This Is How I Navigate Pleasure As A Black Asexual Person

Before I was on the internet, I didn’t really have a sexual wellness journey. I was very disassociated from my sexuality and my own autonomy within my body. It wasn’t until I got on the internet and started chronicling some of these issues I was having that I began to work them out and understand the ways I needed to be better. I was raised in a really traditional, conservative Christian household that laid the foundation for so much of what I knew and what I now know about my body and my sexuality. I’ve had to unpack things, like signing a period contract when I was eight, over the decades. 

I also had a lot of sexual shame that was given to me through church and through my parents. I do think about my mom a lot. My mom is a really sweet, wonderful woman who is still very much rooted in her Christian foundation. As I’ve been open and transparent about my own journey, experiences, identities, and open relationships, I’ve always been really sceptical about how my mom is going to receive that. I’m always bracing myself for my mom’s reaction, and she’s had her “Oh my God!” moments, but she comes around. I’m really surprised that I’ve been able to be the full spectrum of who I am and she is able to meet me there in the way she knows how. It’s not perfect and she’s had her moments where she is praying for my mortal soul, but she’s very accepting and honest about how who I am can challenge her and also check her perspective.

These experiences are one of the reasons I got into this work as a sexual educator. I found myself in a place where I was really stuck and I wanted to figure out who I was outside of these stories of shame, stigma, and dogma about sex, queerness, my body, and gender. After all of that, I feel really grateful about how arduous that journey was for me and I’m so grateful to be here. I have this relationship, new understandings, and new stories. 

So much of my work has been centred around having folx identify the people that have told them how their sexuality needs to present or that their body needs to look a certain way to experience the best orgasm. Who has been saying all this stuff and can you turn that energy into what you want? I want folx to ask themselves what it means for them to be sexually free. Really ask yourself what kind of sex you want to have. What kind of relationship do you want to have with your partners, your orgasms, and your pleasure? Those questions are really powerful because it turns the power back on yourself. For myself, a lot of my power was facing outward. I was giving my power to outside sources. But the beginning of me feeling sexually free started when I asked myself what I wanted.  

The best part of this journey has been the realisation that I’m not alone in my struggles and my experiences. I was talking to my friends and they were all having these amazing sexual experiences and carrying themselves with confidence, vivaciousness, softness, and sensuality. I just felt very odd. I felt like there was something I wasn’t given or there was a switch that wasn’t turned on inside of me.

But when I began to speak publicly about my experiences, the biggest thing that surprised me was hearing folx say, “Same! I also have the same insecurities and stories of shame in my body.” Or that they had the same questions about feeling awkward in their body or being a late bloomer. I remember when I first began writing about this and I got messages and emails from people saying I’d ripped a page from their own diary. It was wild because I truly thought I was one of the only people facing these issues.

We’re not alone and there are many resources and folx who are out here trying to find a way. The path is messy and the journey will always be a part of our experience, but you have to find a little faith and trust in the process. One of the first things that I ask folx to get curious about is to understand that in order to get better connected with our body and sensuality, we have to slow down. Move slower than what capitalism and our survival strategies are telling us to do. We have to carve out times when we can just be with our bodies, the sensations, and the messages it is trying to communicate to us. 

I think it is great to see Black folx taking their power back and prioritizing their well-being in a world where historically that has not been the case. Everything was built upon our backs, so it is beautiful and powerful to see folx saying, “My well-being matters. My wellness and my pleasure matter.” I love seeing that. I’m also really wanting folx to ask hard questions about the way well-being comes to us. Pride used to be so fun, and now it feels like one big commercial.

I wrote about this not too long ago and it doesn’t have anything to do with buying beer, or chips, or whatever. I don’t feel most prideful when I am wearing a rainbow by one of my favourite brands. What makes me feel pride is being fucking free and autonomous in my own body. I feel pride when I can choose who I want to be, what I want to do, how I want to make myself feel good, and do it in ways that cultivate my own community. That is pride to me. 

Inclusivity starts by recognizing there are other people on the other side of that plus sign in LGBTQ+ that don’t get represented enough. I’m talking about intersex people, Asexual people, etc. We are out here and we exist on various spectrums. This is also where education is extremely important, particularly around asexuality. There are folx that still believe asexuality has to be black or white. For some that is true, but for the vast majority on the ace spectrum there is a lot of flexibility and fluctuation. It isn’t just that asexual people “hate sex” and “never want to have sex.” I would love to see people have more education the same way we are seeing more education and visibility regarding trans, queer, bi, and pansexual folx. You may be asexual and not even know it!

That’s one of the things I’ve found most interesting in my work. I’ve spoken with folx about my personal experience being on the ace spectrum and so many people have been able to relate to that and how it sounds similar to their own journey. The more we educate ourselves about the different ways we can exist in our sexuality and identity, the less alone we feel and the more we can create community. It creates more visibility and education, which creates this beautiful circle. 

Folx are just now realizing that sex doesn’t have to be something that people prioritize in their relationships or that romance isn’t the only thing people are thinking about when they get into long-term partnerships if they decide to have long-term partnerships. As an educator, I understand that people don’t know what they don’t know and if I am going to talk about this then I am going to have to explain a little bit. This came up a lot for me when I started dating again for the first time in a few years. I’m on a dating website and there were all kinds of assumptions people make about you. I have to be very clear about being on the ace spectrum, which means sex is not the most important thing to me and not what I’m here for. It would be nice if it happens, but that’s not necessarily why I’m here. If you are looking for someone to fuck, I’m not the person for you. 

Having those conversations are important and require labour. I’ve worked with people in the past who were having the realization they were on the ace spectrum and they had no idea how to talk about it. They either felt that people would count them out or that people wouldn’t want to date them based on their own acephobia. There’s still a lot of work we need to do in our culture regarding differing desires and the way that sexual desire and attraction can fluctuate or not exist at all. I feel really lucky to be in the position where I can talk about this stuff and do a little bit of labour so that other folx won’t have to do so much for themselves.  

I hope to make other people feel like they are not alone in their struggles. I also hope to give folx questions or some things to think about that I think a lot of us aren’t given. Things like how we are actually feeling in our bodies on a regular basis. Or what is our relationship to feeling good in our bodies and our relationship to pressure? I want to remind people — particularly Black, queer, and trans folx —that we are on this earth not just to suffer. We’re not here to just experience pain, sorrow, and frustration. We’re here to experience deep wellsprings of love, passion, excitement, and freedom. For me, my pathway to those things has been through uncovering and healing sex, but that is also not the only path that folx can take. There are a lot of folx on the ace spectrum like I am who may not feel that sex is a priority in their lives. Wherever we are within our sexuality or gender, whatever questions we have or stigmas we’re trying to unlearn, the shame we are trying to release within ourselves, we’re all okay.

My desire has always been that folx feel less shame about who they are as they follow me on my journey to feel less shame about who I am. My hope also is that we can all expand our definitions and horizons of who we think we are. I want us to expand our understanding of how much pleasure we can contain, what identities we can move in and out of, and the different ways we can be when we feel free. I want to create more possibilities for folx and I hope that comes through in my work. We don’t have to be just one thing. We can be multiple things at the same time and it can be a beautiful, powerful, amazing thing.