges. Visibility activism aside, there is no good creative reason for ignoring our existence in works of fiction.
7. Asexuality may be especially difficult to convey on screen, especially since mainstream viewers are unlikely to recognise it when they see it, without explicit mention and pedagogical scenes. This means creators simply have to be better at what they do. It is indeed more difficult to convey experiences of humanity without relying on stereotypes and existing archetypes.
8. Although on-the-page asexuals are rare, asexual people have always existed, and creators have always included us in a large cast, most often as minor, illegible, laughable, repressed or pitiable characters. It’s likely most of those creators didn’t really understand their fictional asexual creations—who were no doubt influenced by amalgamations of marginalised people from authors’ day-to-day lives.
9. Even today, whenever asexuals are included and named in a work of art by ‘progressive’, ‘sex positive’ creators, we tend to get a ‘diversity cameo’, but no developed storyline.
10. The aspec community is thereby left to read works of art allegorically if we’re to relate to fictional characters in the way mainstream sexualities get to relate to fictional characters.

Why Aren’t There More Books About Asexuals? at Electric Literature

Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.