Ace of Hearts

Jeanne Campbell (she/her)

Never has there been a piece of media that sums up the perceived difference in sexual desires between men and women more succinctly than Grease. You know the story: Sandy is happily singing about holding hands and going on lemonade dates; Danny is bragging to his buddies about how his girl got “friendly, down in the sand”. She wants to watch a movie at a drive-in; he’s busy doing the old arm-around-the-shoulder trick. For her, sexual advances are something to fight off; for him they’re a basic need.

Let me get this disclaimer out of the way—Grease is not a film to take any cues from, ever, and that’s intentional. You’re meant to be having fun doing the hand-jive, not pausing to ask “Who let all these 40-somethings play teenagers?” or “Holy shit, did the radio host just try roofie this girl at a school dance??” or “How the HELL did she fit into those leather pants?” But when you watch it in Drama class age twelve, it sets a precedent: guys want sex, girls want love. Everything you read from then on in—curse you, CHERUB series—establishes the idea that a girl will sleep with a guy to keep him from straying, but only begrudgingly. She’ll never initiate sex, but if she does, it’s to stop her man from storming out. And, we learn that a guy’s need, not want, but need, for sex, will steer him through most of life. In other words: if you’re a girl and you don’t have a “Open 24/7” sign over your vay-jay-jay, prepare for heartbreak.

Now, I could write an entirely separate article about how damaging this is for guys—about the sexual pressure it puts on them, about the themes of toxic masculinity and aggressive sexuality that keeps this ideal alive—because how much of Danny Zuko’s behaviour was driven by his need to fit in, to seem like a ‘cool guy’ and a ‘real babe magnet’. But that’s not why I’m here today, folks.

Over the years, there’s been a real growth in sex- positive media for women, and specifically young women. Teenage Bounty Hunters has a side-story about a character breaking through her reluctance to masturbate, Big Mouth has an animated clitoris cheerfully giving advice. So why did this not make me happy? Why did reading the autobiographies of Ali Wong and Rachel Bloom, where they talk frankly about masturbating from a young age, make me feel kind of Uncomfortable?

Imagine you’re me for a moment—try getting into the role by getting diagnosed with anxiety, obsessing over Pacific Rim, and surrounding yourself with gay idiots. You’re in your first year of university and for the first time, sex and love have become two separate things. It’s no longer an act you do with someone you love because you want to make them feel good and be intimate, but something you can go out and find! There are whole TV shows around this premise! You’re like a girl in New York City, and it’s up to you to experiment with the guitar hipsters and the asshole businessmen, because you’re honouring the early suffragettes by having a damn good time! 

Because you’re sex-positive, right? That’s just good feminism. You think women should have the right to an active sex life without shame or judgement, you respect and applaud any woman doing it for herself (wink wink), and you think talking about all this stuff should be normalised... so why aren’t you interested in it? Why does a certain purple, white, grey, and black flag keep catching your attention?

Positive representation of asexuality and its wide spectrum is still rare in the media. Back in 2012, the medical show House MD got fans all excited when it dropped a trailer promising a story about two asexual patients. And then, because we can’t have anything nice, it turned out the guy had a disease that effectively killed his sex drive, so his wife was pretending to be asexual to make him happy. Because according to one blue-eyed asshole doctor, “the only people who don’t want [sex] are either sick, dead, or lying.”

(Insert Owen Wilson “wow” meme here, but like 500 times more deadpan).

Now obviously anyone looking for positive representation of ANY kind shouldn’t search in a show that was basically just a vehicle for Hugh Laurie to prove he had range beyond jolly-old-school-days, upper-class British twits.*

*No luck, buddy, you’ll always be Bernie Wooster to me. But one isolated episode isn’t the issue here, it’s the overlying assumptions. That anyone who doesn’t like sex just hasn’t had a ‘proper dicking-down’. That someone who doesn’t like sex is just a prude needing some kind of sexual awakening, or has past trauma linked to sex in some way—because sex is just ‘sooo natural and a basic human need, so basically by not sucking my dick you’re violating the Geneva Convention’. It’s the fact that in most of the media I consume, sex is taken as a natural stage. It is what happens after the daring first kiss in the rain/atop a Ferris wheel/after crashing a wedding, but before the “I love you.” Everybody does it, and everybody wants it.

So what happens when you’re a girl and you realise you’re not interested in any of that?

You worry. You worry because sex is seen as a way to get validation and for someone to look at you and to be held for a moment. You’ve internalised that ever since the world started seeing you as a Girl, and not just a bad haircut in a rugby sweater. You worry because the world is already so oversexualised, and being a bi woman just adds to that, because it’s part of your stereotype to be out there screwing whoever you want. You worry because everywhere you turn, queer women are making posts about Keira Knightley and The Favourite, and how they’d let Rachel Weisz destroy them, throw them up against a wall, and pin them to the ground.

That’s not to say you don’t try. When your friends see a picture of Hozier with his hair up and say they want to do filthy things to him, you nod along. But really, the most daring thing you want to do with someone else’s body is to rest your head on their chest. When you look at the beautiful girl sitting opposite you there is no want, no heat. Kissing the hand of the boy in your History tutorial is all you want.

You worry because you want to be loved just like anyone, and who’s going to give you the time? A lot of people out there want sex, as something to give and receive, as a way to show their affection for someone they care about, and you GET that. It just doesn’t, uh, spin your wheels. You’ve had people in your life who have liked you and loved you, but that’s before you even understood a little thing called the asexuality spectrum, and where you fell on it. Now that you’re trying to own that part of yourself, hasn’t your field shrunk down?

A few years ago I invited a guy off Tinder to come stay the night—it was late, we’d both gone a while without human contact, and so on. “Just so you know, I don’t think I’m into sex” I tell him as we share a hot chocolate. He accepts that, but gently tells me I might be on the wrong dating app, and then we fall asleep half on top of each other.

Honestly, his point was valid—anyone who goes on Tinder looking for non-sexual relationships is kidding themselves as much as anyone who watches handyman porn because they want to see how a dishwasher gets fixed. But what are my other options? What are my options when I’m lonely and I want someone to hold me close, to make me feel wanted for a moment, and all my flatmates are out?

So you understand that when the fucking GROUNDBREAKING show Sex Education features a sub-plot around a character struggling with asexuality, I’m glued to my screen. And when sex therapist Jean gently says, “Sex doesn’t make us whole, so how could you ever be broken?” I start to cry. Because I have been dealing with this deep-rooted fear, this ache in the pit of my stomach, for so long: that I am broken.

But maybe I don’t need to see myself like that anymore. Maybe one day a girl like me will get her own story, and there’ll be nothing in it but love as far as the eye can see.