For Years, Paris Hilton Thought She Might Be Asexual

Of all the names Paris Hilton has been called over the past two decades, the “kissing bandit” never quite stuck. But apparently that’s what she called herself throughout her 20s, during a period of intense external scrutiny and internal uncertainty for the celeb, who’s best known for her love of money, small dogs and the color pink. And while she’s also known as the star of a sex tape that was released without her consent in 2004, Hilton revealed in a recent Harper’s Bazaar interview that she actually wondered if she might be asexual for a long period of time before she met her now-husband Carter Reum.

“I was known as a sex symbol, but anything sexual terrified me,” she told the magazine. “I called myself the ‘kissing bandit’ because I only liked to make out. A lot of my relationships didn’t work out because of that.”

Hilton, now 42, said she met Reum at a friend’s Thanksgiving in 2019 and quickly established a level of trust enough to “enjoy hooking up” with him. But before that, sex was anything but easy.

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In This Is Paris, a documentary released in 2020, Hilton opened up to filmmaker Alexandra Haggiag Dean about her youth, when she was bounced around a series of boarding schools designed to reform “troubled teens.” In her upcoming memoir, Paris: The Memoir, she further elaborates on those difficult years, describing the emotional and occasionally physical abuse she endured from her educators and fellow students. (Actually, she makes them sound more like inmates than anything else.) She also mentions an instance of sexual abuse from a middle school teacher. And she’s long been vocal about how the sex tape, filmed when she was 20, will haunt her for the rest of her life.

Given the adversity she’s lived through, it makes sense that she might experience some kind of trauma response to sex and find it difficult to trust or express intimacy. But that trauma history in itself doesn’t necessarily make her asexual, per se. Asexuality refers to a spectrum of sexual identities ranging from absolutely zero desire for sex to desire for sex under certain circumstances. Under the “Ace” umbrella, there are fraysexuals and graysexuals, sex-neutral and sex-repulsed folks, and dozens of others who experience different levels of interest in sex and attraction.

Where on that spectrum she falls, only Hilton knows. Still, there’s plenty to celebrate in having found someone who makes her feel good. In the immortal words of the socialite herself, that’s hot.