CW: rape, sexual assault/SA and abuse are spoken about throughout this whole essay.
Intro
On lesbian twitter, a stud came forward about their experience of being domestically abused by a femme and this femme was a popular greysexual lesbian.
I don’t know any of the users involved on a personal level, but I recognised the greysexual lesbian femme because they were one of the first and most visible ace lesbians I saw in that online lesbian community.
I felt obvious disgust and discomfort, but also a weird level of disappointment, a kind of ‘how can someone like me do something like this?’ And then I remember other small, but ‘off’ feeling moments of going ‘oh’ when realising a person causing harm is on the asexual spectrum.
I think of another time seeing a viral post defending and glorifying rape and incest in fiction and then seeing the user was aroace.
I think of being told that Black allosexuals were breeders and disgusting by white asexuals of tumblr.
And then I don’t go ‘oh’, but instead ‘of course’.
Asexuals are consistently assumed and actively told our sexuality makes us inherently passive in terms of sex, so therefore, passive in terms of morality too. An ‘unproblematic’ sexuality incapable of doing anything because to be asexual is to do nothing and do no one.
I’ve already addressed under the ‘Do Nothing’ concept through Asexuals Do Nothing (And Neither Do Aromantics) in my essay Aces Are White, Aros Are Green, But Spades Are Black (2025):
‘When JK Rowling and other bigots attack asexuality, the common phrase is invoked again to ‘defend’ us. How could this happen? Asexuals do nothing! Aromantics do nothing isn’t as commonly said, but the sentiment still exists. How can aromantics cause harm when they don’t date? When they don’t fall in love? Aromantics have no romantic attraction so why would bigots like Julie Bindel come after them? Aromantics do nothing! ‘Do nothing’ is aspecness-as-repairable in black and white, or, purple and green. ‘Do nothing’ is code for innocence, purity and some cases, brokenness. This so called ‘defence’ is really an admission of non aspec people and how they view the white asexual and white aromantic; white people who ‘do nothing’, white people who are innocent. It’s also an admission of how they view non aspec people with greater visibility who are more commonly attacked. The idea that asexuals do nothing, so JKR shouldn’t attack us, is a confession that they believe that trans people must have done ‘something’ to deserve JKR’s harassment, vitriol and dehumanisation. They think anti-trans rhetoric is understandable and therefore, deserved, but anti-asexual rhetoric is confusing and therefore, undeserved. The idea asexuals do nothing, so conservative homophobes shouldn’t attack us is a confession that they believe that non asexual gay, lesbian, bisexual and pansexual people must have done ‘something’ too. As addressed, this sympathy doesn’t and never extends to the Black asexual or the Black aromantic either. Yasmin Benoit is never told she’s doing nothing, she’s always accused of doing something.’
The concept that asexuals ‘do nothing’ is a tactic called asexuality-as-ideal, developed by Ianna Hawkins Owen in On the Racialization of Asexuality (2014) to describe asexuality being associated with moral vigor for the maintenance of whiteness, focusing on good acts and good work to serve capitalist society instead of being distracted by pleasures such as romance and sex. Of course, this is only a temporary measure before having said romance and sex for said white capitalist society inevitably in the future. The concept that sexual activity, specifically activity that’s premarital, non procreative, same gender or polyamorous, equates to low moral character is already deeply reactionary, but it gets worse with how asexuality in reverse is used as a way of establishing high moral character. The origins of this are puritan and white supremacist and only serving a specific niche of privileged asexuals, who can take part in the cishet nuclear family with small accommodations for their lack of sexual attraction or the asexuals who live without any type of ‘sinful’ pleasures on their own.
Queer discourse brushes off The Asexual as a non-issue and non-factor for every issue because ‘asexuals don’t even do anything’. But what happens when The Asexual does do something and what happens when another asexual is the victim or survivor of that something?
The Erasure of the Asexual Victim/Survivor
With the absence of sex and/or sexual attraction, The Asexual isn’t only erased as a potential perpetrator but also as a potential victim.
