Zana’s Reviews > Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture > Status Update

“...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.’”’

“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.’