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June 4 - June 14, 2025
I believe it is more true to say that asexuality is defined by a relationship to sex that is atypical to what has been decided on by society at large to be normative, and that atypical nature is marked by varying degrees of sexual attraction and desire.
What we call asexuality is only one type of multifaceted experience along a vast spectrum of experiences with sex, attraction, and desire; it is simply another way of being.
Asexual is an umbrella term for those who exist on a spectrum, with a myriad of observations, perspectives, and conclusions about asexuality itself, how we relate to it, and how it fits—or refuses to fit—into the existing world. It is not always synonymous with having rare or absent sexual attraction, nor is it always synonymous with having rare or absent sexual desire.
When there is a constant, urgent cry for it to be known that “some asexuals still have sex”—while this is a fact—there must also be an equally urgent accompanying affirmation for those who prefer not to.
Compulsory sexuality is the idea that sex is universally desired as a feature of human nature, that we are essentially obligated to participate in sex at some point in life, and that there is something fundamentally wrong with anyone who does not want to—whether it be perceived as a defect of morality, psychology, or physiology.
When sex is compulsory, it fosters the sense that we are each duty-bound to consistently engage in a certain arbitrary amount of sexual activity—regarding it as something that should be weighed, measured, and quantified, rather than an experience that people should engage in only when all involved have the desire and ability to do so, regardless of how frequent or infrequent that may be.
Under compulsory sexuality, the desires of those with normative sexual urges are prioritized. It’s a belief system that eschews consent and preaches instant gratification for people who want sex, but cares not for the safety, comfort, health, or autonomy of people who do not. It doesn’t just ask us to comply. It makes way for others to demand, manipulate, coerce, and force us into situations in which we are expected to disregard our own well-being for the sake of “normality.”
In my understanding, asexuality exists as a refusal of compulsory sexuality, in defiance of cisheteropatriarchal mandates, and as an opportunity to deeply interrogate how sexual scripts connect with and inform conceptions of gender and race.
Blackness negates the need for consent in the social imagination since we are constructed as always consenting—either passively or enthusiastically—to the sexualization imposed onto us.
A significant and integral part of acephobia is the stubborn refusal to recognize asexual people as authorities on our own lives, as knowers of our own sexuality.
The very unfortunate reason that we must concern ourselves with the fact that allosexuals overwhelmingly misunderstand asexuality or deny its existence is because of what that misunderstanding and denial leads to: violence and discrimination.
The term corrective rape refers to the rape of any individual who does not conform to gender or sexual norms, committed with the intent to “correct” or punish their transgression.
The fundamental belief at the root of this denial of asexuality is the lie that none of us truly have the freedom to set boundaries that honor our own bodies and sexual autonomy because we live in a society in which sex is expected of us.
Hyperfocus on queer sex and sex roles is a direct result of the oversexualization of queerness as a means to construct it as nothing more than sexual deviance and also to reassert heteronormative gender roles within queer relations—i.e., the myth that mascs cannot be bottoms and fems cannot be tops due to the misogynistic idea that masculine sex partners must always penetrate feminine sex partners because both penetration and masculinity are conflated with dominance and control while femininity and being penetrated are each associated with being passive and submissive under someone else’s
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Centering queerness around sex leaves very little room for queer folks for whom sex is insignificant, or for whom sex is never or rarely possible, or for queer folks who have never had sex before, or for queer folks whose only sexual experiences have been violent. It also leaves a lot of queer people, especially young ones, feeling pressured to have a certain amount or a certain type of sex in order to legitimate or prove their queerness to themselves or to someone else.
It’s time for queer communities to abandon the hierarchy of trauma that supports acephobia with the myth that asexuals do not have “enough” trauma related to our sexual identity to be considered queer. Trauma is not a factor by which queerness should be measured.
Infantilization is a dehumanizing process by which a self-righteous sense of superiority is wielded over someone seen as inferior—assumed to be less mature, more naive, and less worthy of respect.
Pronatalism—which I understand to be a sibling of compulsory sexuality—is the policy or practice, particularly on the government level, of encouraging the birth of children without concern for the quality of life or health of those children and the people who birth them.
The general resistance to asexuality, an orientation which mostly people assigned female and socialized as women identify with, cannot be divorced from this misogyny.
The 2018 National LGBT Survey “Research Report” had approximately 91,000 respondents. It found that asexuals were the most likely to have undergone or been offered conversion therapy, and racially marginalized people were more likely to have undergone or been offered conversion therapy than white respondents.
