postscript: an interview with Canton Winer
the voices behind my asexuality feature for Sojourners magazine
Hey everyone,
There was no way I could fit everyone I interviewed into my feature story with Sojourners, as much as I wanted to and tried. Regardless of whether some interviewees were quoted once, a couple times, or not at all, everyone I spoke with meaningfully shaped the article with their insightful perspectives.
I think it’s important to lift up voices of asexual people and people who study asexuality for Asexual Awareness Week, so I’m taking some of the interviews and posting abridged versions for y’all to read. I have permission from Sojourners and each interviewee to do so. As another disclosure, my publication of their views doesn’t mean I endorse all of them. These are discussions, not debates.
We’ll start off with Canton Winer: an assistant professor of sociology and gender/sexuality studies at Northern Illinois University. Here is my conversation with him …
JOEY THURMOND: Canton, tell me about yourself. What are you doing right now?
CANTON WINER: I'm a sociology PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine. I'll be done with my degree at the end of this year. My dissertation focuses on asexual people or people who experience low or no sexual attraction and what we can learn about the relationships between gender and sexuality by speaking to this kind of unusual experience of sexuality in some ways. So, over the past few years, I've interviewed 77 people who find themselves somewhere on the asexuality spectrum, and I've engaged in this large-scale, community-engaged digital ethnography, where I'm talking with people on asexuality spectrum online all the time, on Twitter, on Reddit, and in other spaces. And I'm trying to show what the broad world — even for people who are not asexual — can learn about the world by looking at asexuality.
What drew you to studying asexuality? How would you describe it to somebody who isn't familiar with it?
Asexuality is usually defined as people who don't experience sexual attraction. But when you actually talk to ace folks, you find out it's a bit more complex than that. Some people on the asexuality spectrum do experience sexual attraction, but maybe it's only in very rare occasions or in very context-dependent situations. So people will use terms like gray-asexual or demisexual to describe those feelings. But that still falls under the asexuality spectrum, at least as most people define it. There's a lot of diversity within the asexual community, so any definition that we're coming up with is a generalization that refers to a broad umbrella of experience that shares something in common [with everyone in that space]. And that's an unusual experience of sexual attraction — that it's lower than most people might assume it to “normally” be.
I'm not myself asexual, although I do identify as queer. When I was preparing for my dissertation, I knew that I wanted to ask big questions about the relationships between gender and sexuality. And I'm very influenced by black feminist scholars who have really powerfully made the argument that when we focus on the margins of society, we learn about the margins themselves [and] a great deal about the center — the more dominant parts of society. Asexual people exist at the margins, certainly of the heteronormative world, right? They defy the assumption that everyone does and should experience sexual attraction, but they also exist at the margins of the queer world in some important ways.
There are different layers of erasure that happen to and among asexuals. You were talking about how they're already at the margins of heteronormative society, but even in the queer community as well. Allosexuality and whiteness and maleness often get centered. How have minority voices expanded and enriched your perspective and research?
The asexual community is a really gendered community. Overwhelmingly, asexual people identify as women, followed by non-binary or trans people, and men are third. Even though women are technically the numerical majority — as far as we know, at least — in the asexual community, men's narratives of asexuality often get centered. When people talk about asexual erasure, it refers to this idea that asexuality is impossible, regardless of their assigned gender at birth and their current gender identity. However, when I probed a little bit more and asked women how asexuality affects them, they told me that others have said, “Well, how does that make you different from other women?’” For women, asexuality is erased through unremarkably, rather than through impossibility. The end result is the denial of asexuality as a legitimate sexual identity, but the paths to arrive there are different — and they're gendered.
There are lots of stereotypes in U.S. society about sexual behavior [among] various different racialized groups. Of course, whiteness gets neutralized as it always does, but black people have historically been stereotyped as hypersexual, and Asian people — especially Asian men — have been stereotyped as hyposexual; that is, desexualized. Although those are different stereotypes (hypersexualization and desexualization), both of them create obstacles for identifying as asexual. Either that you have to defy a stereotype or it can feel like you're confirming one.
