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August 5 - August 6, 2023
Sherronda does something in this book that I want to stress to you, dear reader. They declare that asexuality can exist, does exist, and should exist in such a way that we don’t need to make utility of it. Asexuality just, is. As a society, we have a hard time reckoning with that. There must be “usefulness” somewhere in this gray space.
Sexuality is a flight of the senses; within sexuality is the asexual experience—also a flight of the senses. We believe that if another entity or person is not there to partake, or witness us partake, then it’s not sensual. It is.
We don’t have to perfectly understand Black asexuality to make way for it. Asexuality is already valid. We can know this about ourselves, and we can have trouble with understanding it, unpacking it, and feeling secure within it. Knowing is a way of being in the world. It’s an act that can take many forms, even conflicting ones. Conflict doesn’t negate knowing.
Beneath it is the assumption that sex will inevitably occur and that everyone desires it. In fact, that assumption is an essential part of purity culture—the idea that we are all “sinners” continually battling sexual urges, and resisting those urges until we are bound in heterosexual marriage “ordained by God” is what makes us pure.
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.
What we call asexuality is only one type of multifaceted experience along a vast spectrum of experiences with sex, attraction, and desire; it is simply another way of being. 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.
Though I recognize and honor all asexual experiences, my discussion here will center an asexuality characterized by rare or absent desire for sexual activity with others as I interrogate compulsory sexuality—the enduring belief that sex is desired by everyone.
Aros, like aces, are relational misfits. Therefore, there will be moments throughout this work on compulsory sexuality and asexual experience that will also be relevant to compulsory romance and aromantic experience.
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 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.
In my understanding, asexuality exists as a refusal of compulsory sexuality, in defiance of cisheteropatriarchal mandates, and as an opportunity to deeply interrogate how sexual scripts connect with and inform conceptions of gender and race.
What is true of whiteness in every space, even in “progressive” and “inclusive” spaces, is that it will always work to create some form of exclusivity as a means to reassert white superiority. Therefore, white asexuals often claim asexual queerness as a property, just as whiteness itself is claimed as a property, as a space that others are barred from entering into.
The policing of the word "queer" that happens in asexual spaces as well as is imposed from without is a practice that centers whiteness
Rejecting new information requires very little work on your part because it allows you to continue to believe what you have already accepted as true. It allows you to continue your life unencumbered by this new information, without needing to do any work to open yourself up to it, process it, and expand your imagination to allow the new idea to find a home in it.
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. This is what British philosopher Miranda Fricker calls epistemic injustice, “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”8 More pointedly, it is what Fricker has termed as testimonial injustice, a type of epistemic injustice that “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word.”9 Ultimately, it means that allosexuals feel entitled to attempt rebuttals against
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Oppressive ideas are never singular; they are always informed by other interlocking notions of power. We understand oppressions and how they operate much better when we recognize them as being rooted in belief systems that are continually overlapping and converging.
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.
I believe that the sexual pressure and coercion of asexuals is always corrective in part, as 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 fact that those who demonstrated the most bias against and aversion to asexuals in the MacInnis-Hodson study were also the most faithful to right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, sexism, and traditional gender roles highlights how the hatred of asexuals is commonly spurred by a desire for strict adherence to cisheteronormativity and white supremacist settler-colonial ideals.
I understand the train of logic that leads many to conclude that queer sex itself is the sole impetus for queerphobia and that, therefore, queer sex should be the primary marker of queerness itself. But queer sex is not the sole impetus for queerphobia; it is the divergence from cisheteropatriarchal mandates.
Excluding asexuals from queerness under the belief that we do not experience discrimination and trauma “enough” only serves to reproduce the same harms as cisheteropatriarchy. Being subjected to and harmed by compulsory sexuality, rape culture, and acephobia is traumatic, and the denial of this works to obscure the very ways in which asexuals have been harmed by people within queer communities. Allosexual queer folks have absolutely been spectators to asexual queering; they have even been participants in moments where we have been queered because of our relationship to sex, attraction, and
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Acephobic exclusionists assert that asexuals cannot be queer because asexual people allegedly never receive the kind of ire and harassment that is informed by someone expressing attraction to the “wrong” person within a cisheteronormative society—someone of the same gender or to people of multiple genders—and, from their perspective, this means that what asexuals experience is “the heterosexual experience.”