Within asexual spaces, to be a sexual assault victim/survivor whilst asexual is stigmatised. Whilst asexuality still continues to be falsely labelled as sexual trauma in itself and not a real sexual orientation, it’s fully possible to have sexual trauma from sexual violence and be on the asexual spectrum as two distinct sexual responses. Heterosexual SA victims are still heterosexual, lesbian SA victims are still lesbian, bisexual SA victims are still bisexual and so on, so asexual SA victims are still asexual people.
Within romantic and sexual relationships, anti-victim/survivor rhetoric is commonly used toward asexuals, specifically alloaces (alloromantic asexuals). Alloaces are often blamed for being raped and/or domestically abused by allosexuals or non asexuals, both in and outside the asexual community. The victim blaming is done in the style of a moral lesson on what happens when an asexual person enters a unit where they believe sex is compulsory and when The Asexual fails to deliver on the sexual quota.
The erasure of asexual victims/survivors continues within friendships and QPRs. The concept that QPRs and friendships are ‘purer’, ‘cleaner’ or ‘unproblematic’ compared to the toxicity of relationships that are romantic, sexual or both, is rooted in puritanism.
In Rotten Zucchinis (2014), the anonymous Omnes et Nihil wrote a zine about the abuse that takes place in QPRs, friendships, zucchinis (a friendship that aims to mimic or have similarities to romantic relationships, unlike QPRs that exist outside of traditional romance and friendship) and other forms of non-normative relationships that asexuals take part in. The zine is a compilation of the author’s experience and some belonging to other asexual individuals. It’s a harrowing series of accounts of victims/survivors on the asexual spectrum and the rapes, physical abuses, psychological abuses and verbal abuses they faced from non-asexual partners. Omnes et Nihil writes plainly:
‘Reading others’ stories, one thing that resonated with me was how people acted like just wanting someone to do a nonnormative relationship was already “asking too much”. It’s as though our QP partners were already assumed to be going “above and beyond” for us, by gracing us with their participation in these “ridiculous” relationships. That amatonormative social framework gave our abusive QP partners the moral high ground, no matter how they treated us, and positioned us like we were lucky they’d stoop to put up with us or these relationships in the first place. And that made it especially hard for us to avoid blaming ourselves and hard to believe our partners should be blamed. (That’s not unique to QP violence, but I think that how it functioned in our experiences via amatonormativity is.)’
With the absence of sex and romance, stigma of asexuality and stigma of non-normative relationships, there was a plain where abuse could thrive in these relationships. The mindset of the abusers of these asexual people were clear - there could be no abusive relationship if their relationship wasn’t ‘real’ to begin with and if the victim has no ‘real’ sexuality to be abused.
I know first-hand what it’s like to face abuse that’s not sexual or romantic. It doesn’t have a softer sting.
In one account called “Topography of a Relationship” is the testimony of an aromantic asexual woman who was abused by another asexual in a QPR. The account follows the usual internalised victim blaming many victims/survivors face, but one line I found the most chilling:
‘The map felt as if it had been ripped to pieces before my eyes, but those guilt-driven hugs ( and the reasons for the guilt ) burned my eyesight. She didn’t know what she was doing any more than I did; she didn’t mean to make me think she’d destroyed the map. It wasn’t destroyed – I just needed to look at it in a better light.’
The asexual perpetrator genuinely believed their asexuality and existence in a non-romantic, non-sexual relationship justified her abuse. And in an even more devastating way, the victim blames the asexuality of their own, writing:
‘If the planets had aligned to make me a romantic, sexual person who had started exploring their sexuality from a younger age, maybe it would have been different’
Asexuals who were abused in QPRs don’t get support within the community outside of victim/survivor specific spaces, which is a symptom of the wider problem in how platonic abuse is often normalised and unaddressed and in turn why the aspec community overall, not just asexual, struggles to acknowledge it. It could be argued that the concept of friendship having less value than romance adds to why platonic abuse is normalised in the sense that a romantic partner is special, so therefore that’s what makes domestic abuse wrong, versus a friend who doesn’t hold that close of a connection to enact abuse, which in itself is a form of abuse apologia. I won’t get the answer for this right now, but I can say that the glorification of friendship and QPRs based on sexlessness and lovelessness as forms of puritanism has been devastating for platonic abuse victim/survivors within the asexual community, by perpetrating the false idea that friendship is inherently pure and that asexuals are immune to enacting harm by virtue of being ace.
