I heard the word 'vanilla' used in reference to sex a couple of times last week, and though I've certainly hear it before, it got me thinking. Specifically, it got me feeling. There was a sensation, in my gut, that I didn't like what I was hearing and I wanted to figure out why. I thought about it, came to a conclusion, and then, out of curiosity and out of a not-quite-unconscious desire to confirm what I'd already decided, I asked some of my friends what they thought. My gut reaction to 'vanilla' as sex slang is that it refers to sexuality that is not, to be reductive about it, either queer or kinky. That statement in itself says a few things.
NB: more discussion on this oh-so exciting topic is happening on Girl-Wonder.org.
There is an ill-defined 'norm,' here, against which both vanilla sex and kinky sex are measured, though 'vanilla' is also, itself, the measure of that norm. When I asked my friends, the specific descriptions of vanilla were things like missionary position and heterosexual/heteronormative, and I'd add that it's not though to involve toys, props, or various clothes that are loosely (perhaps erroneously) categorised as 'fetishwear.' The implication of that binary--vanilla vs. queer/kink--is that queerness is inherently kinky, that these two things are essentially similar in some way.
Whether it's also implied that kinkiness is inherently queer, I'm not willing to claim. I think a woman who really gets off on whipping men, or vice-versa, is probably not going to be described as 'queer' unless we're talking about her taking on a typically masculine position, but then the queerness has little to do with the kink, assuming we're calling whipping kinky, which I think I can. (Part of the problem here, for me, is that I don't have much of a perspective on the lived experience and practise of kink, so a lot of this is speculative.)
I think the most overt implication of the vanilla/kinky divide (to set queerness to one side, for now) comes from the words themselves. I'm not going to go into the imagery of the word 'kinky' except to point out that it can't be coincidence that the spatial/formal metaphor is the lexical opposite of 'straight,' even though I've never heard gay people referred to as 'bent' or 'curvy' (at least not in reference to their orientation; there are certainly curvy, queer women out there, much to the delight of a lot of other gay women, I'm sure, but I digress).
It's 'vanilla,' and the implications of that particular word that I started with, though. 'Vanilla' says to me, colourless, boring, the default, mass-produced and mass-consumed, "this flavour which is not one" as it were (with apologies to Luce Irigaray). It's unimaginative, uncreative, chosen out of habit and marketing, perhaps the convenience of abundance, rather than genuine desire. These implications match up, sadly, with the attitudes of some people toward those whom they would call 'vanilla.'
I haven't often encountered that attitude among my friends and colleagues, but it has reared its ugly head on occasion, and usually in a hauty, self-assured, and frankly arrogant fashion. The assumption is that being 'vanilla' is the result of a lack of choice, a lack of action, a lack of enlightenment, a lack of willingness to experiment, a lack of courage, things like that. It's funny. Now that I think about it, all of those things imply choice, even though one of the major pillars of gay rights is that it's not a choice, and social commenters, people like Dan Savage, are quick to treat kinkiness, specifically fetishes, in much the same way. "You are what you are. As long as you're not hurting anyone, just enjoy." I pretty much agree with this, but I find it curiously at odds with the idea that to be 'vanilla' is to have failed to choose to be otherwise. Perhaps there's something I'm missing, here.
So where I got in my little meditation on the word was that I don't think I like what it inevitably means. I can see the use value in having a term that differentiates that sex which we socially designate as "the norm" (a complex and problematic concept in itself, mind you) and that which we designate "kinky." We already have language for orientation--gayness, queerness, straightness--and even though it probably starts as many fights as it resolves, the words are useful.
But the specific word that was chosen seems to me to be inherently dismissive of non-kinky sexuality as something practised only by the stupid or the cowardly; I put that phrase in deliberately blunt terms, by the way, to highlight that even when the word is used in a respectful way, as Dan Savage does, to explicitly say "that's what they do, and that's fine," it still retains implications of inferiority and narrow mindedness. It's kind of like when Schwarzenegger, way back in the 70s, said that he "really didn't have a problem with the fags." Yes, he was specifically expressing a positive message of toleration, which we like, but the word he used carried its own message.
I find myself reaching this kind of conclusion more and more, but I've decided that instead of using that all-too-convenient short-hand for "default, non-kinky, straight sexuality," I'm just going to say "default, non-kinky straight sexuality." Convenient short-hand words, especially to designate social groups, tend to lead to normative implications, and I'm not a fan of those.
I'm turning comments back on for this post because there are some, in many ways far more informed, friends who I think would like to comment. Have fun!
Posted by orion at November 26, 2006 6:31 PM