by Mistress Matisse
(06/04/03)
I've sometimes amused myself at the expense of militantly vanilla people by asking them to define what, exactly, is the dividing line between the kind of sex they have and the kind of sex they think I have. This seems easy until I start cross-examining them.
"Well, I don't hurt anyone when I have sex," they say.
"So if I tied up my partner, and we did dominant/submissive role-play while we fucked, but I didn't actually hurt her, then that would be vanilla sex?" I ask. Well, no, they say. Maybe it's that they don't use any accessories during sex -- just two innocent naked bodies, coming together as they were meant to by God and Rick Santorum.
"So if I am having sex with someone without any toys, but I'm biting him, pulling his hair, pinching his nipples, and slapping his ass, then that's vanilla sex?" They usually get a little cranky with me at this point.
There is a cousin to this debate in kinky circles, which is the following: What differentiates "just (kinky) sex" from "a BDSM scene"? The controversy sometimes arises from conversations like this:
Disgruntled Lover A: "We never do BDSM any more!"
Disgruntled Lover B: "What do you mean? We did a scene Tuesday!"
Disgruntled Lover A: "No, that wasn't a scene, that was just sex."
While Max and I aren't disgruntled, we do want clear, agreed-upon words to use when discussing that voodoo that we do. Life as a self-aware sexual outlaw means learning how to pick apart other people's terminology in order to construct your own erotic language. That's why I can run verbal circles around the straight-and-very-narrow crowd. But it also means no definition is sacred and absolutes are hard to come by.
So the only bulletproof system of reference Max and I could come up with was a geographic one. If the entire episode takes place on the bed, it's sex. If it happens somewhere else, it's a scene. Doesn't matter if there are ropes and nipple clamps and floggers involved, as long as we're in bed, we'll wake up the next day and say, "Ooh, that was great sex." Another episode might involve nothing more exotic than a bathrobe tie and the arm of the couch, but we'll still speak of "that scene we did last week." As with real estate and cunnilingus, location is everything.
