Is it really Vanilla?

Guess that'll depend on each individual's perspective & experience. I have friends (guys and girls) who don't know what a 'cock cage' or 'male chastity device' is.

 

I here ya, I’ve seen some complain about their vanilla wives that practice chastity and dabble in bondage, but since they don’t get taken with a strap on or dress up, it somehow makes her vanilla. I suppose how long a minute is, depends on which side of the bathroom door you’re on.

 

I like nuts.

 

Well, I am in a vanilla situation but in chastity without my wife's knowledge. So... I guess I thought that's what this sub-forum was mainly for.

However, points taken.

 

I agree with the spectrum theory. Just as with the spectrum for homosexuality to heterosuality, very few of us live all the way on one end or the other. As we have seen on more than one occasion, someone condemning homosexuality has been found to own a pair of knee pads and expertly practices “lips together, teeth apart.” I’ve also had more than one lesbian friend who, while being happily married to her partner, has “just needed a real cock.”

Maybe problems just tend to go hand in hand with labels. Maybe there are too many ways to live for labels to be entirely accurate.

In My life I have been topped by wonderful men, women, and trans folk. I’ve pleasured them orally and they have taken me anally. I have served each of them gladly and without fear. Now I am in a heterosexual FLR, I am tightly locked in chastity, and I regularly receive discipline from my wife and from Miss Rommely in Minneapolis. I go to church. I volunteer. So how do you put together a label that covers all of this?

Now, what if all you knew about me was that I go to church? Vanilla? What if my church was known for welcoming members of the LGBTQ community? Still vanilla? What if you knew that I regularly socialized with a subset of this church community? Vanilla? Suspect there might be the beginnings of that chocolate swirl? And what if you knew that several of us met monthly at a rented dungeon for BDSM FUN? What label then?

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that each of us is a unique symphony of characteristics that when taken in our totality can not be adequately labeled. Are some of us who practice chastity purely vanilla? Probably, but I bet the number is low. Are any of us entirley bent and twisted kinksters doomed to burn in hell forever? Probably. If you are one of these people on the fast track to meet the Devil, pease introduce yourself. I’m sure several of us would like to meet you and share the ride.

The rest of us are in the middle somewhere and many of us don’t know where we belong. The struggle among conscience, societal influence, and the host of forces that tell us how we should be rages on. If you don’t believe me, reach into that bag of sexual secrets you are terrified to share with anyone. If you insist your bag is empty, I do have one of two labels for you: “liar” or “free”.

Jamie

 

Well, *I* don't claim to be in a vanilla life, but my wife (and KH) feels she is. At this point, she is accommodating my desire for chastity, but she doesn't directly desire it, and would give it up on the spot if I asked to. (She *is* increasingly getting accustomed to and desirous of the extra loving attention she gets from me, but that's a different thread.)

 

I'd say chastity and orgasm denial is quite kinky

 

I have a friend who regularly engaged in group sex who thinks chastity is the weirdest thing he ever heard of, so I agree everyone has their own perspective, kinks, hangups, baggage, likes and dislikes. I don't think tease and denial is all that kinky---lots of people use it for foreplay. Most people would consider wearing a cock cage kinky.

 

Wearing a chastity device is a form of bondage. Bondage is the B in BDSM. If you think about it and realize that I spent almost 3 years in constant bondage, that sounds kinky. On the other hand another guy, hanging upside down, hogtied with a cattle prod up his bum, might say “you think that’s kinky?!”

 

I should have elaborated. I meant long term orgasm denial with only releases from prostate stimimulation (if that) ever allowed

 

I dont think you can call chastity itself vanilla because let’s face it, it’s bdsm and pretty kinky to have your parts locked up so you can’t access yourself. However based on how your key is held can be very vanilla if your partner isn’t interested in anything else but holding your key until she is ready for sex. Then if the sex is “vanilla sex” then that’s how I’d describe the relationship as “vanilla chastity”. I suppose it’s more of a personal perception of how I view sex and chastity together that makes me define what’s vanilla and what’s not. I doubt we all have the same definition of vanilla.

 

If you wear your chastity device in the real world where you work, shop, etc. is it still vanilla?

 

I very much consider chastity not to be vanilla. It's a kink no question about it; unless we were monks and that's a completely different matter.

However, I suppose you could argue within the range of various practices of chastity there are some things which are relatively vanilla. The question is which practice is vanilla within chastity. Is PIV vanilla? Is pegging vanilla? Is edging vanilla? What about intercourse where the husband has PIV; but with a strap-on? What about CBT, bearing in mind there various degrees to which pain can be inflicted? How about ruined orgasm?

 

For those who use the word "vanilla".....What's the value of the word "vanilla"? Is it a way of saying to a non-kinky partner "hey, I do this thing that's a little different, but its not soooo weird and not sooo threatening..." Is it more important to you to think of yourself as vanilla or so you want your partner or others to think of you was vanilla? People are a lot more openminded than even 20 years ago. When I first went to swingers clubs, swingers were like "we just like to have fun here, not like those crazy BDSM people". We heard the exact flipflop at BDSM clubs. Now we've seen BDSM rooms at swingers clubs, and we've see hot straight, gay, lesbian, you name it sex at BDSM clubs.

