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Vanilla on Top
How White Folks “Other”
Themselves
for Fun and Profit
By Richard Leader
Printable
Version 
Vanilla Sex: most of us prefer to think of it as something that
only happens in Red States. There are few things more politicized
than the missionary position. Even as “sexologists”
competing for their own slice of the lucrative dirty-dictionary
pie have worked to come up with their own spurious etymologies for
the term, trying in vain to locate the first region where indigenous
people were first taught to do it as the Good Lord intended, such
accusations of colonialism are hypocritical for their own belief
in some sort of sexual variant to the Noble Savage mythology; a
popular bit of Blue State imperialism, where men with skin browner
than not are still presented by the media as virile predators for
white entertainment. Such pop-culture depictions of Sexual Chocolate,
inseparably yoked in the minds of many to the animalistic connotations
of “doggy style,” yet another politically loaded name
for a sexual position, renders any implied sense or usage of Vanilla
with a capital V against a backdrop of racist power.
Being that Vanilla Sex (and blandness in general) is something
often attributed to Red States, many gallant white Liberals might
find themselves delighting that their own sexual escapades—if
only in their imagination—take cues from the “exotic”
practices associated with the oppressed, presuming almost hopefully
that only Republican men are selfish and monotonous and that their
women are forced to suffer through it, thinking of dear old England.
But using “vanilla” as an aspersion, especially when
the pejorative light is twinkling to the beat of one’s own
ego, does absolutely nothing to divest one of racial privilege,
even for hip white folks in the big city.
Real power is power, not hot sex. While many black men have come
to embrace various sexual mythologies imposed upon them as they
seem advantageous, or at least something rather than nothing, there
are many competing but mutually reinforcing definitions of masculinity
and being pigeonholed into but one still remains a handicap in the
contest of patriarchy. Sheila Jeffreys noticed a similar trajectory
amongst women, calling the pursuit of the “orgasm of oppression”
the next opiate of the masses in her 1996 “How Orgasm Politics
Has Hijacked the Women’s Movement.” She argued that
to eroticize power is to legitimize both it and how it is distributed;
that the roles humans are forced into to determine whether such
power is delivered or denied come to be presumed as natural. Even
if popular experimentation in “topping” and “bottoming”
does prove these roles to be mutable, any demonstration of their
mercurial and arbitrary possibilities does nothing to upset the
notion that these roles themselves are both inevitable and desirable.
Vanilla, as a cultural marker, is a deceptive fiction that works
to confuse such issues of power. Consider the story of Lilith, Adam’s
rumored first wife who was created in the same manner as he—rather
than from him—who refused to lie below him in the missionary
position. To many today Lilith’s agency has come to be associated
not with her distinct manner of creation but with the way in which
she chose to engage in sexual intercourse, as if a slight alteration
of a temporary position in physical space could rectify more serious
issues of power. The version of Eve whittled from Adam’s rib
still would have remained subordinate even if handed a pair of handcuffs
and a leather riding-crop: the Apostle Paul’s argument that
women should remain silent was directly footnoted by the order of
divine creation and not what happened in the bedroom. Yet the missionary
position (and other signifiers that have come to be associated with
the category of Vanilla) is itself seen as both a symptom and now
a cause of oppression: in this worldview, Eve could have just followed
Lilith’s example to have entered into freedom—or some
semblance of it worthy of explicit and repeated notice under the
banner of “sex positivism”—simply by selecting
any number of other positions that photograph better in pornography.
The contemporary interest in Lilith’s story presents a paradox:
it at once serves a specific cultural purpose, ostensibly feminist,
serving as a positive example of female empowerment, yet the fulcrum
for the heroine’s rebellion (the supposition that the missionary
position itself is fundamentally submissive) is not generally believed
by those interested in its retelling, at least with any amount of
conviction. What is commonly believed in our world, I will
argue, is that individuals are inherently slaves and slave
keepers: only social circumstances permit varying levels of honesty
regarding the expression of this sentiment. Feminism as a rubric,
philosophy, and an experiential process is one such social circumstance.
