links.mimuki.net

Some really interesting perspectives in this thread.

Asexual people have been near-universally the kinkiest suckers I have ever met. Focusing less on physical attraction to bodies and more on the subjects and actions surrounding the concept of sex would do that to you.

Where have I heard this before...

Only when I started reading more broadly about different kinds of bonds and decentralizing romance, about how deeply romance-centered our culture is, did I begin to understand that what I wanted was not romance at all.

I am a loving person. I form deep, committed friendships. I crave emotional and intellectual intimacy. I can admire people the way I admire a painting or an intriguing book cover, aesthetically, intellectually, with curiosity and warmth. This kind of looking isn’t pursuit but attention without possession, closeness without claim, something our language rarely makes room for.

But the gravitational pull everyone described, the merging of lives around a romantic feeling, did not happen. And I certainly didn’t want anyone in my bed. What I wanted was connection, and society taught me I could only truly find it in romance.

Particularly the book recommendations on compulsory sexuality seem interesting.

In short:

• Sexual arousal refers to the set of automatic physiological reactions, with no defined direction or cause, and with variable frequency and intensity.
• Sexual desire is the intentionality or impulse to engage in sexual activity, either with oneself or with another person. [...] Desire appears after arousal.
• And finally, sexual attraction is the focus or direction of desire: the concreteness of desire toward a specific person who sparks interest or with whom one wants to engage in sexual activity.

Sexual attachment, on the other hand, can be defined as the development or strengthening of a bond between two people after sexual activity, caused, among other things, by hormonal interaction and the neurological and psychological adjustments this entails. Sexual attachment will strengthen if the experience is repeated between the same people and, to some extent, will create emotional dependency.

That is to say an asexual person could develop sexual attachment toward their partner—if they have sex recurrently, of course—despite having no attraction, no sexual desire or even no sexual arousal.

In my particular case, as I have already mentioned, I do experience sexual arousal occasionally; but once out of the relationship, I realized that my sexual desire and my "sexual attraction", upon returning to their natural state, so to speak, became practically nonexistent or diffuse.

The relevance of this model lies in a particularly suggestive idea: romance may not be an autonomous form of intimacy, but rather a cultural narrative built from several combined intimacies.

From this perspective, what we call “romance” ceases to be a fixed essence and becomes instead a particular relational configuration among many others.

[...]

In [queerplatonic] relationships, what matters is not necessarily romance or sexuality, but the structural quality of the bond itself: mutual care, deep intimacy, emotional continuity, shared meaning-making, and sustained presence in one another’s lives.

Rather than rejecting romance outright, queerplatonic relationships seem to question the assumption that every profound bond must necessarily be organized around the classical romantic model.

At a basic level, roleplay and feeling powerful and/or desired is fun; psychoanalyzing myself, as an adult, I admit that growing up alienated by the absence of sexual and romantic attraction has made me intellectually ravenous to understand sex of all kinds.

...I didn't write the title, but it does serve as a good content warning, I suppose. I'm more interested in how the author relates to sex & kink as an asexual person more generally... but wow, I learned some new words in the process, too.