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September 17 - September 26, 2023
All the will, intention, and magic that it takes to conjure something that doesn’t yet exist into the world is found here. What you have in your hands is not only a declaration of time, space, and embodiment; what you have in this book is a grimoire on how to cast yourself and folks like you into the world in a way that won’t be denied.
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What some spiritual traditions will tell you is that queer folk (intentionally inclusive of asexuality) were once prized in their assumed ability to hold certain foresight and wisdom; it was seen as a spiritual rendering of self.
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. —Toni Morrison
Diet culture attaches morality to food as a way to police the way people eat and to bring bodies under colonial and capitalist control. Purity culture attaches morality to sex to do the same.
Even though “lacking sexual attraction and/or desire” is the widely accepted general definition, I do not understand asexuality to be defined by this “lack.” It is not about being without sexuality, though some may choose to describe themselves this way. 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. Asexual experiences stand outside what has been accepted and approved of as “normal” sexual
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It understands that sex can be technically consensual, but still unwanted.
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.
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.
But labels don’t put us in a box. Ideas do.
cisheteropatriarchy
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.”
it is also necessary to examine how various power dynamics work to paint asexuality either as an impossibility, or as not queer (enough), or as somehow both at the same time.
When we view our own experiences inside our own bodies as what is “normal” and then have that idea challenged by new information, it presents us with an uncomfortable situation, but it also presents us with the opportunity to learn and grow.
People are not exposed to the myriad ways one can experience their sexual identities, and it leaves around 1–5 percent of our population [the estimated number of asexuals] out of the conversation.
closing themselves off from their capacity for imagination and critical thought when asexuality is the topic of discussion, even to the point of refusing to acknowledge allosexual as a term that describes them. This response to allosexual mirrors the way others have responded to cis in conversations about trans and nonbinary identities.
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.
Their denial does not negate our existence and their lack of understanding does not taint our authenticity.
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 people who pressure us into sex after we initially, and sometimes repeatedly, decline are always seeking to override our no and “correct” our course toward a yes.
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.
What are the things that would have to be unearthed and attended to if more allosexuals took inventory of their sexual lives and realized that some of the sexual experiences they always told themselves were consensual were actually not wanted?
Many of us have been infantilized and belittled because sex is seen as one of the principal markers of maturity and adulthood.
Trauma is not a factor by which queerness should be measured. In fact, I argue that queerness should not be measured at all.
What queer exclusionists claim is the “straight-passing” of asexuals is nothing more than others projecting their own heteronormative assumptions onto us based on their own narrow notions of how queerness should be performed.
What other people choose to see—and what they choose not to believe—from their own biased perspective is not the responsibility or fault of asexuals.
But the issue is not a matter of us making ourselves easier for them to read; it’s a matter of others doing the work to expand their own imagination.
Through this ideology, asexuality becomes understood as liminal—as an intermediate life phase or condition, a state that is merely in between, transitional, on the cusp. Asexuals are expected to always be working toward moving out of this perceived liminality and into what is accepted as maturity and adulthood.
a relic of colonialism. When European colonizers observed Indigenous Americans eating freely—whenever they were hungry, rather than according to the time of day—they interpreted it as evidence that Indigenous peoples were “uncivilized.”
Chrononormativity, “the use of time to organize human bodies toward maximum productivity,”
Even though we make up the majority of the current workforce, with approximately 72 million millennials represented, our generation controls less than 5 percent of the country’s total wealth, making us collectively four times poorer than baby boomers were at our age.
Many asexual people do feel distress about their relationship to sexual desire prior to learning about the asexuality spectrum, identifying with it, and finally feeling comfortable in their identity. And this distress comes from the experience of navigating compulsory sexuality and acephobia—societal, medical, and interpersonal pressure to have “normal” sexual desires, shame of not conforming to social or cultural norms, fear of losing important connections, and especially cisheterosexual expectations of dutiful sex for people socialized as women.
The medical and scientific communities continue to remain split on whether asexuality should be considered a sexual orientation or a physiological-psychological disorder.
!!!!!!
“Individuals ‘discuss’ sexual freedom all too often in terms that will serve only to reinforce the choices they have made.”
An untold number of people would be significantly helped if there were more awareness of asexuality and the different ways sexual desire can show up. “I know for a fact that if I had seen more representation, or had more conversations or just more education about it, I would not have been as troubled, would not have struggled as much as I did in the beginning,” Ev’Yan says.
with the likes of Sigmund Freud declaring clitoral orgasms to be “immature” and pathologizing those never able to reach orgasm through penis-in-vagina sex alone,20 which nearly 75 percent of people with vaginas are unable to do.
Stories like this would help to fuel the social attitudes that would allow terms like “frigid bitch” to become commonly used as insults against people socialized as women who were noncompliant with cisheteropatriarchal sexual demands.
Am I really straight, or have I just been socialized toward heterosexual attraction? Have I just been conditioned to unquestioningly value and participate in heterosexuality? Have I spent my life mistaking a desire for attention and validation from certain people as attraction to them? How much of the way I (think I) experience attraction has been determined by social norms and compulsory heterosexuality?
from those who have written that narrative onto us—even
But many asexuals have taken this in stride, (half-jokingly) concluding that, if we are not human, then surely we must be displaced gods.
“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.
I also want us to interrogate how sexuality has become regarded in the social imagination, so that asexuals are understood as abnormally lacking sexuality to the point of dehumanization while Blackness is hypersexualized to the point of dehumanization. We must think more deeply and ask more questions about what it means when these two phenomena happen simultaneously.
As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson attests, “Eurocentric humanism needs blackness as a prop in order to erect whiteness: to define its own limits and to designate humanity as an achievement as well as to give form to the category of ‘the animal.’”
Regardless of whether or not the image my friend shared with me was real, what is remarkable about it is the fact that it is wholly believable and, frankly, unsurprising
The fetishization and hypersexualization of Black people continue to provide a mask for the dehumanization of Blackness itself, but so many have swallowed the lie that white desire is somehow evidence of care for Black life.
When asexuality is socially prescribed and written onto a particular group of people, it can be used as a tool of control—whether
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me. —Octavia E. Butler
How many have been assigned other, more legible queer identities, because the idea of an asexual or aromantic existence—whether in concept or name—was unfathomable to those around them?
The instructors were baffled by Butler’s fixation on sci-fi, fantasy, and grim subject matters. And so, she was met with the exasperated question, “Can’t you write anything normal?” from one of her teachers. “The answer may be no,” she would later say. “Or, at least, I don’t want to.”
Moya Bailey (she/her) serves as the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and is known for coining the term misogynoir to address the unique intersection of anti-Blackness and misogyny.
honoring what might be called an ambiguous (neuro)queerness.
