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

by Sherronda J. Brown

purity culture and diet culture are indeed siblings. They are the offspring of colonialism and capitalism, and shame is integral to them both.

Purity culture attaches morality to sex to do the same. 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.

This right to total sexual autonomy is central to consent, and society’s inability to properly honor consent and interrogate rape culture—and the ways it is upheld by misogyny and racism—is central to the denial of asexuality.

Within rape culture, sexual violation becomes trivialized and normalized, victims are made to carry the weight of the blame, and those who commit these violations are not held accountable. People who are socialized as and perceived to be women are often especially vulnerable to being victimized in this way; we too often have our entire lives undone by rape culture and the abuses it permits.

Violent, angry men inhabiting incel circles, perhaps more than any other subset of people, demonstrate how dangerous compulsory sexuality fused with rape culture can be.

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.

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.

Fortunately, allosexuals are not the authority on asexuality. Allosexual opinions on asexuality will never be the barometer against which I measure myself and other asexuals. Their denial does not negate our existence and their lack of understanding does not taint our authenticity.

Oppressive ideas are never singular; they are always informed by other interlocking notions of power.

I tried to “come out” of the proverbial closet, but every time I took a step, there was always someone there to shove me back in.

And so, 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.

Centering queerness around sex leaves very little room for queer folks for whom sex is insignificant, or for whom sex is never or rarely possible, or for queer folks who have never had sex before, or for queer folks whose only sexual experiences have been violent. It also leaves a lot of queer people, especially young ones, feeling pressured to have a certain amount or a certain type of sex in order to legitimate or prove their queerness to themselves or to someone else.

Trauma is not a factor by which queerness should be measured.

Is a queer child who grows up loved and affirmed in their queerness any less our comrade than the queer child who grows up hated and suppressed for theirs? Would we not welcome them both with open arms?

Though it does not and should not define us, it is unfortunately true that so many queer people know the feeling of a crushed, dying spirit that comes from feeling forced, coerced, and threatened into performing a sexuality or gender that is simply not a part of our natural way of existing.

Gatekeeping is always about power—in the same way that borders are always about power, in the same way that policing is always about power, in the same way that categorization is often about determining who should have power over whom.

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. If the world must be structured through hierarchies, then marginalized people who are not fully committed to liberation or the dismantling of these hierarchies must find a way to never be at the bottom.

There are a number of terms about sex and sexual activity that mirror economic jargon, and I believe these terms and how they are deployed demonstrate how compulsory sexuality can become wrapped up with capitalist interests.

And this will never not creep me out.

Cosmo responded to the alarmist claim of a sex recession with “The Millennial Sex Recession Is Bullsh*t” in 2019, collecting their own data and providing context that was glaringly absent from other commentary on young people and sexual activity: Despite what the media says, we’re not lonely, porn-addicted careerists who are too selfish or busy to get it on. According to top experts, Cosmo’s exclusive data, and, um, actual millennials, we’re the most experimental, enlightened, and sexually fulfilled generation yet.

In a capitalist society, this means that these patterns, and the “maximum productivity” of our bodies—including sex and reproduction—become tied to capitalist interests.

The number of children (read: future laborers to be siphoned from) the average person with a viable uterus in the United States is expected to birth (read: produce) has dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to less than two in modern times.

In June 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) released their Global Alcohol Action Plan for 2022–2030, in which they strongly recommend that “women of childbearing age” refrain from drinking alcohol, because alcohol consumption could impact their ability to become pregnant.23 Essentially, it suggests that people with uteruses spend their adulthood being concerned with and policing themselves for the sake of nonexistent, hypothetical future pregnancies.

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 reproductive injustice—cannot be divorced from white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy, paternalism, gender inequality, and economic disparity.

But capitalism is always invested in convincing us that we are flawed in order to sell us remedies.

That right there is a broadly applicable statement.

Asexuals, as well as allosexuals with perceived low sexual desire, do not owe the narrow ideal of sexual health to anyone, particularly when we know that the “healthy sex life” others demand of us, and that we often feel pressured to seek out, would be detrimental to our actual health and well-being.

As scholars of various disciplines continue to interrogate humanness to understand the ways certain groups become dehumanized, I also want us to interrogate how sexuality has become regarded in the social imagination, so that asexuals are understood as abnormally lacking sexuality to the point of dehumanization while Blackness is hypersexualized to the point of dehumanization.

I hope to see scholars of critical race studies, sexuality studies, and more interrogate how humanness has become defined through and attached to allosexuality—or, at the very least, the performance of allosexuality—alongside race, as I believe it will produce new insights and create new interventions in multiple fields of study.

I want us to interrogate what we demand of our queer icons—and more, what kind of performativity we demand from our own queer selves and queer kin—and how this is informed by compulsory sexuality. 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.

I believe Octavia E. Butler, Langston Hughes, and more have left impressions of asexual lives—as in, lives that can be read asexually; as in outside of, subversive of, and illegible to cisheteronormative understandings of sexuality, desire, romance, and connection. But by and large, the world has failed to consider it as a genuine possibility for them, and for many others. In them, I see asexual possibilities, even as others continue to write a different narrative on their bones.

I began this book by saying that I do not believe asexuality to be an orientation defined by “lack.” To lack is to be without, deficient, or not have enough. 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.