Here’s your Quote of the Day from the Men’s Rights subreddit. Well, not so much of THIS day as of a day four months ago, but, hey, I only discovered it today with the assistance of the AgainstMensRights subreddit. Bonus points if you can tell me what the hell a “public organ-orifice” is and/or how an AVALANCHE can “blare.”
Quite and excellent comment indeed!
And onward marches the World’s Greatest Guaranteed Top Quality Human Man Rights Man-Movement of the Twenty-First Century!
BTW the way I think of “vanilla” has always been in terms of baking – it’s the basic flavor that’s in almost everything and that everyone likes, the base onto which other spices can be added if you want, but that also tastes good by itself.
In culinary terms it vexes me to see vanilla being used to mean boring, because have you ever smelled a real vanilla pod? There’s a reason an entire industry was built on top of trading vanilla. Most of the vanilla that people think of when they think of blah flavors isn’t real vanilla at all, it’s artificial vanilla flavoring.
That’s another issue – what any given culture considers to be normative sexual behavior is pretty much 100% culturally determined. Which is part of why I find it so funny when people like Roissy start banging on about what’s “natural” for women and for men. Sex is about as good an example of the way that society shapes behavior as you could hope to find. People will always have individual preferences, but as far as general demographics tending to act in a certain way? That’s all about culture.
Should I alert my husband that I’m living off his noble man-labor? I mean, he’s on vacation today, and I spent today completing a major client project, the pay from which could cover all our bills single-handedly for the next three months.
…Maybe today is a bad day to bring it up.
@CassandraSays, having had real vanilla seed pods brought back from Ile de La Reunion for me, I cannot understand why anyone thinks vanilla is boring.
I think it spins off the baking, as you say, and the fact that artificial vanilla extract became the “vanilla” people were thinking of.
Personally, since I find kink virtually impossible to define given that normative sexual practice is culturally determined, the whole thing seems a bit moot to me. It seems to me that it’s more about identity and community construction than anything else.
Hyena “Is time travel a fetish?” Girl: Well, if it involves this guy….:
http://images1.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Captain-Jack-Harkness-captain-jack-harkness-1137032_375_523.jpg
A marginally more serious answer to “Is oral kinky?” would, I think, put the general idea of sodomy of either sort as, well, “French vanilla”. Still vanilla (using the more positive version I stuck up earlier on the thread), but starting to experiment a bit, and something that a lot of folks would prefer to ‘regular’ vanilla.
@freemage
are you still describing ice cream flavors? I mean, is french vanilla actually a different flavor of ice cream than vanilla.
Speaking of Captain Jack, got my mother hooked on Torchwood on the first episode.
But yes, time travel? Please!
Whenever I see the word “avalanche” in all caps, I think of Final Fantasy VII. This time is no exception.
The community construction aspect is a bit fraught for me, because although I like a lot of kinky stuff, I don’t really like the kink community at all. Not so much because it excludes people, because all communities do that in one way or another, as because of which viewpoints it often excludes and why. Basically, it bothers me when the kink community gets delusions of being outside and superior to the rest of society, because all of the bad stuff that’s in the mainstream exists in the kink community too, often in amplified form. I feel like, although the idea that we (kinksters) are better at consent it sometimes true, it’s sometimes really not, and the idea that it is always true is used to paper over a lot of real problems.
@Marie: French Vanilla is just vanilla-custard flavour, or it used to be. It is usually sold as a separate ice cream flavour.
@CassandraSays, you and I are in pretty much complete agreement on the issues with the kink community.
Marie: Honestly, I think I’m just being very, very silly. In fact, i’m pretty sure of it.
Karalora – re Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer societies, there is no evidence to suggest it was men hunting, women gathering and cooking. If they were anything like their modern equivalents, the tasks were pretty evenly divided rather than along sexual lines. So there’s no basis for this “we hunted the mammoth for you” at all.
Seconded, but I’ve made my complaint about that often enough. 🙂
There’s also the fact that even if tasks are divided purely along gender lines that doesn’t mean that the tasks the women do are less important. But that’s much too complicated an idea for our MRA friends to process.
