A couple quick things:
Due to recent increases in trollerly, I’m being a bit more cautious about whom I let comment freely here, and while I will let new commenters post, I will be keeping them on moderation until I’m convinced they’re sincere, and not creepy abusive assholes, etc. In general I will be a bit quicker on the moderate/ban button.
EDITED TO ADD: If you’re a new commenter and want to be taken off moderation more quickly, email me with some info about yourself so I know who you are. (This info will be kept confidential.)
If someone is acting egregiously in the comments, please email me about it.
And generally, keep safe. Be careful with personal info. There are angry assholes everywhere.
On a happier note: Remember that thing about Sandra Fluke and her (allegedly) lesbian fingers? PZ Myers has torn apart the dubious science behind relative-finger-length-gaydar.
Is it weird that I want this more than sex right now?
I don’t know if I’m nauseated by the cute, or the thought of a turducken >_>
Also, I gets down like French Silk pie…. you may commence swooning
@Hellkell
Isn’t that a bit of an unfair accusation? Ozy did go out of zir way in zir post to assure you that zie’s not questioning your experience, just shocked that you’ve had such a different one to zir. At least, that’s how it reads to me.
Shadow, I read the “really?” differently.
Oooh, ooh! How about “curly sex!”
It analogizes cutely to “kinky” and I think it’s without value judgements or implications that one is more “normal” than the other. (Obviously, “straight sex” was right out. “Wavy sex,” I suppose could work.)
If you do not practice fetishes or engage in BDSM or related activities, you have curly sex.
problem solved
@Hellkell
Oh, okay. I read it as an expression of surprise, but I see where you’re coming from.
Is a three-way “braided sex?”
I like “wavy” sex.
Kind of like “creamy” and “crunchy.”
This conversation is making me a bit confused as to whether I should stop saying that I’m into BSDM, since what that means to me doesn’t seem to line up with what it means to other people. I like bondage (from the domme side, not the sub side). I like some bloodplay. But I don’t really like any form of hitting. I’ll do it, if a partner wants me to, but only up to a certain point (I won’t ever hit anyone in the face – if someone wants to be hit on the ass or back, that’s fine). The idea of doing what I think of as BSDM stuff outside of a clearly sexual context baffles me – if we’re not going to fuck at some point during the proceedings, I have no interest in any of that stuff. It’s intrinsically sexual to me, and I can’t decouple it from sex, so the idea of doing just the BSDM stuff and then not having sex leaves me scratching my head. I’m not challenging anyone else’s right to do it, it’s just not how I’m wired at all – is that what most people mean when they call themselves kinky?
So I’m left wondering if I should be calling myself vanilla, even though I like tying people up and I’ve been known to cut someone’s chest and lick the blood, and I’ve happily done breathplay which I know a lot of kinksters consider to be rather at the hardcore end of the spectrum.
Please excuse both TMI and rambly incoherence – I have the flu so I’m hopped up on all kinds of meds.
CassandraSays – You sure as hell sound kinky and BDSM-y to me. Hitting and nonsexual play are kinds of BDSM, they’re certainly not the Only Official Kind.
Also, at some point it’s a self-definition thing. You identify as kinky? Then welcome to the club.
I’m not challenging anyone else’s right to do it, it’s just not how I’m wired at all – is that what most people mean when they call themselves kinky?
Not in my experience, at least. I know self-identified kinksters who fall into both camps, and I’ve never encountered anyone in either camp who argues that the other folks aren’t kinky. So you’re probably fine, as heaven knows there’s enough kinky people out there who are more than happy to tell people about the One Twoo Way to be dominant/submissive/masochistic/etc.; if there were any particular push not to count people for whom BDSM is inherently sexual, I feel like I would have encountered it and rolled my eyes at it by now. :-p
I feel like declarations of the One Twoo Way to do things happen in any subculture, because some people are assholes. Just wondering if there had been some sort of odd linguistic shift since I seem to be the only person identifying as kinky here for whom it’s purely sexual (and who doesn’t like hitting).
On the vanilla thing, I’ve seen it used both as a slur and in a totally neutral, descriptive way, so again I feel like the issue there is that when it’s being used as a slur it’s because the people using the word are assholes.
I am old enough to remember when vanilla/kinky were never spoken of, ever. Well, in public. I have only ever done things considered vanilla, and I am fine with that. I am also fine with being called wavy or whatever.
No one is going to fuss at me in any way in my regular life for what I do in the bedroom, and I think everyone should have that kind of expectation for their lives.
No one should be arrested or harassed for things they do in private that are consensual.
