For people who can’t see the image for some reason:
It’s a “Dear Abby” column, published in 1995. The letter writer, “Not Looking for a Girlfriend in New Jersey,” identifies as a 53 year old male virgin with no interest in either women or men, despite coworkers having assumptions that his lack of a family means he must be gay.
This man expresses no concern about his situation (other than the presumed exhaustion at being continually misidentified), and suggests he was writing simply so other people could see that “a man who had no interest in sex” exists.
Abby blows it out of the ballpark with her response:
People who have no sexual feelings are called “asexual.” Since it doesn’t appear to bother you, it should present no problem. You are accountable to no one except yourself [emphasis mine].
Here we have the bastion of middle American, the “nice White lady with all the answers”*, normalizing this man’s experience and literally telling him to ignore the haters. Pre Millennium. She even calmly supplies this man with the language to identify himself, since he seems not to have encountered it before; that must have been so empowering for him, to have a word for his experience and identity, and to hear that others shared it.
Everyone, you are valid, and your identity is accountable to no one except yourself.
This phrase is in quotation marks to indicate it was the perception of the “Dear Abby” persona at the time the letter was published. The creator of Dear Abby, and coauthor at the time of the letter’s publishing, was Pauline Phillips, a Jewish woman. Her daughter Jeanne Phillips began helping Pauline on the syndicated column in 1987, and continues the column to this day.
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