Sex is Not the Center of the Erotic Universe
If you’d told me, when I first started my kink blog Circumstance and Carefulness, that I would come to identify as someone without much interest in sex, I would have been horrified. I’d spent ten years trying to find a way to make sex work for me after my sexually coercive first relationship, and then four years flitting at the edges of play parties, certain that kink held the key. The year before I started my blog, I had at last found my way into my first D/s relationship. My submissive partner and I lived in different cities, and phone sex was the main way we did D/s over distance. In our hours-long phone calls, sex felt as dizzyingly thrilling and embodied and right as it had in my fantasies over the years. If you’d told me I would one day call myself gray asexual, I would have thought you meant I had to give that feeling up.
The tagline of my blog was a queer survivor on kink, sex, and desire, and I took it for granted that my desire for kink was, at its core, a desire for a certain kind of sex. But I also knew that my desire for kink was, in some way I couldn’t fully put into words, a desire to protect myself. There was something in the process of kink that felt safer to me: you talked about what you were going to do, you did it, you reflected on how it had felt, and if you didn’t like whatever you had tried, you never had to do it again.
I’d come to New York’s queer leather scene hungry both for exploration and for the kind of protection I thought kink offered, even if I couldn’t say how. But over and over, I’d come home from parties alienated and shaken. I found negotiation challenging. When people asked early on what I was into, I answered honestly: I love the way this community handles consent. But that annoyed my interlocutors, who seemed always to be looking for items off a list of acts. When I told people I wanted to top, they advised me that as a newcomer, I should first bottom instead. When I told them I didn’t know what I wanted to bottom to, they’d suggest we kiss, or make out, and I’d agree, grateful someone was giving me a chance.
There was a twisted trauma-logic to my making out with strangers at play parties. Kink was protection from harm, and kink was sex, so maybe making out, which was a step toward sex, was protection too, and anyway, it must be better than going to a party and doing nothing. But there was another kind of logic that told me seeking sex was the same as seeking safety, and that was the logic of compulsory sexuality.
Compulsory sexuality, an ace term adapted from feminist (and, sadly, noted transphobe) Adrienne Rich’s idea of compulsory heterosexuality, is a worldview that sees sexual desire as natural and universal. A related idea, sexual normativity, describes the sex we all supposedly desire. Normative sex is orgasm-focused and genital-based. It follows a predictable pattern: foreplay, missionary, climax, if you’re heterosexual and cisgender; in the queer world, genital stimulation, orgasm, reciprocation. Even though the kink scene had broadened my understanding of what erotic acts were possible, it had never led me to question the idea that sex and sexual desire were at the heart of any act of sadism or D/s.
I saw in the process of kink — negotiation, exploration, reflection, revision — the potential to set boundaries around acts I didn’t want. But compulsory sexuality told me that sexual acts like kissing and making out could not possibly be acts I didn’t want, because they were acts everybody wanted. And so I would go into play parties armored with the ability to set boundaries and fail each time to set those boundaries where I needed them most.
After years going to play parties with high hopes and coming home hurt, I found my way into my first D/s relationship. There, for the first time in my life, sex felt good. There were perhaps clues even then that sex wasn’t the point for me. I was confused during phone sex when my partner wanted to create a shared fantasy about me touching her; on my end, what was hot was that she was touching herself for me. When we met in person, my receiving touch sent me into dissociative tailspins. Power made sense and felt grounding and hot. Sensation, in the absence of a power narrative, made me disappear from my body, intensity without meaning.
But setting boundaries around sex with my submissive partner wasn’t imperative to protecting myself the way setting boundaries around sex with strangers at parties would have been. I’m gray ace; sex works for me sometimes, and here, in the context of D/s, mediated by distance, sex felt at once magical and mostly safe. Kinky sex was good. I didn’t need to wonder what else was possible.
A few months after my D/s relationship ended, I left New York. I moved to a smaller city, where I was taken aback to discover that as far as I could tell, there was no queer kink scene at all. As frustrating as the New York queer kink scene had been, there were norms there that I now saw I’d taken for granted: the belief that sadism and masochism, dominance and submission, were valid, meaningful forms of erotic expression. The idea that erotic desire looked different for different people and that seeking out erotically compatible partners was something one might prioritize. The idea that being kinky mattered, that S/M and D/s were deep and thrilling expressions of our humanity, worthy of the books and classes and parties and community-building we had devoted to them.
The loss of social recognition and connection around kink was so shocking that I did not immediately recognize what else was missing.
Three years after the end of my D/s relationship, I went on a date with someone I’d met through friends. I did not know if my date was kinky, but I let myself hope, and in that hope came a depth of pleasure and embodiment I’d almost forgotten was possible. Maybe my date would kneel by my bed. Maybe she would take pain for me, a pinch of skin, a hand firmly gripping her hair. I did not know if she would want to do these things, but it had been three years since I’d touched anyone with any erotic intent, and even this glimmer of hope was intoxicating.
