What Do Asexuals Celebrate When They Celebrate Pride?
By celebrating Pride, the asexual community celebrates queer experience and identification outside of the sexual culture.
By Hanxue Jiang
By celebrating Pride, the asexual community celebrates queer experience and identification outside of the sexual culture. They acknowledge who they are and the diverse possibilities for leading their social and individual life.
Pride celebrates the culture and history of queer communities, and affirms queer individuals’ rights and freedom to choose who they love and how they love. But the mainstream image and recognition of Pride tend to place “sexuality” at the center of the celebration. This risks limiting the understanding of “queer” identity to just groups with non-heterosexual sexualities, but those with non-traditional preferences and choices in non-sexual aspects, like the asexual community.
Ace individuals celebrate Pride not to celebrate the ways they are feeling sexual attraction, but exactly how they are not feeling it. They celebrate numerous possibilities and aspects of being “queer” beyond sexual culture. Here are a few examples of the things the Ace community is celebrating in Pride:
1. The Lack of Sexual Attraction as Natural Experience
The myth of asexuality often portrays asexual individuals as cold, repressed or diseased. By affirming and making visible one’s self-identification as an asexual, one acknowledges this experience as a natural one. They participate in Pride to show that feeling little to no sexual attraction is a valid and genuine experience, just as the ways allosexuals feel asexual attraction. Celebrating the asexual experience embraces humanity’s natural bodily experience and reactions, and not something deviant or that needs to be “cured.” It also further affirms the queer slogan “sexuality is a spectrum,” for it sheds light on the far end of the spectrum – the end with no sexual attraction at all.
2. New Possibilities of Intimate Relationships
Many asexual individuals explore other ways to structure their lives and form meaningful bonds with others. Pride holds a place to celebrate these relations that are not based on sexual attraction or marriage. The Ace group celebrates and raises awareness of queer-platonic relationships, chosen families and other more open-ended units; they challenge the norm of the couple-based life. Asexual individuals who prefer not to enter, or do not feel any need for, romantic/intimate relationships also celebrate their choices of life and their own vision of happiness.
3 . The Rejection of Sex as a Priority of Life
Celebration of Asexuality recognizes the fact that there are many other things that one would value in a happy, fulfilled life other than sex. Friendship, hobby, dream, vocation and solidarity could all be important elements in one’s social and individual life. Celebrating Ace identity means celebrating not just how “sexuality” guides one to love, but also how it guides one to become who they truly are and to lead their life. It acknowledges that not only sex and sexual instincts are liberating and queer, but that other aspirations and attractions in life are also fundamental and empowering as well.
4. The Journey of Self-Discovery
To celebrate the existence of asexual identity and experience is to honor every asexual-identifying individual’s navigation of their sexual identity. It is typically even harder for asexual individuals to explore and realize their “sexuality” when the mainstream culture is still dominantly allosexual and promotes sex-based relations. The celebration of asexuality acknowledges this oftentimes difficult and meandering path, and the courage of exploring who one really is despite the societal stereotypes of asexuality.
5. The Inclusivity of the Asexual Community and Identity
Asexuality is an umbrella term. It includes various sub-groups, such as greysexuals, demisexuals, recipsexuals, fraysexuals, placiosexuals, and so much more. These labels help ace individuals better understand who they are and how they experience “the lack of sexual attraction”, and allow them to better communicate their self-identity when needed. The celebration of all “types” of asexuality celebrates the respect of all kinds of unique individual experiences and the inclusivity and support of the Ace community.
The Asexual community takes pride in their identity and experience for their bravery to explore who they really are, how they experience their bodies, as well as how they want to relate to others and what to pursue in their lives. They celebrate all kinds of queer imaginations and possibilities for social/intimate relationships and lifestyles that are often neglected in Pride or in the LGBTQIA+ image in general. Show your pride and allyship to the ace community this June as we celebrate the many ways people thrive beyond conventional expectations of sex, romance, and relationships.
