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

by Sherronda J. Brown

The connection between sex, capital, and the economy inevitably makes way for the constitution of sex as productivity, and our productivity is the bedrock of the capitalist system as the principal driving force behind the wealthy class’s ability to hoard capital. Under capitalism, being productive is what makes us valuable to the system itself, and this has long been conflated with our value as human beings. If we are not being productive and using whatever free time we have to work toward ways to become even more productive or “useful,” then we are not doing enough to make ourselves valuable. This system, which encourages us to understand ourselves and our value through our productivity and labor, makes it more and more difficult to view ourselves as having any purpose outside of laboring within and for the system. We become only bodies for the nation-state’s use, and our bodies become instruments for amassing capital that marginalized workers will never be able to partake of as long as this system persists. Those who deprioritize or divest from sex—and often marriage and reproduction along with it—regardless of the reasons why, become a threat to the established systems that rely and thrive on the exploitation of and extraction of labor from our bodies, including sexual and reproductive labor. In this system, those who exist outside of normative sexuality, particularly those socialized as women who do not perform adequate sexual and reproductive labor for male partners, ...