Holly of The Pervocracy, talking about normal vs. kinky brings up one interesting data point…
All I know is that if I have to sit through another conversation at work on the topic of “my husband and I are never in bed together and that’s awesome because gosh it’s such a pain having to deal with those icky things he wants”, I’m going to explode and tell them everything.
and one of her commenters brought up another…
Is ‘icky things he wants’ non-vanilla sex or is it sex at all? I’m over on the asexual end of the spectrum, and if I came out with something like, “Actually, I’d be perfectly happy to never bother with sex again,” at work, I would be stuck spending the rest of the season putting up with well-meaning busybodies demanding that I justify my marriage.
Pretty wild, right? If you’re “too” sexual (in Holly’s emergency-medical staff workgroup that evidently includes owning a vibrator) you get branded a wild child. But! On the other hand, as the commenter pointed out, if you’re not sexual you’re in for a world of scrutiny as well. All made worse by our general reluctance to discuss whatever “happy medium” it is we’re all supposed to “naturally” have.
Or, as yet another of Holly’s commenters, Mousie76, puts it
I don’t think normal, vanilla people know what normal and vanilla is like, because part of being normal and vanilla is not really talking about it.
Much hilarity does not ensue.
I’m way late on this, but I
Submitted by tlt (not verified) on Sun, 2010-09-12 21:05.I’m way late on this, but I was bereft of internets at home for three weeks (and I’m working for a federal law enforcement agency that would frown muchly on finding your url on my browsing history – if it didn’t get blocked and red-flagged first) so I’m wading through all the posts I’ve missed.
I was with you right up until the last paragraph. Something is really bugging me about what Mousie762 said. Remember a post you wrote several months ago about the occasional tendency of some people on the kinky end of the spectrum to assume that vanilla-leaning people have sex lives that are boring, repressed and generally substandard? That kinky = joyful, liberated, expressive and satisfying, so vanilla must = something that’s lacking all that? That comment seems to have fallen right out of that playbook.
How often, how explicitly, and with whom would one have to discuss his/her sex life to meet with Mousie’s approval? How would one “prove” that it’s a personal preference not to talk much about sex or to like certain things rather than evidence of being restrained by the shackles of….vanillity?
It just seems awfully patronizing. I mean since when does “doesn’t own a vibrator” mean “never masturbates?” Some people just don’t see the point of buying a tool for something they can do just fine by hand.
I went over and read the whole post. If the people who are certain that they aren’t “normal” admit to not being certain where normal/vanilla stops and starts, then how do they know who they’re even talking about when they talk about “normal, vanilla people?”
Hi tlt, I think the trick
Submitted by figleaf on Sun, 2010-09-12 22:38.Hi tlt,
I think the trick is that it’s more of a statement of fact that “vanilla” means “don’t talk about it” than a specific indictment. That doesn’t mean there aren’t social consequences (like a really poor definition of whatever the line is between “normal” and “kinky.”) But while I think partners who are willing to talk about it benefit when they do (even if they’re otherwise completely vanilla preference-wise) I don’t think it really harms people on either a partner or a personal level if they don’t.
The social consequences, though, mean there’s probably a lot more unnecessary embarrassment, and/or unnecessary desire to experience it. For instance I agree that you don’t need a vibrator to masturbate, and most people don’t actually use them. But a) I’m pretty sure most vanilla people would also be embarrassed to admit they masturbated, and b) to hide their own discomfort they’d (perhaps not even disingenuously!) opine that anyone else who admitted it was “a wild thing.”
As for Mousie’s expectations, eh, a lot of kinksters take a lot of pride in just how much they negotiate and communicate with their partners. In fact I think there’s a whole dimension where negotiation itself becomes eroticized. Still, I think there’s probably a happy medium between maximum communication and limiting one’s self to “you want to do it?”
I’m not sure that makes sense. Hope it does. If not let me know and I’ll give it another try when I’m not wrestling with an unusual bout of insomnia.
Thanks!
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Hmmm. I think I read what
Submitted by tlt (not verified) on Mon, 2010-09-13 17:09.Hmmm. I think I read what Mousie said differently from the way you did. So maybe I read it differently from the way it was meant.
I took Mousie’s “not really talking about it” to mean not having conversations with friends, co-workers, etc. about what one does or doesn’t do sex-wise. I thought he/she was saying that vanilla people don’t know what “normal” really is because they don’t talk about it socially, not because they don’t talk about it with their partners.
So, when I said “...personal preference not to talk much about sex…” I meant having conversations about sex with co-workers or friends. I didn’t mean not talking about it with one’s partner. Maybe I had it the wrong way ‘round.
I guess I’m the sort of person who, if the subject of someone’s vibrator came up in a conversation, I’d just not say anything. It’s a much more effective way of concealing embarrassment that the “That is SO KRAZY” approach. Funny thing, though – part of my job involves producing digital photos from crime scenes, search warrants and raids. I very nearly always find that the agents have taken photos of porn stashes that they find during searches. Not long ago I found photos of a woman’s underwear drawer, with the underwear pushed aside and a vibrator at the bottom of the drawer. There’s no evidentiary value to any of those kinds of pictures. I’m pretty sure the agents are taking them for “Heh heh heh, lookit what I found” reasons, then forgetting to delete them. But even if they’re not watchers/users themselves, the death, ruin and bedlam they see at work so far surpasses porn and sex toys that it shouldn’t even register on the “shocking” scale. Weird.