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Sunday, April 26, 2020

Television's Alarmingly Normative Representation of Asexuality

I am not attracted to men, and whenever I say that, people assume that I am gay. I know that this will happen, but I don't intend to be deceptive. Rather, this is how I test the waters before coming out to someone in a more direct and specific way. I first get them accustomed to the fact that I am not straight, and I see how they react. And then I tell them that I'm not attracted to women either. I look them in the eye, or I look down at the table, and I tell them that I am asexual.

And I just replicated that very process with you. For me, what really works about it is that it situates my sexual orientation within a queer context. The asexual community has not been around for very long, and most people do not know that it exists, so placing my identity within a familiar context helps people to understand and accept it. Plus, I myself feel disconnected from the asexual community. The majority of my queer friends and role models reside elsewhere in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet, as do the characters in books and movies who I relate to and enjoy the most. 

Golden Boy by Abigail Tartellin, which has an intersex protagonist, absolutely destroyed me in the best way possible, and I paused my tv to scream when Shunsuke came out as bisexual on Terrace House. (This was mostly because Terrace House is among the straightest shows I have ever seen, and I was moved that they finally acknowledged the existence of queerness.) I have been deeply affected by iconic gay stories like Rubyfruit Jungle and Moonlight, but we asexuals do not have titles like these at this point. We have not yet made a dent on the culture. We are the new kids, and we need some time to develop our oeuvre.

Depending on who you ask, it is much more nuanced than this, but according to me, there are two types of asexuals: those who date and those who do not. I am the latter kind. And exclusively engaging in platonic relationships is a significant lifestyle choice. My asexuality, which is the simple fact that I do not experience sexual attraction, has a comparatively smaller impact on my life. I never forget that it's there, but in the vast majority of situations, it remains hidden from others. It describes something internal, a feeling that I do not have.

So, there are two aspects of my asexual identity: there is how I feel (or don't feel) toward other people when it comes to sexual attraction, and there is the fact that I exclusively engage in platonic relationships. The community calls this aromantic, but I'm going to call it platonic because I like that better. I am a platonic asexual. And pop culture has a tough time with my existence. It can sometimes handle asexuality, but once you introduce the abstention from dating into the mix, pop culture absolutely cannot handle it. It is just too threatening to the status quo, and it must not be touched with a ten foot pole. Apparently, pop culture also cannot handle that asexual people are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. In terms of our deviation from cis-heteronormativity, asexual people are not a one-off. We have an army of other norm-disrupting people behind us.

After I came out to myself and began seeking asexual representation, I wasn't expecting much. I mean, I did not even hear the word asexual until age 25, so I knew the representation was lacking. I heard about the EMT workplace sitcom Sirens on some asexual message board, and this was my first foray into asexual representation. While I had a lot of fun watching the show, I found the asexual representation wildly inaccurate. The asexual character, Voodoo, is as normative as the writers could make her while still claiming that she is technically asexual. Allow me to present her role in the plot: She dates men, but she does not have sex with them, which is a deterrent for her male coworker, who is one of the main protagonists. (She is more of a side character.) He has a crush on her, and they date on and off. In one scene, shortly after one of their breakups, she shows up at the bar that same night with a man who she had met on an asexual dating site. Jealously ensues.

Though there is great diversity within the asexual community, most often, asexuality does not look like this. Voodoo is basically a straight person who just doesn't have sex. I especially have a bone to pick with the asexual dating site she supposedly uses. Asexual dating sites are not Tinder. Unlike straight people, it is not easy for us to find others who share our sexual and romantic orientation. Also, we are 1% of the population, and only some of us are on asexual social networking sites or dating sites. (I have been on an asexual social networking site since 2015. I have spoken with a grand total of five people and met only one of them in person.) If you are looking for a date on an asexual site, you will not be able to find someone of the gender(s) to which you are attracted, who is interested in dating, who is interested in dating you, who will go out with you the same night you begin speaking with them. This is not really what asexuality is about, and the numbers do not work in your favor. If you are an asexual person who dates, your experience will look much different from this, but Sirens is clearly not going for accuracy; rather, it is going for normalization.

