"One funny thing: At most of the kink parties Selena went to, no one was doing anything that seemed to be sexual. People would say, 'I'm tying someone up, that's sex,' but much of the time it didn't seem to feel sexual and nobody could explain how this made sense. Was tying someone up really sex, or was it a rope and some trust? Selena didn't care about sex, but she did love rope, so it was unclear exactly what was happening here, and what she actually wanted.
Intimacy, it turns out. Selena cared about intimacy, and kink was a way for her to be intimate with others. Intimacy and sex are not the same. Intimacy can be in service of sex or sex can be in service of intimacy, or they can be completely separate..."
-Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex