Certain statistics that I’ve encountered on my travels around the internet will haunt me until the day I die. I’m talking the kind of miserable stats that make me want to curl up into a ball and cry for the rest of eternity. The kind that makes you second guess what you’ve been doing with your life up until that point, and force you to readjust your focus going forward just to account for this new information that will now live rent-free in your mind for the rest of time. In that category there is no stat that I feel more attached to than the fact that, according to the National LGBT Survey published in 2018 by the UK government, 89% of cisgender asexual people avoid being open about their sexual orientation to family and peers for fear of a negative response, the highest of any surveyed sexual orientation, and significantly higher than the 70% stat that includes all cisgender LGB+ people. Asexual people also report lower life satisfaction scores among both trans and cis respondents in comparison to people of other sexual orientations.
At first, I wasn’t sure how to process any of this. Being openly asexual had come so easy to me (I’m asexual… I probably should’ve led with that…) so the idea that someone - let alone an overwhelming majority of asexuals - might struggle with this was something foreign to me. It was the start of my journey into learning how my asexuality interacts with the world, the normative assumptions that I challenge with my very existence, and how we can make the world a better place for asexuals down the line.
Obviously, not everyone shares that ambition. I’m reminded of when, in July of this year, asexual model and activist Yasmin Benoit made a post on Twitter that read “asexual people deserve equal rights” in relation to asexual people being excluded from the Equality Act (2010) and conversion therapy bans. A great, empowering, thought-provoking message that nonetheless caused right wing social media commentators to collectively lose their minds. If anything, that response acts as definitive proof of how people are afraid of what they don’t understand. Sexual attraction is so deeply engrained in how people think about relationships that any deviation from that established norm is viewed as alien, even though further scrutiny would reveal that it’s not that crazy.
But one of the main questions raised by those commentators is how exactly asexual people are discriminated against in society. Now those people have their answer in the form of research by LGBT+ charity Stonewall. The new report, which is titled Ace In The UK and features a forward by Yasmin Benoit herself, is the best deconstruction of the impact of compulsory sexuality in the UK that we’ve ever had. The report goes into detail about different components of the asexual experience in the UK, from happiness and wellbeing to existing in the workplace to how they are viewed and understood by the general population.
That third point is a particularly interesting one. In 2019, a Sky Data poll revealed that around three quarters of the general population are not able to define asexuality, despite around half claiming to be able to. Every single discussion about asexuality should be prefaced by that statistic, and indeed the report states that “public engagement in asexuality remains relatively low.” The evidence suggests that the general population is both disinterested and ignorant with regards to asexuality and the issues around it, despite many choosing to throw their hats into the ring on the rare occasions that it comes up in the popular discourse. On all such occasions, these people end up embarrassing themselves.
That might be the most crucial takeaway from this report: the lack of education that leads to a lack of understanding. Focus group participants noted that the “lack of societal understanding of their asexuality had made it harder for them to come to terms with their own asexuality.” The issue compounds itself. People have oversimplified ideas about asexuality that have come about through the lack of education about the topic which leads to people spewing ignorance that further perpetuates certain misconceptions. All of this makes the coming out process unnecessarily difficult for ace folk. Some of the immediate follow up questions that ace people have to deal with upon coming out are simply dumbfounding. From questions about masturbation habits, porn, sex toys, to the ever classic “you just haven’t met the right person yet.”
The prevalence of these misconceptions is interesting for a number of reasons, but most significantly it reveals an unwillingness on the part of the general population to consider asexuality a legitimate sexual orientation. The extent of the conflation of sexual attraction and sexual action with regards to asexuality is something you rarely see in the conversation around other sexual orientations (and don’t even get me started on the conflation of sexual conservatism with social and political conservatism – it’s a whole other thing).
But the most distressing part of the report comes from where it considers how asexuality interacts with the work environment. 49% of asexual people are not open with work colleagues in comparison with 18% of all LGBTQIA+ people. Part of this gulf in openness is the natural biproduct of sexualised work environments. At best, informal sexualised banter among work colleagues can lead to asexual people feeling isolated. At worst, some describe moments when they were assaulted upon disclosing their asexuality. Once again, this is violence that asexual people are not legally protected against, and indeed, in this particular case, nothing was done about it. Inappropriate curiosity form work colleagues creating awkward situations might be understandable for some from time to time, but sexual assault certainly is not.
The report has many more parts to it (mental health, smear tests, reproductive health and more), but the messages are clear. Asexual people should be considered as part of conversion therapy bans. Asexual people should be protected as part of the Equality Act (2010). Healthcare professionals should be better trained to provide their services to asexual people. Asexuality should be included within LGBTQIA+ education in schools. We need to build a world where asexual people can live and thrive without having their orientation challenged.
None of these are unreasonable adjustments, and yet people like to pretend they are. I once again bring up the barrage of ridiculous criticism thrown upon Yasmin Benoit for simply bringing these issues up on social media. The general population are convinced that this is a non-issue in spite of the vast evidence to the contrary. Do I think those people are going to actively seek out this report and change their minds accordingly? No, of course not. Do I think that this report is going to have any immediate impact in how the general population views asexuality? Also no. But what I do know is that asexuality is finally being forced to the forefront of the queer conversation. If this report provides follow queer people a framework to consider how they might be complicit in allonormativity and compulsory sexuality, allowing them to interrogate their own position within those institutionally enforced normative expectations, I would say the report would have done its job. It’s up to us to make that change. I reckon we can do it.
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