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

by Sherronda J. Brown

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. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Gail Bederman details how “‘civilization,’ as turn-of-the century Americans understood it, simultaneously denoted attributes of race and gender. By invoking the discourse of civilization in a variety of contradictory ways, many Americans found a powerfully effective way to link male dominance to white supremacy.”1 In white civilized society, “women were womanly—delicate, spiritual, dedicated to the home [and] civilized white men were the most manly ever evolved,” and these differences were an “intrinsic and necessary aspect of higher civilization.”2