CHAPTER 3
COMPULSORY SEXUALITY AND (MALE) ASEXUAL EXISTENCE
WHEN HUNTER WAS VERY YOUNG, his parents would take him to the local superstore and let him hang out at the video game display while they bought groceries. One day, seeing that an older kid was already there playing the demos, Hunter asked if he could take a turn for five minutes.
“Yeah, right,” the kid said. “You’ll hog it.”
“No!” Hunter insisted. “I’m not lying because I’m a Christian.”
Religion was the beating heart of his childhood, and Hunter had not yet realized that Christians could lie too. His family prayed before every meal and attended church each Sunday, but the greatest source of moral pressure, always, came from Hunter himself. As a child, he had a strong moral sense fortified by the teachings of the Bible. As he grew older, this turned into a form of scrupulosity that he would one day look back on with bemusement.
No one talked about sex. During all those childhood Sundays, only a single sermon directly addressed sex, and that was a warning against temptation. Yet while nobody was talking about sex, everybody learned that sex was good, a gift from God and a pleasurable reward so long as enjoyed only within marriage.
Sex bound men and women together in a way that nothing else could—“like a superior connection,” Hunter says, a quality so notable that it could almost be seen. People became different around each other, more tightly integrated, like an unofficial marriage. Hunter longed for that connection and knew that God would provide if he remained chaste. To uphold his end of the bargain, Hunter began training himself to resist temptation and in college picked up a book called Every Man’s Battle that promised a system for staying pure.
The gist of Every Man’s Battle is that avoidance is the answer to the problem of lust. Readers are instructed to “bounce your eyes,” Hunter explains, which means immediately looking away from anyone who might trigger an impure thought. Visual repression starves the sexual appetite, supposedly. “I totally bought into that,” Hunter says, “just telling myself not to look at people because you can’t lust. In hindsight, it maybe brought me some harm in other ways because there was nothing sexual to begin with, so I was constantly looking away from strangers who happened to be attractive.”
Avoidance was easy for Hunter, ridiculously so. Lust was not as much of a struggle for him as it was for others. He did not consider that lust might not be a struggle at all, that he had invented a struggle because he was told that he must have something to struggle against. Today, now that he has told old friends that he is asexual, they laugh and say it’s not fair that he had no sexual urges to suppress. “Hunter,” they say, “you had cheat codes the whole time.”
The assumption that everyone struggles against sexual temptation—the “every” of Every Man’s Battle and Every Woman’s Battle and the rest of this best-selling Christian series—shows that religion, too, emphasizes the ubiquity of sexual desire. Despite its emphasis on purity culture and the importance of abstinence, religion is not entirely free from compulsory sexuality or the belief that lust is universal and to be otherwise is to be abnormal.
If the phrase compulsory sexuality sounds familiar, that’s because it borrows from the poet Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality. In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich argued that heterosexuality is not merely a sexual orientation that happens to be the orientation of most people. Heterosexuality is a political institution that is taught and conditioned and reinforced.1
Compulsory heterosexuality is not the belief that most people are heterosexual. It is a set of assumptions and behaviors—that only heterosexual love is innate, that women need men as social and economic protectors—that support the idea of heterosexuality as the default and only option. It makes people believe that heterosexuality is so widespread only because it is “natural,” even though, as Rich writes, “the failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.”2
Building off this idea, compulsory sexuality, an idea central to ace discourse, is not the belief that most people want sex and have sex and that sex can be pleasurable. Compulsory sexuality is a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.
Make no mistake: Sex is political, and its meaning is always changing. The world is big and complicated and the amount of compulsory sexuality, and the way it is expressed, changes according to context. Sex is associated with impurity and sin, and celibacy is required for some members of the clergy. Generally, heterosexual married sex is celebrated far more than unmarried sex, more so than gay sex or kinky sex. The world has not encouraged sex for those who are poor or for people of color. As Illinois State University gender studies scholar Ela Przybylo points out in an interview, sex negativity exists alongside compulsory sexuality; people celebrate queerness even while homophobia is rampant.
