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

by Sherronda J. Brown

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.

Compulsory sexuality and rape culture result in people being pressured into sexual situations because of the assumption that they should want to have sex and that there is something wrong, unnatural, and inhuman about not wanting it to the extent that others expect or not wanting it at all. Sex is so often regarded as a property and a “right” owed, as a demand that we are obligated to fulfill, that many people feel entitled to sex—and

I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to their sense of feeling cheated of the advantages which accrue to white people in a white society. There’s an element, it has always seemed to me, of bewilderment and complaint. Now that may sound very harsh, but the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept black people than anywhere else in society.9

what I learned from queer exclusionists is that asexuality will never be loud enough or legitimate enough to be called queer, because queerness is apparently about sex and that fact disqualifies asexuals.

many queer people center sex in their queerness and conceive of sex acts as the catalysts for queerness itself. And if that’s where queerness was located, and could only be located according to some, then where did that leave me? I wasn’t fucking back against heteropatriarchy, and what’s so radical about not fucking back? What’s so queer about not fucking, not dating, not loving in the way that society pedestals as the most significant? In order for asexuality to be understood and recognized as the queer identity that it is, sex acts and sexualization would first have to be removed from the center of dominant conceptions of queer identity. It follows that asexuals would never fit seamlessly into a mainstream queer discourse that largely focuses on sex and how queer folks (are thought to) engage in it, especially as terms like top, bottom, and verse go more and more mainstream. 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

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.

Overall, 86 percent of asexuals were assigned female at birth.

“It’s relieved a lot of pressure that I put on myself about how I’m supposed to be sexual, and particularly this pressure I put on myself as a sex educator that I should be sexual in a particular way.”

‘Just have sex anyway. Create this muscle memory where your body will associate sex with desire, attraction, fun, and pleasure!’ So, essentially, override your body. If your body is like, ‘I’m not interested in sex; I’m not attracted to sex’ or whatever, just do it anyway. Then that ‘natural urge’ and ‘natural instinct’ will kick in, and then you’ll be the sexual person you want to be.

what contributes to lowered levels of sexual desire are the social and cultural expectations that women partnered with men—and women are always expected to be partnered with men under cisheteropatriarchy—exist as eternal and tireless household laborers, while being caregivers and nurturers who mother their male partners (who often deploy weaponized incompetence) as well as any children they might have and their aging parents. Cisheteropatriarchal expectations also dictate that women must strive to live up to the constant pressures of fitting into racist, ableist, anti-fat, capitalist beauty standards and follow established gender roles by never showing “too much” sexual enthusiasm, but always being congenial when their male partners initiate sex, as “turning him down” is perceived as selfish and insubordinate.

the liberation of the lesbian and other nonheterosexual identities would require the abolition of gender categories altogether, and along with it, gendered understandings of both the sexual and the social.

“Man” and “woman” are, therefore, categories that only white people have full access to. Bederman details how it came to be “true” that gender among the more “advanced” and “civilized” white race was characterized by pronounced and evident differences between manly men and womanly women, whereas nonwhite “savage” races displayed little to no gender differentiation:

attraction is often coerced and informed by gendered societal conditioning through the upholding of cisheteropatriarchal gender ideals, especially the myth that we are required to make ourselves appealing to and engage in sexual/romantic relationships with men.

those of us who are expected to be attracted to men are sent an array of messages throughout our entire lives, in pornography and otherwise, that work to convince us that “enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually ‘normal.’”34 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.

“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,”

the absence of heterosexuality—presumed or apparent—does not inherently give way to or definitively indicate a same-gender sexual attraction or desire.

asexuality is an orientation that regards a partner as nonessential to sex, and sex as nonessential to a satisfying relationship.”