Ace Erotics: Or, Why You're Thinking About Sex and Eroticism All Wrong
And a hypnokink aim trainer taught me why.
I came out as ace earlier this year, sending me on a thorough journey of self-exploration and discovery that significantly challenged my sexual politics. A lot of my prior writing on sex and sexuality felt a bit like a cope in retrospect: Trying to enjoy something I really didn’t, and trying to appear like someone who was having more sex than she really was. Ace politics freed me, in part because my specific sexuality — aegosexuality — isn’t divorced from porn and sexual pleasure.
Aegosexuality is commonly described as a sexual orientation where someone has "a disconnect between themselves and the subject of arousal." For example, aegosexuals might enjoy porn where someone has sex with another person, they may fantasize about seeing other people engage in sex, but they don’t necessarily feel sexual attraction to having sex with another person. They’re more likely to fantasize about others having sex.
These labels are, of course, way more complicated than their textbook definitions, but “aegosexual” describes my experience with sex well: I appreciate it, I appreciate others’ bodies, I love seeing hot people have sex, and I even find myself attracted to certain scenarios, fetishes, and kinks in porn. But I don’t necessarily want to have sex with other people just for the sake of having sex with another person, there has to be another core motivation. More often than not, that motivation is power exchange, and it’s why my interest in sex mostly lies with Domination and submission.
The more I thought about my own relationship with sex, the more I started to pick apart the texture of my sexual and non-sexual relationships. What was I seeking out of other people through sex? Why did I gravitate toward relationship arrangements like D/s, and why did I need some element of power in sex? Why do some of my queer friendships feel homoerotic when others don’t, and why, to crib an old ace joke, are some of my friends sluts in theory while others are sluts in practice?
All these questions made me think hard about the difference between “sexuality” and “eroticism.” I think this difference is super important, because queer theory tends to conflate the two, or it assumes that all intimacy defaults to an underlying drive for sexual pleasure. In actuality, I think it’s the opposite: The joy and belonging people get through sex is part of a larger sphere of needs and desires called eroticism, which is an incredibly complicated and ecstatic form of connection between people.
Ace erotics
For those that experience sexual attraction to others (allosexuals), something is obviously innate about their desires: They see a hot person, they feel attraction to them, they crave sex with them, and so they seek out ways to have sex with them. There are often additional underlying motivations, such as intimacy, connection, or staving off loneliness, that are connected to the way this desire is felt. These can enhance the desire for sex, but the core motivation — someone is hot, and I want to fuck them — is often the engine driving the sexual encounter forward.
For an ace person such as myself, all those emotional needs for connection exist, but not the attraction to a specific person for sex. We therefore seek out intense intimacy in unique ways. That’s where ace erotics come in.
I first got turned on to the idea of ace erotics while reading Angela Chen’s Ace, which is a pretty thorough and provocative crash course on asexuality and ace identity. Chen finishes the book by musing on “the pleasure and richness that can be found without sex,” pleasures “equal to, or even greater, in its power.” Building off queer theorist Ela Pryzbylo’s work Asexual Erotics, she explains how “erotic” and “sexual” were not necessarily synonyms until Freud. Instead, she asks the reader to reframe eroticism through Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”
“Lorde defines eroticism as ‘the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual,’” Chen writes. “Such a definition of the erotic, as a profound force greater than the sexual, is crucial to how aces think about all that life has to offer.”
There are parts of Lorde’s writing on erotics that I disagree with (I think her criticism of pornography as “sensation without feeling” isn’t necessarily true), but I think Chen and other ace theorists are right to reframe eroticism as something that can be meaningfully separated from sexuality. Or rather, that eroticism can encompass sexual attraction, and not vice-versa.
In the past year, I’ve tried to find a way to define and redefine eroticism against sexuality, and I’ve found a good working theory through feminist scholar Cristina L. H. Traina’s Erotic Attunement, which takes a particular interest in the erotic components of motherhood. Traina ends up with these two definitions:
Sexuality begins as the complex of feelings and desires we associate with genital pleasure, and the ways in which we incorporate these into our relationships and behavior. It includes as well the ways in which these sexual relationships are institutionalized. Depending on the context — and this is part of what is at stake — sexual can imply the meanings above or refer to any act or image that implies genitality, painful or pleasurable
Eroticism is a quality of attraction to another person that desires intimacy with her on multiple levels: physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. Eroticism can include what we think of as genital, sexual desire, but if it does, this is a subset of the larger category.
Sounds familiar to Chen’s musing on the erotic as “a profound force greater than the sexual,” right? These definitions appeal to me because they start to free non-normative, non-vanilla intimate relationship structures away from the “sexual, or platonic?” paradigm, which implies there are either intense relationships or serene friendships.
Let’s say I was in a dedicated, 24/7 D/s relationship with a femdom, and I was her submissive. If that were the case, the highest priority for me would not necessarily be sex, but the act of power being exchanged itself. I would need to feel my Domme guiding me, controlling me, telling me what to do, and telling me how to serve her. For me, that would be the most important source of pleasure.
Some people consider the very act of power exchange sex. Not for me. As per above, I only find myself sexually attracted to certain scenarios, not people, and D/s on a day-to-day level is not one such scenario. So unless we engaged in specific fetishes or kinks that I were sexually attracted to, such as size play or body worship, the D/s connection in and of itself would not be a constant source of sexual pleasure.