For Hunter, taught that same-sex desire was not consistent with religious teachings, compulsory sexuality was packaged neatly into compulsory heterosexuality. Hunter is romantically attracted to women, so he already fulfilled the hetero part—and it is the hetero part of compulsory heterosexuality that receives the most attention—yet he still found the elevation of sex and the expectation of sexuality hard to fulfill.
Compulsory sexuality separate from compulsory heterosexuality exists too. In queer subcultures where heterosexuality is not enforced as strongly, compulsory sexuality can be expressed as the expectation that gay men be hypersexual or the worry by lesbian women about supposed “lesbian bed death.” In many cases, lack of sexual attraction is a problem regardless of whom that attraction might have been directed toward. Zii Miller, a trans man in Florida who grew up in Europe, did not have to contend with either compulsory heterosexuality or purity culture. However, when he told his mother about being ace, she blamed America, believing that her son would be different if the family had stayed in France. There, Zii would have been exposed to so-called healthy, open sexuality, instead of America’s Puritan values and discomfort around bodies. American values, she thought, had caused him to be repressed. The United States had made her child weird.
One of the more obvious examples of compulsory sexuality is the fear of a sexless population. It is a great irony that despite hand-wringing over loose morals, Americans are having less sex than before. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41 percent of high school students in 2015 reported having had sex, down from 54 percent in 1991.3 As for American adults, in the 2010s, they had sex about nine fewer times per year than a quarter-century earlier.4
Such findings have prompted cover stories about “sex recessions”5 (a recession, naturally, is not a good thing), articles about how the sex recession could lead to an economic recession6 and hand-wringing comments over how young people are doing it wrong and are boring now. Economic worries could be to blame,7 or anxiety over unclear dating norms, or the popularity of Netflix and social media.8 Americans, according to some researchers, have traded the pleasures of genital stimulation for the pleasure of likes on social media and binge-watching The Great British Baking Show. In one Washington Post article about the decline of sex, an eighteen-year-old is described as sitting in front of “several screens simultaneously: a work project, a YouTube clip, a video game.” For him, abandoning this setup for a date or a one-night stand “seems like a waste.”9
Often implicit in this framing are these questions: Isn’t it sad that people are having less sex and that a one-night stand now seems like a waste? Isn’t it pitiful to be playing video games instead of feeling sexual pleasure? Shouldn’t we be worried that people don’t care about sex anymore? For truly passionate people, sex—the pursuit, the experience—is always better than a movie, a book, a game. The loser of today has three computer screens and no sex drive.
Such articles imply not only that sex is normal and wonderful but also that sex is the main source of adventure, reflecting what journalist Rachel Hills calls “the sex myth” in her book of the same name. The sex myth, which is an extension of compulsory sexuality, has two parts. One is obvious: sex is everywhere and we are saturated in it, from song lyrics to television shows to close-ups of women’s lipsticked mouths eating burgers, meat juice trickling down their throats. The second part is the belief that “sex [is] more special, more significant, a source of greater thrills and more perfect pleasure than any other activity humans engage in.”10 No sex means no pleasure, or no ability to enjoy pleasure.
The result is that anyone who isn’t sexual enough or sexual in the right way becomes lesser. The label of asexual should be value neutral. It should indicate little more than sexual orientation. Instead, asexual implies a slew of other, negative associations: passionless, uptight, boring, robotic, cold, prude, frigid, lacking, broken. These, especially broken, are the words aces use again and again to describe how we are perceived and made to feel.
The existence of these associations can be traced back, in part, to the commodification of sex. Sex sells, and sex makes other things easier to sell. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, often credited for this shift, did not merely provide photos of naked women. Playboy provided a vision of the good life, of what real men did with their time and money, and that included using their purchasing power to buy the attention of gorgeous models and access to orgies.11 When sex is a commodity, having and flaunting sex becomes a form of conspicuous consumption, used to signal that we are not passionless, uptight, boring, and robotic but instead have the financial and social capital to be hip and fun and high status and multiorgasmic.
