compulsory slxllx

 Sex Is Compulsory  from here

In preparing this section, like any good essayist, I searched for definitions of compulsory sexuality using Google. The results were disappointing, so I’ve prepared my own definition:

‘Compulsory sexuality’ refers to a set of social attitudes, institutions and practices which hold and enforce the belief that everyone should have or want to have frequent sex (of a socially approved kind).

Compulsory sexuality differs from sexuality in that it is imposed from without, whereas sexuality is discovered from within. Compulsory sexuality states: “You must have sex, you must want sex”, but sexuality arises from a dynamic between people in which they reach a mutual recognition that, “We would like to have sex”.

The two are not entirely separable as compulsion becomes internalised. Thus, our sexualities are twisted into knots such as, “I want to want sex”, or, “I want to want the sex I am having”; conformity to the compulsion becomes the normative sexuality, deviation from it is experienced as pressure from within as well as without.

As this section covers a number of different expressions of compulsory sexuality, I’ve split it into sections on heterosexual, queer, asexual and “unfuckable” people, ending with a section on the way in which value is assigned to people based on the extent of their visible participation in sexuality.

Compulsory Sexuality For Heterosexuals

As a dominant sexual order, patriarchy ensures that the above definition is not neutral with regard to gender. Compulsory sexuality is strongly linked with compulsory heterosexuality, defined by Adrienne Rich in her definitive piece on the subject, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, as an ideology which preserves:

Male right of physical, economical, and emotional access [to women].

I retain Rich’s term ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ despite the fact that women of many sexual orientations have sex with men, and that men of many sexual orientations have sex with women, and that people of other sexes and other sexual orientations also have sex with men, women and people of other sexes. I do so because patriarchy will sanction the sexual behaviours of those people to the degree to which it considers their sexual practice to resemble heterosexuality, and punish them to the extent that it considers them to diverge.

Put more simply, this all means: in the eyes of patriarchy, “men gotta fuck women”. If you are a woman not being fucked by a man, you are doing ‘woman’ wrong, and if you are a man who is not fucking women, you are doing ‘man’ wrong. (The consequences of doing ‘woman’ wrong are, of course, significantly more punitive than doing ‘man’ wrong, because women are always closer to consequences under patriarchy.)

In mainstream culture, “gotta fuck” is channelled into morally constrained paths. Thus it is “gotta fuck in marriage”; except we all know that the “in marriage” clause applies more to some than others. Andrea Dworkin describes in detail the ways in which systems of laws and morals are used to best preserve male right of sexual access in several of her books (all an essential read for the budding sex-negative feminist); this quote is from Right Wing Women:

All of the sexual prohibitions in Leviticus, including the prohibition against male homosexuality, are rules for effectively upholding the dominance of a real patriarch, the senior father in a tribe of fathers and sons. The controlling of male sexuality in the interests of male dominance – whom men can fuck, when, and how – is the essential in tribal societies in which authority is exclusively male… The heinous crime is in committing a sexual act that will exacerbate male sexual conflict and provoke permanently damaging sexual antagonism in the tribe among men.

Among other things, the ‘sexual antagonism’ Dworkin refers to is the disruption of male sex-right and the possible subjection of men to male sex-right.

Compulsory Sexuality for Asexuals

As I understand it, there is an ongoing debate in asexual communities about whether compulsory sexuality and its message of “gotta fuck” is a cultural force which structurally oppresses asexual people. Most seem to agree that if it does, it does not do so exclusively or in a unique way. The subject is discussed in issue #18 of AVENues, a bimonthly newsletter/magazine featuring submissions from the asexual community. In the lead article, ‘The (A)Sexually Oppressed?’, MANDREWLITER writes that:

Being able to portray asexuals as oppressed appeals to people’s moral feelings and can be useful in making allies and doing visibility… Clearly, there is a real need to increase visibility and understanding of asexuality, but if we view ourselves as oppressed – and especially if we view ourselves as victims – there is the danger of the sense of the “unassailable moral superiority” that comes from such a self-perception.

