Vanilla is a Precious Spice, Not a Reason For Shame

Vanilla is a precious spice. It’ll set you back $200 a pound, so only one percent of vanilla flavourings contain actual vanilla. These pods only bloom one day a year, and as the third most lucrative spice in the world, the beans that are harvested are often stolen.

On Fetlife, though “vanilla” is an insult. If you’re slapped with the label, you don’t belong. We’re only as worthy as the severity of our marks in BDSM Land. Our gatekeepers will accuse you of “watering down” the community if you use the “evolving” tab on your profile. It’s a subtle form of othering that has very real consequences, so please show me on the doll where Jack Vanilla’s last blowjob hurt you.

It’s not okay to shame people for being poly.
It’s not okay to shame people for being bisexual.
It’s not okay to shame people for being demi.
It’s not okay to shame people for being vanilla.

BDSM is hard work. It requires you to process pain and degradation. It requires time, preparation, and even financial investment. If you gave me the choice of kink or vanilla, I’d choose kink, but when you’re dealing with the daily grit of ordinary life, that’s not always practical. If you have the spoons to make every sexual encounter a squealing, bruising wreck, you have more spoons than I.

I know because I’ve had a relationship that was 95% BDSM.

My vagina melted all over the furniture, and my brain fizzled away in a cloud of nope. It was fun, but exhausting, so I made room for vanilla in my next relationship. I suspect most of us do. I think anyone who thinks it’s possible to live BDSM 100% of the time has never actually attempted it.

In other words, they’re probably vanilla. That’s besides the point, though. The shame of anti-vanilla hype is the point. People should feel free to have sex any way they like. Their sex lives have no bearing on those of strangers. If people didn’t tell you they had vanilla sex, you wouldn’t even know, so I doubt your sex life has diminished as a result.

Conversely, if you’re Jack Vanilla complaining about kink on a kink website, I’m not sure you can point to any injuries on the doll either. You’re probably the reason people develop anti-vanilla hype in the first place, so please stop telling autonomous, intelligent bottoms we’re being abused. We don’t need anyone to rescue us. We’re superheroes and can rescue our own damn selves.

Sex is just Mother Nature’s way of convincing us to reproduce. It’s meant to be fun, not a philosophical conundrum. There are better gates to defend. I hear CDProjekt Red is prioritising the console version of The Witcher 4 over desktop. Go keep that gate. That gate actually matters.