The Asexual Fetishist

I’m attracted to concepts, not bodies or people.

Photo by MK Hamilton on Unsplash

It’s 9:30 am on a Monday, my regularly-scheduled time for a workout. Like always, I pad across the floor of the living room, roll out the yoga mat, arrange the dumbbells, and flip open my laptop to find a follow-along strength training video on YouTube. 

The algorithm knows my patterns and proclivities. Populating the first row of content is a perfect encapsulation of my weekday psyche: a thirty-minute shoulders and abs video, a fresh episode of The Bald and the Beautiful to listen to while I complete it, and for relaxing afterward, a 60-minute livestream in which a sweet-faced middle-aged mother named Sammie is repeatedly dropped into a hypnotic trance and made to repeat mantras of obedience and servitude by her loving hypnotist and boyfriend. 

If my workout doesn’t take too long and I’m alone in the house, I will absolutely make time for Sammie. I love watching her eyes roll up into her eye sockets as her boyfriend counts her down into a state of hypnosis, and hearing the shift in her voice as she transitions from alertness into a zombielike groan. 

I love all the sides of hypnotized Sammie: when she is made to be a giggling maid, and when she dons fuzzy ears and mewls like a cat; when she devotedly calls her hypnotist Master and erases her memories for him, and when she freezes, smilingly, into a happy doll begging to be played with. I’ve watched all of her hours-long livestreams in their entirety, some of them multiple times, her vacant, entranced stares and stiff, robotic movements sending my own body roaring into a satisfied climax, sometimes without even touching myself. 

But I am not attracted to Sammie at all. In fact, I’m not at all attracted to women. To the extent that my sexuality involves making contact with other people, I’m a gay man, exclusively interested in other queer men. But to even bother with that distinction confuses things a bit, because ultimately my sexual orientation does not hinge upon people’s identities or bodies. Though I can admire the beauty of all kinds of people, and even feel a handsome man igniting my curiosity at times, ultimately I’m just not really “into” human beings at all.

What I’m into is hypnosis. Or mind control, brainwashing, and conditioning, if you like. Hypnosis is the bedrock that holds my psychosexual landscape together; without it any potential engagement in sex slips, and falls apart into nothing. Hypnosis is the anchor that keeps my insatiable libido grounded; without it, any possibility of having satisfying sex floats away, and my mind dissociates from the event as it’s happening.  

I’m a deeply sexual person, and I always have been. I discovered masturbation early, at around four or five, and took part in it actively, getting caught a few times as a kid before I learned to sequester into my bedroom for it early in the morning and late at night. Beginning in my teen years, I got into the habit of pleasuring myself for between an hour and a half to two hours per day, and that rate has continued throughout much of my adult life. 

I voraciously consume videos, short stories, animated gifs, and visual art about my sexual interests regularly, and whenever I want, I can enter a lushly populated fantasy realm, wherein I am a blank, mindless drone being puppeted by some unseen, alluring hypnotic master. When the circumstances are right and the interests are compatible, I have sex quite often, with a great many people. I’ve laid down in a Steamworks bathhouse with a blindfold on and condoms beside me and fucked more people in a single sitting than I was able to count. I have a high libido, high enough that no partner I’ve ever dated has ever been able to keep up with me. 

And yet, I am also asexual — because as much as my body craves sexual release, and as often as I pursue sex, my drive has no relationship to how other people look, or anything else about them, and my release doesn’t need to involve any specific sexual activities at all. 

There’s nothing especially alluring to me about any type of body, or any type of face. The idea grabbing a dick or cupping a pert ass feels a bit formal, as if I were examining a purebred at a dog show. I can recognize the differences between one type of person and another, and even recognize the qualities that someone else might like, but to me all these gradients just dissolve into a bland field of fleshy sameness. 

I’m equally bored by the mechanics of sex: the motions and stimulations bring me absolutely no pleasure. An attractive and attentive stranger could rub the correct spots on my body for hours, with the exactly right pressure and speed, and I’d only feel hollow if the experience weren’t also combined with some mind-controlling mantras or a swinging pocket watch. 

Hypnosis is sex to me. Even in its most stagey and sterile forms, I find it inescapably erotic — and that leaves sex itself as just some boring party trick. You can touch me, or you can perform a series of backflips in front of me on the floor; either way I’ll tell you that you’ve done a very impressive job and all but it will not make me cum. 

