Media Storm - S5E2 Why does asexuality make the media so angry?

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

It's Valentine's Day! A day full of overpriced chocolates, high expectations, and focus on how much sex you're going to have. So what about those who have no interest in it? 'Ace' is an umbrella term used to describe people who experience little, fluctuating, or no sexual attraction. There are also aromantic people - who experience little to no romantic attraction. Asexuality is often widely misunderstood, including within the LGBTQ+ community. Asexual people are also not recognised in legislation, such as under the UK Equality Act, and Stonewall found asexual people may be at a higher risk of conversion therapy than gay, lesbian and bi individuals. But when asexual activists take to the media to raise these issues, they are met with a chorus of criticism, ignorance, and insults: they're vying for victimhood, or they're offered the enlightening advice to simply "get laid". Here to help us understand why exactly the media are so angry is Yasmin Benoit, model, academic and activist. The episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (@mathildamall) and Helena Wadia (@helenawadia) The music is by Samfire (@soundofsamfire) Follow us @mediastormpod Support us on Patreon! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day to my true Valentine. What are you doing tonight? Because, wait, it's not with me. I know, what the hell? We should stay here? Yeah, should we? Should we just have a sleepover in the studio?

I like it. Sexy. I'm not doing anything because I think Valentine's Day is kind of overrated. I don't know. I'm so excited for this evening. I'm going to go home and I'm going to go to sleep. Wow.

I'm so diet. That is romantic. Yeah, no. Not a Valentine's Day. God, we're just meant to be. I know. Let's run away together.

That would be a happy Valentine's Day. Okay, what are we talking about today? Apart from this. Apparently, our secret affair. Well, with Trump in power,

trans rights, media censorship, it is an incredibly scary time for many LGBT plus people. Definitely. And talking about social media censorship, Ellen Jones is a speaker and a campaigner who's a previous guest of media storms. And she's also a debut author as a very recently. And her book is called Outrage, Why LGBTQ Plus Equality is not yet one and what we can do about it. It's great, but Instagram slash meta don't seem to think so. A picture of Ellen holding her book with the caption celebrating and thanking those who have supported her along the way was taken down. Ellen was asked to prove the post wasn't offensive. Anyway, after about 400 people

tagging Instagram, her post has now been reinstated. But Ellen made a great point when I was chatting to her and she said that she's currently at the front of every bookshop in the country, being displayed by foils and waterstones, yet she had zero mainstream media interest in covering her book. And then because of that, she was relying on social media to spread the word. Now, we don't know that this Instagram post was taken down because the content was queer related. But as Ellen pointed out, several queer authors were hit with the same issue in the same 24-hour period. And as we see Mark Zuckerberg, head of meta, cozying up to Donald Trump, many minority content creators are saying their reach has become more limited. Yeah.

And so there are so many reasons that we wanted to focus on the queer community this week. But even within that community, there are groups that do not get as much media retention or protection as others. And so this Valentine's Day, we wanted to focus on one of those communities, the asexual community. Admittedly, we started out researching asexuality as a topic we were both really ignorant about. So we're hoping this episode is a space for us to all learn about. it together. Definitely. Now I think it would be useful to give a definition. You'll likely hear us use the term ace or maybe acephobia. Ace is an umbrella term used to describe people who experience little fluctuating or no sexual attraction. There's also a difference between

a romantic and asexual. Aromantic refers to people who experience little to no romantic attraction, while asexual people experience little to no sexual attraction. But asexuality is often widely misunderstood even within the LGBTQ plus community. So we will ultimately leave it to our guests to help us clear up some of the main myths later on. Data shows about 1 to 2% of the US and UK's population are asexual, but only 1 and 4 are open about their sexuality with friends. Asexual people are also not recognised in legislation, such as under the UK Equality

Act, or in most LGBTQ Plus specific training for healthcare professionals. While more and more TV shows, films and mainstream media are exploring queer experiences, is there still a pointed lack of exposure given to asexuality? And when asexuality is represented, is it helpful or hurtful? There are reports that asexual people are less happy. Well, you'd assume that's the case, yeah. What's an unfortunate pose for somebody who doesn't want any sexual attention? piggybacking off the genuine victimisation of homosexual police.