Personal responses to feminism in all of its myriad aspects impose
certain filters on when expression of this belief (and ultimately
of more importance: the question of whether it ought to be believed
at all) is appropriate and how such performances will be carried
out.
As many feminists, scare-quotes unnecessary, have internalized
this message of born slaves and slave keepers, the story of Lilith—and
the implicit comparison to Eve—compresses the various competing
interests at stake into a parable that is socially useful in navigating
their contradictions. It at once fills the modern requirement of
bolstering female agency while preserving the foundation of domination
and the roles required for it: repeating the tale (chiefly, reiterating
it to those who have already heard it and know intuitively what
it is used to signal socially) allows the teller to construct for
herself a specific sexualized identity apart from those who do not
give such social performances. Those who do not are constructed
into Vanilla archetypes of various sorts, in order to divide the
good non-Vanilla slaves and slave keepers from the bad Vanilla slaves
and slave keepers. Lilith is only one example in such an arsenal.
The term itself is hardly used as often as it is in circles devoted
to Bondage/Discipline/Sadomasochism (the acronym “BDSM”
seems overly benign compared to its long form, perhaps by intention),
who often employ it to describe anyone outside of their preoccupation
and the capitalist webs that serve as a backdrop for their fixation:
Vanilla, always referring to others, is a way of focusing on the
insider-outsider dynamic and to privilege the group in conceptual
space. Accusations of Vanilla do not at all rely on factual evidence
of what others do in the bedroom but what one group needs to imagine
them doing in order for the insiders to shore up their own sense
of identity. Thus, the very idea of hypocrites tends to be elided.
While exposing the kink of the God Fearing might be good for a giggle,
the amusement is its own end and political implications remain unexplored;
outsiders must forever remain Vanilla, just as adherents must remain
“otherwise,” even if their own acts begin to mirror
the very worst aspects of mainstream culture. If, on one hand, Vanilla
Sex is indicative of pre-feminist consciousness and inextricably
linked to subjugation (hypothesized as inherent to the missionary
position), and is therefore suspect, that the new and improved alternative-sexuality
to Vanilla actually includes the word “bondage” in part
of its acronym is a galling admission.
Non-vanilla sex is not considered superior for what it is but for
what it is not: and that is normative. No one in a Blue State wants
to be considered average and as Americans we all love a good underdog
story. While conservatives have often made ham-handed complaints
about identity politics, ignoring the anachronistic folklore they
must invent for themselves to even launch such attacks, identity
politics in the Liberal consciousness have shifted dramatically
from their roots (typically Marxist) over the course of the past
few decades. Identity, rather than something forced upon you from
external influences, has been transformed into internal mental-gymnastics:
women are no longer adult human females but any person who believes
herself to be a woman, a social class that is far easier for males
to colonize into than it is for females to opt out, patriarchy and
postmodernism collaborating to decide precisely when biology is
permitted to matter. In one sense, to be normative is to belong
to a potentially oppressive class that has its own perspective privileged
over that of others (“straight white male,” with the
inclusion of other possible adjectives: educated, able-bodied, white-collar,
Christian, etc.), but within the new construct of choice-centric
identity politics it takes on a secondary meaning. To be normative
is simply to be ignorant.
Eve was ignorant of the alternative sexual practices that would
have somehow rendered her Adam’s equal (or even superior)
and her lack of choice was emblematic not of God creating her as
a birthday gift for another being but of her own lack of imagination,
something for which she herself can be blamed. For this, it becomes
safe to revile her. In rational terms, Lilith occupied a higher
social position than Eve (a status demonstrated now in the prior’s
role as a feminist hero and festival mascot) and yet Eve’s
own oppression has become evidence of guilty compliance that puts
her own identity in line with that of Adam’s: she is the normative
housewife who glares sternly at the fetishistas over on the wrong
side of the tracks.
