#compulsory sexuality

[leikeliscomet]

When it comes to asexual allyship a lot of people wanna have their cake and eat it too (pun unintended). People like a lil 'aces are valid' moment but don't actually unpack compulsory sexuality. People see sexless queer representation and always clock puritanism before they ever clock asexuality. No one's actually reading the ace theory and texts coming out. Everyone keeps doing surprised Pikachu faces whenever a conservative or TERF says they're against asexuality despite the fact ace activists have been saying since day conservatives are not anti sex but anti sexual autonomy. 'Aces are queer' until we actually are. Even ace support posts keep ending with some expectation or condition that asexuality is #valid as long as asexuals still perform a small quota of sex/sexual activity. I'm so over 'Aces still have sex!' 'Aces are hot' Aces are sexy' 'Aces aren't virgin vanilla prude sexless puritans!' disguised as support.

Like no. Sorry. Until you accept that some asexual people's no is permanent, that some asexual's singleness is permanent, that some asexual's childless-ness is permanent, that some asexuals are the 'no' in little to no sexual attraction and i'd say most importantly, that queer sexlessness isn't a biological, social or moral failing, I don't believe you'll ever genuinely support asexuality. (In reverse, I also feel similar about aromanticism and romance).

Like a lot of u haven't gone beyond 'the a isn't for ally' and it shows. I don't want people to support asexuals just because we're soooo hot or because we write the best smut apparently or because we could have hypothetical sex or because we could do hypothetical kink or because our minds are soooo dirty actually or because we'd do romance reallllyyyy well or because we can still have kids or because asexuals hand out water bottles at the orgy or some shit. I want people to support asexuality because no sexuality is deviant and it's basic human decency.

EDIT: U lot really like this post huh. Well it's blown up again and the point's been lost so let's wrap that up:

'But op, some asexuals DO have sex/I'm an acespec that has sex/I'm a non asexual person what about meeee :(' pt 2, pt 3

'There's asexual studies OP??/Where's the asexual studies OP?'

EDIT 2: Yeah I'm locking this one up until u lot get better reading comprehension. If you genuinely, unironically, deadass believe this post is anti-sex favourable, anti-demi, anti-grey, pro-gold star/black stripe ace or even TERF rhetoric for saying asexuals don't need to have sex to be supported as human beings then compulsory sexuality has a done an absolute number one you. Read asexual theory. Look at the follow up posts I'm so tired of repeating myself.

[ilovedthestars]

Sex Positivity post: Sex is good and normal and fine, and people should stop being so weird about it.

Random person in the notes who is probably engaging in bad faith: #not everything has to be about sex #i don't like sex

Sex Positivity OP: You're actually the problem. Not every post has to be about you. Stop being a puritan and censoring other people

Me, an ace person reading this post: I don't actually know whether or not to feel safe with any of the people in this conversation

[anistarrose]

no hate to people reblogging posts that are MOSTLY relevant and important Fascism Updates with the misfortune of having some absolutely dogshit commentary tagged on, but no, we don't have to "be hornier" to defeat the fascists. the fascists want people who don't have sex to stop existing just as much as they want the people who have queer/non-monogamous/kinky/etc sex to stop existing. if you don't know what to say in opposition to fascist porn bans other than "horniness is morally necessary in these times," then i'm honestly worried for you. you need to fucking get it together

[plum-petunia]

Just so we're all on the same page, if we want to get rid of compulsory heterosexuality we also have to get rid of compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity because compulsory heterosexuality is a subset of them ok thank you <2

[ace-lesbian-culture-is]

Alloaces aren't valid just bc 'we can still fall in love' like non-ace people. We're valid bc asexuality exists and is not a lesser state of being no matter how much or how little romance we participate in. We're valid bc we don't 'have to' engage in romance to make up for the little sex and sexual attraction we have. In fact we don't need validity, just freedom and the right to express our sexuality just like everybody else.

[black-ace-culture-is]

Broke: Yasmin Benoit makes asexuals look bad by trying to be sexy and she's too sexy to be really asexual

Woke: Yasmin Benoit has the right to dress sexy if she wants to because asexuals can be sexy too

Bespoke: Yasmin Benoit is not trying to be a sexy asexual but simply doing her job as a model and wearing the clothes she wants. Whilst lingerie has a sexual connotation, Yasmin wearing lingerie is to showcase the clothes as part of the collection of the brand she works for, not to give sexual consent. The reason you think she's trying to be sexy is because you have been conditioned to believe Black women are more sexual than other races of women and so you think Yasmin, a Black aroace woman is trying to seduce you as the viewer by simply existing in her own body, in her own clothes.

