Unexpected Validation and Resistance: The Impact of Abstinence-Based Sex Education on My Coming Out as Asexual
““For many young acespec girls… the abstinence-only approach to sex education… isn’t hard to abide by. If they don’t or only rarely experience sexual attraction and choose not to have sex because of that, they’re able to keep themselves “pure”—without feeling any of the guilt that other young women are made to feel when they do experience sexual attraction or fantasies. They’re doing what they should be doing, right? They’re just doing it “better” than everyone else. It turns out that’s simply because they don’t necessarily have overbearing sexual attraction to contend with in the first place.” ”
Growing up aspec, [2] I found myself bored and confused when sitting through my school’s abstinence-based sex education unit. I was filled with questions, yet probably none most of my peers were thinking. Almost every time I walked into health class, the question on the forefront of my mind was: why was I required to be here when I knew I didn’t want to have sex? In fact, I vividly remember sitting in one of those old, rigid school desks, thinking to myself, “I’m not going to have sex in high school, so I don’t need to listen.”
Years following my 10th grade health class, I’ve often struggled with articulating my early asexual experiences, especially any moments before I knew I was asexual. And it wasn’t until reading Costello and Kaszyca’s words in their book Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else that it clicked for me. I feel guilty about my aspec high school experience. Unlike Costello and Kaszyca’s discussion on purity culture, celibacy, and its false correlation with asexuality, my guilt stems from not experiencing explicit discrimination or violence for being asexual. I have recently realized that all throughout high school, I never once saw my asexual desires as pathological or subordinate to sexual and romantic attraction. While the shaping of my personal understanding of love and desire extends far beyond abstinence-based sex education, it is a focal point in my youth that fueled my normalization of asexual love and desire before I knew I was asexual. And my journey around my asexuality is a story I wish to share here and now in hopes of opening a greater dialogue around abstinence, sex education, and asexuality. Through my personal experiences, I navigate how abstinence-based sex education can and does impact aspec youth coming into their aceness.
While discussions of asexuality have started to be implemented in sexual violence research during the last few years, there is little to no conversations outside of online forums on how abstinence-based sex education is impacting the way aspec youth understand their sexuality. [3] And I have yet to encounter any discussions on ways abstinence-based curriculums have influence aspec youth’s internalization of compulsory sexuality and allonormativity on their journey to realizing their asexuality. The relationship between abstinence-based sex education and your understanding of your (a)sexuality is the discussion I wish to pose to scholars and non-scholars alike. Specifically, I have been wondering as of late how abstinence-based sex education has resulted in (unintentionally) empowering or validating these youth alongside the ways it can invalidate and pathologize. It is my personal experience attending public high school in the U.S. that has led me to asking these questions. The asexual community, and other queer, feminist spaces, have begun to recognize and discuss the ways heteronormative, cisnormative sex education harms aspec people, but in what ways has it unintentionally validated asexual experiences and desires? In what ways does abstinence-based education’s influence on your aceness change with different social and cultural factors?
Before diving into my past and the ways abstinence-based education was used as a tool to counter allonormativity, I must be clear I am not promoting the use of abstinence-only or abstinence-based sex education. I believe all youth have the right to inclusive, factual sex education that provides clarity and guidance around intimacy, sex, and consent. While I discuss the importance of asexuality within sex education later, I wish to first explore the impact abstinence-based sex education has had on aspec youth in the United States, good or bad. And I begin to explore this very quandary with my personal story, one I believe to be a less visible asexual narrative of assurance and normalization.
Reflecting on my personal experience, having abstinence-based sex education made coming into my asexuality so much easier for myself. It was a vital pillar for making my aceness easier for me to accept. I never had this feeling that I was necessarily broken. There was no explicit event for me that I can recall, where I realized that I was different and that being different was not okay. There have been several events where I have noticed that my desires around sex and romance were different from my peers, but that started in college, not high-school or earlier. And I think that my school's abstinence-based curriculum had a really big impact on that. And I think that’s something not too many people talk about.
So many public schools in the United States use abstinence-only curriculums or push abstinence as the first and best method for sexual safety. [4] I often hear people talking about how they felt pressured into having sex because of how hypersexual college or high school hookup and party culture can be. [5] But, in high school, I found myself having a polar opposite experience with my abstinence-based sex education. I did understand that kids in my high school were hooking up and having sex, but it never sank-in that that’s what I should have been doing. And there were several factors that played into my high school experience and this mindset: that being my friend groups, the social spaces I occupied, the discussions we had within those spaces, and what I was being taught in health class.
My friends and I never really talked about sex, sexual desires, or crushes in high school. Some years after graduating, I learned that my closest friends in high school are also on the ace and/or aro spectrums, so that probably answers a few questions as to why we weren’t following the allonormative, compulsory sexual script high schoolers where expected to. And because I wasn’t having these conversations socially, I only ended up having these conversations in the classroom—because I wasn’t looking into media that talked about sex and sexual desire. Obviously, I consumed it, I mean, trying to find a popular TV show or movie without a sexual or romantic subplot is merely impossible. Yet, I never really processed that sexual desire and sex were things everyone had to do, because I had friends that didn’t want to do it, making my own lacking interest seem normal because of that.