Do they need to be recognised as a group? You're just not oppressed. No one cares what you don't get up to in the bedroom. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Helena Wadia and I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's Media Storm, why does asexuality make the media so angry? Welcome to the Media Storm Studio. Today's guest is a British model academic and activist.

She led the UK's first asexual rights initiative, co-founded International Asexuality Day, hosted the first asexual themed bar at Pride in London, and was the first openly asexual woman to appear on the cover of a UK magazine. She also published the UK's first report, into asexual discrimination with Stonewall and has since continually provided hard data into this vastly under-researched area. Welcome to the studio, Yasmin Benoit. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for being here. And Yasmin, we at Media Storm have been very fortunate with the timing of this episode because thanks to your own academic work, it coincides with having some new rare, hard data on the subject of asexuality. So on the 7th of February, King's College published a paper with you as one of the authors and it tells us why this episode is important. Asexuality representation is not just a problem of invisibility. There is real ridicule and discrimination resulting from the misunderstandings around it. The study found a significant number of the people they spoke to

held prejudice towards the asexual community. Can you tell us what this prejudice actually looked like? Yeah, so in the study we were looking at public attitudes. towards asexual people and we did this thing called a double list experiment to try and alleviate social desirability bias

because you often get that when you're asking people for their opinions on marginalized groups everybody tries to sound like as good as possible and doesn't want to say what they're really thinking. But then what was interesting

when we were doing it is that there actually was no social desirability bias for the asexual community. People had no radar of oh, this would be a bad thing to say about this. group so we might as well have just asked them straight up because people would have just said it

anyway. They had absolutely like no radar for what was offensive and what wasn't, which I guess shows that we could be much more vulnerable to receiving this kind of abuse and this kind of prejudice because it found that one in three people think that asexuality is something that can be cured with therapy, which is definitely symptomatic of the medicalization of asexuality in the UK. and that was a finding that didn't surprise me that much personally. They also found that one in nine doesn't think that asexual people exist at all. And yeah, they had no problems just saying that outright. And two in five said that they don't think that you can be asexual if you have sex,

which I guess is a fundamental misunderstanding of what asexuality is as an orientation. And also that a quarter thought that asexual people just hadn't met the right person yet and that that's all it was. So yeah, it's kind of one of the first studies to kind of give an indication into what people are thinking and how widespread it is. Because even though I've had people telling me these things all the time, there isn't anything that I can really like reference people to outside of like my Twitter comments.

So it's good to have something like written down. Yeah. Absolutely. And so, you know, in terms of the actual real life harm this causes people, if, as you say, many people are under the illusion, that asexuality is something that can be cured or is even a problem in the first place and needs to be cured. Does this mean that asexual people might be put through conversion therapy, for example?

Yeah, it was actually the Government Equality's Office when they did the National LGBT Survey back in 2018. They found that asexual people are 10% more likely to be offered or to undergo conversion therapy compared to other orientations. So, they're actually one of the most vulnerable groups to that. And again, that wasn't something that surprised me because I think from the time when I was like 14 onwards, I've had people saying like, oh, you should see a doctor about that. There's probably a way to fix that. Like, this must be some kind of condition that can be resolved.

And people still tell me that all the time, especially on social media. And it's kind of like an unfortunate asexual right of passage to have people saying that to you. How does that feel for you when people say stuff like that? I think it was quite strange about it. It's just that, you know, I think it's just that, you know, I think. think on the most part, people have a good gauge of what not to say when it comes to other orientations. Like, I think nowadays, like, people would register, like, oh, if someone tells me they're gay, I shouldn't tell them that you should probably fix that with therapy. Like,

most people can kind of tell that that's an inappropriate thing or to suggest to anyone that you can fix their sexual orientation with therapy would be bad. But then when it comes to as sexuality, like, the people are very comfortable. Even the most, like, intelligent, like, well-meaning people will still come out with that. And that was actually something else that, like, the research indicated because we were largely doing it on, like, a sample of, like, younger people. There were quite a lot of LGBTQ plus people in the sample. There were quite an educated people in the sample. So it's kind of a demographic you would expect to be more accepting or more knowledgeable, but even they were still saying that.

