“Vanilla”: dissection of a term

One of my favorite people, who happens to be relatively vanilla, asked me to write a post on the term. Who am I to refuse?

On the most basic level, “vanilla” is just a word the BDSM community uses to designate “people who are not into BDSM”, or “sex acts that are not BDSM-related”. For me, when I use the term “vanilla”, I don’t feel like I’m insulting “vanilla people”. They’re vanilla; I’m not. Some people are gay; I’m not. We’re all friends here. … Which makes me feel a little puzzled, when some vanilla people feel bothered by the designation “vanilla”.

It gets a little more complicated when we consider the cultural connotations of “vanilla”, though. (Not to mention what happens when we start thinking about whether “vanilla vs. non” is a black-and-white thing, or whether there’s more of a continuum there.)

Let’s start with something most of us agree on: vanilla is delicious! It is a layered, complex and interesting flavor that can be used in many exciting ways. But, while there are lots of awesome things about vanilla, most people also agree that it’s not as awesome as richer/more exotic flavors (particularly the perennial favorite: chocolate!). Think about the way we talk about “plain vanilla” … it wouldn’t be “plain” if vanilla weren’t considered boring, expected, dull. The major cultural connotation of “vanilla” is “not as good as chocolate”.

So … if BDSMers refer to non-BDSMers as “vanilla” … does that mean we’re looking down on their sexuality? That we’re saying it’s “not as good”?

I’ve tried thinking about this from the vantages of other alternative sexualities. For instance, if “straight” weren’t such an established term — if it weren’t a word that I’d grown up using — I think I might feel slightly miffed that it’s the word for non-LGBTQ folks. I mean, I may primarily be interested in having sex with men, but must the word for that be “straight”? Am I “straight”? Is all of my beautiful unique snowflake personality a “straight” one? … How boring!

Obviously “straight” is only a descriptor of my sexual preferences and not my entire personality. But that’s not necessarily how it feels when I hear it. And from that perspective, it’s somewhat understandable that some vanilla people feel insulted when called “vanilla”. No one wants to be “not as good as chocolate”!

I don’t think vanilla people would find it insulting when I call them “vanilla”, if they perceived the term to be an expression of neutral preferences. Vanilla people who feel insulted by the term must feel insulted, not because they think I’m describing an unimportant difference, but because they feel that I’m saying something about them. Perhaps this points to an issue about how we think about sexual preference: perhaps we consider sexual preference as defining a lot about a given person. We probably shouldn’t. I don’t think that most people’s in-bed preferences actually correlate highly to other specific personality traits.

This also points to some larger issues. Specifically: this highlights the way that non-”alternative” sex — sex that isn’t BDSM, queer, multiple partners, etc. — is perceived by some as being boring and limited and “plain” by default. That sucks, because there are lots of fun things you can do with straight, vanilla, one-on-one monogamous sex! Straight, vanilla, one-on-one monogamous sex should not be seen as boring and limited by default!

Part of the problem is that non-alternative sex has not been forced to develop the same kind of self-consciousness, ingenuity, negotiation techniques, etc. that other types of sex require and facilitate. We all know that American culture too often shames its members into being unwilling to discuss or acknowledge their sexual needs. But even the liberal subcultures that teach kids to think that sex is a beautiful thing still don’t teach them how to talk to their partner or determine their needs — which means that even kids raised in sex-positive households often find themselves floundering and confused once they actually start having sex.

The only places that provide guidelines for those things are the sexual outlaw subcultures — because we’ve had to develop them. BDSM, for example, has been forced to invent very specific sexual negotiation tactics because if we don’t carefully work out our interactions, we end up violently assaulting our partners. That is, we’ve developed very careful communication practices because if we fail at sexually communicating, the consequences are arguably more serious than they would be for other sexualities. The BDSM community has an entire vocabulary — words like “kink”* and “squick”**, for instance — developed to help us parse our sexual experiences. Within the BDSM subculture, you can frequently find actual workshops or lectures to teach negotiating sexual preferences. You don’t find words or workshops like that in the “normal world”.