Aces do not comply and so are dismissed and told that our experience is depression or delusion or childish innocence, and that we cannot play with the big kids. We are not quite right, or not quite worthwhile—made in the shape of a human but with faulty wiring and something lost, something fundamental to the good life.
The religious narrative that dominated Hunter’s life warned to wait until marriage, but always running alongside that message was the simple, secular one: sex is cool. Sex makes you cool. Compulsory sexuality told Hunter that he was naturally lustful. The cultural legacy of Playboy and coming-of-age movies like American Pie further taught Hunter that sex would take away his worries about being masculine enough. “Watching [American Pie], it was like, ‘Oh yeah, that kid was a loser and he became the hero of the movie and the catalyst for that was having sex.’ That’s what I wanted,” he says. “I wanted sex on an intellectual level. I wanted everything that sex was supposed to bring me.” Hetero and white and male, the very model of privilege, Hunter nevertheless felt enormous pressure to be different from how he was. The way that compulsory sexuality intersected with gender expectations and religious teachings would be the source of much of his pain. His faith was strong, but the dictates of faith couldn’t obliterate the message that real men are sexually aggressive.
Surveys of the ace community show that far more women identify as asexual than men—about 63 percent versus 11 percent, according to the most recent numbers12—likely in part because asexuality is a greater challenge to male sexual stereotypes. Men are taught that they are not men, and therefore not deserving of respect or status, unless they can sleep with as many women as possible. (Women talk about sex, too, but are socialized to discuss relationships and emotions while men’s conversations are more laser-focused on the sexual.)
In Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige, Indiana University scholar Alan D. DeSantis observes an exaggerated example of this dynamic, the ur-model of male sexuality. DeSantis describes fraternity brothers who “engage in the old fraternal tradition of ‘kissing and telling,’ or more aptly put, ‘fucking and bragging,’” chronicling their conquests while laughing and giving each other high fives. The gossiping ritual “continues for another ten minutes until everyone’s dirty laundry has been aired” and we learn that, as DeSantis writes, “as far as these fraternity brothers are concerned, the ideal masculinity is hypersexual, promiscuous, and heterosexual.”13
Plenty of men aren’t in fraternities, but this scene lines up with a 2017 Pew Research survey that tracked attitudes toward masculinity and femininity. According to the survey, nearly 60 percent of millennial men said that they feel pressure to join in when others are talking about women sexually.14 “But what happens when all your friends start talking about sex and you’re still a virgin?” asks sociologist Colby Fleming in an interview with MEL Magazine. “A male virgin can effectively be locked out or outright shamed.”15 Performing sexuality provides access to formative friendships and respect; it can be more social than personal. The lack of the right kind of sexual behavior is a barrier to connection, so men’s talk and behavior can be less about wanting sex than it is about wanting friends.
The lesson that real men have a lot of sex is responsible for the experiences of two seemingly opposite groups. One group, of course, is ace men. The other is the incels, or involuntary celibates: misogynistic, usually heterosexual men who are angry at women for not having sex with them.
Ace men, who are often voluntarily celibate, have trouble relating to discussions of sex because of a genuine lack of interest. Przybylo, the gender studies professor, interviewed several ace men for an academic article on asexuality and masculinity.16 All, unsurprisingly, experienced tension between gender expectations and what they actually wanted. They “played along” with male friends by pretending to have crushes on women or had unwanted heterosexual sex with partners. “Some people just can’t wrap their heads around” a man not wanting sex, said one interviewee, Billy. “Some people will react like, ‘How can you not love it?’ I wish I knew. Apparently it’s the best feeling in the world, but I wish I could appreciate it,” he told Przybylo, adding that he wondered whether he would feel less alienated if he were gay but not asexual.17
Gay men, too, feel intense pressure to be sexual. “I think we assume that a single gay man is having sex,” a man named Craig told GQ, “There’s a focus on appearance, categorization, youth, and the like that colors dating and sex in our community.”18 For him, being twenty-two and gay and not having a lot of sex is embarrassing. Men who are ace and homoromantic tell me that compulsory sexuality in the gay community makes them feel doubly ostracized.