@Kitteh,
Good point! I should have prefaced it with “Even if they’re right about Paleolithic division of labor…”
Medical care is one area, but it’s not the only one. I agree that I shouldn’t tell people about my kink if I wouldn’t normally be telling them about my sex life, because TMI. But if word does somehow get out (and sometimes that can happen outside the kinky person’s control – someone took a picture at a kinky event and posted it publicly without the subject’s knowledge or consent, someone is trying to smear or shame the person), it can put people’s jobs or right to take care of their children at risk.
That just doesn’t happen with “vanilla”/non-kinky sexuality. Even if I would never talk about my sex life with my employer, they are probably aware in a theoretical way that I probably have one, and wouldn’t be scandalized to know that that’s the case (they just don’t want to hear about it). If someone breached my privacy to prove that my partner and I have (non-kinky) sex, it might be embarrassing (depending on how explicit vs. indirect the “proof” was), but chances are I wouldn’t get fired or lose custody of my (so far nonexistent) children for it. Whereas I know of at least one person whose ex tried to use her kinkiness to get a court to deny her custody of her child, and several others who have to watch their backs about nothing about their kink ever leaking to the wrong people because they had jobs in conservative fields that were bound to fire them.
So that’s another concrete effect of societal bias along the lines of “kinky people are sick and dangerous”. I still wouldn’t insist on phrasing it in terms of privilege or oppression, though.
A lot of this depends on where you live too. Right now I’d get a lot more side-eye from most people around me for mentioning that I’m into kink than mentioning that I’m queer, but that’s because I’m in San Francisco. It would be very different if I was in, say, the Bible Belt.
My understanding is that kinksters can also face a lot of difficulty when there’s a violation of consent–the usual victim-blaming gets turned up to “11” with strains of, “Well, you’re into pain, right?” In that environment, it might not be totally inaccurate to speak of a ‘vanilla privilege’. The Pervocracy has written a fair bit about it, I know.
And now for something more pleasant:
A snoring hummingbird!
Apparently, my lady-boner can’t keep quiet when Captain Jack Harkness is posted.
That was the note from it.
Also semi-ontopic:
Maybe a public organ-orifice is an alcove in a train station where a pipe organ is installed so that buskers can entertain the public with organ music.
Similar to the Kendall Station band but with wind instead of percussion.
“That just doesn’t happen with “vanilla”/non-kinky sexuality.”
I wonder. Women get plenty of shit and slut-shaming when simple nude photos are published. Doesn’t matter if they took the pic themselves in what was supposed to be private between them and the boyfriend, or if he took it non-consensually, it’s still the woman who gets the slut-shaming and can have her reputation or career hurt. No kink involved there, just misogyny.
“In that environment, it might not be totally inaccurate to speak of a ‘vanilla privilege’.”
Freemage, that confused me a bit – what is the vanilla privilege you mean in that context?
There was a case last year where a journalist was fired because she had a part-time job as a stripper. I knew a woman who almost had her child removed by social services in London because her social worker didn’t like the fact that she had multiple sexual partners (nothing to do with kink). Pretty much any form of sexuality, or anything even vaguely related to sex, can be used to shame women and threaten their jobs and relationship with their children.
I really hope I remembered the blockquote thingy right…
Anyway, even that depends, and from what I hear it can be empowering, especially for bottoms, for many because they question why they are into this stuff and if it has anything to do with their past. Testing your own boundaries, physically and emotionally, is empowering and gives a feeling of control.
About this natural talk, I think the arguments from an evolutionary viewpoint regarding society is useless anyway.
Yes, it contains a lot of guesses and most people who argue like this seem to have never seen other people or animals(dogs give each other orals, for example), but why is it even important if something is natural? Everything is! And not all of it is necessarily good.
I don’t get into arguments with people who start like that, it is pointless. They are cherry picking. It just sounds really sciency. We don’t interpret bird behavior by looking at dinosaur bones, after all.
YES YES YES I did it right! blockquoting yay! I’m a hax0r!