You know, the anonymously-authored blog 25 Things About My Sexuality provides an imperfect but still very good window into other people’s takes on their own sexuality. The premise is you email 25 things about your sexuality to the listed address and, as far as I can tell, whereupon they’re published. I have no idea whether and/or how they’re selected, filtered, or edited — which is part of what I mean about its imperfection. But the results are varied enough to offer insights into sexual experience one might not otherwise get.

At any rate, an entry from June 15, 2010 begins 1. This account is going to be less colorful than some, but it may also be more typical. Us vanilla people have stories to tell, too.

If you follow the link you’ll find a perfectly average, and perfectly wonderful, account of a 21-year-old heterosexual, self-defined vanilla woman who’s very comfortable with her sexuality in the context of the relationships she’s had with her partners.

After a couple of great conversations last week in New York and D.C., some brief and some very long, with a number of very thoughtful people it’s just been really sinking in lately how deeply we take relationships as a given when we confer about sex, kink, gender, and media.

It’s not that we don’t take relationships into account. We do! It’s just that we tend to treat them sort of the way birds treat air or fish treat water.

I’d really like to see that changed. A one-night stand is a relationship. Two people watching porn together are in a relationship, even when they’re not also long-term partners. A customer who hires a sex worker is in a relationship, and, more significantly, may be in a domestic relationship with another partner as well. Conversely, those who’s sex and romance life is limited to vibrators, lube, and/or tissues in the solitude of their own bedrooms may not be in relationships — a phenomenon that also tends to be handwaved away with terms like “loser,” “low status,” “cat lady,” “loner,” or even “asexual,” rather than considered as a social being. But I digress…

It seems to me that the most of most people’s sex lives more or less resemble the anonymous poster’s, which we tend to dismiss as the neutral flavor to which all the more interesting flavors of kink may be added. And yet… and yet… without that base what’s left is often just a bunch of pretty syrup and sprinkles puddled in the bottom of the bowl. And even without the added flourishes the base tends to still be… pretty fucking fantastic.

Again that’s not to say the extra flavors, textures, aromas, and sprinkles of kink are without merit. Quite the opposite, they’re often delightful. I just think we should stop taking “vanilla” for granted.

Not least, I might add, it should stop being taken for granted by “vanilla” people themselves.

Further reflections on “vanilla,” “kink” and negotiations. At Sex 2.0 I finally got to meet Miss Calico of Dominatrix Next Door. A week or two ago Calico wrote with warmth and fondness about a BDSM scene she played in with an acquaintance. In addition to sounding eye-rollingly painful for her (which I can handle) her description sounded dangerously out of control (which alarmed me.) I mentioned this to her, in rather maudlin terms that surprised both her and her top.

We talked about it a little further when we met in person and she said, with some exasperation, that she hadn’t thought it was necessary to write about the extensive email, phone, and in-person negotiations she and her partner had gone through to detail exactly what they intended to do together, what to expect from each other, what their limits and squicks might be, what their contingencies would be, nor did she think it necessary to talk about their communications before and during the scene nor the details of aftercare afterwards.

I said it made perfect sense that she wouldn’t want to do that in her post but that I thought it would be nice for her to talk more about negotiation and aftercare in her blog because a lot of (CoughVanillaCough) people who might like to try kinky things would probably have better experiences if they knew more about it.

The blank look she gave me was worth the price of the plane ticket. “People already know to do that,” says she. So I tried to rephrase it, saying that I knew people heard about things like “safe words” but not so much else and that there really wasn’t a lot of discussion of “sub drop” and aftercare and that it didn’t just come naturally because negotiation, communication, reconsideration, and aftercare isn’t really part of standard heteronormative scripts. _[Aside: would The Ethical Slut. What was different, though, and what drove home the point was Calico’s sense of shocked aggravation not with what happens during vanilla sex but with what generally doesn’t happen before. And after. (Think being criticized for driving race cars by people who don’t even wear seat belts.)

Which leaves one wondering which practices, exactly, should and should not be discussed in the sexual disorders and fetishes sections of ab-psych classes.