114 | Angela Chen on Asexuality in a Sex-Preoccupied World

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2020

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sexuality is, and always has been, a topic that is endlessly fascinating but also contentious. You might think that asexuality would be more straightforward, but you’d be wrong. Asexual people, or “aces,” haven’t been front and center in the public discussion of gender and sexuality, and as a result there is confusion about such basic issues as what “asexuality” even means. Angela Chen is a science journalist and an ace herself, and she’s written a new book about asexuality and how it fits into the wider discussion of sex and gender. Precisely because sexuality is so taken for granted by many people, thinking about asexuality not only helps us understand the issues confronting aces, but the meaning of sexuality more broadly.

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Angela Chen received a B.A. in comparative literature from UC San Diego. She is a contributing editor at Catapult magazine, and her writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and elsewhere. Her new book is Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We live in a world where there's increasing
0:07.3	understanding of and hopefully acceptance of
0:10.3	different varieties of
0:12.6	sexuality and gender orientation and gender expression, not just the usual boy and girl getting together, getting married, having two and a half kids.
0:21.6	We're increasingly happy with
0:24.6	homosexuality, with bisexuality,
0:27.4	hopefully transgender people are being more and more accepted as time goes on, although we're certainly not there yet.
0:33.3	So what about asexuality? What about people who do not foreground
0:38.7	sexual desire in their lives in the way that everybody else does?
0:42.4	This is an idea that most of us have heard of, but maybe are not too familiar with. Asexuality, it turns out, can span a wide variety of
0:51.3	manifestations from people who are very romantic and even have fulfilling sexual relationships with their partners to people who are completely
1:00.0	repulsed by the idea of having sex. And it's interesting not just to understand those people and their needs and how they
1:07.4	can flourish in this world, but how the rest of us when we're telling stories or organizing society more broadly take for granted.
1:16.1	The idea that whatever your sexual orientation is, sex is something that you will want to have and it'll be a
1:21.9	success story when it's going well for you. So today's guest is Angela Chen.
1:26.2	She is a science journalist and she is asexual herself or ace as they say in the business and she's written a new book about this called Ace
1:35.2	What asexuality reveals about desire society and the meaning of sex?
1:41.0	It's interesting if nothing else just to reflect on the centrality of the idea of sex in our lives and how we think about our lives.
1:49.8	So I like that just the idea that
1:53.5	coining a term, right, adding some vocabulary to the way that we conceptualize the world changes the way we think about it in an important way.
2:02.2	And asexuality is an example of that, but I think the lessons here are broader. So let's go.
2:10.7	Angela Chen, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So I think asexuality, which we're going to be talking about, would you have a new book coming out?
	...

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