text: In 2016, Jughead's orientation was confirmed to be asexual in the stories of Chip Zdarsky (and later Ryan North and Mark Waid) for the Jughead comics as part of the New Riverdale line. Zdarsky said of his run on the book that "the next writer could make him discover girls or boys or both and that's totally fine. There have been iterations of Jughead over the decades where he has been interested in girls, so there's room to play around if someone was inclined. For me though, I like an asexual Jughead." He later tweeted that he viewed Jughead as "ace and probably demi-romantic, but for the purposes of his teen years, aro." Both Riverdale fans in the asexual community and Cole Sprouse, who portrays Jughead in The CW's Riverdale, have complained of asexual erasure in mainstream television and expressed desire to see the character's asexuality explored. However, Sprouse later noted that the Jughead Zdarsky created is the only asexual version so far. At the same time, he said that Jughead is aromantic in the classic Archie stories, "a different thing [from asexuality] but deserves attention as well."
  A group of girls formed the UGAJ (United Girls Against Jughead) in an effort to get him interested in romance, using methods such as computers or food, though ultimately failing.
  For his first 40 years or so of the comic, Jughead often claimed to dislike girls, but a shift in societal attitudes has caused later writers and fans to try different ways of explaining this, such as past heartbreak from childhood romance, bad impressions from Veronica and Ethel, and in the 2015 reboot, asexuality. There has never been one consistent canon explanation for Jughead's avoidance of girls and dating. In one story, Jughead declares, "I don't hate girls—I just love food more!"  In the story "Phood Phobia", Archie and Dilton Doiley discover a hidden layer to this: it turns out that Jughead is actually nervous around girls, and he turns to food for comfort.  When confronted with this, Jughead is stunned; finding out that girls are the reason he enjoys food so much makes him lose his appetite.  In another story, when Jughead saw that Miss Grundy was upset on her birthday, he rallied the other students to cheer her up.