Liberation Includes the Right to Not Want

Discovering I was asexual after a lifetime of masking, sexual trauma, and compulsory performance -- guest post by vōx

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today we are continuing our Summer of Deconstruction series with a special PRIDE essay about a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. So many autistic people identify somewhere on the asexual spectrum and this is a topic that still needs a lot of care and attention. I am so pleased to share this tender personal essay on masking and sexuality by vōx — and be sure to check out her Substack! I am only able to publish these essays and pay these incredible writers thanks to the support of my readers — so thank you so much :)

Allegory of Simulation by Lorenzo Lippi (1640)

Liberation Includes the Right to Not Want

Discovering I was asexual after a lifetime of masking, sexual trauma, and compulsory performance by vōx

CONTENT NOTE: This essay includes discussion of sexual trauma, consent violations, asexuality, chronic illness, and internalized ableism.

“Under compulsory sexuality, the desires of those with normative sexual urges are prioritized. It’s a belief system that eschews consent and preaches instant gratification for people who want sex, but cares not for the safety, comfort, health, or autonomy of people who do not.”

—Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality

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I was sixteen the first time I kissed a girl. The first time I surrendered my autonomy to prove I was normal. Her mouth tasted like cheap beer. I found the experience abhorrent, my sensory world screaming “no.” But I’d learned early on that kissing girls made you seem fun, feminist, and free. So I forced myself to kiss my friend in that dingy garage. Not for us. For the pleasure of boys. To prove there was nothing wrong with me.

Compulsory sexuality is the quiet script that tells us we’re incomplete without sex. That wanting it, performing it, and enjoying it are all signs of health, growth, and adulthood. It doesn’t ask what we want. It tells us what we should.

While at church camp as a pre-teen I would promise myself to God, vowing to save sex for marriage. In truth, I was terrified of sex, so putting it off til marriage gave me a socially sanctioned escape hatch. A barrier I could hide behind. But as I grew older and disentangled myself from the church, this vow didn’t make much sense anymore. Why would a non-religious person need to save themselves for marriage? I’d need a new excuse for my constant confusion around intimacy, or I’d need to become more adept at covering it up.

I certainly had a flair for pretending to be someone I was not. At the time, I was just grateful for my acting skills, constantly feeling defective and out of sync. I was sure the real me wasn’t worthy and had to be hidden. It turns out my skills of deception stemmed from my undiagnosed autism, but I wouldn’t receive this insight until my mid-30s.

Instead, I repressed my needs, floating through much of my life having no idea what I wanted. Every decision was made around my yearning for approval. By the time I started dating, I just wanted to be loved and accepted by anyone who would have me.

Within my masking portfolio, I carefully cultivated the performance of sexuality. I saw in the media how this was rewarded, and I wanted the spoils. In college, I started watching a lot of Sex & the City, which taught me that sexual activity is essential to adulthood, confidence, and femininity. In the show, queer relationships are often played for laughs. Characters who aren't interested in sex are portrayed as prudish, repressed, or needing “fixing.”

So when I started to have trouble around sex in my relationships, I took these teachings to heart. I blamed my prudishness on religious trauma and believed I needed to ‘reprogram’ myself to become sexually free. Sex was clearly the path to wholeness.

Sherronda J. Brown writes:
“Compulsory sexuality is the idea that sex is universally desired as a feature of human nature, that we are essentially obligated to participate in sex at some point in life, and that there is something fundamentally wrong with anyone who does not want to—whether it be perceived as a defect of morality, psychology, or physiology.”

What I couldn’t name at the time, but deeply felt, was the pressure to grow up fast. Especially as an autistic girl often treated as someone overly sensitive or too immature to understand social cues, I felt an urgent need to prove I was mature enough for everything: sex, love, adulthood.

My neurodivergence complicated my narratives of desire in so many ways I couldn’t see at the time. Growing up in a small town, at first I attributed my moral innocence to a religious and sheltered upbringing, but it’s more likely the core of this comes from my autistic traits. I’ve been more easily exploited and manipulated in relationships due to my difficulty detecting lies and subtext.

My autism also sheds light on the sensory distress I’ve experienced around various aspects of sex. Nausea, panic, and pain that I’ve forced myself to continue through.

As Brown writes about in Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, compulsory sexuality privileges neurotypical, non-disabled ways of relating to sex. For those of us who experience sensory overload, chronic pain, or difficulty with emotional subtext, desire becomes not just complicated but distorted by expectation.

And because I couldn’t keep up with my neurotypical peers but had no reason why, I saw myself as broken and unworthy, and began putting myself into dangerous situations on purpose.

In my second year of college, I finally lost my virginity to a girl who was a friend at the time. I thought losing it to a woman gave me some kind of cool factor, so I pretended afterward that it was okay. But I had been blackout drunk, and it wasn’t consensual.

