Compulsory sexuality is the default assumption that everyone is — and should be — sexual, plus the everyday machinery that treats not wanting sex as a defect to explain, cure, or pity; allonormativity is the worldview sitting underneath it.
Compulsory sexuality is the water most people never notice they're swimming in. The idea, built on Adrienne Rich's 1980 work on compulsory heterosexuality, is blunt: society doesn't merely permit sex, it expects it. Wanting sex is filed under "healthy default," and not wanting it becomes a puzzle — something a doctor, a therapist, or the fabled right person is supposed to fix. Allonormativity is the quieter word underneath: "allo-" means "other," an allosexual is anyone who feels sexual attraction, and allonormativity is the unspoken worldview that assumes that's simply how everyone is wired.
Once you have the name, you spot it everywhere. The "you just haven't met the right person yet" script. The friend who worries out loud that you "don't seem interested in anyone." The medical checkbox that reads low desire as a disorder before it reads it as a Tuesday. Even sex-positive spaces get caught: a scene built around desire can quietly assume everybody shows up with the same amount of it, and treat the person who doesn't as someone who wandered into the wrong party.
Here's why we care. Being sex-positive is not the same as being sex-mandatory. The whole point of consent culture is that a yes only means something when no is genuinely on the table — and "no, not this, not ever, not with anyone" has to count too. Asexuality isn't a bug in a desire-driven world; it's the reminder that a scene worth building has room for every volume, zero included. If your sex-positivity only works for people who always want sex, it was never really about freedom.