As Eve (and the putative straight white women she represents) is
thought to be utterly conventional by those who believe themselves
otherwise, her Vanilla nature in and outside of the bedroom is deserving
of scorn. The normative housewife is a born submissive—Eve
before eating from the Tree of Knowledge—while the BDSM practitioner
is able to imagine herself freely choosing that same submissive
role. Similarly, it is now Vanilla for a female not to reject the
very concept of “woman” (and any feminist praxis that
is built upon that base) as an archaic fairytale, while a male choosing
to enter into the tradition of womanhood is seen as a perfectly
genuine pursuit that must be respected and honored. Thus those possessing
less agency are seen as the oppressors of those with more, a grotesque
reversal.
With that in mind, no sex act is actually Vanilla: people in Blue
States do it in the missionary position, too, after all. The position
itself is only subservient when alternatives are lacked, which seems
a sensible enough assertion (as a more direct word for that lack
of alternative might be rape) but for the fact that so
many, if not all, of the available alternatives also eroticize subservience;
the ideal of choice trumping that of freedom. Vanilla Sex is thus
conveniently whatever Vanilla People do or are imagined to do. Sorting
out the mechanics of those sex acts is only half as problematic
as this imagining of people as Vanilla in the first place.
To be Vanilla is not just to be normative, it is to be banished
wholesale from the new process of identity-politicking that favors
choice: Vanilla people have none and are forced to derive their
class-based identity from outside opinion, whether they are receptive
of the outcome or not. Whereas identities that resulted in nonstandard
or exotic “flavors” were once a liability (as it continues
to be for those existing in, and under, traditional minority categories),
today they are more often than not the result of privilege as it
is upwardly mobile and highly educated whites who are most able
to carve out for themselves a non-Vanilla identity while simultaneously
working to buttress the myth of Vanilla to and append it to their
social competitors.
Two separate and antithetical models of identity thus exist, the
old as a personal response to external constraints and conflicts,
and the new where identity can exist as a intrinsic core value irrespective
of the outside world, even if it is signaled by various arbitrary
“performances” people make in their daily lives. The
conflict between these two models is exacerbated further by the
fact that many of those partial to this newer philosophy (often
filed under the general heading of Queer Theory) still rely on the
pronouncements of those laboring under the Feminist and Marxist
viewpoints: at least when those conclusions on identity can be wielded
as a hammer against those outside their own personal circles of
association, against Vanilla people, those uncomplicated folk to
whom all the simplistic “old” analyses still apply.
Many feminists are critical of this new conception of identity,
finding it to be no accident that at precisely the same moment when
the people historically determined by male authority to be women
have attained some measure of true agency by organizing together
as women, that the same male authority has finally allowed
the category of “woman” to be “deconstructed.”
Other feminists believe such arguments to be mired in essentialism
(being more partial to deconstruction at any cost, even if it is
males who benefit first and foremost from this arrangement); some
even go as far as to accuse the former of being Vanilla themselves
for their rejection of such identity politics, even if that rejection
is made on philosophical grounds and not out of the bias of “normative
ignorance.” This can be a socially devastating insult to women,
no matter the specifics of their individual class identities, and
its increasingly frequent usage amongst feminists is perhaps made
even a bit more disturbing when one ponders that the word “vanilla”
itself is derived from the same sheath-like Latin root for “vagina”
that many feminists reject for their own bodies.
For the young, Vanilla is to be sexually inadequate and not experienced
enough to disingenuously regard sex as passé—in as
much as make-believe detachment has always been the hallmark of
cool—and the normative connotations of Vanilla often serve
to exile women with unpopular beliefs, whether they are radical
or regressive, from the feminist community as a whole by presenting
them as the oppressors of women: being that they are women themselves,
they must first be promoted to a fictional class of überfrau
in order for such a reversal to succeed. Consider the distinctions
routinely made between the large number of bisexual feminists, who
are nearly always partnered with men themselves, and the allegedly
more conventional women (the ones who do not read Bitch
or Bust or associate with all the right social circles)
who experiment with “culturally sanctioned” bi-curiosity.
