Switching Between Worlds

In BDSM vernacular, ‘vanilla’ means ‘someone who is not kinky’.

If the black and white cookie is anything to go by, chocolate and vanilla are two flavours which can peacefully coexist, but don’t blend very well. There is not really such a thing as partially chocolate. Once that cocoa hits the icing, it will go brown. The vanilla becomes tainted. If you wanted a pure vanilla flavour, baby, you’ve gotta start again.

People in the BDSM scene adore using the word vanilla. Shortened sometimes to ‘nilla, it is often delivered with a condescending sneer, so that it also starts to carry connotations of ignorance and stupidity.

Just like any group of humans, the kink community is certainly guilty of the ‘we’ve found the light while meanwhile the rest of you poor sods are still stumbling around in the dark’ mentality. We patronise people who, for whatever reason, are outside of our world. It becomes nearly impossible to see how anyone else could have a different opinion, and how that opinion could ever be worthwhile or valid.

I know, because I’ve behaved this way myself.

Why?

Because all my life I’ve felt like a freak. I’ve always had something to hide – some part of myself I needed to obscure in order to fit in. I’ve felt like I was the crazy one, the dirty one, the one with the problem.

And so to find out that there were other people like me, and then to have my weirdness not only accepted by these people, but celebrated as valuable and beautiful – it was like coming home.

Still, even though an entire community of twisted perves exists, we’re still very much in the minority. And thus, for most of us freaks, we find that it becomes necessary to switch between worlds.

We all need money to live, so we must fit into some kind of work environment. We all have families, and unless we’re estranged from them, we must fit into the role of daughter/son/sister/brother/uncle/niece/etc. We need somewhere to live, so we must be able to convince a landlord that we are good, trustworthy people.

Not that being kinky has any impact on your suitability as an employee, your love for your family, or your ability to pay the rent in a timely manner. Of course it doesn’t – but we hide it just the same, because it could be perceived to be ‘bad’. We might not personally have a problem with this label, but it creates inconveniences for us in our everyday lives that we’d rather live without.

So we pretend.

Do you know how exhausting it is, pretending to be ‘normal’ all the time?

And how frustrating it is, to have to disguise something that you’re proud of, something that you love, something that makes you you?

It sucks. It makes you cranky. And then you find yourself at a fetish club, during one of the few social occasions where you don’t have to lie about your personal life, and you find yourself mouthing off about the vanilla world and how closed-minded, repressed, and irretrievably dull everyone in it is.

The thing is, however, that going to a fetish club every Friday night in your latex catsuit so you can bitch and moan to the same people about the same people, is just as boring as going to the same pub every week with the same bunch of friends so you can talk about the same football team.

Non-vanillas might think they’re so superior, but ultimately, they’re just people, just like everybody else.

There’s nothing special about us, other than we’ve got distinct tastes when it comes to what gets us off. New members of Under 30s often remark about how relieved they were to discover that we’re all so friendly and normal. As if they were expecting us all to have wings, claws, tails, and be raving, delirious psychopaths who want to eat their brain for dinner.

Many of my friends are kinky. Many are not. (Which doesn’t mean that I pretend to be someone else in front of my not-so-kinky friends – they know who I am and they love me for it, even if they are not necessarily interested in it themselves).

But with new friends, there is always an awkward ‘coming out’ phase, which I’ve not yet mastered.

Many in the scene would say that this problem could be solved by not bothering with the vanilla world.

Which I think is extremely narrow minded. For these reasons:

• Being kinky does not automatically make you interesting, and by that reasoning, being ‘vanilla’ does not make people boring. What’s boring is making judgements about people you don’t even know, and thus becoming limited by your own spectrum of experience.
• On first impression, a person might appear to be vanilla, but you never know what dark desires they might be hiding. I once knew a man who seemed to be more vanilla than a crème fraiche, but that was until he got very drunk one night, and asked me to slice up his chest with a steak knife. (I said no, and I regret that now. It would have been hot.)
• If we, as a community, insist on barricading ourselves inside our own world, like a secret society, of course people are going to have misconceptions. What we need is more people talking about kink, not just among ourselves, but to anyone who is willing to listen. *Waves to my not-so-kinky readership*

Coming out is never easy. At best, you can be laughed at. At worst, you can be shunned or discriminated against. A friend of mine has blogged recently about the difficulties of telling people about her kink life, because she wants to be perceived to be “dependable, reliable, and trustworthy”. I feel exactly the same way. Even though I know that being kinky does not detract from my ability to be dependable, reliable, and trustworthy, I fear that other people will see it differently.

The solution?

It’s up to the dependable, reliable, and trustworthy members of the kink scene to educate the less informed.

I don’t think this Berlin Wall of ‘us versus them’ is doing anyone any favours. Instead of retreating into our dark corners to play out our sick and twisted perversity, perhaps we could bring a little of it out into the light?

Or would that be defeating the point?