I’ve been reading a really great anthology called Pomosexuals; it’s a little old by now (1997), but so much of the commentary in there remains smart and important. It includes Pat Califia’s essay “Identity Sedition and Pornography”, and writing this post brought the following quotation to mind:

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Straight people blithely assume it’s their prerogative to write about us [queer people]; but we know a lot more about them than they know about us. We came out of them. Most of us made a rather extensive study of heterosexuality before leaving it behind. Even after we come out, we have to be experts in straight presumption, ignorance, and frailty in order to survive.

… We are not the only group of people dealing with a heritage of sexual shame and repression. Heterosexuals really need our help and inspiration, and I wish they’d admit it.
::::::::::

Moral of the story: No one should look down on vanilla people for being vanilla. Nor should anyone think vanilla sex is automatically “plain” or “boring”. Conversely, vanilla people would do well to understand that they have a lot to learn from BDSM ideas about sexual communication (and from other sexual subcultures, on other relationship topics).

We’re stuck with the word “vanilla” now, along with all its connotations. It would be annoying and probably impossible to invent a different word for “people who aren’t into BDSM”. But, hey — we’ve reclaimed so many other terms in this modern era … why not reclaim “vanilla”? Let’s make “vanilla” mean “delicious, complex, layered and interesting”, rather than “plain”!

(As a side note, one interesting thing that my vanilla friend pointed out is this: “I feel like we should have learned by now that all these things occur on a spectrum. Maybe I’m not gay but I am queer. Maybe I’m into handcuffs and blindfolds but nothing else. Maybe there needs to be language to describe that spectrum rather than trying to draw a line in the sand. My sense is that the grey area is vast. Embracing it could be a useful strategy.”

There’s a term, “french vanilla”, that BDSMers sometimes use to indicate people who are “kind of into BDSM, but not heavily into it”. It’s cute, but I don’t ultimately find this term very helpful, and here’s why: as soon as you start talking to BDSMers about their BDSM preferences, you quickly find that they are more into some things than others — and that there are many BDSM acts they just aren’t interested in.

Usually, I think about this in terms of “sliders”. On the most basic level, I envision several BDSM sliders: a Bondage slider, a Dominance slider, a Submission slider, a Sadism slider, and a Masochism slider. Frequently, these sliders overlap — for instance, many people with a high Masochism slider have a high Submission slider. You can get even more complicated and talk about the specific acts that people enjoy or dislike, but I tend to find that those sliders are a good place to start.

So basically, if we’re going to complexify the conversation by talking about the BDSM spectrum, then I think we might as well go straight for the sliders, and skip vague terms like “french vanilla”.

… I just had a startling thought. Arguably … what we’re actually describing, when we talk about “vanilla people” vs. “BDSM people”, is more about the way people think about these acts — how formally people articulate these acts — and less about how much, or how heavily, people actually do them. But this post has already gotten quite long, so I’ll have to explore that idea another day.)

* “Kink” = “a specific sexual preference”. For instance, if I like whipping people, then you could say that I have a kink for whipping people.
** “Squick” = “a non-judgmental dislike of a certain sexual act”. For instance, if I feel really bothered by the idea of someone whipping someone else, then you could say that I am squicked by whipping.

BDSM-related relationship screwups

Bloody Laughter has recently started a fantastic series of posts about BDSM screwups, and how it would be helpful if the BDSM community were more willing to talk about the encounters we’ve had that went wrong. You know: the encounters where we miscommunicated — felt confused — felt like we were pushed into things before we were ready — pushed our partners into things they weren’t ready for ….

