What Horniness Looks Like for Asexual People

Illustration: Hana Chatani

“It can be a very asexual thing to be horny,” said model/activist/writer Yasmin Benoit during a recent Zoom with Jezebel. “There’s no contradiction there.”

But before we get into what horniness can look like to asexuals—as it is, after all, Horny Week on Jezebel—we ought to be familiar with asexuality and its vast community (an estimated 1 percent of adults identify as asexual). Those who aren’t part of the community—allosexuals, or people who do experience sexual attraction—might believe that asexual folks lack sexuality and therefore live lives devoid of sex. But though there are asexuals (aces) who don’t have sex or a libido to speak of, the term is much broader than that. Most simply put, “asexuality” tends to refer to “a lack of sexual attraction towards anyone, regardless of their gender,” Benoit said.

“And when I say ‘sexual attraction,’ I mean that intrinsic sexual desire towards other people, the desire to involve other people in your sexuality, which then has nothing to do with what sexuality I have for myself as an individual,” she added. Asexuality does not necessarily bespeak a lack of sexual bodily urges—they just aren’t pointed at other people.

In her brilliant 2020 book Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, Angela Chen breaks down said distinction like this:

Sexual attraction, then, is horniness toward or caused by a specific person. It is the desire to be sexual with that partner—libido with a target. To use a food metaphor: a person can feel physiological hunger, which would be like sex drive, without craving a specific dish, which would be more like sexual attraction.

Food metaphors run rampant in the raft of recent books on the topic of asexuality, a long misunderstood and marginalized orientation, which has found community via the internet. In Eris Young’s Ace Voices, from 2022, they write:

Sexual attraction is like wanting pizza, and in a world where almost everybody wants pizza (each one a different kind of pizza, but still pizza) I do not have any desire to eat pizza. This doesn’t mean I cannot eat pizza, or that if I try it I wouldn’t like it, but still I never experience the desire to eat pizza.

And then later, a source in Ace Voices called VC shares:

Think of my ideal partnership as a cake (very ace of me haha) and that my recipe for the cake is different from the traditional cake recipe. In my recipe, sex is an ingredient that is briefly mentioned as an optional ingredient, maybe a topping. I don’t really care for it but maybe be curious to try adding it to my cake at some point.

My outside observations indicate that articulation is prized amongst aces, and those on the asexuality spectrum, or a-spec, use a lexicon that could fill a pocket dictionary. Some aces also identify as aromantic, or aro. There are aceflux people (people who are somewhere between allo and ace, perhaps depending on the situation), demisexuals (people who don’t experience sexual attraction in the absence of an emotional bond), and lithosexuals (people who might experience sexual attraction but don’t want it reciprocated). There are sex-favorable asexuals, sex-neutral asexuals, and sex-repulsed asexuals. The designations go on and on.

The vastness of this argot is indicative of nothing less than an expansion of the infinite possibilities within the benign variation of human sexuality. As Sherronda J. Brown writes in 2022’s Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture: “Asexual consciousness recognizes that none of the things we ‘know’ to be true about sex are immovable, and they are always influenced by societal expectations, permissions, or other environmental factors.” This is what is so revelatory about familiarizing oneself with the asexual community, even if one is firmly allo: The precision with which ace people discuss themselves and each other is a model for the intimate knowing of oneself that is possible when one has the proper linguistic tools and opportunity for introspection.

This is so even when the definition of asexuality is itself sort of loose.

“I knew that I had to always be guided by the data, as it were—I had to be guided by the real experiences of the people I spoke to,” Young, who interviewed dozens of ace-identified people for their book, told Jezebel. “So any time that someone shared an experience with me that didn’t match up with this idea of a lack of sexual attraction, any time I encountered someone who defined their asexuality differently, it really made me sit up and pay attention and think about why it is that lack of sexual attraction is our received definition.”

As they write in their book: “There are as many ways to describe and define asexuality as there are asexual people, and yet each of these experiences is, by definition, still an asexual one.”

Chen’s idea of sexual attraction as “horniness toward or caused by a specific person” suggests not that asexual people are never horny, but that ace horniness might look somewhat different from how an allo person experiences it.

“For me, horny often just feels like an imposition,” Cody Daigle-Orians, author of the upcoming I Am Ace, told Jezebel. (His book will also feature a pizza metaphor for sexual attraction.) “I don’t necessarily connect [with] a lot of the kind of excitement around horniness that I know some of my fellow allo peers feel, where horniness is an invitation to an exciting experience of pleasure or pursuit.” To him, horniness is a physical feeling that functions more like a prompt for next steps. “Is that either just masturbating, and then that’s done and I can go back to doing what I’m doing? Or is that making a decision to initiate sex in some part of my life because I’m polyamorous and I have multiple partners?”

