"If you wordlessly initiate a sexual encounter with an asexual person without ever having any discussions where you pull apart those cultural expectations beforehand, the weight of them will still be pressuring that encounter. Even if it turns out to be consensual (and since you didn’t ask, you don’t know—don’t pretend you’re psychic, because you’re not, and because of the existence of tonic immobility, the onus is on you to ask permission, not on them to say no if you start touching without asking first), if you didn’t actually ask permission you certainly haven’t negotiated any boundaries about it, so the sex isn’t going to be good. At best it’s going to be mediocre, somewhat uncomfortable. Probably quite detached. It doesn’t have to be that way just because someone is asexual. Popular conceptions of asexuals having sex include descriptors like “passionless” or “frigid,” but it IS possible for asexuals to give good, informed, affirmative, even enthusiastic consent (although using enthusiasm as the only indicator of good consent is problematic for asexuals), and “passionless” or “frigid” are certainly not descriptors my partner would apply to me. I’ve read erotica scenes similar to some of the sex we’ve had, although frankly, I think ours was better.

Plus, if you won’t talk about sex before you have it, and you won’t ask permission and make sure everything’s okay for fear of not getting to have sex after all? That just REEKS of desperation. Is it really THAT important that you get to have sex with this particular person? Even if it’s really bad sex that is damaging and traumatic for them?

While you might be able to make a case for the benefits of non-verbal communication about consent with other people, if you’re trying to have sex with an asexual person, that script just doesn’t work. It puts us in a very dangerous position, because we don’t know how you’re going to act or how you’ll expect us to act—or worse, we do know how you’ll act and expect us to act, and we know that your expectations don’t take our feelings into consideration at all. We need to be sure you understand that “spooning leads to forking,” as the popular saying goes, is NOT necessarily true (and likely for us more often false)."