So it's quite a widespread thing. Absolutely. And we'll definitely get into attitudes within the LGBT community a little later on in the episode. but you know you mentioned already some common myths that people who are asexual face and you know we have to admit when we started researching this episode like neither of us knew a huge amount about asexuality so thank you by the way for reaching out and putting it on our radar because Yasmin actually suggested this episode so to help us and our listeners better understand what it actually means to be ace or asexual we'd love you to yeah just help us out a bit. And as you mentioned, one common myth is that you can't have sex and be asexual. So what does it mean to be asexual? And what does that spectrum look like? Yeah. So the most widely accepted definition of asexuality is just that it means experiencing little to no sexual attraction towards anyone, regardless of their gender. So it is a type of

sexual orientation that falls under the A and LGBTQIA plus. It's not the same as abstaining from sex. It's not like a lifestyle choice. It's not synonymous with celibacy, which is something else people tend to get it confused with. So in the same way as like you might be a gay man who's had sex with women before. It doesn't mean you're not gay anymore. Same for as sexuality. It's not about your attitudes towards sex or wherever or not you have done it before. I think especially as lots of asexual people are in romantic relationships with people that aren't asexual. So in those relationships, they might then be doing that with their partner because that's something that their partner still desires and they don't mind when we're talking about the sexual attraction

aspect for some that might be like absolutely none like zero never for some it might be like a very rare occasion or kind of like a very weak feeling and they might identify as being more gray asexual as the term is or for some there might have to be the condition in those rare instances where they might feel some sexual attraction that there has to be an emotional bond with the person first and then in which case that's a type of gray as sexuality that they call demisexuality, so there are different terms that kind of fall underneath it, but the overarching theme is experiencing little to no sexual attraction. You also pointed, you know, within that spectrum too, the fact that people are often in relationships and asexual doesn't necessarily

mean aromantic, but aromantic also exists, right? Yes, I happen to be both, but it's not like a given lots of asexual people still experience romantic attraction, and for those you kind of use terms like heteromantic, for example, or homeromantic or biromantic or aromantic if you don't experience romantic attraction either. Then also, if you are asexual and aromantic like me, which means that, you know, I'm not going to have a romantic relationship. People kind of apply a lot of judgments in terms of not just how they think your life is going to be, but also what kind of person you must be to not be experiencing that and to not have the capacity to experienced that. They kind of assume you must be like Voldemort or something. You must be like a

total sociopath, I think, is in my top ten of things that I get called. And just, you know, to give people a sense of the scale of asexuality, how common is it? The statistics vary a little bit, but I think if you were to kind of find the average, it's like roughly around 1% of the population. I remember the Rainbow Britain report kind of estimated it being more around like 2%. Whereas the census kind of said it was at like zero point something, which is actually way lower than anything else has ever estimated it. So I think it's something to do with the phrasing.

So yeah, I would probably say it's around between 1% of the population, especially if you take the wider spectrum into account, which sounds small. It's like the same as gingers, right? Yeah, it's like the same as ginger people. It's the example I always give. And it's like everybody knows a ginger person. It's not that unconsor.

And also the trans population is also like similar to that. And that's still, you know, an important population that is talked about. So it's not that tiny really. A lot of these misconceptions that you've addressed about asexual people, these come from a lack of visibility in the media. But there are also cases where there's actively negative representations in the media. Now, the common pitfall we always cool out here at Media Storm is coverage. about a community that doesn't include a community.

There's also often, I've seen kind of an ironic mix of commentators disbelieving that discrimination against asexual people exists at the same time as ridiculing and mocking asexual people. At the end of 2023, a landmark report from Stonewall came out that you, Yasmin, participated in. It investigated the discrimination faced by ace people in the UK. following this, you faced a personal targeting and a backlash from right-wing media, including a comment piece in spite which accused you and your fellow ace representatives

of vying for a spot at the top of the victimhood pile and ignorantly suggested a quickie might improve their mood. A discussion on GB News by someone who clearly hadn't read the report since their summary of it was wildly inaccurate also offered the enlightening advice, No wonder they're unhappy. They're not getting any. You know, this was a whole feature in which people were speaking about you and not to you. Does this categorize a lot of the media coverage towards you and other asexuality campaigners? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Spike to love me. They're always like, sometimes I wish that I could like hire these people to do my PR because they're like the first to write an article about me within five minutes of me releasing something. I'm like, you were waiting up all night for that to drop so you can. Yeah, like, sorry you're so obsessed with me. Like, literally, I send them those gifts on Twitter whenever they try and tweet at me.