Beliefs about the voracious nature of male sexuality are so strong that they can lead ace men to doubt their gender identity. One ace man I interviewed said that he initially wondered whether he was trans because he knew that women were supposed to be the ones uninterested in sex. Antony, who talked to Przybylo, said that the more a person identified with the gender label of male, the more he would feel the pressure to go out and meet women to have sex.19
For ace men who are trans, the intersection of gender and sexuality can be confusing too. “I’ve connected being transgender and asexual,” says Zii, the trans man from Florida. “I’ve sometimes thought that I’m transgender because I’m asexual, since I hit puberty and developed secondary sex characteristics and never felt comfortable using them. I wanted to get rid of them.” During his first visit to the endocrinologist, Zii said that he didn’t want to be anything—he’d rather be “neutral”—but he especially didn’t want to be female, not when being female meant having to shave and wear particular clothes and be hit on by guys.
From his current vantage point, Zii can see important differences in how he was treated when presenting as female versus now. His lack of interest in sex was viewed as natural then, because girls are supposed to be hesitant. “And as a man,” he tells me, “they say, ‘You gotta get out there and stop thinking like that.’”
Incels, on the other hand, are desperately interested in sex. Incels have also absorbed the lesson that real men have sex with women, but they lack the sexual expertise needed to participate in the rites of masculinity. For this I have sympathy. Exclusion and social rejection are painful, and in fact, the first incel website was started by a woman who wanted to create a supportive community for the lonely.20
Incels, however, are not merely lonely. They are also entitled, and here my sympathy ends. Instead of questioning the narrative of masculinity that prioritizes sexual conquest, incels lean into it, misusing evolutionary psychology to make themselves more miserable and falling into reductionist theories about genetic fitness and how the purpose of men is to impregnate as many women as possible.
Some affiliated groups, like Men Going Their Own Way, avoid engaging with women at all.21 In other cases, the hatred has terrible consequences. The subreddit r/incel had about forty thousand subscribers before being banned for inciting violence.22 It had become affiliated with people like Elliot Rodger, who murdered six people at a California university in 2014 because women wouldn’t have sex with him.23 Four years later, twenty-five-year-old Alek Minassian went on a rampage with a van in Toronto, killing ten. Before his murder spree, Minassian had made posts on his Facebook that praised Elliot Rodger and claimed that “the incel rebellion has already begun.”24 All this rage and violence from not having sex.
But it is not really about sex. As Tim Squirrell, a researcher who studies online extremist groups, tells me: “If it were just about the sexual thrill, why wouldn’t incels resort to increasingly elaborate forms of wanking?” If sexual frustration were the only problem, incels could try to pay for sex. Yet, many incels refuse to “debase” themselves by going to sex workers. They divide women into the blonde, large-breasted Stacys, and the Beckys, plain women who commit gender crime by refusing to accentuate their femininity, Squirrell explains. Incels scoff at Beckys, hoping to score exclusively with Stacys because Stacys alone are the sexual currency that will lead to admiration. It’s about the status.
I am no incel apologist. Many people feel unattractive and undateable without believing that others owe them sex or resorting to murder. Still, it’s undeniable that the rage of the incels is connected to cultural expectations around men and sex, and that the same is true of the alienation of ace men. These groups, so different in desire, are both constricted by the same sexual norms. Making sexual experience less of a prerequisite for male social inclusion—and less of a requirement for acceptance and status generally—would help both groups.
For now, though, male sexual stereotypes remain so strong that voluntarily celibate aces are sometimes conflated with incels. Ace men tell me that people of all genders assume that they are secret incels who hide behind a made-up identity. Such is the trap: Even when a man doesn’t want sex, he can be lumped in with the men who will kill in their desire to have it. Men cannot be simply uninterested; there must always be something else at work.
The promises of faith trumped the temptation of being cool, so Hunter and his girlfriend followed every precaution. No rooms with closed doors, no fooling around, and no sex until they married when Hunter was twenty-five.
