OPINION - Vanilla-shaming is hot right now — but liking kinky, BDSM sex doesn't make you special, sorry

When Fifty Shades of Grey was published in 2011, it led to a spike in purchases of Amazon Kindles. People were embarrassed to be seen reading a book filled with BDSM sex, even though it was one of the bestsellers of the century.

Nowadays, you wouldn’t see such prudish Kindle closeting. Popular culture offerings in recent months have been full of kink: from golden showers in TV show Industry to Nicole Kidman on all fours lapping milk from a saucer in Babygirl.

Kink has gone mainstream off-screen, too. Dating app Feeld has seen a boom in popularity. The app is designed for people with non-conventional preferences with sex and relationships (there are 22 sexual identities to choose from, including skoliosexual, greysexual, and demiromantic, while desires range from dom/sub to polyamory). Its user base has grown 30% year-on-year since 2022, almost double that of Hinge. Meanwhile Tinder’s has been shrinking 9% a year over the same period.

Hinge is now seen as the vanilla dating app, for anyone whose ideal Sunday includes a long walk, a roast lunch and Netflix. Most of my single friends have traded it up for Feeld and have advised me to do the same. When I floated the idea to one that my profile might be a bit of a drab read (straight, cisgendered, not necessarily looking to join a polycule) she advised me to “just say you like being submissive, that’s what I did”.

Unsurprisingly, veteran Feeld users are grumbling that the app is being invaded by everyone from a Tinder exodus of straight men looking for casual sex to “vanilla tourists”. These interlopers are muddying the waters for people with unconventional desires and pushing the app towards its Match.com conglomerate brethren.

The origin of the term vanilla isn’t necessarily derogatory: it was coined by the BDSM community in the 1970s as a way to distinguish conventional sex (think standard-issue) from kinky, fetishistic, BDSM sex. Yet in recent years it’s become a byword for boring sex. The missionary position, puritanical by its very sound, is the vanilla sex-haver’s North star.

In reality, most people tend towards vanilla. Numerous surveys from highly reputable sources like glossy magazines have found that missionary is the UK’s favourite sex position, while studies disagree over how much of the population has engaged in BDSM (since the parameters could range from using a blindfold during sex to being yoked to a Medieval torture device and flogged), but usually find that it is around the 20-30% mark.

The current cultural landscape would have you believe that monogamous, conventional sex is a fringe practice. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there shouldn’t be any shame in wanting it.

Kinky sex is now de rigueur for a trendy A24 film like Babygirl. But while it’s billed as an erotic thriller, the film’s sexual charge leans heavily on Harris Dickinson’s almost unfathomable good looks.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s weepie cancer rom-com, We Live In Time, which features a ludicrously cliched sex scene that starts with the pair stumbling through the apartment door snogging. Where’s the happy medium?

While kink-shaming has become a buzzword in the last few years around judging people for their sexual proclivities, vanilla-shaming is on the rise. It follows from noughties slurs like “frigid” and can have the effect of pressuring people into unwanted sexual situations.

There’s different folks for different strokes. Just because some people get off on being peed on, doesn’t mean you have to feel like a dullard for enjoying normie sex in a comfy bed, ideally not wearing a human pony harness. Conversely, there’s no need to co-opt a whole subculture just to seem a little edgier. It doesn’t tend to go down well.

Claudia Cockerell is lifestyle and culture writer