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

by Sherronda J. Brown

Some may not have pinned down the best language to describe or talk about their personal relationship to sex, attraction, and desire, but they find a home in asexuality nonetheless because they recognize their experience as being atypical, as outside the “normativity” of allosexuality.

If you’ve never had sex, then you can’t know that you are asexual. If you have had sex, then you just haven’t had enough sex to know what you like yet. But you also can’t possibly be asexual if you’ve had “too much” sex, especially if you enjoyed any part of it. If you come out as ace before a certain age, then it’s too early to know that about yourself. After a certain age, you’re a fraud because otherwise you would have come out sooner.