Imalah ’s Reviews > Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex > Status Update

bodies and secure with their place in the world. The sexually repressed woman is an object of pity and a reminder of the importance of progress. She is embarrassing. I believed all of the assumptions embedded in this archetype of the woman who doesn’t embrace sex: that she is prudish and prim, that she hasn’t done the proper work of liberating herself from shame, and that she is politically conservative too. None of this aligned with my goals. The words used to describe women who didn’t have sex (celibate, abstinent, pure, chaste) seemed either clinical or moralistic in a way I disdained. The words used to describe women who did (free, empowered, bold) I liked and wanted to apply to me. I absorbed the language of archetypes and aesthetic tropes—the repressed woman, the liberated woman—instead of thinking more critically about whether these stories were true and, if so, what they might imply about how we connect sex and politics and power."

I am not asexual but reading this as a religious person is interesting.

And frankly very relatable