In the minds of whites who thought like Ellis, it was near impossible for “uncivilized” nonwhite races to experience any absence of sexual desire. This cannot be separated from the enduring racial fetishism, sociosexual terror, and mythologized hypersexualization of the “savage.” Also inseparable from this are white anxieties about “race suicide.” If the white race does not reproduce at rapid and consistent enough rates, then surely they will be overtaken by the “uncivilized races” and inevitably forfeit their institutional and political power to oppress all others.
In order to further entrench myths about the natural superiority of white men, gender policing became a means to help establish whiteness as “civilized” and all other races as inferior savages.
Villainous Asexual and/or Aromantic characters often also dismiss friendships, familial relationships, and other human relationships [and] tend to have a Lack of Empathy as well. Characters might be interested in nothing but their work or might have a near-sexual interest in sadism. If they ever have sex, it’s only to further some agenda.
When dehumanized based on the perceived absence of “uniquely human” characteristics, people are considered animalistic. When dehumanized based on the perceived absence of “human nature” terms, people are seen as mechanistic.
MacInnis and Hodson examine two bases through which people become dehumanized: (1) trait-based, as in the denial of human traits, and (2) emotion-based, as in the denial of human emotions.
Asexuals were seen as the least human, as both animalistic and mechanistic, and were believed to have the fewest “uniquely human” and “human nature” traits among all sexualities included in the study. Asexual people are accustomed to hearing dehumanizing rationalizations for why asexuality either cannot possibly exist or for why asexuals are deviant, with variations on the claims that asexuality “goes against (human) nature” or that “sex is what makes us human.”
“It’s harmful to suggest that asexual and aromantic people are incapable of forming any kind of emotional intimacy or care for others, especially when this is attached to antagonists. There’s a message of ‘Be careful around these people because there’s something about them that might make them behave without care for others’ melding with the idea that being ace or aro means you’re broken somehow,” Melanie says.
It is imperative that we critically engage with what it means for there to be such a connection between humanness and sexual engagement, and to have this connection regarded as eternal, innate, and inseverable. This entanglement of humanness with allosexuality is foundational to compulsory sexuality, and this entanglement necessitates the dehumanization of the asexual.
When we don’t acknowledge how the uses of sex can and sometimes do align with white supremacy and anti-Blackness, people can easily convince themselves (and others) that having sex and reproducing with Black people, or at least expressing a desire to do so, absolves them of their anti-Blackness.
Mammy had to be made into a threat, otherwise white mistresses would have to contend with “the truth of their sexually predatory husbands.”33 To shield themselves and their psyche from this truth, white mistresses often punished Black women for their husband’s sexual violence against them and even “derived a titillating pleasure from whipping black women.”
Mammy’s legacy means that Black people, especially those socialized as women, are never allowed to claim asexuality or sexlessness unless such an existence works to reinforce stereotypes about Black bodies and Black undesirability in ways that are rooted in anti-Blackness, misogynoir, and anti-fatness.
When asexuality is socially prescribed and written onto a particular group of people, it can be used as a tool of control—whether it is to abuse and debase Black people, or to project an image of white sexual purity and superiority. If we are granted the freedom to individually determine our asexuality, then asexuality becomes more difficult to utilize as a tool of white supremacy.
I want us to interrogate what we demand of our queer icons—and more, what kind of performativity we demand from our own queer selves and queer kin—and how this is informed by compulsory sexuality.
Those who are single at heart instead prioritize and delve deeply into aspects of their lives outside of the sexual and romantic, finding profound satisfaction in remaining unpartnered and reveling in their solitary nature. This means that they have no interest in or intention of centering or restructuring their lives around sexual or romantic partnerships, because not doing so allows them to be their happiest, most prosperous, and most authentic self.
The lack of preservation and teaching regarding asexual history does not mean that the history is not there. It means that it has been neglected; it has not been made cohesive.
The more we affirm asexuality, the more asexual people will feel comfortable, safe, and valid in embracing their asexuality, and the more others will see how compulsory sexuality impacts their lives as well.
According to the “2018 Tracking Report: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Grantmaking by U.S. Foundations,” out of a total of a record $209.2 million in funding, only $70 was allocated to asexual communities.7 This was the first time any grant money had gone toward asexual outreach at all.
What Black asexuals and other asexuals of color need are acknowledgments of the racism and anti-Blackness within many asexual spaces, conversations about how we can move toward liberation from white supremacy in asexual spaces, and tangible actions taken to help make this happen.