Despite it seeming to be representative of prevailing published views on asexuality, I am a little uncomfortable including this quote as, in my opinion, reducing concepts of oppression to a “victimhood” model can be a mistake. Many of the above arguments have been made about feminism, a movement which clearly has a place and which clearly fights a structural oppression. As a relatively new movement, it may be that there has not yet been time for a sufficient diversity of asexual activists to find their voices, or it may be that there are simply no systems in which asexuals are oppressed qua (as) asexuals.

EDIT: On the subject of that ‘diversity of activists’, Framboise commented with a different analysis (click to jump to the comment):

Women [in the asexual community] nearly universally perceive structural oppression, nearly every asexual woman I know has received some form of sexual harassment and violence up to and including corrective rape upon disclosing their asexuality or just a disinterest in sex. Coercion towards sexuality for women seems to come not only from the wider culture, but from within the asexual community.

Regardless of the oppression issue, it seems clear that compulsory sexuality in its capacity as assumed universal sexuality (that everyone must be sexual) marginalises and erases asexual identities. If everyone is sexual then asexual people do not exist, or have simply not yet found the right context in which to be sexual. And in its efforts to ensure that all women are objects of the male fuck, compulsory sexuality would act against asexual women qua women, except that for asexual women there are even fewer desirable outcomes to an unwanted proposition.

Compulsory Sexuality and The Unfuckable

Some people are apparently non-consensually placed outside of “gotta fuck”. This includes some trans* women, fat women and racialised women (three groups all of which are also sometimes stereotyped as hypersexual, another way of denying that we are capable of being discriminating sexual actors as well as something used to explain away others’ rape of us), some disabled people, some older people (‘older’ typically used in a relative sense, i.e. seemingly sufficiently older than the person or group which is making the determination of age) and others (this is also touched on in my article, Significant Othering).

But this is in appearance only. To be outside of “gotta fuck” is not to be free of it. Firstly, people in all of the above groups are still targetted for rape and other forms of sexual violence, sometimes moreso via the horrific suggestion that they should be grateful that somebody deigned to fuck the unfuckable. Secondly, those perceived as unfuckable, or incapable of fucking, are lesser in a world where the distorted object-value of human beings is partially predicated on fuckability or the amount of fucking performed. This is a very specific definition of ‘lesser’, of course: when sexual attention consists of the exercise of male power and violence, for people of any sex to be sexually lesser in the eyes of men may be no bad thing.

(And if you’d like to read about the intersection between fat positivity politics and compulsory sexuality, there’s an article at Fat Body Politics discussing the subject.)

Compulsory Sexuality And Object-Value

This leads to our last definition of compulsory heterosexuality: whether you are seen as one who fucks, one who is fucked, or whether the way you are perceived is fluid based on the spaces you are in and the ways you present, your value is perceived as higher if you participate in the system of “gotta fuck” than if you do not – shaming, hatred and punishment notwithstanding.

A man who has too much sex is a horndog. But a man who has too little sex is a virgin who lives in his mother’s basement, explicitly still a child, failing to perform manhood. A woman who has too much sex is a slut. A woman who has too little… it can go two ways. She can take the route of deferred sex, saving up her sex for the ‘right’ man, all of which is still really sex, it is just considered elaborate foreplay. The practice is acceptable insofar as it eventually leads to sex. But women who truly remove themselves from or deprioritise the possibility of sexual relationships are monstrous, dried-up, man-hating, a threat to civilisation itself.

Of course, patriarchy hates all women, including sluts. But who would it prefer if it had to choose?

Is all compulsory sexuality derived from compulsory heterosexuality? Or are there other compulsions towards sexuality which operate in hetero/non-hetero spaces? I actually don’t know. But I know that if compulsory heterosexuality was eliminated or reduced, the question would become much easier to answer.

To sum up: wherever you go, whatever your sex and sexuality, compulsory sexuality is always in the room. It can be queered, channelled, refused or denied but it is present. Compulsory sexuality is sex without the joy. It is doing something that you’d love (if you love it at all) but with the boss standing behind your shoulder, criticising or praising you according to standards you do not create. It means upholding those standards if you fuck the way he says, and dealing with his censure if you fuck differently or not at all.