Status Updates From Refusing Compulsory Sexuali...

“...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.”

‘What we must do is abandon this singular view of “normal” sexuality, as well as the gender binary and cisheteropatriarchal gender roles that mandate sociosexual submission to men and punish those who dare to imagine lives without it....’

‘My hope is that we will collectively do more to interrogate our preconceptions of other people’s sexual identities and how compulsory sexuality implores us to project certain sexualities onto others to begin with—particularly when that projection is a response to their “failure” to meet cisheteronormative and chrononormative expectations of heterosexual relationships, gender roles, marriage...’

“Compulsory sexuality and binary thinking have worked in tandem in the public’s minds to place [Octavia Butler] into the box that makes the most sense according to the logic of a cisheteronormative society that overwhelmingly views same-gender sexuality as the binary opposite of heterosexuality....

‘As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson attests, “Eurocentric humanism needs blackness as a prop in order to erect whiteness: to define its own limits and to designate humanity as an achievement as well as to give form to the category of ‘the animal.’”’

‘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....’

“Sexual accessibility is constantly demanded of us via both white supremacy and Black patriarchy. When we fail to meet the expectations created by centuries-old myths built around Black sexuality, we can find ourselves on the receiving end of angry resistance, aggressive sexualization, and even physical violence from those who have written that narrative onto us...”

‘Frigidity was understood by people like English physician and eugenicist Havelock Ellis as a threat to “civilized” white society and imagined white superiority. In fact, Ellis considered frigidity to be merely a cultural phenomenon, remarking that “among most uncivilized races there appear to be few or no ‘sexually frigid’ women...”’

“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.”

‘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.

‘Historically, pathologizing and medicalizing “low” sexual desire or sexual aversion has not only been about “correcting” people’s sexual behavior toward a socially acceptable heterosexual performance. It has also largely been about the ongoing need to bring those socialized as women under cisheteropatriarchal sociosexual control, to ensure that we remain “fit” for society.’

“...Compulsory sexuality contributes to this construction of our bodies as instruments for capital, and the rhetoric around the so-called sex recession and Coronavirus Baby Bust reveals how our value becomes measured through our sexual and reproductive usefulness to the economy and the nation-state.”

“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....”

“...It is profitable to ensure that workers are not paid a living wage and have limited socioeconomic mobility while pronatalist governance ensures both the production of a future workforce and the racial majority of white people within white supremacist nations. Sex becomes yet another means of productivity to sustain the exploitative system.”

‘...And it is the prioritization of sex, marriage, and reproduction of the patriarchal nuclear family to help sustain a deeply unequal capitalist system that remains ever at the center of this true, “productive” adulthood. 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.’

“The eldest millennials are now in their forties and the youngest are in the second half of their twenties. Despite this, we are still not considered to be true adults until we demonstrate a desire, or at least a willingness, to conform to the chronobiopolitical patterns set by white cisheteropatriarchy—patterns that asexuals are less likely to participate in....”

“We are underinsured, overworked, and drowning in debt from predatory student loans after having college shoved down our throats throughout our formative years. Harris believes that Marxists would refer to this [divergence between productivity and compensation] as an increase in the rate of exploitation, meaning workers are working longer, harder, and more efficiently but are receiving less and less in return.…”

The critical theory slaps but it's not all that accessible to the layperson