For today’s #KinkMonth post, it’s all about SEX! As you’ll have gathered (unless this is your first visit, in which case – welcome!) I’m doing posts inspired by Kayla Lords’ 30 Days of D/s. Today, Kayla asks:
Have you ever considered D/s without a sexual component? Would you be interested in something like it? How important is sex to your current or future D/s relationship?
So when it comes to me and kink, there is one fundamental thing you need to understand:
I do it because it gets me off.
For some reason, it seems to be a thing to deny that BDSM is mostly, or entirely, about sex. And for some people, this is probably true. But, if I’m completely honest, I’m a bit sick of it.
For me, kink and BDSM are, and always have been, overwhelmingly about sex. Yes, they’re means of connecting with people I love. They’re sometimes spiritual. But for fuck’s sake, the vast majority of the time, I do this stuff because it makes my pussy wet and gets me off.
People have tried to divorce BDSM entirely from sex. I am willing to entertain that there are some people – folks at the far end of the Ace spectrum, for example – for whom this is the case. But at its core, I do believe it’s fundamentally a sexual or sex-adjacent practice 99% of the time.
I don’t fuck everyone I scene with, but I do get turned on during pretty much any good kink interaction. It’s part of my pre-negotiation with new partners: “you don’t have to do anything about it, but you need to be okay with the fact that if we have a good scene, I WILL be aroused.”
What’s wrong with sex anyway?
We live in a world where it’s pretty hard to admit that something we do is mainly or entirely about sex. Sex is not seen as a good enough reason to do something – there has to be a higher purpose, a better reason.
Confession I’m seriously not proud of time: pre-20, I was really judgy about people who have casual sex. “I only have sex when I’m in LOVE,” I proclaimed loudly, as if it made me better than other people. Thankfully, I 1) grew the fuck up and stopped being a judgemental bitch, 2) learned the awesomeness that is good casual sex.
A lot of polyamorous people – and yes, I used to be one of them, much to my embarrassment – go around saying “it’s about LOVE, not SEX!” This often goes hand in hand with, “we’re not SWINGERS!” The problem with this is that it implies being a swinger is a bad thing, that love is inherently superior to sex, and it neglects the fact that sex is a hugely important part of romantic love for a lot of us. In this way, people who are ostensibly part of the sex-positive community fall into sex-negative and sex-shaming patterns.
It’s easy to do and I sympathise with it. We’re taught, more or less from birth, that sex is bad. Dirty. Gross. That sex is only “when mummy and daddy love each other very much and want to have a baby.” A huge part of sex-positivity and the sex-posi movement, in my view, is about unlearning these toxic narratives and trying to do better.
Real talk: I don’t have an IUD to control my period (though that’s a nice side effect.) I have it for birth control.
For evidence of pervasive anti-sex sentiment, see also: “I use birth control for reasons that have nothing to do with sex, like controlling my painful periods.” Again, for a lot of people with uteruses (uteri?), this is entirely true and it’s completely valid.
However, lots of us DO use birth control for sex, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Saying that it should be freely available BECAUSE it has uses that aren’t sexual is really problematic. It should be freely available because it’s a normal part of healthcare, and lots of people like sex while also liking not being pregnant.
Let’s all just admit that some things ARE about sex
My challenge to you, and to myself: next time you find yourself wanting to defend a part of your life or identity with “it’s not about sex!” …Stop. Think about it. And resist the temptation to jump to this defense. Because sometimes, it is about sex. And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.
I’ll leave you with my favourite quote from the great Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
Kinky item of the day: Condoms! If you engage in penetrative sex or share toys in non fluid-bonded relationships, you need condoms to keep things sexy and safe. Buy 2 packs for 20% off.
Heads up: this post contains affiliate links.
I often talk about and write about non-sexual kink (I’m asexual) because kink isn’t sexual for me and one of the tropes in the media when it comes to BDSM is that kink is all about sex. Not knowing that kink could be non-sexual is why it took me an extra twelve years to realise I was kinky in the first place. (I had been introduced to the loose concept of submission, though it wasn’t called that, when I was twenty-four, but, you know, all kink is sexual and I wasn’t interested in sex, so I must not be kinky and didn’t read an article that said: kink doesn’t have to be about sex until I was thirty-six.) I missed over a decade of community and spent that time feeling alone and like the type of relationship I needed didn’t exist because everywhere you look BDSM is about sex. You never see non-sexual representations of D/s.
So, yeah, I talk about non-sexual kink all the time. I point out when people say it’s only about that in the books I review on my show or when someone talks about non-sexual kink in books like they’ve been paying attention to the entire BDSM community I give them props.
It’s exhausting to be erased within your own community, let me tell you, by people who should know better and who should celebrate all the different ways to connect.
And so many people do shout that IT’S ALL ABOUT SEX it makes me feel like I don’t belong here, either. And makes me wonder if I’m going to find a Domme. Sexual people rule the world–sex is everywhere–and there’s a messed up relationship to what people are allowed to talk about versus how prevalent it is, but it’s still something everyone is supposed to want and enjoy. You’re still in the majority–you’re the still the ‘normal’ ones. But sexuals still feel the need to say how kink is all about sex. Okay. According to advertising *everything* is about sex.
Being asexual in the kink scene sucks. Being asexual in the *world* sucks, but it really sucks in a highly sexualised (do people REALLY not think kink is sexual, we must know different people) environment.