Are there any other misconceptions that come to mind with asexual people?
One of the most common that I've encountered is the idea that asexual people are repulsed by sex and are all sexually abstinent. Some asexual people are repulsed by sex. Some asexual people are abstinent and have never had sex. Those are completely legitimate ways of operating out in the world. But asexuality is an umbrella term, so some asexual people do have or even desire sex. You can desire to have sex even if you don't experience sexual attraction. People who are not asexual have sex for reasons that have nothing to do with our experience of sexual attraction, right? We might do it because our libido is active, which is distinct from sexual attraction; we might have sex because we want to make our partner happy — asexual and otherwise.
Another misconception is that asexual people are sick, basically. Something’s wrong that can be fixed. Current academic literature still medicalizes asexuality, treating it as a condition that can be fixed through therapy; we can train you to like sex. Many asexual people do speak about going through that, which is not something that we often think of as affecting asexual people. One more stereotype is that asexual people are immature in some sort of way. It’s a reflection of a very prevalent cultural idea that being sexually active and forming romantic partnerships are core markers of adulthood.
Most people assume that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are ubiquitous for everyone. How do asexuals experience those feelings and desires differently, or not at all? You talked about libido and that being separate from sexual attraction as well. Expand on that.
Libido, horniness, and sexual attraction are not synonymous but often used that way. When we think about our own experiences as people who aren't asexual, we can see that sometimes we're sexually attracted to people, but we don't feel horny. Our libido may not necessarily be super active. Or we might have quite an active libido, even though we aren't experiencing sexual attraction to anyone specifically. You can experience both at the same time as well, but they float a little bit apart and then merge together at times. That’s a big lesson that asexuality has to offer to the wider world. Not just about libido and sexual attraction, but thinking about what attraction is more broadly. So often in casual conversations, we tend to collapse all the different types of attraction under sexuality.
But it's quite common in the asexual community to think of attraction as split. Not everyone in the asexual community uses this model, but it's very common to use something called the Split Attraction model, which says there are different elements to attraction: sexual, romantic, sensual, platonic — we could go on and on. These various types of attraction might correlate with one another, but they don't necessarily need to. For example, you could experience no sexual attraction but still experience romantic attraction. And you might use different terms to describe that. Say, you are asexual to describe your experience of sexual attraction, but you are heteroromantic, or homoromantic, or panromantic to describe your experience of romantic attraction. Or aromantic could describe that experience too, because maybe you don't experience sexual attraction or romantic attraction. Many people within the asexual community do experience romantic attraction. The utility of thinking of attraction as multifaceted, as split, as having various different components, is so valuable and important.
A misconception is that only asexual people experience the Split Attraction model — this idea that attraction has many different parts and they don't necessarily align with each other. We could apply to anyone. There are people in all sorts of different sexual orientations and identities who can use the split attraction model to more productively think about the ways that they experience attraction, too.
How can the experiences of asexual people affect society in how people understand how to manage and approach relationships and intimacy?
We can more broadly accept people who don't experience sexual attraction, or who experience it very rarely or at low levels. We need to rethink what sexuality is more broadly. In that, we'll create more flexibility in how people can behave, identify, and live. Asexuality (like many other queer identities) offers us more freedom in living lives that are affirming to us; that feel good to us; that feel liberating. That's just the value of queer identities in general, and I think the same could be said about other marginalized experiences with people like intersex folks.
How does asexuality affect how we look at consent? How does that square away with the differing needs of partners? For example, this can be taken to the extreme with purity culture in Christianity, which puts men’s needs above women’s needs because the husband has a raging libido that his wife is obligated to satisfy at any moment.
