Current location:	White Dwarf
Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	Loreena McKennitt
Entry tags:	examining vanilla sex, rape

Examining Vanilla Sex Part One: The Expectance of Sex
To fully understand this post you must first read this post. Pete warned me this might happen.

I'd like to do a series about the problems inherent in vanilla sexual relationships. I think these types of relationships are problematic for a number of reasons, but because of right-wing conservatism this has not been discussed openly, if at all.

First, let me make it clear that in no way am I trying to regulate you sexual practices. It's not my job to tell you how you should fuck, that's the job of the patriarchy. I just think that perhaps you don't know what's actually out there. Nothing has been examined or discussed, it's just assumed that what you do is the default.

Let me start by saying that, when I was young, I had a strange idea of what vanilla sex was. I thought it was all soft and fuzzy, with My Little Ponies and kittens everywhere. Honestly, I found the idea hilariously laughable. I would look up soft-core porn on the internet with my friends and we would all laugh at the fuzziness of it all. Everything just seemed, well, fake.

I didn't have my first experiences of true vanilla until I met my first boyfriend. He seemed to be a nice guy, at first, but then when it came to sexual matters I discovered that he was anything but.
Firstly, he kept stroking my hair. He was under the impression that "that's what girls like". No! I hate it when people touch my hair, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable, and yet he had the nerve to keep doing so!
When I asked him to spank me, he just looked at me strangely, as if he'd never heard of the concept before. When I asked him to scratch my back he barely touched me with his nails.
All in all I got the impression that he was more interested in getting his orgasm than in giving me mine.

But you know the worst part? He never once asked me for my permission first! He just assumed that, because we were dating and kissing, he automatically was aloud to sleep with me. Where was the negotiation? Where was the consent? That's not sex, that's rape!

This is truly the most horrifying aspect of vanilla sex. Without discussion of consent, of what acts can and can't be done, how can you ever be sure that what you're doing is ok? How can you be sure that your partner enjoys it, that your partner wants it?

It seems to me that vanilla sex has become so ritualised that people don't even bother to ask anymore, they just assume. They've even gone as far as to give each part of their sex lives names, or "bases" - if you've been in [this] relationship for [this] amount of time, you should automatically be at [this] base. And this deeply worries me. If you reduce sex to this kind of ritualised procedure, you lose all of the love and intimacy involved!

Sex needs to be more than that. It needs to involve consent, trust, mutual goals. And vanilla sex has none of this.

Stay tuned for Part Two: Heteronormative Patriarchy