lol what?
I don't want to have sex.
— Off with their heads!!
lol what?
I don't want to have sex.
— Off with their heads!!
And yet, conservatives do not care to address the many concerns related to raising a child – such as rising costs of childcare, affordable housing, and lack of reproductive justice. They only seem to care about making everyone become a parent.
preach
What, are they going to make it illegal to not have sex then? What?
Nigerian incels' last hope.
Nigerien*
Nigerian would be someone from Nigeria
I would not put it past the nutjobs (of any country) to pass a law that requires that each and every person* ensures their own replacement if not also surplus to that effect to make up for those that can't. Or won't.
* of course, by that point they might have created propaganda if not also a law about who or what counts as a person, because they only want more of those, not anyone who might be classified as less than one.
Being outwardly celibate is a way lots of different people resist. That is now removed.
You can expect to be used against unmarried women, forcing them to get married. Likely also bound to stigmatize getting married at even a mildly later date than one might have.
It removes any protections LGBTQ folks may have had by staying "single" publicly.
Will likely also result in couples being unable to have children being otherwise persecuted.
Somehow that's even more stupid than criminalizing homosexuality.
What does that even mean, in practice? Mandatory government sex?
It's a proxy for "why aren't you married and having kids?" Niger usually has one of the highest fertility rates per woman, which is a troubling way to measure that.
Source: lived there for years. People take "be fruitful and multiply" very literally.
Neat, a first-hand source! What else should we know about Niger, beyond the statistics?
The article links to an irrelevant source. What's the actual law?
I would have to go looking too. But, the article makes it clear it's an umbrella anti-gay law.
The actual answer to that question, is that they're going to just ignore the parts that don't make sense, because there's no rule of law anyway. Written laws serve as something more like campaign promises, in an authoritarian state.
It seems, by itself, people within the target group need to have an opposite sex alibi. In practice, and if anyone can find out what the law says exactly, it’s probably targeting people over a certain age who are not married with kids.
Edit: y'all getting mixed up I'm out
Besides having nothing to do with Niger, which is a totally different situation, the first bit is understandable. A kid needs a house and stability much more than an adult does. Here, there's not really council houses for kids, either.
And no, it's not migrant's fault. Stop reading the Sun or the Daily Mail or whatever.
But that’s not how you treat criminals. You’re describing a mix of positive and negative incentives, which are just policy effects. Criminalization means a particular action or belief has been made criminal, for which a person may be criminally suspect of having committed. There are consequences to be satisfied, such as prison time or community service, not passive burdens for not conforming. Is that not correct or am I overreading the word “criminalizing” here?
This is also about censorship. Can't discuss or teach about these things, since they're "criminal". Engineering sexual ignorance.
It's becoming increasing obvious how desperate the elites are getting, now that every woman isn't churning out 5+ children for the meat grinder.
This is Niger, where the mean women has like 7, meaning many have more. IIRC it's the highest rate in the world. Niger is also one of the poorest countries, so there's no real reason they'd want more.
Okay, but how many do the nice women have?
(sorry, couldn't resist. The article is horrifying, so i'm escaping into humour)
Mild conspiracy alert time, but:
Increased diplomatic ties with Russia + Russia is desperate for more soldiers = keep churning out those future military contractors
Also much of that region of Africa (Niger included) is highly unstable; there's always the possibility of more localized geopolitical concerns promoting a population arms race.
Going more by Occam's razor, and a bit of Hanlon's: They copy-pasted every queer term they could find, and dumped it into the gay-bad bill. The junta may or may not have known what asexual even is.
It's an islamic country, which also has evangelical missionary influence, and positions itself as anti-Western (when tolerance is highly associated with the West), so that's a great way to win political points. Now, poorly written laws like that would be a problem... if they had rule of law and working courts in the first place, which they don't.
In June 2026, the nation of Niger became the first nation in the world ++to criminalise asexuality++, as part of a wider crackdown on the LGBTQIA+ community. The country, currently run by a military junta, broadened its anti-LGBTQIA+ laws, increasing the criminalisation of LGBTQIA+ ‘practices’ to include anyone who ‘attempts to’ participate.
The ILGA database says the newly passed laws, Article 25 and 390, are already having life-threatening implications on LGBTQIA+ people in Niger.
Ace people in Niger, alongside people of all LGBTQIA+ identities, can now face 5-10 years in prison and fines worth up to £130K.
The change was significant as it makes Niger the first country to name the asexual community in its law books. However, it begs the question: how does one ban an asexual “practice”, other than to punish people who are not married and those who don’t have babies? To understand, we should see this law as part of a bigger – and growing – global trend among conservatives.
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Niger’s crackdown on asexual “practices” is not isolated to the West African nation; it’s part of a greater trend of anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, enforced monogamy and anti-abortion movements worldwide.
In ++2026++, Niger (alongside Burkina Faso and Mali) has strengthened diplomatic ties with Russia, while their military juntas are at war with insurgent groups. This move comes at a time when Russia instituted a ban on “++propaganda++” that promotes childfree lifestyles. But this rhetoric is not isolated to countries we tend to associate with deep-rooted conservative laws.
Meanwhile, conservatives in the U.S. have been shaming childfree women as ++“childless cat ladies”.++ This builds on previous campaigns from the religious right in America, which stated the Respect for Marriage Act ++would lead to asexual marriages++, which they believed would lead to a marriage “inferno”. Groups like the Heritage Foundation equated asexual marriages to “selfishness”.
Zoom out a little, and it's easy to see the hypocrisy of conservative religious people demonising asexuality, considering how much abstinence was preached to me growing up in a conservatively religious home.
Asexuality stands in direct contrast to the religious right’s shaming of ‘childfree’ people, which also often ignores other routes to having children like adoption, and ++family models that show you can be asexual and a parent++. Instead, the decreasing birth rate has been a talking point of right-wing politics for years.
And yet, conservatives do not care to address the many concerns related to raising a child – such as rising costs of childcare, affordable housing, and lack of reproductive justice. They only seem to care about making everyone become a parent.
[...]
The fuck is the crime??
Being a virgin.
You can be ace and have sex, have children...
Traditional family = more people to be exploited by religion and capitalists.
I can understand why would someone want to criminalize homisexuality or transexuality. I think those reasons are utterly stupid and deeply immoral, but at least I can see the reasoning behind them. But asexuality?
how do y'all criminalise asexuality does every citizen get a member of government punishing you if you don't fuck?
Like the article says, how do you prove Asexuality? (Not sure why my iPhone insists that word must be capitalised.) It’s proving the absence of a thing. Or a concept.
I feel like this is something that isn’t intended to be used to catch people who are ace. I think it’s something they’ll tack onto other charges. Like making something up. Unmarried? We can also say he’s an ace and keep him locked up longer. Doesn’t make sense. Don’t have to. Dictators and all that.
Neocolonialism requires a pseudo-sovereign oppressive regime to be the executor of colonial violence.
An egalitarian nation would be more capable at resisting the west, and therefore neocolonial parties sabotage egalitarian regimes and replace them with oppressive regimes, which are weaker and more dependent on neocolonial support to suppress their populations.
Consider the EU's "everything but arms" tax scheme, where neocolonial corporations can get a tax benefit if they get their goods from destabilized African nations except when it would build up a weapons industry that could help empower nations to throw off the neocolonial yoke.
Oh, yeah, I see how you could read that differently from what I intended.
I meant that neocolonialism requires oppressive regimes in the same way it requires oil and slave labor. It depends on them, it consumes them, and therefore it engages in proactive measures to acquire them.
Your nation being an oppressive regime is not a prerequisite for your nation to become the victim of neocolonialism.
I wouldn't defend the law, it's totally unnecessary. I get, though, that it's probably to be expected because the vast majority of Nigeriens are Sunni Muslims and there's just no way a country that religious will be queer accepting.
This is just... rediculous, right? Like, how the fuck do you prove someone'll never wanna fuck? It's unreasonable and cruel. I suppose cruelty is, once again, the point.