Let’s rewind a bit. Asexual erasure is gendered. Asexuality is erased for men because it’s impossible, and it’s erased for women because it’s unremarkable. The broader assumption that women are not very sexual and ultimately responsive to men's sexuality is shocking. Common beliefs like this show how deeply baked rape culture is in our culture around sexuality. If it's a common assumption that women aren't really that sexual and don't really experience sexual attraction, but are yet still expected to provide sex to men, that’s quite alarming. Ultimately, everyone is supposed to be responsive to men's supposedly inherent sexual veracity, right? This is a pressure that not only affects asexual people, but ends up affecting everyone.
You've spoken about purity culture online and how it relates to compulsory sexuality. What is purity culture? What has been your impression of how Christian asexuals have navigated and experienced that space?
There's this interesting debate that's existed for basically 50 years among feminists: Is sexuality compelled or is it repressed for women? What I found really quickly in my interviews with people on the asexuality spectrum is both. Sexuality is both compelled and repressed, and where this was most obvious was evangelical Christians, specifically people who used to be evangelical but then felt pushed out of that community, largely due to their experience of asexuality. This was especially true for people who were assigned female at birth, although I did talk to some people assigned male at birth who expressed these feelings, too.
Purity culture involves typically religious ideas that sex should only be happening within marriage, and it should be oriented toward procreation. Anything outside of that is impure, sinful, and wrong. Asexual people I spoke with who grew up in this often said, “When I was a young adolescent, I though, ‘I'm really good at this. I don't understand why all of my peers around me are struggling so much with this. I must just be really godly or something.’” As they got into later adolescence, things start to shift with new pressures being introduced — pressures that they couldn't see before to actually provide sex. This was especially pronounced for women, who are expected to be gatekeepers of sex in some ways. Purity culture believes men naturally have a big sexual appetite. It’s women's duty to make sure that men remain pure by providing sex in marriage, so that men aren't tempted to find sex outside of procreative marriage. Which, again, brings us back to some ideas of rape culture, where women are pressured to provide sex, regardless of whether they desire sex. Women's sexual agency, their ability to consent or not to sex, is very limited by this purity culture framework.
People tend to think of purity culture as being very sex-averse, as really repressing sex and trying to remove sex from everything. But the experiences of asexual people in evangelical communities makes it clear that's happening in some ways, but there's also very strong pressures to be sexual and to provide sex, specifically within marriage. So, purity culture both represses and compels sex in the long run.
You said asexuals in evangelical spaces often remove themselves from it because of the pressure. Have you seen Christian asexuals seeking out conversion therapy or being compelled to because of purity culture? How does that differ from conversion therapy for gay people?
When we hear the words “conversion therapy,” we think gay people. Trying to beat the queerness out of people. Repress people's sexuality. As I've talked to asexual people, I've learned that conversion therapy does and can look like that a lot of the time, but it also can look like pressuring people to be sexual. “What's wrong with you? You should be joining in these heterosexual unions and procreating, creating more evangelical Christians,” right? Because many people are completely unaware of asexuality, asexual people wind up feeling really different and might try to change those feelings. Conversion therapy is a broad term that can refer to going to a psychologist or some other kind of counselor who is trying to help you change something about yourself through “therapeutic means.” In this case, a lack of experience of sexual attraction.
But it can also refer to things that aren't provided by medical professionals. So, some asexual people told me about Christian camps geared at heterosexualizing people; preparing people to be “good little heteros,” more or less. It wasn't something I was specifically looking for in my research, but I need to learn more about the specifics of those kind of “conversion Christian camp” experiences. They're not explicitly branded that way. They’re Christian camps with subtext. You understand what you're getting yourself into. Some asexual people told me, “It was basically like summer camp.” The main goal wasn’t getting people to be good married heterosexual evangelical Christians, specifically. But [heterosexuality] is such a core value of some evangelical communities that it gets baked into camps that aren't explicitly driven by that.