The latter are at once seen as pawns for their ignorance and yet
their presumably normative status obviates against a sympathetic
reading: as their interests are assumed to be in line with those
of men, so becomes their class-identity, which is externally mutable
given their Vanilla status.
Whether such patriarchal-enforcers (or “token-torturers”)
occupy a less privileged position amongst women for their inability
to escape such collusion, or should be greeted with malice for any
rewards that more normative women purportedly receive, is a profoundly
antifeminist argument, benefiting neither side, as the sides are
entirely fictive and drawn for the benefit of patriarchy. As individuals
can become Vanilla either through being ignorant of choice-based
identity politics or by their deliberate rejection of them (and
it is generally assumed that any such rejection is itself a sure
sign of ignorance), it is a vicious twist against truly progressive
values that some of the most unconventional of political thinkers
are increasingly being labeled “mainstream” (as Vanilla)
in an attempt to discredit them. Indeed, the meaning of Vanilla
Sex has expanded to include not just “archaic” forms
of sexual mechanics (the male-dominant missionary position et al.)
but the more egalitarian varieties of relationships theorized
by many radical feminists as well, all of which are increasingly
seen as tediously dreary and just a shade away from being beige;
optimism and cynicism being oft confused categories these days.
But for older feminists, the Vanilla accusation often carries all
the weight of “bigot” and “racist” behind
it, the creamy-white implication of the word emphasizing the mythology
of whiteness that has been attributed to those commonly referred
to as Second Wave. Just as accusations of sexism are made in an
atmosphere of racism (making rap and hiphop artists out as bigger
offenders than their peers producing rock music), accusations of
racism are also made in an atmosphere of sexism, a sea of hatred
for older women ensures that only the feminists least of use to
men—Mary Daly comes to mind—will ever meet with such
attacks, perpetrated against them most often by women as white as
themselves. The pointing out of other racists is a rather facile
way of divesting oneself of racial privilege (just as finger waving
pro-feminist men cannot help but take advantage of the existence
of rape-culture to make themselves look good by way of comparison)
but once again, a fictional class of oppressive women is invented.
Even if “Mary Daly vs. Audre Lorde” was an iconic moment
in feminism, it was built (and continues to be built) into some
sort of postmortem celebrity death-match not by black women but
by whites concerned with advancing their own politics and careers,
often in stark opposition to ideals that both Daly and Lorde embraced.
That is not to say that intersections of race and sex should go
unexamined, far from it, but no matter how white or straight a woman
might be, she is still a woman and not a virtual-man—to be
considered privileged only for the duration of an argument amongst
her peers. As the conceptual groundwork of the anti-Vanilla polemic
(which by its very nature needs Vanilla to exist as a concrete entity)
is based in choice, one woman’s simple disagreement with another
woman can become the exact equivalent of an oppressive act by a
man, given that disagreement is invariably read as condescension
when one’s sense of agency is at stake. Being that men as
a class have a vested interest in women adopting this new definition
of agency, and have no material interest in arguing against it,
pimps and johns often start to look like magnanimous allies while
radical feminists begin to look like fascist overlords; “patronizing”
is ironically something only women can ever be in such a climate.
As identity shifts from something that is “overdetermined”
in the Marxist sense, that is, a single effect can result from any
number of competing causes—some of which might even appear
contradictory on a superficial level—to a Gnostic paradigm
where any sense of identity begins and ends at the self, allowed
to blithely remain indeterminate, the very bedrock that allows for
the understanding of the existence of social processes like racism
is undercut. This has already happened in the arenas of sex and
gender, where women are no longer a class of people but a social
fiction (begging the question of who it is exactly that misogynists
hate and what it is that certain transsexual or transgender people
desire to be) due to deliberate misunderstandings of what “essentialism”
actually means. That this erosion has taken place at a slower rate
with regards to race has less to do with demonstrable differences
between its social construction and that of sex and gender, but
because white on white (and male and female on female) accusations
of racism frequently make for an effective control tactic against
those who would fight against sexism.