When I went to health class, both in 8th and 10th grade, we always talked about abstinence first and that it was the best thing you could possibly do. I remember my teacher walking up to the front of the room, and quickly talking about practicing abstinence, to then move on to talk about condom usage and safe sex between heterosexual, cisgender, monogamous couples. And I remember thinking to myself that I didn’t need to listen. I felt like I didn’t need these “warnings” because I had no desire to participate in sexual intimacy. Afterall, my teacher instructed us that you should wait until you’re older, until you’re an adult. So, I spent 8th to 12th grade with the idea that my peers and I were not expected to have sex. The idea that my peers were having sex never even crossed my mind. After all, if my school’s telling me, telling every student, not to have sex, then obviously people wouldn’t be. And why would I have a problem with following this rule if my school and New York state was teaching it to us? Why would they ever provide us with a task that was so difficult to maintain? Why would they implement teachings that set us students up for failure?
I had faith in my institution and my country to have my peers and my own safety in mind. I assumed that school knew the best ways to protect and guide its youth. I never once questioned that our education system set us up to fail, and then not assist us when that failure inevitably occurred. Since I thought my educators knew best, their teachings cemented my lacking skepticism around needing to feel sexual attraction. And I never felt sexual attraction, nor did I talk about it with people, so why would I realize that I wasn’t the norm? Yeah, people have sex. But the people I saw and imagined having sex are adults on TV, in music, and my personal life. It was adults, with jobs and college degrees. It was people with children and mortgages. It was not high schoolers, at least in the media I was exposed to, either by force or personal desire. So, if everything in my life was teaching me that being a high schooler meant I don’t have sex, why would I ever question my lacking desire to do just that?
And I never really paused to think about what that meant at the time. Afterall, there was nothing occurring in my life that made me feel like that was a thought I needed to reconsider or think about more deeply. It wasn’t necessarily a superiority thing, but I also never really thought about the fact that that very thought signaled a social difference, that I wasn't following a certain social norm… Yet maybe there was a bit of superiority tied to it. But it didn’t have to do with sex, it had to do with the instructions. I knew that my teachers could just tell me what to do and tell me the “best option.” They could tell me how to follow the script of being a youth in the United States and I didn't need further explanation or to be reprimanded for breaking that rule—or going against their advice. I knew that I wasn't going to do it because I didn't have an interest in doing it. I lucked out (in this specific context) because what they wanted me to do and what I wanted to do were the same thing, albeit for highly different reasons that later brought various forms of strife, grief, and hardship to my doorstep. And I never questioned that our desires weren’t supposed to be the same.
I haven’t really talked about this with anyone else. I would even avoid talking about my early asexual days with other aspec people because of the countless stories I've heard about how painful it is to grow up asexual in a compulsory sexual and/or hypersexual setting. And I didn't have that experience. I felt like I was almost lucky because when I first encountered the words asexual and asexuality, in my senior year of high school, I felt a sense of clarity and unity. College is really when I started to see that divide, and experience forms of othering, total erasure, and discrimination for my (a)sexuality. But beforehand, I didn't. Sure, at times I felt alone and had started to realize my desires (and lacking desires for sex and romance) were the minority. But I had never thought of them as wrong or less than. Learning about asexuality cemented that in me. Because it was proof that others experienced what I was experiencing. It was proof that many people wanted what I wanted, and that was enough proof for me that it was a valid, human experience equal to any sexual or romantic desires others felt.
There are no explicit memories I have in high school where my absence of sexual attraction caused me to see myself in a negative light. Everything seemed to go my way when it came to my asexuality: my friends, my schooling, my aspirations, my desires. Yeah, I felt incredibly isolated all throughout high school. And I think there are a lot of factors that play into that from my neurodivergency to my gender expression and sexuality. I also recognize that my familial experiences were strained, and at times highly unsafe or negative, because of my asexuality. However, those experiences had to do with being queer in a rural, conservative area and less so due to explicitly being asexual. But being asexual in a rural, U.S. setting has its complexities that could fill countless articles and essays, so while I do not wish to discredit the discrimination I experienced, I see it as a separate issue from what I wish to discuss here. When it came to my social and school life, there were no massive roadblocks that caused me to see myself as pathological. And even in the familial setting, I never saw my asexuality as pathological. And I often wonder if other people have similar experiences as my own. If other people had abstinence-based or abstinence-only education (especially in the US public schools), and if it prolonged their unawareness of asexuality or prolonged the sense of normalcy that they experienced. Did it prevent them from being aware of the hypersexual, allonormative world that they lived in, at least in Western society and culture, like it did me? I feel like abstinence-based sex education, the impact it has on your sexuality, and coming into your aceness is rarely talked about if it didn't have a never effect on your personhood, and I think it should be.
