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You needn't. First, there's nothing wrong with so-called "vanilla sex." It can be wonderful stuff, magical, transformative, and complex. Why, even diehard kinkmeisters are known to enjoy a straight-up schtup or some old-fashioned orality now and then -- a fact which can be easy to miss in the midst of all the funk and glitter, leather and noise generated by more outr? forms of sexual expression. I know I'm not the only sexpot out there who still finds plain old fucking and sucking to be a perfectly wonderful m?tier. Second -- and perhaps more important -- is it really helpful to characterize one's sexual desires with such a hopelessly reductive binary as "vanilla" versus "kinky," as if two terms accurately described the entirety of the possible dynamics for sexual interactions? Truth be told, I think that like sexual orientation and libido level, sexual activity exists on a wild continuum with multiple axes such as emotion, love, types of sensation, and amount of physicality, to name a few. You can have rough and emotionally tempestuous sex without adding a single drop of kink. You can have tender, delicate, sensuously teasing sex using all the leather and bondage gear in the world. You can have some seriously heavy SM dynamics going within sex that, to the outside observer, looks like plain old missionary position...as long as you don't know what one partner is whispering into the other partner's ear. And for crying out loud, you can have hot sex without handcuffs or talking dirty or whatever...the passion and desire are the basics. Anything else is lagniappe. What's more, within any given sexual interlude, you might engage in a variety of actions which, characterized individually, might be seen as "kinky" or "vanilla" depending on context. Is it kinky to claw your partner's back hard enough to leave red marks? Is it vanilla to give someone a hickey or a love bite? What about holding your partner's wrists down and pinning him to the bed? Does a playful slap on the ass, or a few well-chosen words like perhaps "that's right, take it" automatically put your sexual experience into one camp or the other? Dividing the world of sex into "vanilla" and "otherwise" makes not only for gross and incorrect conceptual caricatures of sexual behavior, but also ends up creating grossly unjust value judgments about both sexual camps. Sex suddenly becomes an us-versus-them activity where the things they do aren't as cool/interesting/liberated as the things we do. If sex only comes in two "flavors," the boring, commonplace "vanilla" kind that boring old straight suburban people like (shudder!) your parents might have, and the other, "kinky" kind, I don't have to draw a diagram to let you know which one is going to be more highly valued by whom. I think a great deal of the guilt and confusion you're expressing comes not from being genuinely displeased with your own desires, but with feeling like you don't measure up to some standard of what constitutes "liberated" sexuality. This can happen whether you've internalized some arbitrary standard from your community at large, or whether someone specific and close to you is holding up the yardstick by which you're finding yourself lacking. Sex should be about what makes you happy and gets you off. That's you, and only you, not your best friend or your sister or your favorite smut writer. What makes your partner happy is also important, but not important enough to do anything that's going to feel destructive. Peer pressure isn't a good enough reason. As mothers around the world have said since the dawn of time, "I don't care if Billy next door is doing it. If he dove headfirst into a chipper shredder, would you do it too?" You really don't have to do anything you don't want to. In fact, you shouldn't -- particularly if someone's implying you're less of a person if you don't or if you feel like you need to measure up to some external standard of sexual cool. If someone else forced you into a sexual act you didn't want, it'd be rape or sexual assault. Forcing yourself into sexual situations that don't feel psychologically or physically right and safe to you likewise smacks of coercion. I'll readily admit the erotic potential of caringly deployed forcefulness, but I just don't think real coercion has a place in sex. This is worth thinking about if you're pondering whether or not to push yourself to do things because a partner seems to expect them. If your partner loves you and cares about you, he or she should be willing to accept that you've got your limits. It's part of who you are. It's part of who anyone is to have limits, particularly in regard to sex. Ask anyone: there are things they like and dislike, things they will do gladly and things they'll do less gladly and things they don't want to do at all. It's a big world out there, no doubt about it. If you look, you can indeed find people who enjoy everything from being pissed on to being tied up and flogged to doing it with the neighbor's Saint Bernard. However, the person who enjoys being tied up and flogged might be horrified at the thought of being pissed on, and the person who enjoys being pissed on might be disgusted by the idea of bestiality, and the person whose puppy love knows no bounds might well think that BDSM sex is revolting. As the Romans so sagely put it, de gustibus non est disputandum, or as we like to translate it, "there's no accounting for taste." You need to talk with your partner about how it feels to you to have him talking about all these other women who've been in his life. It's pretty manipulative of him to set up such comparisons. What does it matter if one or more of them were willing to do something sexually that isn't your cup of tea, when obviously there was something major keeping those relationships from flourishing on other levels? Obviously the sex alone wasn't enough to make the relationship work, right? Your boyfriend wants to eat his cake and have it too, and methinks it may be time for a little reality check. Unless he's a scary control freak, he doesn't insist that you have the same favorite dishes as he does, like all the same music, or have all the same friends. There are points in sex, as in these other arenas of life, where your tastes simply may not synch up. It's quite okay to worry less about pleasing your partner and spend a little more energy on whether you're getting what you want and need. Your attitude about sex sounds quite fundamentally positive and healthy. "Sex-positive" merely means that you think of sexuality in