The writing on Sirens is among the most blatant examples of this. It reflects the tendency to reassure straight people that asexuals are really not that different from them. In reality, we are like them in many ways: we value meaningful human connection, experience joy/embarrassment/shame/vulnerability, and like eating grilled cheese. I would love for the show to focus on this. Instead, it represents its reductive understanding of asexuality and waters down the ways in which the orientation deviates from the norm. We are different from straight people in significant and fundamental ways that Sirens does not care to meaningfully address. Also, along with the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community, we are a threat to cis-heteronormativity. It makes sense that the writers wanted to deemphasize that or ignore it given how powerful it is and how challenging it would be to many viewers.

A couple of years after Sirens introduced us to Voodoo, Bojack Horseman introduced us to another asexual character, Todd Chavez. Like Voodoo, he dates, he seems to be heteroromantic (a term that describes asexual people who date cross-gender partners), and he has a relatively easy time finding partners who share his sexual and romantic orientation. Over the course of the series, he finds not one but two asexual women to date. It's not like he lives in rural Idaho (the show is set in L.A.), but I'm still skeptical. While Voodoo meets her asexual date through a website, Todd meets these two women through work and at the airport respectively. I know that Bojack takes place in an alternate, absurdist universe, but it is highly improbable that an asexual person would meet two asexual partners by chance. And representing asexual dating this way diminishes the ways in which it differs from heterosexual dating. Unlike straight people, it is unlikely for us to meet fellow asexual people at a coffee shop or at work. (To my knowledge, the only times I have met asexual people "by chance" have been at LGBTQIA+ events. This has happened twice. Again, we are 1% of the population.) Aside from his abstention from sex, Todd's dating life is normative. And aside from attending some asexual meetups and using an asexual dating site, he is not involved in the LGBTQIA+ community.

I'm sure there are some asexual people whose lives look like this, but mine very much does not, and I know I'm not alone. Moreover, I don't think it is a coincidence that Voodoo and Todd are both heteroromantic people who engage in monogamous relationships and do not participate in the LGBTQIA+ community. It seems that the writers are trying to make them slightly different from the norm but not too different. In explaining the creative team's choice to include an asexual character in Sirens, Executive Producer Bob Fisher said, "We were talking about people we knew, and several of us had known people who identified as asexual. And I'll tell you it appealed to us because in workplace comedies, there's always a will-they-or-won't-they trope, and we thought that added an interesting spin to it." Asexuality is not an "interesting spin" on heterosexuality. Asexuality is... asexuality! It's its own thing! Also, asexuality is not a spice you can add to a tv show to make it more interesting, nor is it a plot twist. There is no depth to this rationale.

It would be awfully convenient if asexual lives looked exactly like straight lives but without the sex. It's an easy way to conceptualize a new and challenging concept. But to quote my favorite show, which has zero asexual characters and a lot of queerness, "The situation's a lot more nuanced than that." My asexual experience is one of relative isolation in that I cannot just go out and meet another asexual person. However, the broader LGBTQIA+ community has made me feel supported, and being a member of the LGBTQIA+ community is a part of my asexual identity. It is a resource, a source of solidarity, and a joy to be a part of. No matter how different we are, I have something in common with every member of the community. We all have a coming out story, we have all been harmed by cis-heteronormativity, and we all pose a threat to it.

It is frustrating that these shows do not present this holistic view of asexuality. If they did, it would give the representation more power and would help audiences contextualize and understand the orientation. While I am not sure that the writers were conscious of their decision to omit the broader LGBTQIA+ context, I still think it was intentional. They were shying away from something big because it was difficult to represent and difficult to digest. Of course, the other aspect of asexuality that is most difficult for normative people to digest is that some of us do not date. Voodoo and Todd both engage in monogamous, hetero-presenting romantic relationships, which reflects the lives of some asexual people but disappointingly sidelines the less normative lifestyle that many of us live. While television has made great strides in representing other members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and it is beginning to grapple with asexuality, the prospect of a character intentionally and permanently abstaining from romance seems unimaginable. It is a major disruption to the status quo.

I was going to try to be cool and say that I am not holding my breath for more accurate representation. I was going to say that I'm not going to wait around for some writers' room to represent asexuality in it its most powerful, most norm-disrupting, most LGBTQIA-aligned form. But the truth is that I am. I am 100% holding my breath and waiting for this. As much as I logically know that I have very little power over this unless I enter a writers' room myself, I still hope that my desires will be realized simply because I desire them. Simply because I am whispering them into the world on this blog. So, we'll see what happens. Until then, when I really need a fictional character to connect to, I will turn to stories about LGBTQIA+ people from elsewhere within the alphabet.

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