“‘Ha. I guess I’m a bit jealous.'
‘Why?’ I asked, confused.
She looked at me. ‘I just wasted a lot of time. That’s all.’”
When I was 17, I realised I was asexual. It took me a long time to come to this realisation, and once I had, the remainder of my teens and early 20s were spent searching for asexual representation in popular media. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that Alice Oseman’s latest novel, Loveless — an own-voices coming out story about an aromantic asexual girl in her first year of university — has been high on my list of anticipated book releases for this year. Although I have graduated out of the target demographic for Loveless, I was still excited to see what Alice could bring to the table.
As an own-voices reviewer, this is the most authentic asexual representation I have ever read. The protaganist, Georgia, is feeling lost and isolated; all of her peers are having sex and falling in love, but Georgia has never even been kissed, and she feels like she’s falling behind. She knows she’s supposed to want all these things, and she wants to want them, but everytime she finds herself in a romantic or sexual situation, she balks, and she can’t understand why. Is something wrong with her? Has something broken inside her? I could relate to Georgia so strongly here; when I was her age, I was obsessed with the idea of falling in love, but whenever the opportunity arose, I bolted. Another part of Georgia’s journey that I found very genuine was her dismay upon discovering how often non-asexual people think about sex. She is shocked to discover she is relatively alone in the fact that she never pictures anyone in her masturbatory fantasies — she never even pictures herself in them — and is discouraged to find that most other people think about sex a lot, if not all, of the time. This was the part of Georgia’s journey with which I identified the most. Realising that my aversion to sex was not universal was the thing that made me feel the most as if there was something wrong with me — if everyone but me was excited about sex, how would anyone ever fall in love with me or want to be with me? Unlike Georgia, I’m not aromantic, but I still resonated with her fear that she would never be loveable. There were smaller details, too: Georgia learns about asexuality from a friend who confidently identifies that way, which is how I first heard of it, too. She Google searches “am I gay?” and takes the Kinsey Scale test online, finding the results as unsatisfying as I found them. She’s afraid to come out to anyone because she worries she’ll be told she’s weird, and she’s right to worry: when I came out to my first boyfriend, his immediate response was, “Wow, that’s weird!” From top to bottom, Georgia’s journey rang with the authenticity that only occurs when an author writes from personal experience, and it was refreshing to read a dedicated asexual story from an author who was clearly channeling their own coming out experience.
While I may no longer require asexual representation myself — I’ve long since come to terms with my sexuality, and have moved on from my need to see myself represented on the page and screen — I am still thrilled that a book this personal exists for every other asexual and aromantic person still trying to accept themselves. According to statistics, approximately 1% of the population identify as asexual. In that regard, asexuality is one of the loneliest sexualities in the world; not only is the asexual community extremely small, it’s also a sexuality naturally associated with isolation (although this isn’t necessarily accurate). When you’re asexual, it’s easy to convince yourself that you will never find someone who will love you without sex involved. It’s incredibly lonely and alienating, especially when you don’t have any asexual peers or have access to asexual representation. That’s why this book is so valuable: it’s asexual representation, which normalises asexuality itself, but it also normalises the process of realising and coming to terms with your asexuality. It takes Georgia a long time to accept herself; she spends months struggling with self-hatred, furious at herself for being intolerant of sex and romance but unable to happily behave any other way. Her path to self-acceptance is emblematic of the importance of asexual representation, and what’s at stake without it. To quote myself, at length, in an article I wrote several years ago for Craccum magazine:
Asexual representation matters. It matters because I spent the majority of my life wondering what was broken inside me, because there was nothing to teach me that broken was the farthest thing from what I was [...] It matters because of all the people who will wrongly identify because they never knew asexuality was an option. It matters because people say to me, “you just haven’t met the right guy yet!” and insist that my asexuality can be ‘cured’ if only I sleep with the right person. It matters because being told that you’re weird by someone you really care about hurts, because being asked if you “just lie there” is an easily avoidable ignorance. It matters because all representation matters. It matters because no one should have to spend seventeen years feeling isolated and alienated and broken.
I may no longer need asexual representation, but hundreds of thousands of people do, and I think Oseman has done a wonderful job of portraying asexuality for the purpose of normalising it, as well as for the purpose of allowing asexual people to feel visible and validated.
As much as I think this is an important book that achieves its representational goals, I am nevertheless too sensible of the defects that I found while reading. Although Georgia’s character arc was a rousing success, I didn’t particularly enjoy the novel plot-wise and felt that the B-plot lacked motive and conviction. Sunil, a friend Georgia makes at uni, is a cinnamon roll and must be protected at all costs, and her roommate, Rooney, reminded me pleasantly of Reagan from Fangirl, but I found Pip irritating when I was obviously meant to find her quirky and endearing, and Jason had little more personality than a slice of white bread. The dialogue was a touch cheesy and unrealistic, I do think that Oseman went too heavy on the pop culture references, and the side romance/conflict felt orchestrated and lacked convincing chemistry. Indeed, without the saving grace of Georgia’s sexual crisis, I most likely would not have liked this book. This might be more of a problem from my end; I have outgrown young adult fiction, and find the whole genre a lot more cheesy and annoying than I used to. If this book had come out five years earlier, I’ve no doubt that I would have adored it and that it would have meant the world to me on all accounts. Unfortunately, I’m a bit too old to enjoy the volume of Scooby Doo references that Oseman chose to include, and found them to the detriment of my enjoyment of the novel as a whole.
Despite my personal criticisms, Loveless is a successful novel that achieves what it set out to do and creates a much-needed safe space for asexual and aromantic people to see themselves and their personal journeys represented in popular media. I admire Alice Oseman for publishing something so obviously and deeply personal; it takes a great deal of courage to lay yourself bare on the page for the whole world to see, and I hope she knows how much her bravery is going to help people who feel lost and alone.
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