Daigle-Orians characterized himself as “primarily a sex-neutral and sometimes sex-favorable person,” and added that sex is “a thing I decide to do among a list of other things I could be doing with my time, instead of like, a drive.” In his book, which he said was written with a YA audience in mind to convey certain basics (and as a first stop before reading the more theoretical and intricate books by Chen and Brown), Daigle-Orians explains how sexual attraction is not the only reason to pursue sex:

There are lots of reasons beyond sexual attraction that a person would engage in sexual behavior. People have sex to experience closeness with their partners. They have sex to procreate and raise children. They have sex to express other attractions they may feel for a partner. They have sex simply because it feels good, and they enjoy the physical sensations.

Sexual attraction is, naturally, not the only reason to pursue masturbation either, when one is horny and asexual. Benoit, who wrote in an essay for Refinery29 that she masturbates “all the time” and described the surprise she receives from allos who have a hard time conceiving asexual masturbation, said sex with herself as “a method of killing time.”

“You know, it’s just something fun to do,” she said. “I know some asexual people articulate it as more of an inconvenience—like it’s something that they have to do because their body wants to do it. It’s like, now my mind wants to do it and my body plays along. Or sometimes my body wants do it and then my mind plays along. I don’t know if it’s chicken or the egg, but either way, I’m down.”

“I think it’s liberating,” she said of masturbating while ace. “I realized that for other people it’s actually quite compulsory to have a fantasy or to have an experience or something to draw off—masturbation and that kind of thing is specifically tied to somebody else. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s odd. You can’t just do it yourself?’”

Young recalled asking one of their ace subjects, “What’s something that a sexual partner does, or can do, to make you feel safe and supported during sex?” The response, as printed in Ace Voices: “Turn off the lights and try not to interrupt my time with my vibrator by touching me…or speaking…or being in the room with me?”

“So much of how we think of being horny, or at least the idea that I have of it from media, is sort of: ‘I want to get some action.’ Like, ‘I can’t sit still,’” said Young. “It’s definitely possible to have that feeling without a specific object in mind.” Young said “loads” of their subjects described regular masturbation. “I encountered a lot of people who kind of seem to have that attitude where it’s like, ‘It’s something that my body wants and I’m going to give it to my body because I love myself,’” they said.

The surprise Benoit describes coming from other people regarding her masturbation is just one of the ways societal assumptions manifest as othering. Another comes from stereotypes about Black people’s hypersexuality, which have been used for hundreds of years in this country to justify oppression (including in lynchings, which were often spurred by miscegenation fears). As Brown writes in Refusing Compulsory Sexuality:

Entire sexual lives are imposed on us and written onto our bodies without our consent, and both utilizations of sex are driven by the same anti-Black sexual stereotypes. These stereotypes have always been used as justification for the incremental genocide of Black people—for terrorizing Black people and communities; for trafficking, enslaving, torturing, and exploiting Black people; for creating policy and law that specifically targets Black people and Black families. These things are always at work in our sexual lives and in how others engage us sexually. Blackness negates the need for consent in the social imagination since we are constructed as always consenting—either passively or enthusiastically—to the sexualization imposed onto us.

Part of what Refusing Compulsory Sexuality does so effectively is refute said social pressure and argue why asexuality is not at odds with Blackness. “Blackness has always intersected with my asexuality,” said Benoit. “It’s impacted every single stage of it. It’s the reason I wasn’t able to come out for 10 years—not for lack of trying, but because nobody believed me.”

Daigle-Orians recalled coming out as gay at 18, which brought with it its own specific expectations. “I was moving through a community where sex was really, really important not just for identity, but also your sense of self and the way that you build connections with people,” he said. “And I felt like I was terrible at it. I was like a broken gay.” He described coming out as asexual in his early 40s as “the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“Now that I understand my relationship to sex in a more complete way, when I am going to have sex with someone, I’m showing up in a better way than I did before,” he said. “There’s insecurity that doesn’t exist all the time anymore. There’s shame that doesn’t show up that used to show up all the time.”

He continued, “It’s removed a lot of the negative self-talk and negative self-perception that I held for a really long time.” Imagine that: Coming out as asexual actually improving someone’s sex life.