What happened instead was that she kissed me, abruptly, in my kitchen. I kissed her back — it had been three years, and I’d missed the feeling — but at the same time, I felt disoriented and alarmed. What had happened to negotiation? When were we going to talk about our kinks and whether they lined up?
I published a piece about this encounter a few years ago, breaking down the assumptions and miscommunications that had brought me, once again, into a sexual encounter I did not want. How I’d told my date I was kinky and thought she’d hear it as a boundary, but how she must have heard the opposite, that as a kinky person, I was a wild daredevil who was up for anything. How I’d wanted to negotiate, but how my date had thought there was nothing to negotiate, because — compulsory sexuality again — everyone wanted normative sex.
In the piece I published, I focus on the assumption that everyone wants normative sex as the root of the problem. If only my partner had recognized that some people only want sex if it’s kinky sex, she could more easily have seen that we weren’t compatible. But another factor was the way I conceived of my own desire. Calling the thing I wanted kinky sex makes it sound far more similar to normative sex than it actually was. If I could have seen how little I desired sex at all, it would have been much clearer to me too that the thing my date wanted was worlds away from what I longed for.
The beautiful thing about boundaries is they help you protect yourself from harm. The terrible thing about boundaries is that sometimes you feel like you’re saying no to everything. Between my first D/s relationship and my second were six years during which I touched virtually no one. The number of people in my life who understood who I was and what kink meant to me dwindled, until I’d mostly forgotten myself. I moved to California, hoping a queer community as legendarily kink-aware as the Bay Area’s would make my identity and my boundaries legible again. I adopted a dog. I wrote a lot of fanfiction. I gave up on California and moved home.
Back East, there was still no queer kink community, but there was a mixed scene with a sizable queer component. There, I became friendly with an ostensibly straight cis man and invited him to play. I thought of myself as not sexually attracted to men, and so I stipulated that I only wanted nonsexual D/s. I knew that nonsexual kink was something people did; my assumption was that it would simply feel less than sexual kink. Less intimate, less complete — the kink equivalent, to use a crude analogy, of only getting to second base.
What happened instead was that nothing felt missing. In my long-distance relationship, my only other long-term D/s relationship to date, most of our play had taken place over the phone. Now, for the first time, I was exploring D/s with someone I could touch on a regular basis. We explored impact and restraint, rituals and protocols, focused scenes and casual power exchange. We wrote each other letters about how our play felt and what we wanted to try next. I’d spend hours each week fantasizing about our next scene or savoring memories of the last. Sex being off the table felt not like a lack, but like getting away with something. It’s like getting to have all the good parts without all the bad parts, I wrote in one of my letters, and my partner, who seemed to have some ace leanings himself, agreed.
As our D/s deepened, I began to see where sexual play could fit into our dynamic, if we wanted it to. Playing with pleasure would be, like playing with pain, a way into vulnerability and power. When I imagined sexual play as dominance, I wondered if I’d simply reinvented what sex had been to me all along. In my long-distance relationship, had sex just been the closest available tool for expressing our D/s? With the date who didn’t negotiate, hadn’t our mismatch been that I only wanted sex if it was fundamentally about kink? I had always thought of what I wanted as kinky sex. But I saw now that there was a whole world of desire and pleasure and intensity that did not revolve around sex at all.
The diagram is an oversimplification — there are many kinds of kink, and for that matter, many kinds of sex — but the paradigm shift it represented for me was profound. I had assumed, without ever questioning it, that my desire for D/s was sex-based, because compulsory sexuality told me that all erotic desires were sex-based. But the opposite was true. To the extent that I desired sex, my desire for sex was kink-based. D/s was at the center of my erotic universe, and sex was simply one way — not even my preferred way, it turned out — of expressing it.
If you’d told me when I started my blog that I’d come to identify as gray asexual, I would have been horrified, because I would have thought identifying as ace meant giving up the best and most intense parts of kink. But if you’d told me there was a whole world of kink that was as intimate and hot and intense as any kinky sex I’d had — impact scenes where I held my partner in her vulnerability as she blissfully fell apart, service rituals for which there is no sexual equivalent, a partner keeping my waterglass full, or kneeling on the kitchen floor while I did the dishes — I might have let go sooner of the assumption that sex was necessary.
The promise of kink was in part that it would help me honor and respect my own boundaries. But in many ways, understanding myself as ace has helped more. It still feels lonely when people in my community don’t know what kink is — or for that matter, what asexuality is. It’s still hard to find partners when kink community and kink-identified people are scarce. But having a clearer sense of my own boundaries makes the process of looking less scary. And knowing that acts of kink can be whole and complete unto themselves makes who I am and what I desire feel expansive and full of possibility.