Sex was nothing like Hunter had expected. “I’d always heard people saying that ‘Oh, one thing leads to another,’ but that was not it,” he says. Sex felt “forced and unnatural”—not forced as in nonconsensual, more like he had to force himself to initiate. Not unnatural as in uncomfortable, but rather that it was unintuitive and he had to focus intently on the movements from moment to moment. Like learning to ride a bike, only your limbs never quite synchronize properly. Years of bouncing his eyes had not prepared Hunter for an act that was okay but nothing spectacular, nor had he expected his own indifference. Afterward, no special, superior connection materialized.
Inexperience was the obvious culprit, but that explanation became less and less legitimate as the years went by. Age became the next scapegoat as Hunter wondered whether waiting until twenty-five had caused him to miss some kind of physiological trigger for enjoying sex. Every Man’s Battle could be to blame, or maybe his religious upbringing more generally was at fault. Maybe the fact that no one talked about sex had made him repressed, “almost like self-conversion therapy, but away from heteronormative sex.”
None of this explained why Hunter had Christian friends who married later and loved sex, saying it was their favorite part of marriage. He couldn’t relate when coworkers joked about being “thirsty” and wanting to hook up, but he didn’t mind hearing these stories either, so repression seemed unlikely. He hadn’t been abused. He didn’t have erectile dysfunction. A visit to the doctor to ask if everything was okay “down there” revealed that his testosterone levels were on the higher end of average.
The doctor’s visit had been Hunter’s last resort. It provided no answer to a question that would not go away. His marriage was official in the eyes of the law and his wife never complained—she was busy and didn’t have a high sex drive anyway—but once again, the moral pressure came from Hunter himself. “Because the sex never clicked, there was always this feeling that I was still infantile,” he says. He was not truly married, not truly an adult and not truly a man.
If sex is a gift from God and wonderful if you do everything right, what does it mean when you do everything right and the sex disappoints time and time again? Where does that leave you? “That’s what brought me to the darkest places,” Hunter says. “I never experienced this great thing and I didn’t know why, for years on end with no explanation.”
Nine years into his marriage, Hunter saw an article about asexuality on Facebook. It made asexuality sound like a medical problem and the doctor’s visit had busted that theory, so he closed the tab and moved on. A few months later, working the night shift at a factory, the term gray-A in an Instagram bio caught Hunter’s eye and he casually googled the term to learn more. By the end of the night, the interest was no longer casual. If asexuality wasn’t about sickness, it might explain what theories about repression and out-of-whack hormones and religion had not. It might provide some measure of self-acceptance
Hunter’s story is one answer to those who mock asexuality and ask why aces need to make a big fuss about not wanting sex. Years of Hunter’s life had been spent wondering what was wrong until he learned about asexuality from an Instagram bio, yet it’s not uncommon for ace activism to be considered a nuisance and a joke.
In 2012, for instance, Fox ran a segment about asexuality that starts with the host asking guest Brooke Goldstein, founder of the Lawfare Project, whether she buys that asexuality is a legitimate sexual orientation. “Oh, I buy it,” Goldstein replies. “Asexuality has been around for a very long time. It’s called being a woman every three and a half weeks. It’s a wonderful excuse to get out of obligations.”25
The host laughs at this quip. No one remarks on the fact that if anyone needs to make up an identity to get out of having sex, that is the bigger problem. It is a failure of society if anyone needs to say “I have a partner” to turn someone down, and it is a failure of society if anyone needs to invoke a sexual orientation to avoid unwanted sex because saying no doesn’t do the job.
Goldstein even continues on to say that aces “are normal in an uber-sexualized society, so we’ve had to invent this asexuality.”26 Yet this point is not addressed any further. Goldstein does not discuss the possible downsides of such an uber-sexualized society and the expectations present around how much sex is necessary and when it is okay to opt out and what happens if anyone tries to hold off for too long. Instead, the host says that because aces lack a sexuality, they’ll be “treated as lepers,” while a different guest, Fox contributor Bill Schulz, is incredulous at the idea that aces face any discrimination and asks if we can “stop recognizing things.” “If [aces are] that small a portion of the population, do I have to recognize you?” he asks. “Like, oh, recognize me because I wear sock-monkey hats! Okay, there’s a couple people that wear sock-monkey hats, I don’t need to recognize you. Yes, you exist. Move on.”27
Completely by accident, this dismissive segment, which ends with the host saying that he doesn’t trust aces, has painted what I believe would be a utopia for aces: not needing to be recognized. Nobody needs to recognize the sock-monkey-hat people because there’s not much pressure against wearing sock-monkey hats. Doctors won’t tell them they’re sick. Immigration lawyers won’t ask them to prove that sometimes they don’t wear sock-monkey hats in order to verify a marriage. Television shows don’t frequently mock people who wear sock-monkey hats. Society does not center sock-monkey hats in any way.