 

I don't use "vanilla" to describe myself -- definitely not! But I do to describe my wife / KH's tastes. And when I first started discussing chastity with her, I explained that while this was a kink I was asking for, otherwise our sex life could stay as vanilla as she wanted -- to reassure her.

 

I don't use the term. However, my wife pointed out recently that there are kinky people and normal people. She's the latter. For people like her, kinks exist but for other people, they are removed. There's no moving between states unless it's not indulging in kink and accepting that it's not going to happen.

On that basis, I would be tempted to refer to my wife as vanilla.

 

No, I think it's this thread. What's happening is that her mind is opening, she's learned how kink can affect real ife. She's less "vanilla" than she used to be. You say she could give it up in a second, but I think she'd rather play and keep the benefits. My wife is making the same discoveries.

 

You may know my wife better than I do Last night she treated me to a T&D session. As she wrapped things up she gave me the warmest smile and said "I love you so much". I responded "does this mean you like me in chastity?", to which she just blushed in reply.

 

Responsible opposing viewpoint here:

There probably is not a *line* beyond which, when crossed, brings a person from a vanilla to a non-vanilla state. There are other aspects, not the least of which is one's mindset when engaging in those acts.

For example, otherwise vanilla partners might try a blindfold, slightly rough sex, teasing, very short term denial, tying one's arms with scarves or belts, or using a few toys. If their mindset is that it's just a little experimentation to spice things up or to make for a special date night, I'd still say that they still fall into the vanilla category.

The easy access to sex toys has moved the kink Overton window over to the side a bit. Dildos and vibrators are the overwhelming biggest selling items for most online distributors, and even the Christian marriage advice sites recommend a little experimentation as being healthy.

Short term teasing and denial is pretty vanilla. "Mmm, you're so horny, aren't you? Well, keep me in your thoughts, until later tonight, okay?" Chastity devices, according to several online sellers, are now fairly high up on the retail list. Is using a CB6000 to "make him wait until the weekend" vanilla? In some contexts, it probably is. They are a fun toy to try out for a week, and then it goes back in the drawer with the Hitachi, the fake velvet "luv cuffs", and the flavored lube, until some other time.

I feel like I'm in a weird spot. Like with @Rectrix and @Consensus , my wife, Mrs Edge, emphatically does not consider herself to be kinky. We've experimented with bondage, riding crops, etc., but none of them "take" for her, on either end of the application. And she considers our arrangement to be fairly vanilla. No, I'm not joking here. Her position is that even though I'm locked and denied for long periods of time, our actual sex life - me using a strapon on her - is otherwise very plain vanilla. She prefers missionary, and once in a while will ask me to lay back so she can ride it. That's it. To her, this is mostly proper sex, and isn't the least bit kinky.

So, as I said, I've come to believe that there's a mindset factor with regard to what is and isn't vanilla.

 

There's trying to look at it "objectively" by trying to compare it to what everyone else does, and also "subjective" as in how somebody feels about themselves and what acts they do. I question how much we really know about what is "normal" even with the Internet. In my mid-40's, I talk or observe or hear about other's sexuality more than ever before and am still surprised by different points of view. I've had an experienced pro domme tell me "I've never done tried that before".

There is also an "act" versus "identity". Someone can try kinky acts, but not really feel they are "kinky". Others can have very kinky imaginations, but not really act on their thoughts for various reasons.

My wife was convinced she was was vanilla and that Femdom or BDSM would bore her, until we tried pro domes a few times. She has a much different POV now.

Context matters a lot. I have't had that much PIV with my wife lately...but on Saturday we did...while she was bent over a spanking bench....in a room full of people....there was a group of trans-people playing some games. But the sex we had, I guess it wasn't that kinky.

 

Plus how we feel about ourselves has a lot to do what we think other people are up to, which can be totally disconnected from reality. I think I read somewhere that an individual's satisfaction with their sex life correlates with whether they think they are having more or less sex than "average" but most people have no real idea how much the average person is or isn't having sex, and their ideas of "average" are total whims.

We also all have different baggage and can view the same acts differently. I'm in my mid-40's, and a thing that I think about a lot is that I haven't had that many partners. I have a hard time trusting other people and finding spontaneous chemistry. I envy people who have "game" and no how to hook up. So I end up thinking of myself as "conservative" (in an adventure, not political or moral sense) or introverted. But I've done some pretty kinky stuff, just not as often as I would like. I say that as a faithful married person who has been married a long time.

 

I think some folks should look up chastity in the dictionary. The definition you'll find there is very definitely vanilla.

Like anything else, however, when the practice (or device) becomes a fetish (you may want to check the dictionary for that, too), it dons a different mantle. At that point, I would say it's no longer vanilla, or at least not exclusively so.I I think it's generally understood that when we talk about chastity here, we're usually not talking about the vanilla version.

The same thing can be said for feet, boots, garter belts, whatever. Finding boots attractive or sexy, even greatly so, may be completely vanilla. But if seeing them creates virtually uncontrollable arousal, or if they are needed to create arousal, then it's a fetish, and we're not in vanilla land any more.

Personally, I don't know that it matters much. It is what it is, no matter what you call it. On the other hand, there certainly is a difference between the vanilla version of chastity and a chastity kink.