Vanilla sex can be some of the best of your life

Like the ice-cream flavour, you can add more to it.

Like the ice-cream flavour, you can add more to it.

“As if womanhood weren’t hard enough, now we have something else to be ashamed of. Vanilla sex,” writes Nikki Gemmel, in a recent column for The Weekend Australian Magazine.

“Vanilla sex” is, of course, the catchall phrase for garden variety, mainstream sex.

The kind that’s free of the bells, whistles, and whips of kink.

When we hear “vanilla” we imagine an ordinary, monogamous, heterosexual couple (the kind that might have Jack Johnson’s Banana Pancakes on their “Sunday Chill” playlist) having lights-off, missionary sex.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it’s neither sexy nor subversive. And when you're young and self-conscious, entertaining the idea that your interests might be "boring" is frightening stuff.

“It's really exciting to be in a time of sex positivity, a sexual revolution, we're speaking about pleasure and orgasms and exploration, I think now on mass more than ever before,” sex educator Georgia Grace tells The Oz. 

“I’ve noticed stress has come with this sudden sexual liberation. There is a lot of comparisons and thinking we should be having sex in a certain type of way.”

So where did the term “vanilla” come from?

According to sex and sexuality historian Hallie Lieberman, it was likely coined during the kink movement of the 1970s, to indicate the “norm” from which the kink community deviated.

Though, as Gemmel writes, somewhere down the line, this once non-judgemental phrase transformed into “a bullying of women who admit they want regular sex. The type that doesn’t including violence or hurting kinks.”

On #Kinktok, the TikTok hashtag where the kink community shares their sex stories, there’s a growing sentiment from users that rejects ‘normal’ sex.

And this permeating idea that non-violent sex equals boring sex.

Videos of young people mocking others for being “vanilla”, some with captions like: "Share this if you’re into [knife] play, I’m trying to prove something to the vanillas) rack up tens of thousands of likes."

@ha.logan

#fyp #foryou #freak #kinktok #viral #blowup #blowthisup #fypシ

♬ original sound - logan :)

It’s a weird shift.

“Vanilla shaming” is not conducive to the ethics of kink, where communication, open-mindedness and acceptance are bedrock. Shame is, ultimately, at odds with liberation.

The porn industry, coupled with a lack of sex education amongst young people, is partly to blame for the misconstruction of kink.

For Gen Z, porn is our default educator for pleasure-based sex.

It's shifted our interests and shaped our sexual scripts, behaviour and expectations.

“Porn is one of the first foundational places that people go to learn about sex, because we're not given consensual, sex positive, sex ed,” says Grace.

She notes that porn can be a great tool to “learn about your desires, to have fun, and to orgasm” when consumed mindfully by those that have received sex education, and can differentiate that porn is a performance and “not real life.”

“However, it is not there to educate you or teach you about sex, necessarily,” she says.

“When we’re looking at young people who haven’t received sex education, who haven’t been taught how to navigate consent, who don't know how to communicate boundaries, and how to check in with someone and look for verbal and nonverbal cues to make sure everyone is excited and feels safe in doing that specific thing. It has a huge impact on what young people perceive to be in ‘the normal way’ to have sex.”

In a 2019 study ‘Feeling Scared During Sex’, 23 of 347 respondents reported feeling fear in the bedroom after being unexpectedly choked out by their partner.

This was most common with young people, with 13% of sexually active girls aged 14-16 reporting being choked non-consensually.

“Because we are often collectively turning to porn for this kind of education, this has informed sexual acts like choking or spitting, or perhaps being playing with power dynamics, or being rough during sex as the average way to have sex,” says Grace.

“However, all of these sex acts like anything new, requires communication, checking in consent.”

There is nothing wrong with kink.

It can be a healthy and fabulous part of sex, provided there is discussion surrounding it. Kink requires consent and continual, verbal renegotiation of boundaries and preferences. Most of the time, porn fails to portray this necessary communication.

“When you look at your average freely accessible porn site, so often power dynamics and choking and all these sexual experiences that are certainly not entry level, or things that can be done without communication or education, are all on the main pages.”

So you want to explore kinks, what next?

Grace recommends speaking with kink or BDSM specialists to glean their insights into all the things you should be considering when engaging in this kind of sex. 

“There are specific ways to choke someone. If it’s something you want to explore, go to a professional and learn how to do that because it can be really dangerous. That’s the practical nature of it.

The same goes for spanking. “There are certain parts of the body that are harmful or dangerous to spank, or it’s dangerous for impact play that you need to stay around the fleshy areas. Not near bones or really sensitive areas.”

If you’re not interested in kinky sex, that’s cool too.

Missionary detractors, be damned! Classics are classics for a reason. Missionary sex "stimulates all of the erogenous zones. You can be close to a partner, look at them, and be really communicative," says Grace.

As for the vanilla slander?

“Like the ice cream flavour, you can add more to it,” says Grace.

“If you're going in with lots of starting with a lot of different flavours, it can feel quite intense when you add more toppings to it. Starting with vanilla sex, means that you can explore and play and add toppings to it and be really creative.

“I think that it's just another way to shame people in saying that the newer sex is bad, but vanilla sex can be some of the best sex of your life.”

If anything, we could all enrich our sex lives by taking a leaf out of the kink communities book.

That is, to say, learn from the culture’s emphasis on dialogue and consent.

Instead of faking your sexual preferences, do yourself a favour and try and figure them out.