Miscommunications happen even in committed, loving relationships. (They even happen in totally “normal”, heterosexual, vanilla relationships — imagine that!) Sometimes those miscommunications are overall positive, because they help partners figure out where their boundaries are. Sometimes they’re overall negative: they strain the relationship, they cause fights, someone ends up feeling violated, someone else feels misunderstood. But either way, talking about these things is one of the best ways to figure out how to avoid them in the future. We cannot create a truly safe, consensual BDSM community unless we’re willing to articulate and describe what it means to be unsafe and unconsensual.

Obviously, I agree with Bloody Laughter. And I’ve got some ideas for posts about some of the problems that have come up, the mistakes I’ve made in my BDSM relationships. But I’m also terrified of posting them. I identify primarily as a bottom — a mostly heterosexual one to boot … so I’m a woman who likes being hurt and dominated by male partners. (Though I’ll admit to a couple of toppish screwups in my time, too.) And that means that the average audience could map all kinds of scary, incorrect abuse images onto my stories. I mean, even I — when I was coming into BDSM — even I was afraid that my desires meant I “wanted” to be assaulted, that I “wanted” to be raped, that I was participating in something deeply warped and abusive.

Of course I don’t want to be assaulted, I don’t want to be raped — of course I am not participating in abuse. But. If even I had these thoughts, once … then how can I expect an audience containing vanilla people to look at my desires, my fantasies, my consensual experiences without flinching in horror? In this particular case, how do I talk about BDSM experiences that went wrong? If I discuss my less-than-perfect moments here, I think I’m mostly telling them to a BDSM-friendly audience: an audience that will get something constructive out of what I’m saying, and might use my experiences as a guide to avoid screwups themselves. But then again, this is the wide world of the Internet, where the audience potentially contains everyone. And the last thing I want is for Concerned Women for America to pick up one of my blog posts and quote me out of context and tell the world about Clarisse Thorn’s abusive BDSM lifestyle.

Arguably, this is a particularly important problem for me, because I am specifically trying to do BDSM outreach right now. I am trying to let the world know that kinksters are not scary. Do I have more “responsibility” in my self-representation? Is it more dangerous for me to talk about problematic BDSM experiences, than it would be for other people?

So. I’ve got some stuff written out, that I’m scared to post. If I post, am I damaging the BDSM community image? If I don’t post, am I allowing anti-BDSMers to silence me?

(Never mind that every vanilla person ever born has had sexual experiences that crossed boundaries — sexual experiences that were poorly negotiated. That’s understood and expected, goddamnit. For so many people out there, their standards for sexual communication are so low, they don’t even notice screwups that the BDSM community usually recognizes as major. Not that I think the BDSM community is perfect, not that I think every kinkster is a brilliant communicator … but we train sexual communication in ways the outside world simply doesn’t.

For instance, there are so many people out there — girls and guys — who are being pressured into sexual acts they’re not comfortable with. Here’s just one example: How many people don’t understand that it’s unacceptable for their boyfriend/girlfriend to demand — say — that they perform sexual acts at times when they’re not in the mood? How many people don’t feel empowered to tell their partner, “I’m not up for that right now, sweetheart”? There’s a lot of them.

Everyone knows that people are sometimes pressured into heterosexual vanilla sex, and yet no one uses that as an argument against heterosexual vanilla sex in itself.

The contrast just kills me. Sure, there were a few problematic miscommunications with — for example — some of my recent BDSM partners. But my slight frustration when I think of those moments pales in comparison to the rage and resentment I feel against my first real boyfriend, whom I dated on and off for six years. My relationship with Boyfriend #1 was entirely vanilla — it was the most vanilla relationship I’ve ever had; we only indulged in genital and oral sex — and he managed to screw me up way past anything anyone else ever did to me. Just thinking about him makes me feel used.

And it just seems totally unfair that I can talk about anything he said to me and people won’t be shocked; but if I mention some of the things my most recent ex-boyfriend said to me, people could be horrified and use it as ammunition for anti-BDSM rhetoric.)

