vanilla sex?
21 January 2008 by devastatingyet
Undertheboot has an interesting post asking “What is vanilla sex?” (The post is also hot. I’m enjoying his blog more and more now that I think he’s for real.*)
Joscelin and I kiss, and fuck, and occasionally I suck on his dick a little bit, and we do lots of side-by-side masturbating, but none of our sex is vanilla. I should clarify that I don’t just mean that our sex is not some stereotype of boring, plain sex; I mean that all of our sex has a d/s aspect to it. It is all strongly “flavored” by our general dynamic.
Take fucking, for instance. If Jos fucks me, it’s at my request/command. (Occasionally he might ask, but generally I specify what we’re going to do, even if he’s initiating sex in some general sense.) He lubes or does not lube the condom according to my instruction. He wears a collar. He enters when I tell him to. When I say “hold still” he doesn’t move. He goes fast or slow according to my preference. He comes if and when I allow it. We’re finished when I say we are.
Some of this doesn’t sound different from good, non-d/s sex. Any woman can say “I’m done now” and the sex ends (else it’s rape, folks). But the expectations between me and Jos are simply different. It’s clear that he’s fucking me in service to me. He enjoys doing it, but we’re not fucking for mutual pleasure, exactly, except in the broader sense in which our whole relationship is about mutual pleasure. He’s there to give me pleasure with his body. It’s for me.
So let’s return to the question of what vanilla sex is. I would define vanilla sex (loosely) as sex in which pleasure is good and pain is avoided, and in which both parties are seeking fulfillment mutually in a straightforward way. (That is, you’re being fulfilled by your pleasure and your partner’s pleasure, not in some convoluted way like “I hate this but the fact of my hating it proves that I’m a slave, which is the hottest thing ever.”)
So there you go.
(*It’s rude, I know, but at first I had a hard time taking his blog seriously, as hot as it was. Nobody tells their vanilla spouse they’d like to try bdsm and then, the next week or so, is up to their eyeballs in gags, whips, piss, etc. Do they?)
My liege and I very occasionally have sex that parses as vanilla to me, and I bet from the outside it looks like a lot of our less rough kinky sex.
The big difference, at least in my head, is when we’re having non-kinky sex, it’s not working the power dynamic. It’s there, in its way, because I don’t stop being his, but that doesn’t mean that it’s relevant to the current instance of sex. We’re just there for each other, as partners, without playing with the power.
It doesn’t actually happen often, because one of the major reasons that we have the sort of relationship we do is because it’s very natural to me to settle into subby mode around him, and so most of our interactions and thus most of our sex involve me feeling subby. But there are times when it’s the appropriate sort of fucking for us to have — the most recent clear example, I’d say, was when we were talking about the fact that my husband and I are going to be trying for children soon, and his response to that was entirely in lover, not in master.
Vanlla sex always has an underlying element of who is in charge, I suppose it is similar to kinky sex only milder and with less rules and terminology. With all of my sexual partners I have been the initiator and the one in control, even with the more naturally alpha type females.
Your point on when she says it is over it is over otherwise it is rape made me smile as I recall a time with one of my more sexually agressive partners when I just wasn’t in the mood, (I had just lost nearly a million bucks in Indonesia in 97). To say she was unsympathetic to my lack of follow-through would be a mild understatement, I had bruises on my pelvis where she attempted to grind me into action, by the way that technique is unlikely to work.
I find your statement fascinating, “… the expectations between me and Jos are simply different. It’s clear that he’s fucking me in service to me. He enjoys doing it, but we’re not fucking for mutual pleasure, …”
My wife and I have a relationship in which she is in total control of sex. Yes, I do initiate some, but any progress is up to her. In your case it has to do with “your” satisfaction. I would love to have my wife be that way. But she is too kind. From time to time (not often enough for me) se allows me to have sex with her. It is always very satisfying. I know that she cares for me and loves me, and that is why she does that. At the same time, my primary purpose is to maximize her pleasure. Mine comes (or not) second. She understands that, and sometimes takes advantage of it. Those are my best times.