The experience of it to be very othering. And then, in retrospect, they interpret it as conversion therapy. I think this is often what happens in more therapeutic or medical settings, too. Asexual people who explicitly seek out someone who could help them fix their feelings related to sex were, really, just going to therapy — talking about the various things on their mind, and their therapist was unaware of asexuality. Often the asexual person themselves was, at the time, unaware of asexuality, and so they interpret these experiences as attempts to fix and convert someone from asexuality in retrospect.
That's really helpful. The culture, the atmosphere, the givens and assumptions — I haven't thought of how Christian camps or medical practitioners can perpetuate a kind of “incidental conversion therapy.” What else have you observed about asexual people with faith backgrounds, perhaps in contrast to nonreligious asexual people?
Former evangelical asexual people experienced a lot of pain (and still do) about their experiences within evangelical communities. These feelings that they were broken and wrong, violating the norms and expectations of the community that had been really important to them for most of their lives until [they discovered they were asexual]. The way that people respond to leaving the evangelical community as asexuals varies. Some of them try to find other parts of Christianity that are more welcoming of queer experiences, including asexual experiences. And some — just like other queer people — end up leaving Christianity and religion altogether. So, the effects vary quite a bit, but it's negative. These are negative experiences that asexual people end up having in these purity culture spaces. And of everyone that I spoke with, no one had remained in an evangelical space after finding out that they were asexual.
Even if asexual people might want to pair up with somebody of the same sex for romantic reasons, there's still that sense of not belonging — you're likely not taking that next, expected step: have sex and kids. But what can Christians learn from asexuals? What can Christians do for asexuals in their communities?
There are powerful stereotypes that operate in our world that churches and Christian communities are all about chastity. They're all about repressing and hiding sex. When we talk to asexual people, we find out really quickly that, yes, that is happening in these communities, but there's also a lot of pressure to perform and have sex. Both can be true and end up harming parts of these communities. Disproportionately it ends up harming queer people. Ultimately, we all get harmed by pressures to either hide sex, to perform sex, so whatever direction it's happening — whether repression or compulsion. It's harming us all.
We think of purity culture as something that only affects people who are themselves religious and engaged in religious communities. But the U.S. has been very dominated by certain Christian perspectives for hundreds of years. A lot of elements of purity culture have become baked into our broader culture. Even if you don't identify as Christian and never have, you may still find yourself affected by these norms. Purity culture is just one element of Christian ideas that leaks into the broader culture. Even though we like to put forward this myth of the separation of church and state, government has enforced these norms in many ways. Look at the types of relationships that are seen as legitimate by the state and those that aren't. It was only until very recently that we saw marriages that deviate from the heteronormative ideal being recognized by the state. Those are still under attack today.
We often forget the anti-sodomy laws in Europe, and how there were some in place in the U.S. as well.
It’s interesting to me how anti-sodomy laws are often interpreted. Those are laws against sex between two men, but not only about that, right? Sodomy really refers to any sex that isn't happening within marriage that isn't procreative. So that's like an overwhelming majority of sex that happens. People don't understand that a lot of these laws and social movements and efforts against queer sex end up being efforts against the freedom to choose to have sex in whatever way you want, regardless of what your sexuality is. It affects everyone. And those anti-sodomy laws were often very tightly interwound with laws against “miscegenation,” right? Interracial sex. Another thing we don't talk enough about in this country.
How have asexual people inspired you? How would you say asexual people contribute to social justice?
The beauty of the queer movement in general is that it provides us with language and ideas to imagine and create a world where we have more freedom, where we have more autonomy over our bodies, over our identities, just over ourselves in general. Asexuality exists as a really important way to push the queer movement forward — to requeer the queer movement in some ways by challenging unstated assumptions about sexuality and attraction and various other things. The idea that it's legitimate to just claim an identity that says, “I'm not interested in sex; I don't experience sexual attraction.” That's really radical by pushing against core assumptions about sexuality. To me, that is the future of the queer movement: incorporating asexual experiences so that we can have an even broader array of lives to imagine and choose for ourselves.
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