I really want to want to have PIVsex w/the guy lm seeing but lately I havent had the sexdrive to want it.Ive been considering trying out PIV w/him anyways but im worried about whether it would feel consensual.Any sexually active aces have any advice?

[CN for consent talk, and all the stuff that can go with that I guess?]

Hi anon :)

Hopefully some other sexually active aces will chime in with their thoughts, but here’s mine:

As I was thinking about how to reply to this ask, I noticed that you said you want to want to have PIV sex, rather than simply wanting to have it. I’m not sure whether that’s just a way of saying that you want it but don’t have the sex drive for it or not, but I think either way it’s worth thinking about why you’re thinking about trying it. Out of curiosity? Because you think it’ll feel good? Because you don’t want to disappoint this guy? There are a lot of reasons why aces decide to have sex, and the reasons that you want to have it can have a bearing on how you feel about it.

For example, sometimes I try things with my boyfriend. If I try it because I’m worried he’ll be disappointed if I don’t, it doesn’t go well and I don’t feel too great about it. If I try it because I want him to be happy or feel pleasure, I generally tend to feel good about it myself. More so than that, I feel like I’m going into it with the right frame of mind, so that if it stops feeling good, I’ll feel able to stop it rather than continuing. So if your reasons for wanting to have PIV sex involve how it would make your guy feel, it’s probably a good idea to look at that more closely to see if it feels fully consensual (by which in this instance I mean you don’t feel coerced, by him or by society’s expectations which may have led to feelings of guilt within yourself) now, and that will give you an idea of whether it will feel consensual later.

It might be a bit cliche, but it could still be worth writing out a pros and cons list to get your thoughts in order, so pros might be ‘it might feel good’, ‘it might make us both happy’, ‘I will know what it feels like and be able to make more informed decisions about it in the future’ and cons might be ‘I don’t have a sex drive so it might not be good for me’, ‘I worry that it could feel not consensual’, and so on. If you haven’t done it already, that could be useful to help you decide whether it’s worth the risk of having PIV sex.

On the lack of sex drive, if that’s a big concern then it may be worth waiting a while to see if it comes back? Also, whilst this may not be the case for you, I find that often even when my sex drive is practically nonexistent, if I start doing sexual things then I get aroused enough that my sex drive comes back (or possibly it’s just the arousal that makes me want to do things, I’m not sure). If that’s the case for you then you could definitely still have sex without having a sex drive - it might even work out better than trying to have sex whilst having a sex drive, because that won’t get in the way of your thought processes!

Finally, if you do decide to try PIV sex with this guy, I think the best way to make it feel consensual is to check in with each other as often as possible. If you feel able to, explain that you want to try it to your guy and explain the feelings you have about it so that he understands where you’re coming from. Make sure that you both feel able to say stop at anytime, and if for any reason you can’t say stop then you should also have some sort of nonverbal signal, such as clicking your fingers. Ask your guy to ask you if you want to continue and what feels good at certain intervals as well – it might help you to realise you want to stop (whereas having the option of saying it might not since you might not keep in touch with how you feel emotionally without someone asking you) but hopefully will also help you communicate which things you enjoy and which things need changing to feel better and/or more comfortable.

Ultimately, however, it might still not feel consensual even with all the thinking and checking in. It sounds as if you already know this, but consent can be modelled as how things felt rather than how the parties involved acted; Coyote wrote a really great post that makes more sense than what I just said which you can read here. 

And here comes a bit of a linkspam on a conversation that happened a year or so ago on what was called the ‘grey areas of consent’, just as a kind of… primer, I guess? Sex is really normalised in a lot of societies, and so these might be useful for introspection on your reasoning, as discussed above, and might also empower you to feel comfortable saying no and expecting that no to be respected. These posts can also be really validating if you feel like that doesn’t or hasn’t happened (please check out the content notes and trigger warnings at the top of the posts, but in short they’ll probably have discussions of consent, consent violations, abuse, gaslighting, and invalidation): 

There’s a lot more on this, but unfortunately I can’t read any more of them at the moment – if the conversation is useful for you then following the links in the posts mentioned and their comments should lead you on to more.

I know that was really long and some of it may have not been relevant to you, but hopefully some of it was useful for you! If you have any more questions or would just like to talk stuff through, feel free to send me another ask or use the Tumblr messaging system (or send an off-anon ask to ask for my username for fb or skype since they’re more reliable). I hope everything goes well for you!