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

by Sherronda J. Brown

asexuality can exist, does exist, and should exist in such a way that we don’t need to make utility of it.

It understands that sex can be technically consensual, but still unwanted.

Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.

white asexuals often claim asexual queerness as a property, just as whiteness itself is claimed as a property, as a space that others are barred from entering into.

I had always failed to perform heterosexuality correctly, but I was not evidencing my deviation from heterosexuality in a way that some could recognize as queer enough.

If we largely define queerness by whether or not we experience these abuses “enough” to be considered authentic, what room does this leave us to embrace our queer identities outside these abuses, especially when our collective goal is to dismantle them altogether?

Gatekeeping is always about power—in the same way that borders are always about power, in the same way that policing is always about power, in the same way that categorization is often about determining who should have power over whom.

Asexual Is Queer

In a capitalist society, this means that these patterns, and the “maximum productivity” of our bodies—including sex and reproduction—become tied to capitalist interests.

Sex becomes yet another means of productivity to sustain the exploitative system.

Of course, their concern is a lie; in projecting and forcing their own ideas of sexual health onto asexuals, they demonstrate that they have no consideration for how emotionally distressing it is to be repeatedly told that you are a failure, you are sick, you should be “fixed,” you need “help” because your relationship with sex and desire makes other people uncomfortable and challenges their narrow worldview.

Asexuals, as well as allosexuals with perceived low sexual desire, do not owe the narrow ideal of sexual health to anyone, particularly when we know that the “healthy sex life” others demand of us, and that we often feel pressured to seek out, would be detrimental to our actual health and well-being.

Have I spent my life mistaking a desire for attention and validation from certain people as attraction to them?

The idea that penis-in-vagina sex is “supposed to be painful or uncomfortable” for people with vaginas continues to be especially pervasive. These messages, and more, result in many asexuals and lesbians spending years mistakenly believing that unsatisfying, miserable, and traumatic experiences with heterosexuality are “normal,” unavoidable, and as to be expected. Therefore, we may never even consider, until many years later, that we are incompatible, misaligned, or at odds with heterosexuality itself.

Bambi-sexuality, which is defined as “Physical interaction centered more about touching, kissing, and caressing than around genital sexuality.”

Compulsory sexuality is a cage. If we cannot make our own determinations about our sexual lives because of social convention and gendered or racialized expectations of sexuality; if we cannot make our own reproductive choices because we are called on to use our bodies to produce future laborers to be exploited by racial capitalism or to counteract the mythical “white genocide”; if we cannot honor the natural ebb and flow of sexual desire because “low” desire is pathologized as an individual psychological or physiological dysfunction; if we cannot fathom untethering humanness from allosexuality because sexlessness, or near-sexlessness, makes asexuals into animal-like or mechanistic figures in the social imagination; if we cannot envisage and honor a genuine Black asexuality because Blackness and the Black body are hypersexualized, because anti-Black logics relegate the Black asexual to a space of distinct impossibility, then we are not free.

More recently, I’m understanding that another part of my discomfort with this attention growing up, or things like street harassment today, are because I typically don’t enjoy being perceived as a sexual person or object of someone else’s desire, and particularly as a sexual ‘woman.’