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

by Sherronda J. Brown

There is a strong connection between anti-feminist attitudes and anxieties about frigid or asexual women causing the decline of white supremacist civilization by eschewing traditional cisheteropatriarchal roles.

Regardless of how it was defined, frigidity has always been produced by the standardization of sex and desire according to patriarchal and phallocentric parameters, and it brings starkly into question gendered sexual disorders and dysfunctions like HSDD/FSAD. The same field that regularly dismisses asexuality as a valid orientation and has a documented history of diagnosing women as sexually dysfunctional according to men’s standards cannot be trusted to determine whether anyone has a genuine sexual obstacle or if they are on the asexuality spectrum.

When Wittig writes that “lesbians are not women,” she also affirms that “no more is any woman who is not in a relation of personal dependency with a man.”14 Asexuals, too, can identify with what Wittig describes as the audacity to “reject the obligation of coitus and the institutions that this obligation has produced.”

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.

Like lesbophobia, much of anti-asexual bias is rooted in misogyny and the white cisheteropatriarchal system’s need for “women” to “remain women”—to remain subservient, in both the social and sexual realms—as the “binary opposite” of men in order to uphold an intentionally inequitable civilization. In reading the work of lesbian theorists through an asexual lens, and witnessing people awaken to their lesbian identity by publicly examining compulsory heterosexuality and socialized attraction, I believe resemblance in how these two queer identities maneuver the expectations of cisheteropatriarchy and gender roles is evident. I therefore see potential for more intentional queer kinship and coalition building between asexuals and lesbians based on this overlap.

Ace- and aro-coded characters like Dexter and the Bond antagonists are removed from humanness in some fashion—more aligned with blood-thirsty beasts or cold, unfeeling machines—embodying the Villainous Aromantic Asexual trope: Media that features characters with psychopathic [or antisocial] traits often try to play up their inhuman nature as much as possible. Many decide a good way to hammer the point home is to have the character reject all forms of sexuality.

“Ace or aro coding as a stand-in for a disinterest in all intimate connections often trickles down to a lack of character development. A lot of our media depicts intimacy as only a sexual or romantic experience, so removing the interest for romance or sex from a character [often] means removing the potential for showing them forming deeper relationships with anyone.” Among asexual and aromantic characters, there is a clear pattern of dehumanization through constructing them as people without empathy and without any real concept of the emotional complexities of humans.

What does it mean for Black asexuals when we are told that sex is a prerequisite to be considered human under compulsory sexuality, even as Black people always already fail at being human under white supremacy, and that dehumanization is achieved through the myth of Black animalistic hypersexuality? Moreover, what limitations does this place on our understanding of sex, humanness, Blackness, and asexuality altogether? Is it possible to sever the connections imagined as inherent between them? And what possibilities might arise if we did?

“Cuck” reared its head during the Trump presidency as one of the favorite insults among white conservatives deployed against other white people who they felt were not conservative enough. As a shorthand for “cuckold”—taken from an Old French term referring to the cuckoo’s habit of laying its eggs in another bird’s nest—this term comes with racist and pornographic undertones that white men use to transmute their fears about loss of institutional and racial power into a weapon. Derived from a popular pornographic scenario in which a white man is cuckolded by, and obliged to watch, a Black “bull” fuck a white woman who is understood to belong to the white man in some way, this insult—and sexual fantasy—has layers.

This work appeared in a medical journal published in 1903: When education will reduce the large size of the negro’s penis as well as bring about the sensitiveness of the terminal fibers which exist in the Caucasian, then it will also be able to prevent the African’s birthright to sexual madness and excess—from the Caucasian’s view-point. During these periods of sexual madness, the negro has all the symptoms of lycanthropia. There is a loss of controlling power over the higher centers of the brain, or else the rabid impulses due to overdevelopment of sexual energy in certain portions of the brain, which the normal power of inhibition—that which the white man possesses—cannot control.

In the scenario in which a white man is cuckolded, “erotic tension is produced in the fantasy of the black man’s extreme sexual prowess and the threat that he will displace the white husband.… This fantasy demands a particular kind of labor on the part of black men in that they are called on to perform the role of a Mandingo who uses his sexual prowess to seduce white women and undermine white men.”8 The use of “cuck” by white men as an insult directly challenges the masculinity and virility of any white man who does not take racist, xenophobic, and nationalist enough stances against immigration and efforts toward racial equity.

Pornhub saw the rise of a new subgenre: Black Lives Matter porn. One such video is called “White Girl Moans Black Lives Matter While Getting Fucked #BLM.” Another is “Black Anal Matters.” There is also a subcategory called BLM protest that mainly shows Black men penetrating white women during a supposed Black Lives Matter protest. Some of these women have “BLM” written on their backs, while others are in jail cells being penetrated by Black porn performers dressed as police officers. In a classic marriage of racist themes, one video purports to show a “black lives matter thug choking out a white cop daughter.” … The recent subgenre on Pornhub that sexualizes and trivializes Black Lives Matter highlights the hypocrisy of [their] public relations effort: With more than 1,000 such videos already on the site, Pornhub is drawing revenue from the exploitation of the protest movement, with recycled racist themes to boot.