A dedicated D/s relationship would bring me ecstatic joy for a different reason. That is my need for eroticism with another person — attraction through the desire for physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual connection, to paraphrase Traina — and I prefer to find it by consensually giving up power, or consensually obtaining it. For me, power exchange is intimate and sacred, and it draws two people together in a way that goes beyond words. It’s a near spiritual experience. That’s what I’m truly seeking out in D/s, and that, to me, is eroticism: Connection so deep that it cannot be communicated.
Others might find innate sexual pleasure in power exchange. That’s fine. What I’m interested in is why so many ace people engage in kink without finding sexual pleasure in it. Clearly, D/s and S/M carry the kernel for passionate entanglement beyond sexual feelings, and by recognizing that eroticism often exists beyond sexual desire, we start to understand just how intense erotic feelings are when the need for sex isn’t there.
What does Overwatch have to do with erotics?
I like to pose these questions, because I find contemporary queer theory on sexual aesthetics is dominated by allosexual writers universalizing sexual pleasure. Their musings on sex and sexuality are often wrong because they discount the ace experience. Just as a gender theorist dismissing a trans woman’s perspective leads to cissexist theory, diminishing the ace perspective on sex encourages compulsory sexuality (per Chen: “a set of assumptions and behaviors that support the idea that every normal person is sexual, that not wanting (socially approved) sex is unnatural and wrong, and that people who don’t care about sexuality are missing out on an utterly necessary experience.”)
Dismissive attitudes are common toward ace kinksters. When our relationship with BDSM comes up, the default allosexual response is usually“they’re simply repressed” or “weird, but OK, you do you.” I find both responses lack curiosity and empathy. Even if we redefine sex to encompass more than genital penetration or outercourse (which, for the record, is a good thing), I still find that two people can have two different relationships with the same act. As I said above, servitude can be sexual for one person, and not for the other. Our relationship with power is complicated.
Which is why I turn to Overwatch 2.
I have, maybe to a fault, been playing a lot of Overwatch 2 recently. It’s an intense, competitive multiplayer first-person shooter where two teams of five duke it out against each other to secure a pre-determined objective. Escort a payload to the other side while another team tries to stop you, hold down a sole command point until you win the first round of three, etc etc.
Kink and games have a lot in common, as I’ve written about before. Just as D/s provides a space for altered reality where new rules and expectations apply that would not be appropriate in a separate context, that’s also the case in Overwatch. By showing up and queueing up, all 10 players agree to certain expectations for how to play the game. You may be (virtually) killed by an opponent, but you can also (virtually) kill your opponents, too. This is consented to and expected. You should also really play the objective (some players are, um, not so great at that rule).
For the Tank and Damage role, which are often tasked with dealing out damage that can lead to a kill, certain players tend to outperform others based on skill and performance. Inevitably, certain players may even come to dominate their opponents, repeatedly landing successful kills, shutting out the enemy team’s ability to execute their plays for the point.
It wasn't until I played Nyx Goddess Games' Gamer Training, a hypnokink-themed aim trainer game, that I realized the virtual battlefield can have erotic components. The game induces a hypnotic trance state in the player, and then makes them bathe in the feelings of Domination and submission that can emerge during FPS play. Whether it’s swiftly knocking out their enemies or feeling like they just can’t keep up with a superior team’s momentum, Gamer Training highlights how players wrestle for power in ways that can be incredibly kinky. This cracked the code for me: Competitive multiplayer games can be intense sources of power exchanges.
In fact, allow me to go one step further. Perhaps multiplayer FPS games are innately sources of erotic power exchange. Power can feel intoxicating, and it can create intimacy “on multiple levels: physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual.” When you’re racking up eliminations in Overwatch, you start to intimately recognize another player for who they are. You study your opponent like a hunter studies prey. If they’re underperforming, you recognize their weaknesses, exploit them, and score an easy kill. If they’re a challenge, you study the ebbs and flows of the game’s rhythm to dance the fatal dance with them, waiting to back them into a disadvantage to wipe them out. Then you dominate and secure their fear and respect.
In other words, you engage in consensual power exchange, and this can feel exhilirating, intoxicating, and addicting.
For me, competitive multiplayer can reach the same terrain of emotions and feelings as 24/7 D/s: I feel intimately connected and empowered, but I don’t feel turned on. Rather, it’s the ecstatic joy of being dominant and unstoppable, or the humiliating experience of being fed over and over to another enemy for kills, that makes Overwatch and other competitive multiplayer games erotic in their design.
I’ve spoken to other kinksters in the past about this, and at times, I’ve been implicitly told that I’m simply confused in my feelings. What’s coming up must be sexual pleasure, it must be a sexual desire for Domination or submission, and I simply don’t know the terrain of my own emotions enough.
This is why I turn to Overwatch. I’m pretty sure I can tell the game isn’t turning me on, especially because other players have gone one step further and created an explicitly sexual relationship with Domination and submission in Overwatch. For example, healslutting is a very popular D/s engagement where a Support player heals a Damage or Tank role, and it’s commonly carried out for sexual pleasure. For me, Overwatch has erotic undercurrents, but not necessarily sexual ones. Just as I can recognize the game makes me feel superior or inferior in ways that draws me closer together with the rest of my players, D/s can serve a similar, albeit far more intense, purpose.
So, to come back to those kinksters who have argued I don’t know my own feelings and desires well enough: What a boring and unsatisfying way to perceive humanity’s emotional range. The great thing about intimacy is that no two people experience it the same way.
That’s why I adore ace erotics. It cracks the door open to the kaledioscope of ways we can think about ecstatic pleasure, and it gives us the language we need to finally reckon with it.
Special thanks to Ashley Louis Yeo Payne and Jacqie for their generous Sex-Haver tier contributions.