The disjoint between my sexuality and that of other people always feels particularly stark when I am visiting Steamworks. The walls are lined with televisions, constantly streaming an array of gay and bisexual porn videos. Bulky men get fisted sitting in leather swings; lithe twinks suck pierced cocks and toss their perfectly-coiffed locks to the side. Men and women alike touch and lick one another in fishnets or latex or denim. I see all kinds of men at the sauna jerking off to these images, just like I see them jerking off to the sight of one another as they roam the darkened halls. But I might as well be walking through a department store showroom of leather couches. 

Getting a little attention is fun, and a stranger using my body for pleasure is appealingly lurid if it’s made part of some dehumanizing mind-control scene, but I’d much rather not have to see any stranger while they are busy seeing and coveting me. It only makes me compare the living hunger inside them with the howling emptiness inside me. 

The cover for Peter Berlin’s film That Boy. 

In the 1974 gay erotic film That Boy, writer, director, and star Peter Berlin plays Helmut, a fictionalized version of himself, a leather-clad Adonis-type who roams the streets of San Francisco showing off his body but never accepting any suitor’s overtures. Helmut is in love with being coveted, and with being wanted, and the camera traces the ridges of his muscles and the outline of his cock countless times throughout the film. Other men desire Helmut desperately, and follow him down the sidewalk, their eyes burning with yearning, but Helmut only wishes to spend time chastely walking through the park and chatting amiably with a Blind boy he’s just met, who cannot see him and want him as they do. 

In several dreamlike scenes, we witness what other men on the street fantasize about doing with Helmut— long scenes of whipping, cock worship, fellatio, and masturbation in dingy bars and gyms — but after each long, pornographic sequence, we phase back to Helmut’s reality, with him and his new Blind friend lovingly roaming around. 

In real life, Berlin reportedly used to cruise simply by enticing men into following him around town for hours — but he wouldn’t permit them to actually have sex with him. And though he was an avowed exhibitionist and photo-philiac of sorts, Berlin was also fiercely protective of his own image. For years, no one but Berlin himself was permitted to take his photograph — until at last he made an exception for Robert Mapplethorpe. 

I first watched Peter Berlin’s That Boy at a special showing at the Music Box theater this past September in Chicago. In the opening scene, Berlin strolls about a lush floral garden, and then rolls around in the grass, sniffing a clutch of flowers that he’s just picked. This scene deliberately evokes in the viewer thoughts of Narcissus, the Greek mythological figure who fell in such intense love with his own reflection that it ultimately killed him. Today, references to Narcissus have an almost invariably negative connotation. Narcissists are evil, narcissists are controlling, narcissists will use you for the ‘supply’ of attention that you can afford them, and then they’ll dispose of you, having ravaged your psyche.

Sympathy for the Narcissist
Can we stop maligning people with a highly stigmatized mental illness?humanparts.medium.com

But in Narcissus, I see a figure of sexuality that is completely self-possessed. In the early 2000’s, he was something of a positive symbol on AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, the first online queer community where I ever recognized myself. As a teen, I felt powerfully in my bones that a cisgender, heterosexual life would never be for me. Yet I didn’t know where to place my sexuality, because thoughts of being with men or with women only made me feel cold. 

Inside me there was a roaring furnace of passionate sensuality, but it had no outward-facing target. Like Peter Berlin, I was open to being seen, and my sexuality desperately wanted to be expressed — but I didn’t crave anyone else, and I didn’t want to be touched. 

I had no idea back then that there was a rich history of gay men expressing their erotic side within the leather community without ever having sex, or of people who enjoyed sex, but had no feelings about identities or bodies. My unique combination of desire and disinterest seemed like a thing impossible for anybody else to understand. Though I now know better intellectually, I still often feel this way. 

Other people see bodies and are drawn toward them. Other people can make meaningful eye contact, the kind that lights a spark of desire inside. People enjoy the feel of a touch, the sensation of their shaft entering a warm, wet passage; they like tall men, or fat men, or hairy backs, or tattooed skin. I don’t care, a partner can look any which way, so long as they want to play with hypnosis. And if they don’t like hypnosis, or if they mind me bringing some element of hypnosis into our time together, then we just cannot be sexual together at all.

I’m a lifelong hypnosis fetishist with a sky-high libido. And I’m also asexual. While at first glance these two facts might seem impossible to reconcile, they’re actually impossible to separate from one another. To really unpack why this is, I need to explain what both fetishes and asexuality truly are — and contrast those truths with the myths we’ve all been taught about how human sexuality works. 