That experience would shape my sense of self and sexuality profoundly. If that was “okay,” then so many other non-consensual experiences were too. If that was okay, then my consent didn’t matter. In that moment, I lost my voice entirely. With each new sexual encounter, I fell deeper into dissociation—spiraling from the PTSD of sexual trauma and the belief that no one would want to date someone who was sexually broken.

Compulsory sexuality doesn’t just assume desire–it demands it. I didn’t feel free to say no, because freedom had been redefined as sexual liberation, not autonomy. It was through Brown’s writing that I began to fully understand this idea, that sexuality is not only assumed but socially enforced. She articulated truths I hadn’t yet dared to think, let alone speak.

It wasn’t until the “Me Too” movement that I acknowledged, for the first time, I’d been raped by my female friend. I read similar stories from others, and I began to disentangle myself from years of pretending it had been okay and blaming myself for putting myself in that situation.

In 2023, I first read Sherronda J. Brown’s Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, a book that put language to a violence I’d spent my whole life trying to name. The first feeling I had upon reading it was dread. The kind of dread that comes from seeing yourself reflected too clearly.

I had heard the term “asexuality” before, but I never even remotely considered it could belong to me. Asexuality is a sexual orientation describing people who experience little to no sexual attraction, and like many queer identities, it has a fluidity that can cause it to fluctuate or look different across relationships. It exists on a spectrum. Some people never experience sexual attraction, while others do only rarely or under specific circumstances.

Sure, my partner and I had been having less sex lately, but I’d chalked it up to my mounting struggles with chronic illness and autistic burnout that left me in constant pain and deep fatigue.

I remember rushing to open Reddit, to search things like, “Will my partner leave me if I don’t want to have sex anymore?” I read thread after distressing thread telling people like me that we were selfish, broken, or bound to be left.

At first, it felt impossible for me to claim asexuality. I knew what would be projected onto me: frigid, unnatural, repressed, unfeeling, uptight, prude, broken. I’d have to work twice as hard to appear healthy and happy—anything less might be used as proof that I just needed more sex to heal. And unfortunately, my history was rife with ammunition: my sexual assault, my religious upbringing, my autism, my disability. These became daggers inside me, piercing doubts into the stories I told about myself.

My internalized ableism made it hard for me to untangle a lack of sexual desire from my disabilities, but once I finally accepted I was asexual, I began to question everything I thought I knew.

I realized now I had been led down a path I didn’t even choose. How little autonomy I truly had over my sexual actions. Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about desire, intimacy, and performance was completely redefined.

What came next for me was a multi-year process of grieving and unlearning.

In the beginning, my grief was practically unbearable around the ways I hadn’t protected myself from sexual experiences I hadn’t really wanted. I had to mourn the innocent girl who didn’t know better, who was conditioned by society, who still felt blame for the situations she put herself in.

It’s important to remember asexuality isn’t a trauma response even if trauma is present. Many people have trauma, people who are queer and people who are straight alike. I would never go up to a bisexual friend and say, “You must just be bisexual because of your sexual trauma,” so why would I say that to myself?

Upon letting go of all the culturally enforced reasons I had sex previously, I found myself suddenly free to think about the reasons I might still want to have sex—connection, love, intimacy, comfort, support for my partner, and sometimes even stress relief. It gave me a framework to be honest, to rest, to refuse. To have sex on my own terms, if at all.

Within this framework, we all win, whether you’re asexual or not. Even my partner, who would have previously described himself as a highly sexual person, has had the space to disentangle reasons he wanted sex to find a healthier relationship on the other side. Sometimes what we really need is a reminder of our worth, to share our darkest thoughts and know we’ll be accepted, to have a snuggle or a distraction from the stress of the day.

I know from my own journey that none of this is as easy as words on a page make it seem. I’m still unlearning every day. If you’re navigating your own deconstruction, know that it might be messy, it might be non-linear, it might be unclear. It’s the liminal areas that make up most of life, and it’s a form of resistance to stay in them unapologetically. To love yourself despite not knowing yourself fully.

“Not wanting sex–either not as frequently or not at all, or not arriving at sexual engagement via clear-cut attraction the way we are told we are supposed to–is not an experience of lack, but of abundance and autonomy.”
— Sherronda J. Brown, Refusing Compulsory Sexuality

Most importantly, liberation must include the right to not want. With this, I know I am not broken. I no longer feel the need to perform. I don’t need to want sex to be worthy of love, of adulthood, of intimacy. There’s power in naming. And in refusing. In that refusal, I finally came home to myself.

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vōx is a writer, musician, and disabled artist living in Portugal. Her work explores the intersections of chronic illness, queerness, and neurodivergence, often through a lens of tenderness, grief, and self-reclamation. She writes the Substack the veil, a quiet space for reflections on embodiment, creativity, and the myth of healing.

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Thank you so much for this beautiful piece! For those reading I am curious about your thoughts on compulsory sexuality. How are you reclaiming your right to your desires — including the desire to not want?