Asexuality is always a site of subversion and resistance to cisheteronormativity itself, and is that not what queerness is? 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. It’s rooted in a fundamental belief—although likely a subconscious one—that everyone is categorically heterosexual until the moment they begin to experience, express, and act on sexual attraction to the same gender or multiple genders.
Acephobic exclusionists also argue that any discrimination asexuals experience is only because we can be and sometimes are mistaken for gay or lesbian. With this argument, they veer incredibly close to a vital point, but ultimately fail to grasp it. If and when asexuals are mistakenly read as gay or lesbian, it is because our asexuality—our failure to perform a “normal” heterosexuality—has signaled that there is something nonheteronormative about us; it has signaled our queerness.
What I have come to learn after many years of studying, thinking, and writing about power and oppression is that there will always be factions of marginalized people who do not want collective liberation from the oppressive systems we live and die under. Liberation is simply too big, too daunting, too difficult to fathom. What these people resort to instead is the creation and maintenance of systems in which they have the opportunity to act as oppressors and wield what little power they do have over others.
When education about one's oppression is not sufficiently liberatory, we seek to become our oppressor
All queer communities are facing the same enemy: white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy and sexual, relational, and gender normativity. Exclusionary politics keeps us focused on fighting each other for space, connection, and resources rather than using our collective power to combat the beliefs and systems that oppress us all.
I am queer. I was queer long before I knew I was queer. I was punished for my queerness long before I knew there was even a word for it. Not only because of my tenuous relationship with the carcerality of gender and the gender binary I know myself to be outside of, but also because my experience with sexual attraction and desire is one that has always been distinct from the prescribed “normal” way to experience these things, and that has tangibly impacted my life.
I affirm that all aces should feel free enough to identify as queer if they so choose. But, ultimately, it is not so much the label of “queer” that matters to me. It’s naming that asexual people’s experiences fall outside of the “normativity” of sexuality.
Only after affirming my asexuality did I understand that this “late bloomer” rhetoric was an unhelpful sentiment and a reinforcement of the same ideologies that caused others to treat me like an abnormality in the first place. One does not “bloom”—as in, enter into sexual exploration—too late, because there is no set time frame in which one must “bloom.” One is not required to “bloom” in this way at all.
I understand the infantilization of asexuals as its own brand of gaslighting, in which seeds of doubt are continually planted in our minds and cause many of us to question our experiences, desires, and perception of self.
If we do not adhere to or achieve the arbitrary markers of adulthood—often also considered markers of health, humanness, and civilization—by a certain point in our lives, successfully moving out of the liminal stage, then we are considered “late bloomers” or, worse, failures. Our life trajectory is supposed to be linear and uncomplicated; we are not meant to stray from the path laid out before us: we are born, we go to grade school, we finish high school, we graduate college, we find a job, we get married, we reproduce, we raise our children, we work, we retire, we die. Sex, marriage, and
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Queer people often navigate life on a trajectory “behind” cisheterosexual people because, due to queerphobia and repression, queer youth largely do not have the same opportunities to engage in the gender or dating rituals and rites of passage that are considered standard during the adolescent years. To this point, many of us understand a common experience of queerness to be an extended or sustained liminality when evaluated by cisheteropatriarchal social and cultural norms.
The pair set out to define and explain what DePaulo calls “the ideology of marriage and family.” However, she later remarked that another, better term for what they were studying is “compulsory coupling”—that is, compulsorily entering into sexual relationships and marriage, valuing these partnerships as inherently superior, and assuming that this is a universally desired experience.
In 1918, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that, in cases of statutory rape—the rape of a minor—it would only be considered rape if the victim had been a virgin prior to the assault.
What struck me most were the sheer amount of assumptions made, based entirely on one central assumption that these people were not having (enough) sex. The audacity of the thread both intrigued and astounded me. Not only does it contribute to the idea that not having (enough) sex is something that is shameful and deviant, but it also upholds the idea that sex is necessary to fuel men’s productivity and that it is women’s responsibility to provide this fuel, drawing a direct connection between rate of sexual activity and economic outcomes.
