As kinksters, defining our individual sexualities can be tricky. To start, the sexual world is largely repressed, primarily heteronormative, and centered on the objectification of women, mostly vanilla or at least "kink-lite," sex education is usually a joke and has avoided teaching things like consent, etc. Not to mention, asexuality seems to have recently been established and prevalent, yet it's still kind of misunderstood and pathologized as some sort of medical defect for the most part. Being a side, as opposed to a top or bottom, has entered the zeitgeist for gays, but I'm not sure if that expands or detracts from the accepted bandwidth for fetishism or asexuality. So, most queer kinksters are left to our own devices to figure things out.
I basically see myself as somewhere on the asexual spectrum. I'd say that I'm asexual and homoromantic, but that sort of negates my sexual attraction to men. I could be demisexual because I'm very relationship-driven and prefer quality over quantity, but now that I've discovered the kind of sex that I like, I'm fine with casual encounters and being in relationships. After saying all of this, it might just sound like I'm gay because I'm sexually and romantically attracted to men and like casual sex. However, when I say "the kind of sex that I like" it doesn't involve the penetrative (top/bottom) kind of sex. I don't find penetrative sex arousing. I'm indifferent to male nudity. The kind of porn I consume can be considered "nonsexual" from a lay perspective, so just gay/homosexual doesn't cut it. This could very much just be a me thing, but I don't think I'm entirely alone with this.
Of course, everybody's sexuality and sexual experience differs, but I feel like the journey I took to discovering my asexuality is more like people's journey to discovering that they're gay and less like the experience of other mostly asexual people I know. I think that a good amount of asexual people might reach a conclusion that they're not interested in normative sex from a rather early age and wind up never having penetrative sex. However, like men who start out their adult lives hooking up and having relationships with women to later discover or accept that they're gay, I started my adult life dating and having sex with men and later discovered that I only put up with normative sex because of how inaccessible bondage was.
Looking back, I even find it a little miraculous that I dated or had any kind of sex life in the past. Although some of it was enjoyable, it felt like so much work to do the delicate dance of getting someone into bed, not understanding what they wanted or were expecting, having to concentrate on the latest bondage scene I jacked off to so I could get it up and keep it up when I topped someone, or wishing that the guy would tie me up or at least clamp a hand over my mouth when I bottomed so I can ignore the pain. Then, there was dealing with the plethora of different responses I'd get from the guys I'd open up to about my bondage fetish, ranging from morbid curiosities about "what lead to my fetish," to unenthusiastic compliance for participating in bondage, to "absolutely nots." This explains how I got into the mostly sexless relationship I was in right out of college. I figured that less vanilla sex in a relationship was better than more.
When I think about how I even started having sex, I can't help but think about all the sexual influences I grew up with. My mom was single and dating different men when I was growing up, getting married several times throughout my life. My guardians didn't go out of their way to keep me from watching rated R movies. I was the youngest of my siblings, so I'd watch them date all the time. My sister had a baby in her teens. My older brother and his friends introduced me to straight porn. I recall a day when his friends put a VHS porno on in one room and everyone had a turn to watch it alone in the room and jack off to it. When it was my turn, the tape did absolutely nothing for me, but out of peer pressure, I was compelled to think about something that turned me on in order to get aroused and seem like one of the boys. In high school, my best friend was gay and more sexually advanced than me. We watched porn together, which I thought was better than the straight porn I watched with my brother, but it still did nothing for me. However, there was less of a bro expectation to jack off when we watched porn together.
Towards the end of high school, I felt pressured to lose my virginity. Teen pregnancy was very common at my high school. Even though there was a good amount of kids in school who haven't gotten laid, there was also plenty who have. My gay best friend in high school seemed to understand how to navigate men and hooking up and had no interest in helping me out. I didn't know many other gay people at the time, aside from men I'd talk to on whatever mobile dating sites that were around back then. But I was too scared to actually try meeting with any of them. I had no idea how to flirt or even what to ask for with sex, which was due to my inexperience, as well as the fact that I didn't actually want that, which I didn't understand back then.
I wound up losing my virginity at age 20 to my first boyfriend. Since it seemed like I was "saving myself" because I was taking "so long" to have sex, he treated it like it was some kind of purity thing that I'd only give to somebody special, but it was just something I wasn't comfortable doing with someone I didn't know, with some guy I went to school with because I wasn't meeting other kinds of gay men in the city.... Let's just say that I find my first bondage sessions more special than my first times having sex. Looking back at it now, I find it ridiculous that people treated my virginity at that age so strangely considering how a lot of gay people don't typically lose it that early because we usually don't have the access or education for it until at least college. It's especially the case for kinksters. But those who judged me at the time were people I'd essentially consider children today.
Even though it was an odd and bumpy road, I kind of like that I've had the experience that I did because I feel like that's what developed my comfort with sexuality and intimacy. I have spent a good amount of my adult life in long term relationships, which could be partially my family's influence, partially being introverted and on the spectrum since I like the comfort and predictability of close connections with few people vs being completely alone or having to rely on lesser connections with people I barely know to meet my social needs. I've noticed that a lot of people who are my age with similar sexualities either aren't interested in long term romantic relationships or like the idea of them, but don't seem to make an effort to or know how to pursue them. This makes sense because it's difficult to navigate relationships when you have sexual needs that seem more complicated, combined with the scarcity of sexual compatibility in a given area and a lack of exposure and experience at a young age. Not to mention, it's easy to be guarded when you're a kinkster because we of all people understand rejection and alienation, which makes it hard to let people in and share your life with them.
I can only imagine what my first experiences would've been and where I'd be with romantic relationships if I grew up in a more traditional, nuclear family; if my parents were stricter about what I watched; if I didn't have older siblings dating, having children, or exposing me to porn; or if I didn't have a sexually advanced gay friend in high school. I would have still been queer, asexual, and kinky, but my exposure to sex probably would've been limited and fragmented because I would've been left to my own devices for a lot more of these things. Many people I know didn't have these kinds of experiences and influences and there's nothing wrong with that, but that's what makes us unique and at somewhat different levels of development and coming of age. From an early age, I sort of learned what sex was, what happens from straight sex, what I didn't like, and even discovered things that I find sexually arousing that aren't made to be arousing.
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