“Not looking for anyone vanilla”

Translation: I shame women into sex acts they aren’t comfortable with.

‘Vanilla’, a word that I’d mostly heard in reference to ice cream until five years ago, is now the new ‘frigid’. And we really didn’t need a new one of those.

Much like kink, Dom and choking, vanilla is a term that has made its way into the mainstream from the BDSM community and taken on a horrifying life of its own. In the spaces it originated in, vanilla isn’t a value judgement, neither is it something a person can be. It’s just a description of what a culture would consider standard or conventional sexual practice.

Some people’s tastes may be more vanilla than others, some acts may be considered vanilla, but it’s not a measure of how exciting you are or aren’t in the bedroom.

Out in the mainstream online world though, from Tinder to TikTok, vanilla has become a badge of shame for those who don’t want to engage in certain sex acts – most of which are painful or degrading. A girl who doesn’t like anal? God, she’s so vanilla. In this new context, vanilla has come to mean boring and, therefore, unattractive. The consequences of this are pretty heartbreaking.

‘Frigid’ was the word bandied about when I was a teenager. And forgive me Gen Z, because I’m going to sound like the mum that I am for a minute. Back then a girl (and it was always a girl) was called frigid if she didn’t want to kiss a boy, or if she only wanted to kiss and wouldn’t ‘let him’ finger her. Vom. Maybe on a rare occasion it might refer to her not wanting to have penetrative sex, but that was as far as it went. It was never about the kind of sex she did or didn’t want to have.

The word ‘vanilla’ is used in just as gendered a way as frigid used to be. I have never heard a man referred to as being vanilla for not wanting to be pegged, for example. This is largely because men’s sexual autonomy is taken for granted. Of course they are subjected to expectations and pressures to perform in the bedroom, but they are allowed to perform as they like; they aren’t expected to cater to their partners’ tastes in the same way women are – that is not what makes them good at sex.

(Just an aside here to say that catering to your partner’s tastes and pleasure, while communicating your own, absolutely is what makes everyone good at sex. In case there was any doubt. Cool? Cool.)

Find yourself in the wrong corner of TikTok in 2022 and you’ll be shown a collection of men in their late teens and early twenties making various references to how they’d never sleep with a vanilla girl. It’s all ‘when she says she doesn’t like to be choked’ and a video of them leaving the room. Okay dude, tell me you can’t get hard without hurting a woman without telling me you can’t get hard without hurting a woman.

I asked my Instagram community if they had ever been called ‘vanilla’ because they didn’t want to do something sexually. 39% said they had.

Terrifyingly, vanilla (in the context of TikTok douchebags anyway) now means not wanting to be strangled, spat at, hit, treated roughly, etc. Younger women and girls are being taught that’s what good sex is. Or at least, that’s the kind of sex that boys want, so it’s the kind they should be having. Hence the thousands of young women and teenage girls writing comments and dueting f***boy TikToks saying that they’re not vanilla and those girls who are ‘are so boring’.

There is a time and place to explore your kinks but, f***ing hell, it is not with some 20-year-old lad who doesn’t know his arse from your clitoris and has himself had his ideas of pleasure imposed on him by the grossness that is Pornhub’s home page. Besides, how do you know you’re kinky if you’ve never explored anything else?

Much like the ice cream, vanilla sex may have a rep for being boring but, if you do it right, it’ll be some of the best sex you’ll ever have. Because, again, all it means is not BDSM – it doesn’t mean not exciting.

Vanilla sex could be your partner going down on you until your toes are curling and your vision blurs. It could be spending ages exploring each other with hands and lips. It could be being so desperate for each other you end up f***ing on the stairs, not even making it to the bedroom.

Or it could be a highly satisfying session of missionary, that much maligned and, I would argue, often excellent sexual position.

In the reality series Love Island UK, there is always an episode where the couples have to play that ‘how well do you know your partner’ challenge. One of the questions they are asked is, ‘What’s your favourite sexual position?’ A classic of the genre. I’m always a bit cynical of their answers – they are inevitably going to be performative, either for the viewers or who it is they’re trying to attract.

Half of the boys always choose ‘doggy’, which is fine, I guess. I’m not a fan of how many men want to f*** us without having to look at our faces on regular basis, but that’s just me.

When women on the show pick supposedly exciting positions (the ones the boys like), such as doggy or reverse cowgirl, the absolute lads do a little cheer. I find this gross. On the 2021 series of the show, two of the women said their favourite position was missionary. In response to this a male contestant said, under his breath, ‘A lot of girls here like boring sex.’ I also found that gross.

Anyone who thinks missionary is inherently boring makes me sad for them and their sexual partners. Like, are we even thinking of the same thing? Face to face, almost the whole of your bodies touching? Looking each other in the eyes, legs intertwined? That missionary?

If it’s not your preference that’s obviously fine, but it’s not boring. The thing is that no kind of sex is inherently boring, and all kinds of sex can be. Whether you’re in missionary position on a bed or tied upside-down on a rack legs akimbo, things can get mechanical and unexciting. I think it’s pretty boring the amount of cishet men who want to have the same kind of sex all the f***ing time – sex that just happens to imitate mainstream porn. I mean, where’s your imagination fellas, mix it up a bit, stop being so vanilla!

TL;DR: Vanilla isn’t boring; it’s f***ing delicious.

Excerpted with permission from Tinder Translator by Aileen Barratt, published by Hardie Grant, November 2022, RRP $17.99 Hardcover.

Tinder Translator is available on Amazon and Bookshop.