a positive light and that you encourage everyone's rights to consensual sexual expression. It doesn't necessarily mean "sex-voracious" or "sex-indiscriminate" or even "I'll try anything once." Practicing what you preach, in terms of being sex-positive, means having the best, most enjoyable, most worthwhile sex life you can, whatever that means in terms of your own desires and needs. It's okay to put your foot down. You have every right to say "You know, I'm really not excited by such-and-so" or even "Not on your tintype, Jack. No way, no when, no how." You've had enough sexual experience to know what you like and what you don't like, what you might want to try someday and what just doesn't turn you on. Own your experience -- it's the best teacher you've got. Don't feel compelled to say yes to things which experience tells you don't interest you. Your partner may be disappointed, but you may feel free to ignore any temper tantrums. One doesn't get a cookie just because one whines, after all. In time, you may well decide to experiment with new and different activities. I think it's great when people experiment with new ways of having sex, because often it can teach you fascinating things. Remember, though, that it is called 'experimentation' for a reason. You're trying something new, attempting to do something at which you've not yet built up your skills. The more complex the sex, the more variables you introduce, the more likely it is that it's going to take some time to learn how to do it well and comfortably. You don't pick up the violin for the first time and leap right into the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and you can't expect to effortlessly negotiate a Boston rush hour if you've only ever driven in an empty mall parking lot. New kinds of sex are no different. You ask "how do I go about it [trying new things] without it being a totally embarrassing, frustrating disaster?", and the answer is: you don't, necessarily. First times for anything can be a little sloppy and slapdash and half-assed. It's okay not to know what you're doing at first. Even with types of sex you enjoy on a regular basis, there's no guarantee that the lube won't spill, that you won't inadvertently fart in someone's face, or that the condom won't break. Shit happens. Much of it is funny, if you can keep from taking it too personally. Keep a sense of humor handy, apply as necessary, and repeat as desired. Reserve the right to laugh. Sex is supposed to be fun, remember? Should you decide to experiment with some of the things your partner has been interested in trying, you may have to remind him that you're not the expert here. You simply aren't necessarily in a position to set up or initiate these things all by yourself. I'm not sure if he's actually asking you to take the reins, or if that's just the way you're perceiving it because of the pressure you feel to perform, but either way it's a bit unreasonable to expect a neophyte to run the show. If your partner just wants to have his sexual fantasies delivered on a silver platter, he's going to have to do some serious thinking about how realistic such a scenario really is. Aggressiveness and submissiveness are not the same thing as aggressiveness and passivity -- a submissive partner doesn't just lie there and soak up all the attention, he or she also contributes materially to the energy and the dynamics of the sex. A bit of honest discussion might go a long way toward helping create a more workable and balanced set of expectations between the two of you. Then there's also the issue of the expectations you seem to have of yourself, which seem to be drawn in no small part from your readings of BDSM porn. Why is it that people always seem to have the erroneous notion that if you like it on the printed page, you should somehow automatically enjoy it in actual physical fact? I find this rather curious -- just because you like reading science fiction, would you necessarily assume that you'd really enjoy living on a space station, fending off attacks by hostile aliens? Does a Stephen King fan really want the experience of living one of his novels? You may like mysteries, but does that mean you really want to be saddled with the real-life responsibility of figuring out that it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick? Fiction is about fantasy, about the sweep of emotion and excitement that comes with description and the "experience" of those descriptions. It's a very very different thing than going through those experiences in the actual physical fact. Things which appeal to you at the arm's length of fiction might be terribly unpleasant or quite simply boring were you to do them in real life. Sexual fiction is no different. Of course, in fiction, the world is what you make it. Things that wouldn't necessarily ever occur to most folks in the process of actually having real-life sex are allowed to seem like second nature to a particular set of fictional characters. If it turns you on to read about people pulling out handcuffs, talking dirty, tying each other up, or whatever, that's great. But if it doesn't occur to you to do those things when you're having sex, and you seem to be having a perfectly satisfying sex life without them, why worry about it? You could conceivably add those things in to your sex life at some point if you wanted to, but you sure don't have to use the things you like to read about in porn as a checklist for your own personal sex life. Heaven help me if you did: I'd have to have a sex change to have some of the sex I like to read about. In sum, it's high time to unload some of this guilt, my confused and scared friend. It's time to own your own desires and let the chips fall where they may. You sound like a hip, thoughtful, sexually enthusiastic, and intelligent woman who has better things to do than worrying about whether or not she's kinky enough to be cool. It's cool to like what you like. You don't have to apologize for your tastes. If, after all this, that nasty little "v" word is still echoing around in your brain, causing trouble, just remember that vanilla isn't just an ice cream flavor, it's also a tropical jungle orchid, lush and beautiful and exotic as you please. Tuck those lovely petals into your hair and enjoy it. Want to ask the Fat Broad a question? Email her. |
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
unexpected as ever.
In the meantime, by all means, enjoy our years of past content,
all of which still remain in the public and subscription areas.
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