Anxiety about the sex recession among young people is also anxiety about an accompanying decrease in marriage, nuclear family making, and home ownership. All of these things are intimately related and impact our economy, especially because they are so easily capitalized on. Those invested in the capitalist system work to convince us that these things are necessary parts of life and that participation in them makes us mature adults and “productive” members of society.
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. The nation-state’s push for reproductive control over those with the ability to be pregnant and the pronatalist push for people to bear more children—especially more white children, as white people deeply fear becoming a racial minority in the West and often propagate a “white genocide” mythos to justify racist violence and
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Many refuse to acknowledge us as true adults if we don’t prioritize getting married, having kids, and buying houses. All the while, they ignore the reality of our financial precarity.
Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, said during an interview with Vox, If we want to understand why millennials are the way they are, then we have to look at the increased competition between workers, the increased isolation of workers from each other, the extreme individualism of modern American society, and the widespread problems of debt and economic security facing this generation.
We are always expected to mold ourselves into “properly temporalized bodies”—as named by Elizabeth Freeman—and we are blamed for harming the economy when we do not mold ourselves accordingly.
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.
capitalism is always invested in convincing us that we are flawed in order to sell us remedies.
Unfortunately, these exceptions are still not enough, especially given the scare quotes around “asexual” in the diagnostic features for FSAD, a subtle invalidation. Furthermore, these exceptions mean that patients need to already know asexuality exists, since they include no mandates for physicians to either educate themselves about asexuality or encourage patients to explore asexuality and determine whether or not it is something that explains their relationship to sexual desire.
The “grassroots” effort to have Addyi/flibanserin approved turned out to have been funded and pushed behind the scenes by its own manufacturer, Sprout Pharmaceuticals.
In medicine, something is classified as a disorder when it causes a disturbance of “normal” functioning of the mind or body. Order and disorder, function and dysfunction, normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy are largely socially constructed and socially determined.
Many know that these tactics have long been used against people with nonheterosexual attractions and gender expansive identities, but the mainstream understanding of conversion therapy needs to be expanded in order to account for the ways it is also used in the attempt to orient those with “low” sexual desire toward “normal” sexuality and asexuals toward allosexuality. The 2018 National LGBT Survey “Research Report” had approximately 91,000 respondents. It found that asexuals were the most likely to have undergone or been offered conversion therapy, and racially marginalized people were more
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healthism is the belief that health is a moral imperative and an individual responsibility. This so-called responsibility extends beyond the personal and also becomes an unyielding pressure for us to signify our health to others according to their perception of what health is.
What must always be affirmed and reaffirmed is the truth that having rare, absent, or “low” sexual desire is not shameful. It is not an inherent aberration that needs to be urgently fixed—regardless of what the reasons behind it may or may not be, regardless of what other things it might be tangled up with—especially if the methods for “fixing” it come with side effects that negatively impact our actual health, and if the reasons for why we feel the need to “fix” it are due to societal, medical, or interpersonal pressures.
In Frigidity: An Intellectual History, Peter Cryle and Alison Moore provide a thorough investigation, tracing the history of frigidity to more contemporary understandings of “female sexual dysfunction.”
Because of this, Garnier reasoned that frigidity was not a physical sickness, but a “neurosis.”12 Furthermore, Garnier was of the belief that “the primary function of the female genital organs [are] to increase pleasure in the male during coitus, and thereby maintain his erection.”13 Therefore, addressing frigidity for Garnier and his ilk was never about improving a woman’s experiences with sex, but about ensuring that she would continue to perform coitus for her husband’s pleasure. A woman was only a receptacle, a masturbatory aid.
An 1882 text by French physician Jules Guyot, Bréviaire de l’amour expérimental (A manual of experimental love), includes a preface by Georges Barral and Charles Dufaure de la Prade that declares that it is not possible for women to opt out of sex. All women needed to participate in the “physiology of love,” for failure to do so would result in “the worst kinds of pathology,” such as hysteria.
Why are men like this
