A couple of friends emailed me in response to the last message. Who knew I had to write about sex to actually get them to say something? One comment was a quotation from G.K. Chesterton:
"The thing about brown paper art is that it forces one to remember that white is also a color."
And last week, a different person, in response to the email I sent out on the same subject, asked:
Now here's a new angle: what is the significance in associating uninspired or repetitive sex with whiteness? Is there a racial implication here? Do non-Caucasians have more fun?
Both of those comments point to a misconception: that whiteness is the absence of colour. My last message definitely invoked that misconception, and I should have pointed out that there is a fallacy buried in there. I doubt it's a coincidence that white paper and white skin (even though it's really pink) are considered the default; therefore, it's probably no coincidence that white (vanilla) sex is the default position as well (pun fully intended). But the point that both of my friends' comments make is that white is a constructed default, just as much as certain positions/sex acts are.
My response to the specifically racial connotation is still only half-formed. All I can think to point out is that race/ethnicity does, absolutely, function as its own kind of fetish in the porn industry. Black or Asian or Latino women are rarely in porn, unless it's racially-themed porn, like Ebony Babes or Oriental Beauties or something like that (NB: those titles are made up; I cannot quote actual porn titles off the top of my head). When the exotic is fetishised (or 'exoticised' as the post-colonialists might say), then the familiar is normalised, by the very same operation. And this leads me to the other comment I received, specifically in response to the blog (as opposed to the email-out last week):
I've more often seen vanilla referred to as non-kinky than as non-queer. I wouldn't blink at hearing a guy say "my boyfriend and I are usually quite vanilla in bed". Actually, I would be more confused by vanilla being used to mean strictly straight sex, although it might make sense in context as a subculture-spread way to refer to "the normals."
The opposition implied by the construction of 'vanilla' as a concept is that kink and queerness are the 'other,' just like non-whiteness is the 'other,' above. But of course, that othering doesn't stand up to either simple logic or the practises of the very sub-cultures we're talking about, the kinky and the queer, which I will hesitantly describe as two different groups with incidental overlap, just like straight/kinky, or for that matter, White/kinky, Black/kinky, Asian/kinky, etc.
Posted by orion at November 27, 2006 1:42 PM