…

Let’s start by considering what a fetish is, and crucially, how it differs from a kink. Kinks are on the lips of a lot of people these days: Fashion models and pop stars wear leather harnesses on the red carpet. Sadomasochistic rituals are depicted (with varying degrees of success) on film and TV screens. Even bimbofication (hypnosis play’s sillier, pinker sister) has become widely celebrated on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, with so many newly-minted bimbos adopting the lifestyle that it’s been covered as a cultural trend by The New York Times and Vice. 

More people than ever seem to be dipping their toes into experimental, kinky sex — even while conservative queerphobes fan the flames of alarmism and consider this sexual exploration an epidemic of degeneracy. But while kink is a fun, freeing palate cleanser for people of a variety of sexualities, it does differ in some crucial ways from a fetish that’s non-negotiable.

Sigmund Freud originated the concept of the fetish in an essay on the subject published in 1927. He theorized that the moment a young boy becomes aware that his mother (or sisters) lacks a penis, he withdraws his gaze from them in alarm, stewing in the fear that he, too, might one day become castrated. 

Whatever the young boy’s gaze falls upon during this moment of revulsion, according to Freud, becomes the subject of his fetish: it could be a pair of his mother’s shoes, say, or a diaper folded atop a changing table. This object supposedly becomes a psychological stand-in for the young boy’s penis, and his internally conflicted relationship to the object of fetishization endures for the remainder of his life. 

A true “fetishist,” in the Freudian sense, is a person who cannot sexually respond without the subject of their obsession in the room. They might need to be wearing a pair of high heels, or to have their sexual partners wear them, or might require their sexual partners to change their diapers, as the case may be. To an outsider, a fetishist might seem needlessly preoccupied with their fetish-object, or they might become embarrassingly flustered at the mere presence of it within a completely platonic context. Though Freud had plenty to say about why the existence of fetishes proved his theory of castration anxiety, he never suggested much in the way of a cure for it. 

The psychiatric community has largely moved on from Freud’s writings, and there is very little from his psychoanalytic theories that I personally consider to be useful to take into consideration today. Still, I find his definition of a fetish compelling. I certainly don’t believe that my fixation with hypnosis was caused by me flinching away in terror at the discovery of my mom’s vagina, and my attention landing by happenstance on the Hypno’s Naptime episode of Pokémon, scarring me for life. But it is true that I experience an enduring fascination with an extremely niche fetish “object” — and it does claim a primary role within my sexual life. 

Some of my earliest memories do involve fantasizing about being hypnotized, or touching myself while I watched or read about a character undergoing mind control. My earliest masturbatory fantasies were of being compressed into a small space and locked into a brainwashing helmet. Touching myself late at night or early into the morning didn’t just afford me privacy, it lent the experience an extra thrill — because, in my tiredness, I could better pretend that I was succumbing to a trance. 

In addition to the aforementioned Pokémon episode, I faithfully watched and re-watched hypnosis-tinged episodes of Sailor Moon, Sonic, Inuyasha, and King of the Hill all the time. A precocious reader, I thumbed through the ending passage of Hannibal (wherein Hannibal Lector systematically drugs and brainwashes Clarice into becoming his loving minion) more times as a kid than I could really excuse or explain. Every time I revisited these depictions, I did so with equal enthusiasm — the fluttering eyelids, the hollow, echoing voices, and quiet surrenderings of conscious control all remained endlessly bewitching to me. 

A screenshot from Sailor Moon Crystal. 

As I matured into a teenager, my sexuality didn’t really change. I saw my friends developing crushes, or enacting at-the-time unspeakable queer desires by playfully insulting and wrestling with one another, but nobody ever moved me in quite that way. I had a boyfriend for a while, and I found some celebrities to pretend to be into (including my beloved Hannibal, Anthony Hopkins), but I never looked at anybody and fantasized about having sex with them. Hypnosis was my one mistress, the one I pined for in my quiet moments or when I had the home computer to myself. Any person that appeared in my imagined hypnotic scenarios was incidental. Slipping under a trance required a seductive, powerful hypnotist, but in that role nearly anyone would do. 

I spent a lot of time on websites devoted to hypnosis and brainwashing around that time. The most popular one was WarpMyMind.com. Back then, the site contained a few flashing hypnotic visuals and some repetitive audio tracks. I remember staring for ages into one that read “It is better to be happy than to be interesting,” willing myself to believe it, working myself up into a panting mess pretending I was being conditioned to become an agreeable thrall. 

