‘How Clickbait Media Missed the Real Story About Asexuality’

When King’s College published their first study on asexuality last week, they were not prepared for the online fury it provoked. Their study explored prejudicial attitudes towards asexual or ‘ace’ people — people who experience little, fluctuating or no sexual attraction towards anyone regardless of gender.

Estimated at roughly one per cent of the population, asexual people are about as common as people with ginger hair.

However, following the report, online commenters suggested that the “gullible university” had been “duped” by an academic “so ugly that being asexual must come as a comfort!” (surely also “a DEI hire”).

“This sort of attention seeking activity,” the prestigious university was slammed online, “is an insult to academics”.

One of the paper’s authors was prepared for the backlash. This was not the first rodeo for academic and asexuality activist Yasmin Benoit, who produced the UK’s first asexuality report with Stonewall in 2023.

At the time, Spiked published a comment accusing her and other asexual campaigners of “vying for a spot at the top of the victimhood pile” and suggested “a quickie might improve their mood”.

Despite this being the internet’s most unoriginal joke for asexuals (as one commenter on Benoit’s posts put it: “Go suk sum c0ck and chill babe”), it reverberated across the right-wing media.

GB News dedicated whole segments to Benoit (without inviting her on), offering the enlightening advice, “no wonder they’re unhappy, they’re not getting any.” All this while denying anti-asexual prejudice could possibly exist.

So on this special day of the year, as we’re inundated with Valentine’s propaganda, let’s ask ourselves: why does asexuality make the media so angry?

For one thing, Benoit is not just asexual — she’s also a model, the first openly asexual woman to appear on the cover of a UK magazine. Sometimes she even models lingerie. So obviously, “she wants to attract sexual attention so she can whine about it while loudly rejecting the people she baited/catfished” Benoit has republished some of her trolls’ comments on Instagram.

Covering up doesn’t work either because she has “seductive eyes”. And it doesn’t help that she’s a black woman, as she says, “probably one of the most hypersexualised demographics in the world” — GB News once ran a ragefest about the fullness of her lips being much too sexy for an asexual. “I’m a black woman with full lips,” Benoit pointed out on today’s episode of Media Storm, “it’s just a feature of my face”. 

When she started her activism, comments like this took her aback because “surely we’re beyond the whole ‘women only wear clothes to make men want to have sex with them’ thing?”

But logic isn’t a sticking point for her critics. Many of the most vicious comments Benoit receives are from “so-called gender critical feminists who say their whole thing is protecting and supporting cisgender women [from] trans women,” but at the same time tell her she’s “a stupid slut who needs to put her clothes on”.

A lot of the anger echoes slurs used against gay and trans people. “I get called a groomer all the time,” Benoit reports, “and it doesn’t even make sense! Grooming them for what?”

Another of her critics’ theories is that “Stonewall, by pushing puberty blockers, has created an asexual generation of people with botched sexuality, and thus have now had to create a new orientation to justify this generation of people”. In this conspiracy, Benoit is “used” by Stonewall “to try to normalise” their fictitious orientation (“and we all make loads of money somehow”).

It’s a cacophony of contradictions. But the seemingly illogical nature of the rage reveals it for what it truly is. The logic lies not in rejecting a genuine threat, but in a tried-and-tested clickbait formula for turning minorities into pantomime villains in order to sustain a fragile and self-serving ideology. 

In its anger, the clickbait media missed the actual story: the discoveries made by King’s College’s research. Such as that one in four people wrongly believe asexuality is a mental health problem, and one in three think it can be “cured” with therapy.

The outcomes are based on a survey of 400 people in England. They help to explain a Government finding in 2018 that asexual people are 10% more likely to be offered or undergo conversion therapy than other orientations.

Healthcare professionals are common culprits, because in the UK’s Classification of Diseases (unlike the US’, which was reformed in 2013 to recognise the orientation), asexuality is conflated with ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’. A disorder, not a sexual orientation.

Benoit calls comments to this effect “an unfortunate asexual rite of passage”. People know by now it’s inappropriate (and inaccurate) to tell a gay person they could “fix that with therapy” — but the awareness is scant around asexuality. Maybe if the media represented asexual people more, that would change.

Benoit is calling for targeted protections: inclusion of asexuality alongside other sexual orientations in the Equality Act, and acknowledgement of its existence in LGBTQ-specific training for medical professionals. Is that really so enraging?

Media Storm’s episode, ‘Why does asexuality make the media so angry?’ is out now.