Society does center sexuality. In the West today, sexuality is considered an essential part of identity. Sexuality is not merely what you do, it is part of who you are, part of the truth of you. As philosopher Michel Foucault argues in his History of Sexuality, this social emphasis on sexuality is the result of historical and political forces.28 I do not think that it must always be this way.
In many ways, the ace movement grew out of opposition to this idea that sexuality must be a cornerstone of both identity and existence. Though asexuality has become a sexual identity in itself, it can also be understood as a way of living that simply refuses to care about personal sexuality. As Julie Sondra Decker, author of The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality, tells me, “We’re whole people who just lack that ‘driving force’ and it’s understandable in the same way that it’s understandable that someone doesn’t have ‘crafts’ as their driving force.” (Or in the way that people don’t have “not wearing sock-monkey hats” as their driving force.) “I’m not a ‘non-crafter’; I’m only asexual because there’s a word for it and because people have an objection to me not wanting to have sex. If they didn’t, my life would not have involved very much of talking about it,” she says.
Sexuality-as-identity is not necessarily the enemy. Compulsory sexuality is. Compulsory sexuality is at the root of the objection against a life like Julie’s and it is the force aces define ourselves against. If there were no compulsory sexuality, aces would not need a community for support. It would not be so meaningful for aces to find each other and realize that we’re okay. Any visibility we have is, in some ways, a reminder that compulsory sexuality exists and that it affects more than us, that it can punish anyone seems to deviate from the expected. If aces make a big deal out of being ace and demand to be recognized, if we have created groups of our own, it is because we want a place away from sexual pressure. If we fight for visibility and change, it is because we want that pressure to be lifted for others too.
For Hunter, the ace community provided permission to be as he was, after nearly a decade of searching for a fix. To explain everything to his wife, Hunter wrote a six-page letter, going through three drafts and five prefaces just to lay the groundwork. It was important that she understand what had been going through his mind all those years and why, from her perspective, he had always been preoccupied with sex, always the one talking about sex and initiating it. He needed her to know that he had put sex on a pedestal and thought himself wrong for not loving it, but that this would no longer be the case. “It was an apology for ways that I’d behaved too,” Hunter adds, “because there were times when I made myself more distant because I didn’t want to deal with that frustration as much.”
Life together didn’t need to change, he wrote. Actions could be the same. He wouldn’t initiate anymore, but she could always tell him when she wanted sex and he would be happy to please her. “The actual act of sex, I don’t really mind,” Hunter says. “Whatever was bad before was the uncertainty of why I was broken and that weird tension.” What had been bad was knowing that he had sex out of insecurity. It was the dream of sex as the promised act versus what it turned out to be.
Agency is present in a new way and accepting asexuality has brought Hunter clarity of other kinds. He had become a queer ally before identifying as ace, but learning about asexuality helped him understand that others emphasized sexual orientation because sexual attraction was an active force in their lives. He has become more critical of male gender roles too. Rejecting one form of social programming makes it easier to start questioning everything else.
“It’s like, Oh, okay, those expectations I had of what a man is or does or likes or wants are expectations that were given to me culturally, and they’re not necessarily the default,” Hunter says. “I’ve experienced this my whole life but never noticed it, and [asexuality] turned everything on its head, and now I’m way more skeptical of all those narratives. I no longer feel infantile, that subconscious mindset of having never attained adulthood. I finally felt more free to be an adult at thirty-four—which is a little late, but whatever.”