You know, maybe what I should do is write a series of posts in which half the post is about a totally vanilla relationship screwup I’ve experienced, and half of the post is about a BDSM-related screwup. Just to put it all in perspective.

That hilarious weird “vanilla fetish”

I volunteer up at Chicago’s own Leather Archives and Museum; because I have some archival experience, they’ve lately had me sort a bunch of ephemera. I look forward to my time at the Archives — every time I go up there, I discover something awesome in the files. Today was no exception.

The box I went through was devoted to Outcasts, an San Francisco “Educational, Support and Social Group for all Women interested in SM between women including Lesbian, Bi-Sexual and Transgender Women”. Regrettably, it looks like Outcasts folded in 1997, but there’s some really smart writing in the file (no surprise for an organization that included Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia and Dorothy Allison).

The Outcasts’ newsletter was called “The Lunatic Fringe”, and the Leather Archives has two April Fools issues that are just hysterically funny. The following is excerpted from a “book review” in the 1991 April Fools issue ….

The Invisible Ring and Other Stories, by Ferdinand Bull. Vanilla Press, 1991.

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be vanilla? We have all read the sensationalistic newspaper stories of vanilla sex rings uncovered by diligent vice squad officers, or watched the recent television special exposing the squalid vanilla sexual subculture operating in the bars and back alleys of Milwaukee. More than one family has discovered, while going through the personal belongings of a recently deceased uncle or sister, that the whips in the bedroom had never been used and that their relative’s true sex life was confined to a few well-thumbed vanilla porn paperbacks hidden under the mattress. If the contemplation of these more sordid aspects of life make you queasy, or if you approve of the recently passed legislation requiring the IRS to maintain lists of suspected sexual deviants based on those who fail for two consecutive years to claim a tax deduction for purposes of sexual toys and equipment, then perhaps you should ignore this book in favor of the latest blockbuster sadist-meets-masochist romance.

… Following the essay is a group of short stories set in a small Midwestern city. My personal favorite was the first of the group, the heroine of which is Leona, a middle-aged reference librarian at the local public library and a reluctantly closeted vanilla. When a controversy erupts within the library over whether to add a copy of Romeo and Juliet to the library’s collection, Leona finds her closet suddenly too small.

Excerpt:
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“I don’t see how we could possibly add it,” said Donna. “Our patrons would be upset, and rightfully so.”
Leona fingered her black leather collar and thought once again how she hated it. No matter how loosely she wore it around her neck, it always seemed to be choking her.
“There’s no way we could justify keeping something as disgusting as that,” added Paul.
They can’t do this, thought Leona. They can’t shut us out. They can’t ….
“Well,” she said, “I’m vanilla, and I don’t find it disgusting.”
There was a stunned silence.
Finally the director said, “I think this is a good question to refer to committee,” and turned away.
::::::::::::

After her initial outburst, Leona is scared at her own temerity, but sticks to her guns. “I know it’s not great literature,” she pleads with Susan. “But it is a classic vanilla work.” In the end, she wins a qualified victory — the library adds the book but keeps it in a locked case. “And tell Sharon,” says the director, “that she is never to order the video.”

… Bull does his best to make his vanilla characters appealing, but the task of rendering vanillas sympathetically is an overwhelming one, at which Bull not surprisingly fails.

The collection concludes with a series of explicit vanilla fantasies, of which the less said the better.

If you feel you must buy this book a few alternative bookstores do carry it, or you may order it directly from the publisher.

I love this fake book review because it’s not merely hilarious — it also highlights the ways in which BDSM-identified people and media are routinely exoticized and censored. It reminds me of this funny blog post I read recently, which takes a similar tack; of course it also brings to mind Renegade Evolution’s now-widely-linked post on vanilla privilege (that one’s a must-read, if you missed it).

Pretty much the entirety of the Leather Archives is awesome, but if you’re interested in issues of BDSM-related organization and social justice, the Outcasts file is for you.