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.

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.

For so many of us, it is in asexuality that we find the affirmation we have always needed but were never afforded by any other language. We have taken hold of the part of our being, or our becoming, that has long been nameless, and we have given it a name.

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.

we all have the inherent right to govern our own bodies and make our own decisions about whether or not to engage in sex, and that we can do this based on whatever criteria we deem fit. 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.

Under compulsory sexuality, the desires of those with normative sexual urges are prioritized. It’s a belief system that eschews consent and preaches instant gratification for people who want sex, but cares not for the safety, comfort, health, or autonomy of people who do not. It doesn’t just ask us to comply. It makes way for others to demand, manipulate, coerce, and force us into situations in which we are expected to disregard our own well-being for the sake of “normality.”

When some people feel confusion and discomfort with a new idea, they allow it to push them fully into denial and refusal because they find the new idea too difficult to fathom.

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.

The term corrective rape refers to the rape of any individual who does not conform to gender or sexual norms, committed with the intent to “correct” or punish their transgression. While the term was initially created to describe particular acts of violence against lesbians, it has now been expanded to include gender-expansive identities and other non-heterosexual identities, including asexuals.

It’s a deep, shared denial among acephobes that creates the insistence that asexuality cannot or should not exist, and that it must therefore be “fixed” by them. The fundamental belief at the root of this denial of asexuality is the lie that none of us truly have the freedom to set boundaries that honor our own bodies and sexual autonomy because we live in a society in which sex is expected of us.

We are often dehumanized—seen as “failures” of humanity, as inhuman, alien, robotic—because sex is accepted as an essential part of being human, and not wanting sex must mean that we are something else entirely.

Dehumanization breathes life into a cycle that makes the dehumanized more vulnerable to and less protected from harm, while others become more emboldened to both enact and deny the existence of that harm. This is the reality for asexuals, and all of this becomes compounded for asexual people who are also marginalized by race, gender, disability, body size, class, and so on because we are even farther removed from the privileged identity categories of white, cis, male, able-bodied, neurotypical, wealthy, and thin.

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.

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.

In her seminal speech “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Audre Lorde offered, Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and [their] oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

As long as the dominant belief is that sexual relationships are markers of maturity and adulthood, many asexuals will fail to meet that standard.

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.

Healthism positions this personal pursuit of health—or at least appearing to be healthy—as a reflection of morality and as one of the most important aspects of life, encouraging us to judge our worth and moral standing according to our health status, both our actual health status and our perceived health status.

In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, policing gender became necessary for the “advancement” of the white race and the maintenance of white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. 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.

even as Black people are barred from full entry into white colonial conceptions of gender and sexuality, we are still expected to abide by the social contracts associated with these categories. We are punished for our failure to properly align ourselves with them, even as such an alignment would be impossible because these categories have been defined against Blackness itself.

Tethering sex to humanness is simply one more avenue by which white supremacy seeks to enact sexual control, cultivate sexual shame, and reinscribe white cisheteropatriarchal ideals as “normal” in every arena.

A world that allows for Black asexuals to be seen as possible, to live more freely in our asexuality, would also be a revolution for all others racialized, gendered, and queered. Such a world requires us to combat white supremacist ideologies and the very idea of “human.”

People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn’t bother me. It’s other people doing the calling that bothers me.

A closet can be a cage, but it can also be a sanctum. Refusal was always his right, as it is always ours.

can change myself, but it’s an effort. And it doesn’t last. It’s easier to do as water does: allow myself to be contained, and take on the shape of my containers.

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

The more we affirm asexuality, the more asexual people will feel comfortable, safe, and valid in embracing their asexuality, and the more others will see how compulsory sexuality impacts their lives as well.

In asexuality, there is abundance, there is room to expand, there are a multitude of possibilities for companionship, stability, and reciprocal support. There is room to let go of the myth that we are less valuable, less productive, less deserving, less human without normative sexuality.

There must be a commitment to interrogating how harmful racial stereotypes and racist fetishization are used to consume racially marginalized people and reify white supremacy. And it is imperative that we divest from compulsory sexuality, from the idea that sex is universally desired, that it is the mandatory route to joy and satisfaction, intimacy and connection, emotional intelligence, maturity, sanity, morality, humanity.