Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture

by Sherronda J. Brown

In Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, Emily Nagoski identifies three types of desire: spontaneous, responsive, and context-dependent. She writes, “Where spontaneous desire appears in anticipation of pleasure, responsive desire emerges in response to pleasure,” and meanwhile, context dependent desire fluctuates between spontaneous and responsive, based on the situation.20 In our male-centric culture, spontaneous desire is what is regarded as “normal” and expected because this is how the majority of cis heterosexual men experience sexual desire, and they are considered the default.21 Nagoski estimates that “about a third of women experience primarily or exclusively responsive desire,”22 and says there is an “existing narrative” that a lack of spontaneous desire is disordered or dysfunctional.