Omnes et Nihil summarises the internal struggle that comes with acknowledging the harm of The Asexual and the clash with asexual recognition, saying:
‘But zucchinis aren’t immune to violence and QP relationships can be abusive or exploitative ( just like every other kind of relationship ). But if we pause long enough to admit this, there’s a risk of undermining our whole struggle for diverse non-normative relationships to be accepted. I know that’s kept me quiet about a lot of things. But it shouldn’t have to be that way.’
Through the fear of self-reflection and accountability, the asexual community’s silence has made space for asexual victims/survivors to be not only erased, but isolated. This isolation lead to the creation of Asexual Survivors by Queenie in 2013, the first network specifically for asexual victim/survivors of rape, SA and abuse. The struggle for asexual recognition and acknowledging of asexual victims shouldn’t be an either/or. For true asexual liberation, the community must be pro-victim/survivor and support victims/survivors in a society that glorifies and justifies rape, abuse and sexual violence, to acknowledge our existence and fight for it will only ever push the community forward, even if that push is scary and uncomfortable.
The Hypothetically Real Asexual Abuser
Many times when conservatives take part in groomer panic towards asexuals, the common defences range from ‘But they’re asexual!’ to ‘How can they be a groomer when they have no sexual attraction?’ to ‘Why would they groom children if they’re ace?’ to ‘An asexual groomer? How does that work?’. Whilst these statements from asexuals and allosexuals alike are in good faith, they all feed into rape culture by reducing pedophilia, rape and sexual assault down to ‘uncontrollable’ sexual desire and the sexual desirability of the victim/survivor and feed into the puritan idea that restraint from sex makes a person morally pure. In reality, these are all deliberate forms of violence that an asexual person is fully capable of taking part in.
In the creation of this essay, I accidentally stumbled across content from the lesbian comedian Ashley Gavin talking to a sex-neutral asexual. The clip starts with the usual sensationalised acephobia, the idea that asexuality is inherently confusing and therefore deserving of mockery, with Gavin joking about the definition of sex neutrality given by the participant and the crowd giggling at the alleged absurdity of asexual existence. The asexual says they dated a baby lesbian and before we ever find out the rest of her story, Gavin plays on the phrase relating to actual babies before saying ‘you would want pedophiles to be asexual’ and jokes that ‘no one [asexual pedophiles] would take better care of that kid’.
Gavin isn’t the first person to joke about the existence of an asexual sexual predator. Finlay Christie’s 3 million view Youtube Short does exactly that, where in response to an asexual person coming out in his uni class, someone said he was ‘a sexual predator’, then the clip ends with Christie revealing he was the one making fun of the ace student. The gag is that the student wasn’t actually asexual, but sexually corrupt and hiding it. Anti asexual rhetoric can be so strong that not even the asexual identity of a hypothetical abuser is safe from erasure and ridicule. Someone is either #actually asexual or an abuser and if we ever talk about asexual abusers, it’s never to genuinely support their unknown victims because society is strongly anti-victim/survivor and as already established, asexual victim/survivors are not allowed to truly exist.
The uncomfortable truth for all asexuals is that it’s fully possible for an asexual person to be an abuser, in any and all forms. An asexual person not experiencing sexual attraction doesn’t make them any less likely to take part in sexual violence and in some cases, asexual abusers believe their overstepping of sexual boundaries is justified because there’s no sexual feelings towards their victim. An asexual person can enter a romantic relationship and still take part in verbal and physical abuse, which has no connection to their sexuality. An asexual person can be in a QPR or friendship and still harm their partners through a range of physical, mental and verbal tactics with no use of romance or sex whatsoever. Asexuality isn’t a moral buffer for sexual, physical or emotional violence and the more this lie is spread, the more victims, both asexual and non asexual, are further hidden away because they’re told their violator was incapable of violation.
