One of my wishlist items was more discussion about the intersections of asexuality and kink, and I thought I'd sketch out a few ways of thinking about those intersections that have been helpful for me so far.

1) Many kinds of erotic attraction

The ace community has a lot of helpful language around teasing apart different kinds of attraction--aesthetic attraction is not always romantic attraction is not always sexual attraction, etc. If you're not familiar with the split attraction model, I found this article a useful introduction.

What I haven't heard talked about is that there are also different kinds of erotic attraction, that one might, for instance, be drawn to do kink with someone but not to have sex with them, or to do one kind of kink and not another. (And in fact, if you recognize that there is more than one kind of kink, then you already understand that different kinds of erotic desire exist.) 

My kinkiness feels fundamentally asexual in that I have very little desire for sex qua sex, and that who I can and will partner with is heavily informed by that lack of desire (though it is perhaps equally informed by the presence of a different kind of desire). But there are also a lot of ace-community things that don't apply to me, like the idea that being erotically attracted to someone is this mysterious, comically unknowable, bizarrely important thing that other people experience and we don't. I do experience erotic attraction, it's just not about sex.

2) Decentering sex

Before I realized that sex was not the center of the erotic universe, I thought that my being kinky meant I only liked kinky sex. In other words, I thought the erotic universe consisted only of sex, of which some subset was kinky sex, and that small subset was where my interests lay. And then I had my first nonsexual kink partnership and discovered that kinky sex was also only a small subset of kink and that I was very happy and often relieved to explore kinky things that had nothing to do with sex at all.

3) Whole and Irreducible

What's it about, if it's not about sex, I remember someone asking me once about nonsexual kink. Is it the adrenaline? I remember finding the question confusing and not knowing how to answer. But what I'd say now is that what's it about is the wrong question. What is sex about? What is the color blue about? Some things aren't especially reducible to component parts.

(Though, incidentally, what's it about is a question I do find myself asking about power-neutral sex. I can get into sex if it's fundamentally about power dynamics--and if it doesn't involve any activities on my ( *unfurls comically long scroll; its end rolls down a corridor and around several corners* ) DNW list--but I don't have an intuitive sense of why sex without a power dynamic is a thing people do, the way I intuitively get power exchange.)


This is fairly lightly sketched, and my thinking is continually evolving (I've identified as kinky for something like 13 years, but thinking of asexuality as part of that identity is much more recent). I'm curious if any of this resonates with others, either as something you've experienced, or something you've read about or observed, or something you've noticed about me. I'm also interested to know if there's any part of this topic you'd like to hear more about. I plan to keep exploring it here, so questions/comments/prompts are very welcome.