In the past four years, my opinion around my personal involvement and understanding of sex education has changed drastically. I think if I knew about asexuality or if sex education was phrased in a non-sexually centered way, rather including more forms of intimacy and need for consent, I would have gotten to where I am now much sooner. The main reason it took me so long to understand my relationship to sex education was this: I didn’t know what questions to ask nor who could ask them. The mere fact that I thought I could ignore what I was being taught in sex education points out the fact that including asexuality in sex education is important. Because, as an asexual person who has no interest in sex, I assumed that it was not relevant to me, to my body and autonomy. But I have people in my life that I love that engage in sexual intimacy. I want to partake in non-sexual forms of intimacy myself, and understanding consent and boundaries is important for that. The difference between consent and unwanted yet consensual intimacy is a discussion that would have a home in sex education. The very mention of asexuality and the differences between sexual attraction, sex drive, and comfort around participating in sex would assist the thousands of aspec youth who find home in the gray and fluid parts of the asexual spectrum. Those teaching would assist in people’s navigation of their sexuality and how they wish to participate in sex rather than forcing themselves to do things they do not wish to do out of obligation and societal pressure, out of the assumption that if you feel sexual attraction, then you must enact it in such a narrow, rigid way. Just because I'm asexual and I don't want to participate in sexual intimacy, does not mean that I don't need to understand what sex positivity and education is. Because I have no choice but to be in a compulsory sexual society, I need to understand it for the sake of being in community with others. I need to understand what it is and how to be safe in it.
Footnotes:
Costello and Kaszyca (2023), pages 116 and 117.
Aspec (also written as acespec) is both a shorthand for asexual spectrum and utilized as an identity label by some members of the asexual community. Someone who identified on the asexual spectrum can also be referred to as aspec. To learn more, read “Dictionary” from Costello and Kaszyca (2023).
See Mollet and Black (2021), Lund (2021), Chan and Hung (2024), Mollet and Black (2023), Brown (2022), and Th-emptyhearse (2018).
See Otta and Santelli (2007), Fox et al. (2019), and The Guttmacher Institute (2023).
See Przybylo (2012) and Gupta (2017).
Citations:
Brown, Sherronda J. Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture. North Atlantic Books, 2022.
Chan, Randolph CH, and Fei Nga Hung. “Sexual Violence Victimization and Substance use Among Individuals Identifying on the Asexual Spectrum: Differences Between Asexuality, Graysexuality, and Demisexuality." The Journal of Sex Research (2024): 1-13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00224499.2024.2351423.
Costello, Sarah and Kayla Kaszyca. Sounds Fake But Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else. Great Britain: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023, 116-117.
Fox, Ashley M., Georgia Himmelstein, Hina Khalid, and Elizabeth A. Howell. “Funding for Abstinence-Only Education and Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention: Does State Ideology Affect Outcomes?” American Journal of Public Health (2019), https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304896?journalCode=ajph.
Gupta, Kristina. ““And Now I’m Just Different, but There’s Nothing Actually Wrong With Me”: Asexual Marginalization and Resistance.” Journal of Homosexuality 64, no. 8 (2017), 998-999, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00918369.2016.1236590.
Lund, Emily M. "Violence Against Asexual Individuals.” In Violence Against LGBTQ+ Persons: Research, Practice, and Advocacy, edited by Emily M. Lund, Claire Burgess, and Andy J. Johnson. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021.
Mollet, Amanda L., and Wayne Black. "A-nother Perspective: An Analysis of Asexual College Students' Experiences with Sexual Violence." Journal of College Student Development 62, no. 5 (2021): 526-546. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/845602.
Mollet, Amanda L., and Wayne Black. "Coercive Rape Tactics Perpetrated Against Asexual College Students: A Quantitative Analysis Considering Students' Multiple Identities." Journal of College Student Development 64, no. 1 (2023): 96-101. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/884291.
Otta, Mary A. and John S. Santelli, “Abstinence and Abstinence-Only Education,” Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology 19, no. 5 (2007), https://journals.lww.com/co-obgyn/abstract/2007/10000/abstinence_and_abstinence_only_education.8.aspx.
Przybylo, Ela. “Producing facts: Empirical Asexuality and the Scientific Study of Sex,” Feminism & Psychology (2012), 15, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ela-Przybylo/publication/258137043_Producing_facts_Empirical_asexuality_and_the_scientific_study_of_sex/links/55e7640408ae21d099c14f87/Producing-facts-Empirical-asexuality-and-the-scientific-study-of-sex.pdf?origin=journalDetail&_tp=eyJwYWdlIjoiam91cm5hbERldGFpbCJ9
The Guttmacher Institute, “Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Programs: Harmful and Ineffective,” Guttmacher, last modified July 18, 2023. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/abstinence-only-programs.