It’s also fully possible for asexuals to take part in rape culture. Asexuals can victim-blame rape victims/survivors, like telling alloaces raped by non-asexual partners that it was their fault for dating an allosexual or claiming they’re happy that being asexual means they ‘can’t be raped’, get STDs, aids or unwanted pregnancies. Asexuals can take part in rape enabling, such as the common advice in allo-ace dating guides that promote allowing non-asexual partners to rape us for the sake of compromise, whether it’s intoxicating ourselves to the point we can’t consent or having a mandatory sex schedule to satisfy our partner’s libidos. Asexuals can take part in rape glorification, by supporting the rape of alloaces for the sake of allo-ace dating success stories and in turn, assimilation into cisheterosexual society or defending or taking part in rape fantasies simply because they have no sexual attraction to the individuals involved. Asexuals can take part in sexual objectification, such as reducing women’s bodies to a series of parts, breasts, bums and vaginas, either expressing this with no humanity for the women they talk about or to call a woman with these parts ugly. Asexuals can take part in slut-shaming, such as constantly judging Yasmin Benoit’s clothing for being ‘unasexual’ and constantly nitpicking the body parts, facial appearances, romantic attractions, behaviours and consensual safe choices made by other asexuals as ‘evidence’ of allosexuality. Asexuals can take part in puritanism, classing themselves and select asexuals as morally and sexually clean, pure and untouched, whilst shaming groups of people who take part in sexual and romantic behaviours they consider disgusting, gross and degenerate. And as the testimonies of “Topography of a Relationship” and the Asexual Survivors network have shown, asexuals are capable of being abusers and rapists.
For the sake of asexual awareness and visibility, it’s obvious that making this known and aware wouldn’t put aces in the best light and this is something that would go into the box of things we don’t want the #allos to see. But to claim asexuality is a moral and sexual standard will always harm aces who are branded predatory under puritanism from entering the label, such as aces who are Black, trans and gay, but gives cover to asexuals who do take part in abuse and further marginalises the victims and survivors who are attacked by these abusers.
Hiding away the abusers, rapists and harassers of the asexual community might be the cost of respectability politics and reputation, but asexual victims/survivors continue to pay the price each and every time.
The Harmful Asexual vs The Harmless Asexual
In my time within the asexual community, I’ve been stalked, harassed and slandered by numerous white and non Black asexuals of colour, all for speaking up about the antiblackness in the community. I’ve had a hate campaign orchestrated towards me by a white aroace influencer because I directly called out their racism. I’ve had asexuals create false accusations about me, saying that I bully white children because I called them out for taking part in said influencer’s campaign against me. I’ve had asexuals stalk my page specifically for Black asexuals to enable hate campaigns towards us. I’ve had asexuals slander my personal character and constantly misgender and ungender me despite making it known I am a Black woman, describing me as morally cruel, horrid, nasty, repulsive, being a dick and a nonattractive hermit because I said that racism and individualism from white asexuals is wrong. I’ve met asexuals who’ve called Black people breeders and niggers. I know first-hand and from the experiences of others how harmful an asexual person can be. The idea ‘aces do nothing wrong’ is a fucking insult to me and many other people with multiple marginalised identities who are on the asexual spectrum.
The concept of Harmful Asexual vs Harmless Asexual is inherently reactionary and continues to place certain characteristics on a pedestal, demonising others and making asexuality an extension of white puritanism instead of a queer identity. ‘Harmful Asexual’ is almost exclusively used to define asexuals on the furthest end of the spectrum with the least amount of proximity to (white) cisheterosexuality and what’s considered desirable. The Harmful Asexuals are almost always defined as those who are sex-repulsed, sex-averse, unmarried, unpartnered, childless, neurodivergent, victim/survivor and ‘undesirable’, meaning features society considers sexually unattractive, like hairy bodies, small genitals and big noses. The Harmless Asexual on the other hand, is code for conforming asexual people who do fit into conservative norms, like aces who are white, cisgender, male, sex-favourable for heterosexual sex and sexual acts, married, with biological children and have features considered sexually attractive, such as big genetalia, muscular builds if they’re men and curvy, slim or slim thick bodies if they’re women (though asexuals with sexually desirable features are often fetishised and that isn’t true acceptance either).
