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Ah, I’m guessing you read a reblog-chain involving this.

Okay, let me see if I can explain this without being either oversimplified or too dense with ace community jargon.

Often when people first encounter the word “asexual”, they think it means “lacking in sexuality”. It’s an easy mistake to make: it kind of looks like it ought to mean that.

Thing is, “asexual”, in the sense used in the modern day in this culture, actually has a meaning analogous to words like “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”. It denotes the types of people that the person in question can generally experience sexual attraction towards: in this case, no types.

Sexual attraction is just one aspect of sexuality. There are others: libido, various fetishes, capacity for orgasm, just to name a few. A person can have these aspects in any combination, or none of them.

Basically nothing is hard-and-fast when it comes to identity labels, but as a general rule, “asexuality” refers only to the absence of sexual attraction. An asexual may have any or all other aspects while still being asexual. (They can also have none, of course.)

Note: many kinky asexuals, if asked how they can be both, would respond that their kinks aren’t sexual: they’re non-sexual fascinations that bear enough resemblance to “kinks” in the sexual sense to make it useful for them to call themselves “kinky”. I am not one of those people: I do consider it a sexual thing, though it tends to look very different from “normal” sexuality due to the particular set of aspects and experiences and (especially) other quirks of brain wiring that went into shaping it, and someone else in a similar situation might have a different view on whether their kink is sexual. Still, I thought I should mention that this is by no means a universal or even necessarily the most common view among asexuals with kinks and/or fetishes.

Wait, I probably shouldn’t leave that ’looks very different from “normal” sexuality due to the particular set of aspects and experiences and (especially) other quirks of brain wiring that went into shaping it‘ bit buried in the middle of a sentence. See, just because, for example, asexuals can have libidoes, it doesn’t mean that their experiences of libido will be the same as those of non-aces. A given aspect of sexuality tends to manifest differently depending on what other aspects are around for it to interact with, as well as what the rest of the person’s mind is like. (Really, given that I tend to dislike overwhelming emotion in general (even the supposedly positive emotions), it makes a certain amount of sense that to me, the most satisfying form of pleasure would not be orgasmic ecstasy but rather calm contentment.) “Hypno-fetishist” is close enough to the truth to be useful, but I often find I approach things differently than other hypno-fetishists do.

I hope this helped. While I do have significant quantities of contact with the asexual community, I’m not an activist and don’t have much practice at explaining the intricacies of asexuality. Feel free to ask for clarification or more information.

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Tags:

#tales from the askbox #sexuality and lack thereof #(that actually used to be my asexuality tag) #(in the early days of my blog) #(but these days it’s settled into being a kink tag instead) #asexuality #Anonymous

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