Vanilla
The word for everything that is not this. Handy shorthand, and the piece of vocabulary most likely to make somebody sound insufferable, usually without meaning to.
Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.
In short
- Vanilla means anything outside kink, whether that is sex, a relationship or the rest of your life.
- It is normally neutral. Vanilla friends and a vanilla job are ordinary phrases with no edge to them.
- It curdles when it implies that other people are boring. That version is snobbery and reads as insecurity.
- Nearly everyone is mostly vanilla. Most people who do this do it occasionally rather than constantly.
Everything on this page concerns consenting adults over 18.
What it means
Vanilla covers the rest of it. Sex without any of this in it, relationships with no power arrangement, and the parts of your life where none of it comes up. The metaphor is the default flavour, the one you get if you do not ask for anything else.
In practice it is used three ways. As a description of an activity, "that weekend was entirely vanilla". As a description of a person, "he is vanilla", meaning this is not something he does. And as a description of a context, "vanilla friends", meaning the people who do not know.
Where it comes from
The word arrived from American gay leather and BDSM circles in the second half of the twentieth century, and the ice cream reference gives away the origin. It has been in general use in British writing on this for decades now, and nobody will look at you oddly for saying it.
Where the confusion comes from
The word is fine. The tone is where it goes wrong, and it goes wrong often enough to be worth naming.
There is a way of saying vanilla that means beige, unimaginative, sexually unadventurous, not quite awake. You meet it at events and all over the internet, usually from somebody two years in who has recently found the vocabulary.
I dislike it for three reasons. It is untrue, since the range of what people do privately is enormous and none of it is visible from outside. It is embarrassing, in the way that any hobby carries a faint smell of superiority when it becomes an identity. And it is a way of shoring yourself up by putting other people down, which is a habit that tends to show up elsewhere in how a person treats their partners.
The other error is treating vanilla and kinky as fixed categories of person. Very few people are one or the other. I am overwhelmingly vanilla by volume, like nearly everyone reading this, and the interest that brought you to this site probably occupies a handful of evenings a year.
In practice
Where the word is actually useful is in describing which parts of life something belongs in. Vanilla friends, vanilla holidays, a vanilla weekend with your in-laws. That distinction is useful and nobody is being insulted by it.
It also comes up in the harder conversation about a partner who does not share the interest. The word to avoid there is precisely this one, because telling somebody that they are vanilla makes it sound like a deficiency, and the conversation you actually want is about a specific thing you would like to try. There is a whole page on that at asking your partner.
Common questions
What does vanilla mean in a kink context?
Anything outside kink: conventional sex, an ordinary relationship, or the parts of life that have nothing to do with any of this. It is used both as a neutral description, as in vanilla friends, and occasionally as a put-down implying that other people are dull. The second use is worth avoiding.
Can a relationship be part vanilla and part kink?
Almost all of them are. Most couples who spank do it occasionally rather than constantly, and the rest of the relationship looks like anyone else. Treating the two as separate categories is a habit of online writing rather than a description of how people actually live.