The threat of Vanilla, as it is commonly employed in discourse,
embraces the existence of sexism and racism by allowing fairly privileged—and
thus normative—people the contrivance of “othering”
themselves, projecting any personal responsibility for patriarchal
culture onto a vanilla-boogeyman that stalks around as the perfect
Aryan-misogynist straw man—all while simultaneously injecting
other aspects of the domination endured by minority classes into
their own relationships as exotic “spice,” the opposite
of vanilla, for their own personal amusement and vanity. Objectification
has somehow become a progressive ethic.
While many feminist theorists continue to be attacked for essentialism
(or “being essentialists,” a phrase that far too few
find irony in!), where simplistic analyses of their work allow opportunistic
readers to assume that they believe women to be inherently good
and men to be bad, such essentialism is actually practiced by those
who hold the more Gnostic view of identity. In such circles, “good”
and “bad” are merely aspects of popularity and not the
ethical choices people make: those who are good are allowed to have
and proclaim an off-Vanilla identity and those who are bad—or
merely out of favor within the Liberal spectrum of subcultures—are
not, regardless of how both sets are situated in objective terms.
Good people then become women of a sort and bad people then become
men or like men (e.g. “oppressive” radical feminists),
at least when it comes to accusations of privilege that are designed
purely to silence, not to provoke dialogue or social change.
In that same fashion, good people are granted access to scarcely
off-white ethnicities which are then treated as overly meaningful,
while the bad are simply white; no matter how many Irish or Welsh
ancestors they might have, the same moral reprieve is not granted.
The good also become queer, no matter how conventionally married
they are or how freshly painted their metaphorical picket fence
might be—their own variety of kink, whether it is milquetoast
or Saturnalian, is enough to buy their way out from heterosexual
privilege. Indeed, the practice of women in heterosexual relationships
referring to themselves as “femme” is gaining traction,
even if such an admission (often delivered coyly as some expression
of guilt) is completely meaningless politically and serves no useful
purpose, other than to separate themselves from the more normative
“femmes” who are unable to impose themselves into the
debates of lesbians. For the bad—or unpopular—no foible
is enough to escape the confines of Vanilla, a sexuality that is
subject to constant reminders of its inherent depravity: rapists
in male prisons are allowed to preserve their default heterosexual
status while same-sex oriented pedophiles are simply pedophiles
and never gay men.
While such judgments are largely utilitarian in nature, grounded
in necessary apologetics given the dangers of homophobia, they are
themselves essentialist for their determinism. More problematic,
however, is the privileging of style over substance when it comes
to deciding what runs contrary to normative sensibilities. Homosexual
interactions that sexualize power and its differentials, no matter
how marginalized they might be, are still in line with conventional
expectations for intimate relationships and engaging in them is
in no way transgressive.
Yet the singular promise of the anti-Vanilla polemic is that of
transgression, shifting ever greater quantities of persons into
the category of “other” in order to undermine the very
idea of normative, the supposed sanctity of Vanilla, when and where
it will finally be revealed to the masses that there are few—if
any—authentically “straight white men” in existence.
This revelation will somehow spark a utopian revolution. Unfortunately,
the actual oppression that exists in the real world today requires
the work of significantly more active parties: real people who have
names that can be named. But through the rhetoric of deconstruction
Vanilla itself is made real, both in the frequent sublimation of
guilt (as we delve into our minor-victimhood) that works in favor
of the status quo, as even the most privileged of men rarely feels
fully enfranchised at any given moment, but also in that it is necessary
to imagine a host of Vanilla People standing on the outskirts of
our own non-Vanilla communities. They are at once a philosophical
foil given that Vanilla itself is to be deconstructed at some eventuality,
in as much as it is held that no one can possibly ever live up to
the rigid standards of such an iconic identity, while sometimes
they are targets of flesh and blood who exist on the periphery of
Liberal subcultures to be knocked down for personal ambition.