In a quest to better understand myself, I also trawled all the major porn sites, watching just about any configuration of people engaging in any number of acts. And I read Dan Savage’s sex advice column Savage Love every single week for nearly a decade, cramming my brain full of knowledge about what human sexuality was capable of being. I only ever read a letter from a hypnosis fetishist in that column once. And for years, no matter how widely I searched, I could find no hypnosis porn. Everything that I could find about human sexuality was but a dull curiosity to me — interesting insofar as all of humanity’s diversity was, but not compelling personally. 

Once I became an adult and started having sex with human beings, I remained unimpressed. I could only have fun or get off during sex if some detailed hypnotic fantasy was unspooling within my head. After disclosing my interests went badly a few times, I didn’t dare tell any of my boyfriends about what I was imagining anymore. I knew I couldn’t trust them to regard my fetish with any respect. Even the ones who made kinky requests of me never got in on the secret — I’d tie them up, or fill their asses with enormous dildos, but I’d never share that all the time I was imagining an alien mind-control insect was making me do it. It was the only way to trick myself into approaching the act with any buy-in. 

I don’t think that vanilla people can easily understand this, but when you have a fetish, being societally expected and pressured into having ‘regular’ sex can be just as traumatic as being pushed to engage in unwanted slapping or bondage might be for them. I didn’t want bland penis-in-vagina missionary with hand-holding. I wanted to be locked into a VR helmet and forced to watch spirals until I believed I was somebody’s pet. 

Regular sex felt wrong in my body, and it alienated my body from my mind. Gritting my teeth and assenting to sex that looked normal took a real toll on me, until, for a while, I thought I didn’t have much of a sexuality at all. 

I think it’s hard for experimentally kinky people to recognize the differences between themselves and the fetishists, too. It’s not that I think I’m more of a pure sexual adventurer than they are; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. My interests are what they are, through no choice of my own, and if I want to get off, invoking them is required. Kinksters, in contrast, can approach power, pain, pleasure, and role reversals all in a spirit of play, trying on any number of outfits and identities as they see fit. With time and exposure, their palates can widen. Mine is frustratingly narrow. 

I wish I didn’t feel bad about it, but I do. There are only so many people on the planet who will ever understand me, or share in my interests. Today, hypnosis play is a lot more popular than it once was, and I rejoice in that, but for the majority of the kinky people who dabble, it will only ever remain just that: a form of play. But I’m a fetishist. I need hypnosis in the room. And even some of the most open-minded queer and kinky partners that I’ve had can’t understand my frigidity in hypnosis’ absence. 

I’ve heard some fellow Autistic people liken having a fetish to having a special interest, and I think that analogy tracks. Autistics get accused of having incredibly rigid worldviews and interests; if all we ever want to talk about is urban architecture or mycology, people will say we’re being anti-social, or that our worlds are too small. Though our passions bring us immense pleasure and inspiration and harm no one, we are stigmatized for having them.

I often feel the same way about my sexuality. There’s a whole vivid world out there where people are finding one another, picking up on unspoken chemistries, smelling each other, caressing each other, and luxuriating in fingering, penetration, or oral purely for its own sake. Try as I might, I can’t enjoy any of it. The comingling of bodies feels like square dancing while wearing a hazmat suit. And that’s why, high libido be damned, I am an asexual. 

…

The writer Ana Valens is well known for her explorations of human sexuality. Her Substack is called NSFW because of how often she reports on that beat — and how unfairly her frank discussions of sexuality are received. Unfortunately, Valens has been subjected to multiple cancellation attempts at the hands of transphobes who can’t handle a trans woman discussing sex toys or sexual gratification openly. 

Though she’s an internet legend for making hilarious posts about transfemme pussy carousels and discussing how a vibrator could be hooked up to the online game Fall Guys, Ana Valens is also an asexual — but one with a libido and a sizeable interest in sex, quite like myself. In a Substack piece from October of 2022, Valens explains that she experiences a disconnect between herself and the subjects of her sexual arousal. 

Ana says she enjoys watching porn, admiring other people’s bodies, and even watching other people have sex — but none of that means she wants to participate herself. 

“For those that experience sexual attraction to others (allosexuals), something is obviously innate about their desires,” Ana writes. “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.” Though of course, she allows, other motivations such as a desire for connection or affection also come in. 