[aroaceenjolras]

When I first heard the word asexual over a decade ago, as a teenager dealing with the twin manifestations of compulsory sexuality that are purity culture and hookup culture, it was a weight off of my back. It was a light in the darkness that said you do not ever have to compromise on this boundary. Not now, not later, not ever. You can live a life where your body only belongs to you and no one else can tell you what to do with it.

This is the most important thing we can fight for, in my opinion. A world where everyone can do whatever they want with their own bodies forever— including never have sex.

There is no sexual freedom without indefinite refusal. Those who choose indefinite refusal are not your enemy. You only stand to gain from recognizing and fighting for us.

[flora-tea]

I feel it's important that everyone takes some time to learn about amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality.

Not only are these harmful to aro and ace folks, they affect everyone in society regardless of orientation.

[foenixed]

Popular opinion on Nosferatu is killing me because Ellen is textually-- not subtextually, not an allegory for-- textually a CSA victim. She unknowingly originally called for Orlok as a lonely child-- yes, a child, she was explicitly called as such-- looking for any sort of companionship, and Orlok answered and slept with her. "At first it was sweet... yet it turned to torture." "Papa found me once laying, unclothed... I was... my body... my flesh..." After this experience, she was called sinful by her father for being preyed upon, as many CSA victims are. She considers herself unclean, as many CSA victims do. To call this an allegory for Victorian sexual repression and Orlok a manifestation of her desire ignores that she was a child when preyed on by a much older man, and that she freely shows her desire towards Thomas.

In fact, she has sex with Thomas to prove her devotion to him and spite Orlok, to prove her desires don't truly lie with him. If this was merely a tale of repression, would she do that? The contrast is not between a repression of desire and desire, it is between the desire she happily feels for her husband and the desire she reluctantly feels towards Orlok, who hurts and coerces consent from her.

And yes, there is some part of her attracted to him, but that does not negate the fact that she is a victim and she consistently shows revulsion towards Orlok as an abuser. As when Orlok says "Tonight you denied yourself, and thereby you suffer me to vanish up the lives of those you love." and she replies "Denied myself?! You revel in my torture!" The only condition that made her submit to him was the mass death and suffering inflicted on the town because of her refusal. Consent cannot exist under these circumstances, it is coerced by violence. She is forced to relive her trauma and submit to her rape, and dies because of it.

My opinion as to why this has been so widely ignored by popular interpretations of this as a dark gothic forbidden romance is because, firstly, the general pre-existing cultural attitudes towards victims. "She must have wanted it, she must have been asking for it" etc. This mindset is also present in the film, with Orlok being justified as a manifestation of her desire.

Which brings me on to my second point, that the creators do not seem fully aware of Ellen's status as a victim. Lily Rose Depp says "It's a love story with Count Orlok as much as it is her husband," framing the relationship as much more mutual then it is. She emphasizes the mutual yearning, but doesn't seem aware that you can both be attracted to someone and victimized by them at the same time, as she goes on to say "There is a yearning going from, y'know, really between the two of them, rather than just this woman who's kind of, like, chased down by this scary demon that she hates." It's honestly very bizarre to hear the lead actress say this given Ellen is quite literally chased down from Romania to Germany and forced to sleep with him under the threat of death for the entire town, after he's already killed her best friend as punishment for refusing him. To brush all that under the rug and focus on the desire launders the relationship as much more equal than it is.

And thirdly I think there is compulsory sexuality pervading the discourse, as a refusal of sex with someone who she's attracted to is seen as inherently repression rather than being allowed to exist as a justified choice. The context of Orlok's abuse is stripped away, the context that she doesn't want to be with someone who hurt her and those she loves, even if she's attracted to him, is discarded. A part of her enjoyed it, right? And that's all that matters.

[aspec-is-amazing]

[leikeliscomet]

A lot of you make statements pathologising or demonising lack of sex as physically, mentally or socially abnormal then slap 'asexuality is valid' & 'oh but I'm not talking about asexuals I'm talking about NORMAL people' at the end like it does something. It doesn't.

Any and every piece of rhetoric that treats human sexlessness as a lesser form of humanity throws ace people under the bus, even sex favourable aces. Whilst attraction =/= action a lot of aces lack of sex correlates with their identity and it puts the onus on sex favourable aces to be 'one of the good ones' and that's not real support. Plus, it implies non-asexual people are acceptable targets if they fail the sexual quota. They're not even if they're not asexual because bodily autonomy isn't an exclusive pass - it's for everyone.

So yeah, everytime you make them posts about the human brain being programmed for sex or how to be #really queer means to be a sexual being, or how being happy and healthy hinges on being horny or giggle about how everyone needs to have more sex to fix this societal problem and political problem or how real art needs to be horny or whatever then yeah, you might get a posse of those 'annoying' asexuals in your mentions. If anything, all this response shows is that you're not ready to accept your understanding of sexual attraction and what you've been taught it's supposed to be isn't the default, and when you come across sexuality different to it you feel then need to shut it down because it's a 'threat' to your idea of normal human sexuality. It isn't.