Like, hey, guys, always you. I mean, I feel like it's more a me thing, honestly. I don't see other asexual people that do this kind of stuff. I mean, there aren't many of them that do. But it tends to be, like, very much a me thing. I feel like I kind of statistically just get more backlash than other people. Because I'm also one of the few black women doing this, I'm sure it has. something to do with it. But it's definitely kind of becoming an increasing thing. Like it's almost

like a tradition. Every time I go to Pride in June, like, okay, when is the piece going to come out and the spectator complaining about me going to Pride? Like every year, everyone's like scandalized that I do Pride in London, even though I've been doing it for a while now. Wait, what's so scandalizing about it? That I go and I'm there. People are getting really upset about it. Like, yeah, people get really upset. I mean, last year I was at the front of Pride in London. I was leading it and I was in the Piccadilly Circus campaign. So people were really

mad that year. Who was mad? Just the same people. Spiked. Spectator. Unheard. All of those. It kind of goes viral on Twitter every single time and then people get mad at my outfits. The horse's like you should be covered up. Okay. Let's talk about that because a common theme

we've noticed with some of the criticism against you is a very physical physical focus. Yeah, physical focus. You're a muddle. Sometimes you muddle lingerie. Your body, your face, are part of your professional currency. People have, however, criticized you for being asexual and sexy, presenting your body,

displaying cleavage. And this is there to some people questioning whether you're even asexual at all. Yeah, here's some of the examples of the comments. You know, somebody complaining that you've got your tits out. somebody saying if you want to see a DEI hired diversity equity and inclusion hire look no further than this. I mean, why do you think people feel the need to weigh in on this? But I suppose more critically, what does it reveal about the nature of their criticism? I mean, what's interesting about it is that, I mean, like, when I kind of started doing the activism,

I genuinely didn't think that like the fact that I've like modeled before would be a big deal. I was like, well, surely we're kind of like beyond the whole, oh, women only were closed. to make men want to have sex with them things. So I was like, oh, that's not even going to be a thing. And then quite quickly I realized that it actually was a thing. And people found it very controversial that I was so much as were eyeliner while being asexual. And I think that what's particularly strange about it

is that most of those kind of comments are coming from so-called gender-critical feminists who say that their whole thing is trans women are a problem. But the cisgender women, those are the ones who are like protecting and supporting, but at the same time you're a stupid slut. lot who needs to put a clothes on. So I'm like, isn't that kind of contradictory to the, to like, shouldn't this not be your concern? Like my cleavage or how long my skirt is saying

that I must want sex and that I'm like a sex toy and like I'm just like some kind of walking problem on the basis of my appearance seems to directly go against what you claimed your mission was, which then I feel like highlights that it's not actually, all the things that they say is nothing to do with protecting or supporting women at all. And you mentioned before that part of this probably has to do with the fact that you are a black woman. In what ways does race and racism play into this, do you think? I mean, black women were probably one of the most hyper-sexualized demographics in the world. Like, I realized quite quickly, it's not actually anything to do with what I'm wearing.

Like, I could, like, I'll post a picture in like jeans and a t-shirt. And then they're like, oh, but your eyes are giving, there's something very seductive in the look in your eyes. Like, well, that's a you thing, though. that's not actually my eyes. I mean, I remember after I did Pride last year, G.B. News did a whole segment talking about how my lips are too pouty. And so it's just strained for an asexual person to have such pouty lips. Like, I'm just black.

Full lips, I'm sorry. But, like, that's just, like, a feature of my face. So you can't really avoid it. I'm like, it's not anything to do with the clothes, really. they'll be like oh well your body shape or your I don't know there's something about you that just seems too sexual to it's like that's that's just you're projecting that and I feel like it's not coincidental that it's almost entirely coming from white people like yeah I feel like there's definitely a reason why that is wow double wow double wow and the thing is what those media reports that dedicated entire segments to the poutiness of your lips didn't actually look at or ask you about was the fundamental purpose behind the research that you had conducted. You participated in this landmark report with Stonewall. And what it actually looked at was the importance of legislation designed to protect asexual people. And this doesn't

seem to be the direction that society is moving in right now. I mean diversity and inclusion initiatives are under attack. This month in the US, some government agencies have updated their websites to remove the T and Q that they had in LGBT-Pus, reducing the acronym to LGBT-B. This, of course, removes references not just to transgender and intersex people, but also asexual people. So help us to understand why legislation may be important. What positive difference is do you believe that this could make for real people's lives and for society in general? It provides an incentive, like just for people to even consider that they're missing something or to consider that there's an issue, or even that there's another community

