On Being Neurodivergent and Kinky

So: I’m mildly autistic. Or “neurodivergent” if you want to use a fancy word for it.

What this means is that my brain works in a slightly funny way sometimes. I tend to obsess over the things I’m interested in. I don’t pick up on social cues that well. I am logical rather than emotional to an excessive degree. And I’m a wee bit sensitive when it comes to both noise and physical sensation.

I’m also quite high-functioning. Which means that I’ve found ways of managing these things so that they don’t really inconvenience me to any meaningful degree. 90% of the time I’m a genuine, bonafide, completely normal human being.

With a little effort I can manage social interaction like a pro. I have taught myself to read social cues. I’ve learned to cope with sensory overload. Most people who meet me don’t even twig that I’m not quite normal.

But I’d be kidding myself if I said that my autistic personality traits don’t affect my sex life, or the way I do kink. Perhaps they’re even part of the reason why I’m kinky in the first place.

So here, to the best of my ability, is a bit about what it’s like to be kinky and autistic – from my point of view, at least…

I was a slow starter

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I was a few years older than most of my peers when I first started having sex. There were a number of reasons for this – not least that sex is complicated. People and their emotions, the messy physicality of intercourse, the silent communication inherent in fucking someone… there’s a lot to learn, and a lot to get comfortable with.

I like knowing what to expect. I like routine. I like to be in control. As such, there were a good few years between me wanting to have sex, and me actually having sex.

I didn’t spend those years sitting around wanking and feeling sorry for myself (not exclusively, anyway). I spent them learning. By the time I lost my virginity I’d probably read more about sex and kink than most people do in their lifetime. I was a theoretical expert.

Knowing about things – even things as slippery and intangible as sex and love and human interconnectedness – makes me feel in control. It allows me to push my boundaries. It allows me to take risks and do things that I never thought I could.

Theoretical learning, to an autistic person, is super empowering.

Emotions are confusing

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Even now I’m constantly surprised by the complexity of human emotions. Just when I’m sure I have a handle on how someone else might feel about something, they surprise me by adding an extra layer of nuance that I’d never even considered before.

This used to cause me no little amount of stress. I felt like a bit of an alien. Where other humans seemed to have an inherent understanding of things like relationships and friendships and emotions, I just… didn’t.

I’ve learned to cope with this mostly by communicating more. It came as a surprise to me that you can ask people how they’re feeling, and that it’s totally okay to misread someone’s feelings. Emotions, like any other difficult thing, can be managed.

Even by someone with a certified autistic robot brain. So.

The kink scene works for me

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The way people do things within the kink scene works for me on a number of levels. Negotiation? Fabulous idea. I love sitting down and hashing things out in words before doing anything physical. Why don’t vanilla people ever consider filling in a checklist before they fuck?

Common kink concepts (like play, or aftercare, or checking in) are all crazy valuable for navigating the complex waters of doing physical, sexual stuff with another person. And they’re concepts that don’t exist in the vanilla world.

You’d think the kink scene would be a confusing place for someone who has trouble navigating social interaction. But the opposite is true – the kink scene is filled with structures and ideas that make so much sense to a person like me.

Sex is my special interest

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I’m an absolute nerd when it comes to sex. I want to know everything there is to know about everything that one person can do to another in the bedroom. I want to try most things, many out of nothing other than extreme curiosity. Kink, to me, is a life-long process of experimentation.

And, like any experimental process, it’s more fun when you have more toys to play with. As interesting and varied as vanilla sex is, kink is more so. It opens up so many possibilities for intimacy and weirdness and fun. It allows me to engage the part of me that wants to play and learn and discover things to an almost endless degree. Hurrah.

Social skills can be learned

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There was a time when I thought that having a relatively normal sexual relationship (let alone a kinky one) with another human being was well out of reach to me. I was too weird, too awkward, too incapable of understanding what went on in the heads of my fellow humans.

I was wrong, of course. It took a while, but through a process of trial and error (mostly error) I learned what normal social behaviour looks like. I learned how to pass. And then, once I could pass, I went right on learning. In some settings, nowadays, I’m downright charismatic.

Perhaps it’s because I had to put effort into learning how to pass. Perhaps it’s because I had to consciously work out how to make myself fit in. Perhaps by slowly and deliberately learning how to do things that other humans can do without any effort I’ve learned these skills better than the average person.

(Or perhaps I’m just a bit full of myself. Who really knows?)