When we don’t acknowledge how the uses of sex can and sometimes do align with white supremacy and anti-Blackness, people can easily convince themselves (and others) that having sex and reproducing with Black people, or at least expressing a desire to do so, absolves them of their anti-Blackness.

White supremacy and the narratives it creates seep into every part of our lives and continually influence how we see ourselves, and even what we believe we are or are not allowed to see in ourselves.

What are we writing onto Langston Hughes and others like him when we use them as canvases to paint our own frustrations about queer (in)visibility, performativity, and closets? What if we instead respected the poet’s closet of his own making? A closet can be a cage, but it can also be a sanctum. Refusal was always his right, as it is always ours.

If, according to Butler herself, she actively interrogated her desires and found that she was not a lesbian, why then have her admirers insisted on naming her as an identity that she has already refused? If Butler described herself as “solitary” and openly remarked on her aversion to seeking out romantic relationships, why then have those who remember her fondly not trusted her to be the author of her own identity?

May we move toward an understanding of ace- and aro-spectrum queerness itself as an avowal of the right to exist as enigma, as refusal—to persist in illegibility, to be unknown and unknowable.

A life that is illegible to cisheteronormative understandings of connection, intimacy, and kinship is a queer existence, and it is queer enough.

Asexuals have long inhabited this world, since well before we were named as asexual. In our lifetimes, we will see queer communities coin new terminologies to name the as-yet unnamed, just as older generations have witnessed with us. We will see them form niche communities and build movements around these new terms, just as we have done, and I look forward to bearing witness to those interventions. Hopefully, they will be met with less pushback, gatekeeping, gaslighting, and exclusion than we have been met with.

For as long as exclusive and active heterosexuality has been considered “normal” and morally right, every type of sexual existence outside it—including those who have a “self-contained sexuality”—has been considered abnormal and even immoral by those invested in maintaining the status quo. Under cisheteropatriarchal systems, all nonheterosexual sexual identities and behaviors have always been understood as being part of the same looming threat against heterosexuality and the society it upholds.

Magnus Hirschfeld publishes The Homosexuality of Men and Women, in which he briefly speculates about philosophers Immanuel Kant (lived 1724–1804) and Sören Kierkegaard (lived 1813–1855) “whom [he believes] people would have to call asexual.”

In another off our backs essay titled “Your Own Label,” Frances Chapman writes, “I attended the workshop on asexuality lead by Barbara Getz. According to Barbara, asexuality is an orientation that regards a partner as nonessential to sex, and sex as nonessential to a satisfying relationship.”

Forcible hand conversion is known to cause an array of problems for the children who experience it, including various learning and speech disorders,3 and, of course, trauma. As left-handedness was demonized and punished less and less throughout the years, more and more people began to feel safe enough to be open about their left-handedness, especially among younger generations farther removed from more blatant and violent forms of discrimination. Since the early twentieth century, the percentage of left-handers in the United States has gradually risen from around 2 percent to nearly 12 percent, and most of them are younger people.

According to the “2018 Tracking Report: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Grantmaking by U.S. Foundations,” out of a total of a record $209.2 million in funding, only $70 was allocated to asexual communities.7 This was the first time any grant money had gone toward asexual outreach at all. Grant funds are used for advocacy, capacity building and training, education, research, direct service, victim support, and more—all resources that are needed in asexual communities, particularly to combat and educate on acephobic discrimination and sexual violence. Every time I witness someone argue that “asexuals steal resources” from other queer people, this report, this meager $70, is what I think of.

What Black asexuals and other asexuals of color need are acknowledgments of the racism and anti-Blackness within many asexual spaces, conversations about how we can move toward liberation from white supremacy in asexual spaces, and tangible actions taken to help make this happen.

Not wanting sex—either not as frequently or not at all, or not arriving at sexual engagement via clear-cut attraction the way we are told we are supposed to—is not an experience of lack, but of abundance and autonomy.

To revisit Frances Chapman’s quote from her off our backs essay, “Asexuality is an orientation that regards a partner as nonessential to sex, and sex as nonessential to a satisfying relationship.”

if we cannot honor the natural ebb and flow of sexual desire because “low” desire is pathologized as an individual psychological or physiological dysfunction; if we cannot fathom untethering humanness from allosexuality because sexlessness, or near-sexlessness, makes asexuals into animal-like or mechanistic figures in the social imagination; if we cannot envisage and honor a genuine Black asexuality because Blackness and the Black body are hypersexualized, because anti-Black logics relegate the Black asexual to a space of distinct impossibility, then we are not free.