Now I’m trying to remember when I first heard the word vanilla being used to refer to sex. 90s, maybe?
Excuse me, I need to shoo these kids offa my lawn…
@Several people about terminology:
LBT: I didn’t mean that you’d automatically see such sex as heteronormative. It just made me a little uncomfortable that you mentioned using that or straight synonymously with vanilla. I’m sure you wouldn’t call anything I did straight, it was just something that caught my eye.
Sorry–that was my fault! I was careless in my comments, mostly because rushing off to the doctor’s office yesterday, then didn’t get online again, then our internet was out today.
I should have clarified: when I talk about using straight or heternormative or whatever, I would not apply to any individual–I’m talking about language for social categories about sexuality. I wouldn’t ever use vanilla because, food term. But I wouldn’t call ANYBODY heternormative: that’s a term for a cultural category. My definition of heternormative is, more or less: MAAB and FAAB cis, self-identified as straight, people, in roughly same age and ethnic categories, who define procreation as goal of marriage, and in theory perform monogamy, etc. And only have PiV sex (because in my understanding, vanilla sex means PiV? Is that inaccurate?)
The discussion was about calling people X or Y on the internet–and my stance there is I don’t all people anything on the internet — unless they tell me what they want to be called (pronouns, terminologies, etc.). But the cultural category that most seem to agree “vanilla” is connected to is what I’d consider heternormative. It’s the ‘idealized’ cultural norm (that “vanilla” is poking fun at/or slurring at, from the alternative sexualities position.).
It’s the cultural ideal that is (usually) associated (though completely inaccurately with many) people who define as straight or heterosexual. (Just as most middle class white people get to think their individual dialects are “good” English even though no dialect is “Standard” whereas everybody else gets told their dialects are “bad” of “non-standard.).
Not sure this is making too much sense (am sort of zonked with spring break exhaustion, a missed thryoid pill, and news I have to get another thyroid biopsy in a few weeks because ultrasound showed enlargement).
So, not, I don’t see heternormative as synonym for vanilla in any way, and was sloppy for language implying so.
@Bostonian: I’m old enough that I remember that the only terminology was “normal” and “like that” (“like that” in a hushed voice, behind closed doors by adults, about the strange man who was found to be up to something strange with his cub scout troop.)
I did not learn the word ‘homosexuality’ until college.
I did not have any concept of same-sex relationships until I found and read Mary Renault’s Greek novels (in college, in the university library reading room, because I was afraid if I checked them out, the librarians would tell my father–small town, rural Idaho, that was not a paranoid fear).
I only knew I didn’t want to get married and did not want to have children and did not like the idea that I had to date men (which meant among other things that I could never show them I was ‘smart’ and I had to always be more interested in their lives).
Oh man, ithilana! I remember those conversations. I am glad things are at least somewhat less horrible.
@Bostonian: It sucked!
If anybody waxes nostalgic about the wonders of the 50s, I know I want nothing to do with them!
Hellkell, I’m sorry. My “really?” was intended as an expression of surprise, not to erase your experience at all. Your experience was very different from mine, and I am curious why that might be.
Ithiliana: I define vanilla as “sex that doesn’t involve playing with pain or power, bondage, or fetishes.” So while PIV is (usually) vanilla, so is oral sex, manual sex, anal play, etc. Admittedly, the edges of the term are extremely fuzzy.
It’s OK, Ozy. Yesterday was my day for misinterpreting things all around. I think part of the difference is that the people who were using the term as a slur were kind of the kinkier than thou, new to the scene types. Also, add a dash of of asshole–which one of the people saying this later turned out to be in a huge way.
Hope that made sense. My new migraine meds have me all, “words, how the fuck do THEY work?”
@Oxymandias42: Ithiliana: I define vanilla as “sex that doesn’t involve playing with pain or power, bondage, or fetishes.” So while PIV is (usually) vanilla, so is oral sex, manual sex, anal play, etc.
Fascinating (see why we all need to define terms). I have never heard that take on it.
The problem is that the ‘default’ is so embedded in people’s minds: one of my students in a grad course did her project on CHOBITS, and I spent all semester pushing her to get out of the rhetoric of “they cannot have sex because her on/off switch is in her vagina” to “they cannot have PiV sex”–and in fact throughout the course the students in general had a terrible time understanding that sex did not in fact mean ONLY PiV sex (teaching gender classes in rural Texas oh so much fun).
For info on CHOBITS: see here, http://sh.chobits.wikia.com/wiki/Chobits_Plot_Summary