that exists and needs the same protection as everybody else. I mean, as we've been talking about things that people say online, and these are things people have said to me in person as well, like, legally speaking, that would probably be considered a hate crime to say these things, but we're not protected by hate crime law, so there is not anything I could do about that. We're not included in the Equality Act, which defines sexual orientation as being towards either a man, women, or both, there is no neither, so asexuality doesn't fall under that. It means that we're still medicalized in the UK. You said that before. What do you mean medicalized? We're medicalized. Well, in the UK, we mainly use the international classification of diseases as a medical

manual, and in Europe as well. The U.S. tends to use the DSM, the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. And in the UK, we have one called hyperactive sexual desire disorder, which pretty much means if you're not experiencing desire or attraction towards other people enough, that is considered as a medical condition. Okay. So it's seen as a disorder, not an orientation. Yes. And so if you are to describe that to a medical professional,

like their instinct would be, okay, this is something that needs fixing. And that was something we were looking at in the report because, as I said, the government's research had found that we're 10% more likely to be offered or to undergo conversion therapy. But I didn't say anything else, aside from that of like, so where? is the conversant therapy and how is it happening and who's it happening too but i had already known like anecdotally that it's a health care issue like it's not really a religious issue as much as it is of other orientations and it was disproportionately impacting um asexual women and people with vaginas because you know we go to gynaecologists and we have like smear tests and all those things where they

expect you to be sexually active over the age of 25 and if you aren't sometimes they will then be like well why not? And if you give an honest answer to that, then it's like, okay, pause on whatever you came here. There's a red flag here. You have a condition. You don't seem to realize that, but you do. So that's what our priority is going to be is fixing that condition. So we're going to book you into psychosexual therapy. And we're going to get you some medication and we're going to fix whatever problem this is because obviously what you're describing has to be a medical condition. and that was very much like the path that people ended up going down

and I noticed that within that psychosexual therapy they definitely were not trying to make more lesbians they were telling the people like you need to be sexually attracted to men why aren't you sexually attracted to men let's unpack that and let's do whatever we can to kind of coerce you or convince you that you need to be having sex with men

and that was kind of the purpose and meanwhile whatever medical problem they went there with is not being treated because they're only concerned about fixing the asexuality part. So that's the medicalization that we're dealing with. And even in the U.S. and the DSM, they put a qualifier back in like 2013 saying, don't diagnose asexual people with this,

but we don't have that here. So I feel like that's why our conversion therapy rates are so high. I wonder if, you know, one of the reason that, you know, also that aren't so many people speaking out about this. Well, I can understand it, given the current political climate that we're in, And something your own personal experience has point to is the risk of visibility. Right now, you know, we look at the campaign for trans rights

and how it's been weaponized in populist politics, being framed as a threat and blown wildly out of proportion. Do you ever worry that, you know, more visibility could bring similar negative attention to the asexual community? And do you think that's a reason that there aren't many people speaking out? Yeah, I think it is a combination. of things, I think. People don't want to speak out because, you know, they do, there is stigma and they don't want to experience that, especially not on like a public scale. Like I know even

when I've tried to do things and get other people involved, they're like, oh, but I don't want to show my face, though. Oh, I don't want to give my names. Like, but people don't empathize with a block of text in the same way as they do like a person, but people, they don't want to put themselves in that position. And I get it because we see what happens to me. But it does kind of make it harder. And I think that, you know, we're kind of seeing, I feel like, the beginnings of asexuality being caught within the same kind of media backlash that we're seeing from orientations. In fact, it's very much connected. I mean, when I did the report with Stonewall, or even when I first started working with Stonewall, like the same publications we mentioned were like, oh, okay,

so Stonewall, by pushing puberty blockers, has created an asexual generation of people with like botched sexuality and thus they've now had to create a new orientation to justify this generation of people that have access to puberty blockers apparently and thus then they have used me to appeal to the youth and try to normalize it and then we can make loads and loads of money somehow is what they genuinely publish and think obviously duh but yeah you can see now that then the asexual community are potentially potentially being starting to be thrown onto the bus in the same way that the trans community are. And, you know, if we're looking at the rise in queer phobia in general,