Within the asexual community, through my many many many interactions with other aces, it’s clear they view me as the Harmful Asexual due to my Blackness and lesbian romantic attraction. I’ve often been perceived as sexually demanding, sexually open or straight up just not asexual because of the sexual and social stereotypes of Black women and lesbians that have been placed on me, that I can’t even escape from with people who I thought were my people. Alternatively, I’m seen as the Harmful Asexual by non-asexual or allosexual ‘allies’ and so-called progressives, who see me as no more than a Mammy, a repressed woman who’s a victim of patriarchy, a mentally and/or physically ill woman in need of curing with sex and/or ableism as punishment, a Jezebel whore in denial, an internally lesbophobic allo lesbian or cishet probably-white woman desperate for attention, because people like me don’t fit the white, straight asexual image they have in their heads. People like me ‘aren’t supposed to’ be asexual.
I also reject the Harmful Asexual vs Harmless Asexual in a political sense. I know asexuals who are socialists, communists, anarchists and feminists and I support them and their work. It’s common for asexual writers and activists to be aligned with leftist principles and values and in order to carry them out they must go beyond the scope of asexuality, acephobia and asexual vs allosexual or nonsexual vs sexual binaries and directly address and tackle patriarchy, capitalism, rape culture and white supremacy, which all inform asexual experiences, oppressions, representations and ways of life to begin with. It means to offer women the choice to say no to sex with men in a society that says women exist solely for men’s sexual pleasure. It means giving Black people and other POC the right to say no to sex in a society that fetishises us. It means giving everyone the right to say to sex and to own our own bodies in a society where humans’ bodies are commodified and our value is determined by our labour.
Leftist and leftist-aligned asexuals are not blank, empty sacks of flesh who innocently want conservatives to leave us alone. Through existence and intentional actions, we are asexual people who want to disturb conservatives by abolishing the systems of oppression they create, enact and benefit from. If conservative sexual norms are rooted in white supremacy, rape culture, pedophilia, patriarchy, puritanism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism, ableism and fatphobia, which they are and to destroy those systems is ‘harming’ conservatives whose pleasure is rooted in the oppression of marginalised peoples, then we are asexuals who do want to ‘harm’ conservatives, who actively do harm conservatives and we do it proudly and on purpose.
To be queerly asexual or asexually queer, as in asexual and actively fighting for queer liberation, is to be harmful in the face of conservatism. It’s to be an asexual person who deliberately aligns themselves with causes and ideologies that are a threat to the dominant conservative system. Aces who are POC, trans and gay are always disrupting the system just by being in the room and our asexuality is another lens for us to keep on disrupting. To be asexual and queer, beyond the literal definition and validity platitudes, you can’t be a Harmless Asexual. In the face of conservatism and fascism, you must be harmful.
Whilst it’s a ‘let men be masculine’ type of statement to say that asexual people can do bad things when compulsory sexuality already states that asexual and nonsexual people are already morally bad for not taking part in cisheterosexual sex and producing children, my call to address harm from asexual people is to protect ourselves and our community’s most vulnerable more than a call for validation from allosexual or non asexual people.
To accept asexuality as truly human, we have no choice but to accept that asexuality doesn’t act as a moral shield and not just a sexual shield and frankly, abandon the concept of asexuality as a sexual shield to begin with. We treat The Asexual as non-human, so The Asexual is a blank slate which non-asexuals or allosexuals project their own sexual values onto and in turn, project their own moral values onto as well. When allosexuals claim asexuals must be super focused on work, staying out of trouble, being pure or clean for not having sex and sexual attraction, they admit as well as imply a lot of reactionary notions about their own sex and sexual attraction, the inverse being their sexual attraction is overwhelmingly uncontrollable and a distraction, that it’s an inherent a problem-starter, that it’s impure and inclean. Not only reinforcing puritanism towards themselves, they project this puritanism onto The Asexual which not only harms us as aces, but allows for intercommunity harm to be downplayed and ignored. The non-human who does nothing can do no harm. And ironically that, in itself, is harmful.
To accept the The Asexual as human, one must accept that the asexuals have the same human complexities, the good, the bad and the ugly. It means accepting the existence of asexual victims/survivors but also supporting and defending that existence, whilst also not hiding away. It means accepting the simple universal truth that no matter our sexualities, we are all capable of harm.