It's deeply suspicious that I've seen like a wave of independent posters talking about this stuff from unrelated corners of the internet. This feels like manufacturing consent for another US military operation in the Sahel.
Ah—it's always some bullshit, ain't it?
Btw, what does "manufactoring consent" mean?
Manufacturing consent is propaganda designed to make you think the people living somewhere want a military intervention (that they consent to it), to free them from tyrrany or something of that sort. It was coined by Noam Chomsky (who wasn't my favorite person, but the term is still good).
Same thing they did with the whole Iran hijab thing for like months, followed by going to war with them. Like yeah, women's rights there might not be the best, but whatever they are, it doesn't justify putting in a US backed dictator to somehow make that right. Same with Niger.
Niger is literally the very first country in the world to criminalize asexuality. It couldn't have been normally ignored at any prior point in history.
Besides, this is more about Niger tightening relations with Russia. Part of their military agreement is aligning society with "Russian values".
No country on this planet is interested in regular colonialism anymore by the way. It's all neocolonialism which in this specific case is fairly obvious Russian neocolonialism. Western neocolonialism occurs in other African countries.
Yeah, colonialism is much easier when channeled through multinational companies. Much less international pressure, a lot less bad press, a lot more cash.
No country on this planet is interested in regular colonialism anymore by the way.
Depending on what you mean by "regular", Israel, China, and the US can all count.
Israel is doing the genocide-and-claim we know from 19th century US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, and more.
China is establishing trade ports as bases from which to break and reshape nations, much as European colonists did to them. And to India, Indonesia, and Africa before the full-on occupations.
The US is overseeing charter companies that establish high concept charter cities in foreign lands, treating the local nations as incidental to the charter city itself, much like the earliest colonization of the east coast of North America by the British, French, Dutch, Swedes, and others.
You're absolutely right, liberation is when queer people are criminalized at the wishes of other neocolonial power rather than established neocolonial power.
The workers are finally free to get rid of the bourgeoisie degenerates that were invented by the West to destabilize the nation.

Like clockwork. There was an article that was deleted too on this. Sorry, but this PDF was all I could find from some searching.
Is this just a way to pressure women into having sex under the threat of law?
The fact that the entire internet laser focuses on Niger and the Alliance of Sahel States at the exact time that this is planning to happen.

It's just a bit sus.
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