“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.”

Ace Erotics: Or, Why You're Thinking About Sex and Eroticism All Wrong
And how a hypnokink aim trainer taught me why.nsfw.substack.com

Ana’s ace erotics sometimes involve an element of power exchange. She might serve as a submissive to a Dominant woman, for example, who might instruct Ana in how to better serve and please her. Ana’s duties as a submissive could involve sexually stimulating her Domme, or it could involve taking care of her and her needs in other ways — and the distinction barely matters, since for Ana it is the deep connection and intimacy of the power exchange that is erotic. It needn’t involve sex. The closeness is the sex. And power exchange can be accomplished in plenty of other ways, including (she writes), competitive games like Overwatch. 

Ana’s experience perfectly illustrates the limitations with most people’s understanding of asexuality. To be asexual is to lack any libido, many assume, or to have no desire for any kind of sexual contact. That just isn’t true. Asexuality is simply the lack of sexual attraction to people.

A lack of attraction to people is not the same thing from lacking any interest in sex, or of having any sex drive. Asexuality is, after all, a sexual orientation, like being bisexual, gay, or straight — those labels tell you something about what genders a person is interested in, but nothing about how often they actually want to fuck. 

Many asexual people enjoy kinky sex for sensory or stimulatory reasons — being tied up or flogging another person can be fun, even if it doesn’t get you off — and others enjoy sex because the sensation of it is pleasurable, even if the body they’re having sex with isn’t one they uniquely desire. For me, hypnosis is sexually charged by its very nature, far more so than looking at a naked human being ever could be. And for Ana, sex isn’t important so much as a sense of erotics, a charged and intimate connection that broaches the space where one person ends and the other begins. 

In most mainstream conversations surrounding sex, a person’s orientation, identity, fantasies, and habits are all presumed to align in a tidy, coherent way. The reality is vastly more complex. 

All around the world there are straight women writing boy-love novels and straight men role-playing that they are lesbian cat-girls. Porn fans are masturbating to activities they’d never want to participate in in real life, and trad wives are hiding dungeons filled with needles and shock collars in their basements. Some gay men happily jerk off to straight porn, and some depressed people with low libidos masturbate only for their mental health. Some experience sex only in their fantasies, and some are transported to mystical fantasy realms while they’re having sex.

Is “Porn Addiction” Real? Is Masturbation an Autistic Stim?

No psychological theory will ever explain the abundant weirdness of human sexuality, nor should it ever attempt to. No sexuality that respects the autonomy of other people can ever be a sickness, despite Freud’s assertions, and the depth and breadth of human interests is something that we deserve to take appreciative awe of, rather than demanding to perfectly taxonomize and understand. 

For far too much of my life, I hid my hypnosis fetish away from the world and from all of my partners, dissociating during vanilla sex then dashing off to read stories about the sexual experiences I actually wanted to have while I masturbated quietly in the closet. I could have spent that time staring into metronomes with like-minded perverts, or listening to subliminal audio tracks through noise-cancelling headphones until they made me slump over. 

There’s a major erotic hypnosis conference in my area every summer, it turns out. It’s called Beguiled, and it has sister conventions on the coasts each year, and there’s an annual hypnosis camp that happens in the dark woods of the Berkshires. People gather from all across the country to take part in our shared fetish. They come together to develop hypnotic video games and VR visualizers too. 

Since coming out as a hypnosis fetishist a few years ago, I’ve had Masters and play partners, Controllers and fellow drones, Owners and Daddies and new friends galore. I’ve delved deep into my consciousness, constructed new personas and mental structures inside of myself, and even pushed my mind to its limits at times — and along the way I’ve also had some incredible sex. Though I’d frequently felt that my desires were too unusual to ever be properly understood, it turns out that I was never really alone. I just had to find the courage to give voice to my desires — and the conviction to start saying no to the sexual experiences and relationship models that no longer suit me. 

I’m an asexual because I have a fetish, and my sexuality is fetishistic because of my asexuality. It’s hard to explain, and it’s tough at times to find people who can work with it, but after an especially fulfilling round of fractionation or amnesia-play with an appropriately hypno-kinky partner, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have a unique sexuality, but I don’t want to change who I am — well, not unless the person brainwashing me wants to. 

The Asexual-Bisexual Mirror
Ace and Bi people are oppressed in many of the same ways.devonprice.medium.com