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JDro comments on Why is our sex drive too strong? - Less Wrong
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I can think of a couple examples in US culture in which this isn't true.
Young men egged on to have sex by their peers.
Failure to "perform marital duties" is, I believe, grounds for divorce in some states.
And there's pressure to have some amount of sex. It may be relevant that asexuals started coming out after homosexuals did. This could be because their situation was less desperate, but I think not liking sex at all is in some ways considered weirder than liking non-standard sex.
Also, virginity past a certain age (varies by sub-culture and by gender) is considered odd.
I think the real compulsion isn't exactly to restrict sex, it's to have rules about sex.
I don't think asexuals were really in the closet until relatively recently. After all, many denominations of Christianity provide people with reasonably high status positions that require that the person abstain from sex. Even the denominations that don't have monastic traditions wouldn't look down on someone who abstains from sex. It wasn't until the sexual liberation movement promulgated the idea that anyone who isn't interested enough in sex is a prude and probably repressed that asexuality became something unacceptable.
I think it used to be more complicated than that, especially for men. My impression is that men who weren't interested in sex were admired by some but considered abnormal by more people. Still, that's just an impression.
The value of abstaining from sex in priestly situations is signalling of willpower and piety, one must be actively resisting temptation. As such someone with no sex drive wouldn't get the same cache.
Not really, since outside observers can't tell the two cases apart.
Well, most people are not signaling their interest in sex most of the time, so not signaling interest in sex isn't noticeably odd. That someone never signals interest in sex is difficult to notice, especially if one believes that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The analogous thing isn't true about homosexuality. It's much easier to be forced out of the closet as gay, and it takes much more effort to successfully stay in it, than as asexual.
So it's not too surprising that asexuals started coming out of the closet only after homosexuals did.