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

Navigating parenthood while asexual is rarely about the biological capacity to have children—it is about confronting the heavy, compulsory narrative that having children must be the natural, romantic culmination of a sexual marriage. Angela Chen explores how compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity create specific social, relational, and structural obstacles for asexual people who want to raise children.

Chen is explaining that sex is fun, it achieves orgasm and it doesn’t have to be romantic for all the aromantics out there but also that asexuals can experience this fun side and orgasm without experiencing the validation tropes behind compulsive sexuality.

In Ace, Angela Chen explores how this concept becomes a double-edged sword—offering a sense of clarity for some, while acting as a rigid, exclusionary tool of self-gatekeeping and community hierarchy for others.

The term "Gold Star Asexual" borrows from older queer terminology (like "gold star lesbian") to describe an asexual person who has never had sex, never experienced sexual attraction, and has no history of sexual abuse or trauma.
They will not be autistic or neurodiverse whatsoever. Double standards?

Sex as Validation, Not Mechanics: An incel doesn't just want the physical act of sex; he wants the status and biological validation of being freely chosen by a desirable woman. Paying a sex worker removes the element of "genuine attraction," which fails to prove his status as a "real man."

In incel ecosystems, refusal to use sex workers—and obsession with archetypes like "Stacys/Beckys"—exposes the movement’s underlying goal: it was never about physical sex, but about compulsory social validation. Incel forums routinely catalogue perceived "gender crimes" committed by these archetypes—framing women’s basic romantic autonomy, choices, or boundaries as deliberate acts of warfare against men.

Sexual attraction is not the only kind of attraction. 1.) Aesthetic Attraction: The appreciation of someone’s appearance or visual presence, completely detached from any desire to touch or be sexual with them. (Like admiring a striking painting or a beautiful landscape.)
Demisexual requires intimate connection to have an attraction. Celibacy is not Asexuality.

Allosexual attraction can hit instantaneously across a crowded room, or flare up toward a celebrity, a stranger, or someone you actively dislike. It is an instinctual, directed pull ("I want to be sexual with that specific human"). An asexual person simply doesn't experience that directional pull. An undirected sex drive does not mean not horny. Imagine a straight man in a room full of gay men.

Angela Chen herself encounters: the claim that aces are overthinking, over-analyzing, or "intellectualizing" something that should just be natural, visceral, and spontaneous. However, Ace flips this premise on its head. Chen argues that aces aren't over-intellectualizing sex; rather, allosexual society under-thinks sex, treating its own culturally learned scripts as if they were simple, unmediated instinct.

One of the most persistent myths about asexuality is that lacking sexual attraction equates to being cold, or incapable of interpersonal drama. In reality, jealousy, attachment, and heartbreak exist independently of sexual attraction. Chen points out that equating asexuality with an inability to feel messy human emotions is another byproduct of a society that insists sex is the only key to genuine human warmth.