Vanilla vs. d/s

I don’t think I could ever go back to vanilla sex now. Once you have tasted the delights of d/s, vanilla seems distinctly – well, lacking in flavour. Perhaps if some gorgeous girl threw herself at me I wouldn’t necessarily delay things by asking if she had a yen for a spanking, but this is such an unlikely event that I won’t bother to speculate on the outcome. I find my habits have changed. In the old days, if I went to a party or attended a conference and I came across an interesting girl, I might try to get acquainted. But things are different now. You can’t just slip into a casual conversation a quick questionnaire about her sexual preferences. There’s no way you can easily determine if she’s partial to being tied up, or whatever. You’re likely to get your face slapped if you try. So, if you are interested in girls of a certain bent, you will focus your efforts on places which are explicitly kink-friendly. Mainly we are talking about the internet. (One wonders just how d/s folk ever did manage to meet each other before the net came along.) So these days my only close encounters are with kinky girls; vanilla simply doesn’t arise as an option.

On the other hand, I don’t subscribe to the view that one is either one thing or the other, exclusively either vanilla or kinky. I see sexuality as a continuum. At one end are those who are almost wholly vanilla, at the other those who are the opposite. Most of us are somewhere in between, a little more or a little less. And we don’t necessarily stay the same. I think people can change, become less interested in power games, or perhaps less submissive, leaning more towards dominance. And of course it all depends on your mood. One day you want to be cruel, the next day you want to reward her for her devotion. It can depend on the person too. Some girls you want to be very cruel to. Others, well, it’s more of a negotiation as to which way things go exactly. I don’t necessarily show the same face to everyone.

Freud said much the same thing about homosexuality, that very few people are totally gay or straight. Most of us have a definite leaning either towards our own sex or the other, but we still have inclinations both ways, even if we choose to do nothing about them, even if we repress them. It’s interesting that these days women seem more and more able to accept that their sexuality is fluid, whereas many men still struggle with the idea of being attracted to other men, and that appears to be just as true in the d/s world as outside it.

One might go so far as to argue that the sex acts actually performed by d/s and vanilla people often do not differ so much. Everyone kisses and caresses, we all like to squeeze and nibble, thrust or be penetrated. OK, vanilla people don’t tie each other up or give spankings (now that would be really kinky!), but there’s a whole area of rough sex where vanilla shades into kink. In any case. I think that there is no sex act which does not contain some kind of power exchange. There’s always one who is top and one who’s bottom, even if it’s not apparent to them who is who. Someone has to make the running. Perhaps the key difference with d/s is that both parties accept that this is so, and indeed welcome it. They have consciously chosen to acknowledge that one has control and the other wants him (or her) to exercise it, and they direct their sexual activity into channels which allow for the free exchange of power and desire.