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

by Sherronda J. Brown

Here are just a few things people “know” about sex, attraction, and desire: Sexual attraction and desire, whether queer or heterosexual, are universal; everyone experiences them and should experience them in the same way. Sex is a necessary, unavoidable part of life and inherent to human nature. Everyone is allosexual—experiencing sexual attraction and desire in normative ways. Anyone who does not have sex is merely celibate or abstinent, suppressing their sexual urges for moral, spiritual, or religious reasons, and people who claim not to want sex are disordered or stunted in some way. Sex occurs because sexual attraction and desire signal that we actively want to have sex with someone. Desire for sexual contact is sustained, especially within committed romantic relationships. Partnered sex is more important, more valuable, and more mature than solo sex. These ideas are immovable and not influenced by societal expectations, permissions, or other environmental factors.

To be asexual in a world that privileges normative sexual partnership is to be atypical, Other, queer. It is to exist in such a way that many allosexuals perceive us to be lacking because asexual relationships to sex do not align with theirs, with what we have always been told is “normal” and right and required. In their eyes, seeing the world through the prism of compulsory sexuality, asexuals must be lacking in joy and satisfaction, intimacy and connection, emotional intelligence, maturity, sanity, morality, and humanity.

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.

Compulsory sexuality allows for a tacit refusal or inability to accept the idea that we all have the inherent right to govern our own bodies and make our own decisions about whether or not to engage in sex, and that we can do this based on whatever criteria we deem fit. This right to total sexual autonomy is central to consent, and society’s inability to

properly honor consent and interrogate rape culture—and the ways it is upheld by misogyny and racism—is central to the denial of asexuality.

This book will take a particular focus on people socialized as women—those assigned female or perceived to be women regardless of their actua...

We have to acknowledge the damage that is done when we don’t admit that our society views sex as compulsory, as an inescapable obligation, largely because it is viewed as something owed to men. We have to contend with how that contributes to both rape culture and asexual discrimination, which are often one and the same.

heteronormativity is “both those localized practices and those centralized institutions which legitimize and privilege heterosexuality and heterosexual relationships as fundamental and ‘natural’ within society.”5

Compulsory sexuality and rape culture both work to help keep alive anti-Black sexual stereotypes, which means they both are and always have been tools of white supremacy.

it is past time for asexual communities at large to acknowledge how social anxieties about sexual difference and “deviance” are deeply connected to and informed by anti-Blackness (and anti-Indigeneity), and to recognize how endemic white supremacist thought is to anti-asexual attitudes. Sexual liberation cannot be achieved for those on the margins without challenging both cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy—systems that cannot be divorced from one another and that Black folks have been writing against for centuries.

Asexual people’s “failure” to correctly perform and align with heterosexuality means that a heartbreaking number of us have endured corrective rape and coercive sex because someone thought they could “fix” us, or because they felt we owed it to them, or made us feel like we were somehow hurting them if we did not agree to sex, because their desires were more important to them than our comfort, autonomy, or safety.

This makes asexual vulnerability to sexual violence distinct from non-asexual vulnerability. Asexuals are susceptible to harm from allosexuals of all sexualities in a unique way precisely because the intent of that harm is often to eradicate our asexuality—it’s meant to kill the very thing that sets us apart from all allosexual identities in the first place, that marks our departure from societal sexual norms, and that threatens to expose society’s devotion to compulsory sexuality.

I also believe that challenges made against the existence and validity of asexuality are inherently challenges to sexual boundaries and consent as a whole. It’s a deep, shared denial among acephobes that creates the insistence that asexuality cannot or should not exist, and that it must therefore be “fixed” by them. 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.

acephobia extends beyond these sexual violations and occurs in nearly every arena of our lives. Asexual testimonies include stories of gaslighting, mockery, and abuse by friends, partners, family, coworkers, clergy, medical professionals, and more because of our relationship to sexual attraction and desire. Many of us have been infantilized and belittled because sex is seen as one of the principal markers of maturity and adulthood.

Of the four sexualities the respondents were asked about—the other three being heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual+ individuals—asexuals were perceived to be the least “human” and to have the least emotional capacity.15 Within this dehumanization, asexuals were characterized as more “machine-like” and simultaneously more “animal-like” than people of other sexualities. “Asexuals were seen as relatively cold and emotionless and unrestrained, impulsive, and less sophisticated.”16

The chrononormativity we are expected to abide by in Western societies is propped up by white supremacy, cisheteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism—more specifically, capitalist exploitation of the worker. All of these systems rely heavily on our adherence to a socially prescribed chrononormativity because the timeline we are meant to follow is an essential part of the oppressive systems we live and die under, and we are indoctrinated into the ideology that we are only “successful” if we follow this predetermined timeline when we are young.