


I bet I wouldn’t have as many friends if I weren’t known for being the vibrator fairy. I give many away to friends who need them more than me. I have boxes and boxes of them under my bed, in my closet, and in my bathroom cabinets. My apartment is, no joke, filled with sex toys. People send me sex toys to consider for articles all the time. Now, I do have a ton of sex toys and fetish gear. These stipulations seem to be a right of passage to attain street cred amongst people I interact with outside of the sex positive community.

It’s assumed that I must have a sex swing hanging from my ceiling (a photographer shooting me for a feature actually asked me this once), that I must be in an open relationship and regularly engaging in group sex and threesomes, and that I must be fully ingrained in the BDSM community. People, particularly white, heterosexual cis-men (but definitely not limited to this group by any means), think that because I am a sex educator, writer, and feminist - I must have a wild sex life.
Vanilla sex full#
As with any sexually active person, they may find their preferences on the commonly termed "vanilla-kink spectrum" are sufficient for their full satisfaction.Being someone who talks openly about sex, feminism, sex positivity, and all the latest innovation on the pleasure market, I tend to wind up in an assumed bracket about my own sexuality. Through exploration with their partner, it may be possible for a more vanilla-minded person to discover new facets of their sexuality.

As such, it is easy for them to be erroneously branded unadventurous in sexual matters. In relationships where only one partner enjoys less conventional forms of sexual expression, the partner who does not enjoy such activities as much as the other is often referred to as the vanilla partner. The term " vanilla" in "vanilla sex" derives from the use of vanilla extract as the basic flavoring for ice cream, and by extension, meaning plain or conventional. The British Medical Journal regards conventional sex between homosexual couples as "sex that does not extend beyond affection, mutual masturbation, and oral and anal sex." In addition to mutual masturbation, penetrative sexual activity among same-sex pairings is contrasted by non-insertive acts such as intercrural sex, frot and tribadism, although tribadism has been cited as a common but rarely discussed sexual practice among lesbians. It can also describe penetrative sex which does not have any element of BDSM, kink or fetish. Among heterosexual couples in the Western world, for example, conventional sex often refers to sexual intercourse in the missionary position. What is regarded as conventional sex depends on cultural and subcultural norms. Conventional sex without fetish, kink or BDSM elementsĬonventional sex, colloquially vanilla sex, is sexual behavior that is within the range of normality for a culture or subculture, and typically involves sex which does not include elements of bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism ( BDSM), kink, or fetishism.