Those who exist at the center of such communities, whether they
are social, academic, or expressly political, are able to further
secure their own control over the group through their ability to
name: to locate the identities of others closer or further away
from the core ideals of the community. This results in a deliberate
reframing of normative which is no longer informed by historical
precedent but by vagary and interpersonal competition at the lowest
level. One conciliatory gesture in interactions of this sort is
inevitably a form of “It’s all right, Sweetie, Vanilla
is another flavor, after all,” which is actually
a cleverly designed admonition, daring the target—testing
her limits and the extent of the accuser’s own authority,
just as in traditional sadomasochistic “play”—to
masochistically accept the unflattering reevaluation of her identity
or be even further removed from the community as a whole. Accusers,
on the other hand, find their own identity and position in their
group strengthened by this process of topping a victim.
The Vanilla model allows those with at least some form of power
over those who are more or less their peers the ability to disguise
that control through the pretense of their own alterity, as they
pick and choose whose individual peculiarities warrant them being
an oppressor or oppressed, even if people on both sides of the line
are identically situated in quantitative terms. If being a straight
white man is truly the hardest thing in the world to achieve, as
it is posited by deconstructionists of all stripes, then it is the
multitude of nearly straight white men who benefit most
from this imagining of Vanilla. If the failure to perfectly realize
the role is acceptable grounds for narcissistic victimhood, then
there is no reason to truly reject the role or the system that compels
it. As long as males are willing to escape into a myriad of identities
sanctioned by patriarchy and allow themselves to duel endlessly
over such minutiae (“primary” male-to-female transsexuals
vs. “secondary” vs. “mere transvestites;”
queers vs. metrosexuals; geeks vs. nerds; etc.) there can be no
pro-feminist movement for our part.
Such decency is precluded by Vanilla rhetoric as it aligns decency
with masochism: as admissions of privilege—and worse, admissions
of being knowingly complicit in that privilege—are the only
allowable evidence of that condition of privilege, those willing
to make such an acknowledgment are beholden to (and thus are “topped”
by) those who are unwilling to do so, even if the other party is
guilty of the same or worse. In that sense, if heterosexuality,
whether it is viewed as an institution or an event-process, is to
be forever linked with patriarchy, systems of domination, and—somehow
even more irrationally terrifying—bourgeois sensibilities,
only the most honest and decent are going to bear the brunt of such
criticism, existing as privileged heterosexuals, while plenty of
penises and vaginas will continue to come into contact with each
other amongst the pansexual, just-sexual, and the self-avowed pervert
populations that continue to indulge in hierarchy as a fetish.
Any framework that encourages people to lie to each other, and
to themselves, cannot by its very nature be transgressive. Palliative
fiction never is. The myth of Vanilla cobbles together the words
of revolution just to give them one final twist, assembling them
with the very legacies of racism and sexism they were meant to dispel.
If there are 32 flavors (or more) of “white” or “male”
it is the height of arrogance to presume that a full 31 of them
are reserved for those one considers friends, deeming anyone else
to be Vanilla. And given the historic connotations of the word,
not only is this a semantic threat that no white or accepted-male-at-birth
person has any right to be making, it is a highly hypocritical one
given that it is most often delivered against one’s actual
peers. Too much success with that makes one bold, however, and now
even minority communities are subject to these Vanilla accusations—hurled
by those more white and more male than not, who have fantasized
about stealing, buying, or colonizing their own way into a more
flavorful existence and a new group of peers of their choice: the
true identity of such colonizers, however, is readily revealed by
their behavior the second one of their new “peers” takes
issue with their presence. That “peer,” taking issue
with the privilege of the accuser, is then temporarily elevated
in class for the duration of the argument into Vanilla, this millennium’s
version of The Man.
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