[queertations]

"Straight people are rarely treated like they’re close-minded for knowing their sexual orientation, but aces are assumed to be unsure and always on the brink of finding the person who will change everything."

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen

[lil-gingerbread-queen]

I'm going to use asexuality and acephobia being put under a spotlight because of JKR's bigotry to bring up something that really annoys me, which is the absence of discussion about compulsory sexuality in the ace community but also the queer community at large.

Compulsory sexuality: the assumption that all people are sexual, and the social norms and practices that both marginalize various forms of nonsexuality and compel people to experience themselves as desiring subjects, take up sexual identities, and engage in sexual activity.

This concept has existed for more than a decade, and SCHOLARS have written about it. This is what harms ace people, and allos do it all the time. This is what made me miserable growing up, and still does to this day, because whatever I do, people will perceive me as a sexual being.

I recommend going through @leikeliscomet 's posts about compulsory sexuality and asexuality, as she's the one who taught me about it. She's way more well-spoken than me, too. Some readings I can also recommend:

Reconsidering Asexuality and Its Radical Potential by CJ DeLuzio Chasin, in Feminist Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, A SPECIAL ISSUE: CATEGORIZING SEXUALITIES (2013), pp. 405-426 - By an asexual, who is specialized in studying asexuality and aromantism. Explain how compulsory sexuality is present in her colleagues' work on asexuality, and also how Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder probably doesn't exist, because the difference between someone being diagnosed with it and an asexual is if they like being ace or not, so treatment for HSDD is conversion therapy instead of helping people accept who they are, because we, as a society, see being asexual as an abnormality.

New Orientations: Asexuality and Its Implications for Theory and Practice by Karli June Cerankowski and Megan Milks, in Feminist Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, SEX AND SURVEILLANCE (Fall 2010), pp. 650-664 - About the historiography of studies on asexuality and how feminism must evolve its view on sexuality and sex.

Compulsory Sexuality: Evaluating an Emerging Concept by Kristina Gupta, in Signs, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Autumn 2015), pp. 131-154 -About why and how compulsory sexuality exist and how we should defy it

Compulsory Sexuality by Elizabeth F. Emens, in Stanford Law Review, Vol. 66, No. 2 (FEBRUARY 2014), pp. 303-386 - About the complex definition of asexuality and how the USAmerican law oppresses asexuals. Yes, this is an 11 years old law article about asexuality being discriminated, take that JKR.

You Have to be Normal to be Abnormal: An Empirically Grounded Exploration of the Intersection of Asexuality and Disability by Karen Cuthbert in Sociology, Vol. 51, No. 2 (APRIL 2017), pp. 241-257 - About the specific oppressions disabled asexuals face for being the combo of the two.

Edit: The term "radical" especially about feminism may scare some of you, but I want to point out that radical feminism has existed historically before terfs reappropriated it, so when scholars are talking about "radical feminism", they aren't talking about radfem bs.

[aroaceenjolras]

The words used to describe women who didn't have sex (celibate, abstinent, pure, chaste) seemed either clinical or moralistic in a way I disdained. The words used to describe women who did (free, empowered, bold) I liked and wanted to apply to me. I absorbed the language of archetypes and aesthetic tropes-the repressed woman, the liberated woman-instead of thinking more critically about whether these stories were true and, if so, what they might imply about how we connect sex and politics and power. I reuse these archetypes and aesthetic tropes now because they represent the way these messages were handed down. Few people would explicitly say that sexually conservative women are wallflowers, but popular culture made that insinuation clear, and so I had a vague, unquestioned feeling that the women who pursue sex are more fun and feminist than the women who don't. Perhaps my attitude can best be summarized by anti-rape activist Alexandra Brodsky, who told journalist Rebecca Traister that she hears from women who believe that "not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure." I could easily have been one of them.

Angela Chen, Ace

[javasquats]

Allo people will think they’re ace allies and ace inclusive because they say “you’re valid you’re not broken.” But then they’ll think that deconstructing compulsory sexuality isn’t For Them.

If you think you understand asexuality because you know the “definition” of it as a label, you are confining your understanding of asexuality into a neat little box that is self contained and doesn’t interact with the outside world. Ignoring how asexuality and compulsory sexuality operate in daily life and are connected to larger systems of control has the same effect as erasing asexuality.

(Read Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda Brown if you want to learn more, it’s a great book)

[simbistardis]

'Black asexuality is a threat to white imaginations of what that illogic wants the world to be. And with a name like Problem Child, if I’m not a problem to my enemies I must be doing something wrong, no?'

- Problem Child (@/problemchild_nyc) in To Be Young, Ace and Black from Real Life Newsletter (2024)