with this demonization of trans people and gender and sexual minorities, how do those different versions of anti-queerness interacts and feed into each other, like transphobia feeding into acephobia, for example? I think it's a similar thing to what we've seen like throughout history, where it's always like just because they start with one group doesn't mean that it's just like okay well we've done that now like we're just going to go back to normal it's like no it does have a knock on effect because what it's showing is that it's okay to target a minority group of people and demonize them publicly take their rights away and why would they then stop

at one when you can kind of use the exact same rhetoric like the same rhetoric that they're using towards trans people is the one they used to was gay people I get called a groomer all the time. And I'm like, it doesn't even make sense. What? What would you be grooming them? It's like, I'm a sexual deviant. That doesn't even like, what these arguments don't even make sense, but they just regurgitate the exact same things. And you're like, okay, well, we can get away with saying these things in the media. We know that now. So, and, you know, how do we spice up the segments a little bit more or less pick a new group? And I think you've also just put your

finger on the reason for this anger that we see, this faux anger. As, you know, as, you know, you have repeatedly pointed out there is no consistency in the logic right if you're trying to protect women then why are you attacking a woman who you know for not having sex how are you a sexual deviant you know because you're asexual like you said the the logic isn't there but i think you did just put your finger on what logic is there which is that demonizing making villains out of easy and vulnerable and marginalized groups is rewarding at this point in time really rewarding for certain media, for certain politicians who get the clicks, get the emotion, staring, present themselves as sort of saviors against these perceived imagined threats.

That's what it seems to come down to all the time. I think definitely now that we have, like I guess, more of a kind of click-based culture, I think, you know, now that, you know, on platforms like X, you can buy the blue tick and then gain a tiny, like such a tiny amount of revenue. I'm like, you're really tweeting every five minutes and a hope of making what, pence, really? Like, this is like way too much effort. But there's like a financial incentive for these things. And it's almost like a cult of personality that builds around people that literally just stir outrage like all the time. And I think even from when I kind of first started

doing this, I quickly realized that the media was kind of using me in particular as like the bait. Like they'd put my picture on the front and they would specifically choose like a lingerie shot or something even though I like sent them a bunch of them just like in like normal clothes and then they'd go the she doesn't want sex is like the headline so people will then comment and be like but she looks like she wants sex and it's like okay I see what you're doing here but this is not actually beneficial for me and no one's reading what I actually said they're just outraged by the picture and the headline so yeah I feel like nowadays it's even like a lot harder to communicate messages that people might have been more receptive to like in the past

I mean, asexual activism's been happening, not noticed much, but it has been happening since like the early 2000s at least. And it wasn't like this before. Do you find then that there is also that lack of visibility or that lack of support from within the wider queer community, the LGBTQ plus community as well? Yeah, and I think that it's one of those things where I guess we've kind of seen. A lot of them are part.

of the queer community, like, we kind of see, like, LGBT Alliance and all those people that are kind of trying to almost, like, radicalize and cause this division and, like, risk from people's ears. Like, you know, if these people have a seat at the table, then you're not going to anymore. And when I was at Pride, people literally were commenting, like, oh, my gosh, you've ruined Pride, so gay people can't go to Pride anymore. Like, it's like, oh, yeah, there's no gay people at Pride. Not one. If you look at Pride in London, there's none. No one's there. It's like, come on. It's sparse.

Like, why did they get? But it's like, people seem to genuinely think that, okay, well, if this is including these people, then that completely takes away from all these other people, so you can't just exist in the same space at the same time, which we have been doing for a while. So I can't, like, a good chunk of the hate I get online is technically coming from people within the community, but it is the same people who are the, ones that don't want trans people there and a bit of a question mark over by people. So I'm not quite sure about them either.

Or any other letter that kind of goes beyond like the G, really. Jasmine, thank you so much for joining us on Media Storm. Tell us where can people follow you? And do you have anything that you'd like to plug? You can find me at the Yasmin Benoit. That's my username on all platforms. And if you want to find the research that I've done, you can find, the Ace in the UK report on Stonewall site and also my King's College one is called

asexuality in the UK and you can also find that on their site as well. Thank you for listening. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shoutouts to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal, at Helen Awadier, and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helen Awadier and Matilda Mallinson.

The music is by Samphire.