Laurent Bilger
October 6, 2025
For a long time confined to the coded lexicon of BDSM communities, the term “vanilla” once referred to “classic” sexuality—heterosexual, genital, without staging, without pain, without role-play. But over the past few years, this seemingly harmless label has turned into a linguistic weapon, a slogan, an ironic cry, a rhetorical question.
On TikTok, in queer conversations, in certain uninhibited feminist exchanges, “Are you vanilla?” is no longer just a casual tease. It’s a mirror. It functions as a contemporary form of identity interpellation: are you still a sexual subject aligned with heterocentric, reproductive, patriarchal norms—or have you crossed the line?
Behind this apparently light question lies an entire topology of modern desire, at the intersection of the political, the sexual, the cultural, and the intimate. This article proposes a reasoned cartography of that question, weaving together queer studies, philosophy of the body, contemporary psychoanalysis, and critique of normative frameworks.
I. Genealogy of the Word: From BDSM Code to Sociopolitical Marker
In the 1990s–2000s, the term “vanilla” was borrowed from Anglo-Saxon BDSM culture to designate those who practiced neither bondage, nor domination, nor role-play, nor sadomasochism. The analogy was simple: vanilla is a neutral flavor, opposed to “exotic tastes” that are riskier or more assertive.
“Vanilla is the absence of edge, of risk, of ritual.” — Mollena Williams-Haas, BDSM educator
In this first phase, vanilla marked a non-place of desire—a normative standard invisible precisely because it was dominant. Judith Butler reminds us that norms only become visible in negative relief:
“The heterosexual norm functions precisely because it presents itself as natural, and therefore invisible.” (Gender Trouble, 1990)
But starting in the 2010s–2020s, in the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) and platforms like Fetlife, this opposition began to shift. To be “vanilla” became a soft stigma, a critical label—almost an accusation: You’ve never explored. You’ve never lived. You don’t even have a safe word.
II. The Phrase as Contemporary Interpellation: “Are You Vanilla?”
In its interrogative form, “Are you vanilla?” operates on several levels:
Performative (Austin, 1962): the question doesn’t describe a state; it produces an effect on the person addressed.
Hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur): it implies that the norm is not neutral but chosen—or the result of implicit submission.
Test of belonging: simultaneously sexual, cultural, and aesthetic.
It functions as a generational code, especially on TikTok, in videos comparing “vanilla” behavior (boring, masculine, penetrative) with “kinky” behavior (playful, inverted, coded, egalitarian). The keyword is often pegging—a pop symbol of hetero role reversal (see below).
The question thus becomes a gateway to the revelation of a political sexual unconscious.
III. To Be or Not to Be Vanilla: A New Biopolitics of Desire
Foucault taught us to see sex as a field of governance over bodies: it is not merely about who sleeps with whom, but how power modulates the truth of desire.
In the post-#MeToo, post-porn, post-queer world, a new sexual dispositif takes shape, in which:
Sexual performance becomes a skill (Preciado, Testo Junkie).
The language of kink goes mainstream (BDSM on Netflix, love languages, dom/sub in Reels).
Consent is ritualized as a form of moral hygiene.
To be vanilla in this world is to stand outside the language of power. It means not speaking the dialect of postmodern desire. It is, at times, to embody a suspicious refusal.
IV. But Could Being “Vanilla” Also Be a Form of Resistance?
What if the norm now lay in mandatory transgression? That is Žižek’s intuition when he writes that contemporary order no longer rests on repression but on the injunction to enjoy:
“The prohibition is no longer ‘You shall not enjoy,’ but ‘You must enjoy.’” (The Superego and Enjoyment, 2002)
In this logic, refusing kink—claiming softness, loving the missionary position, not wanting to be choked—becomes a subversive act. Several feminine currents (religious, spiritual, or simply weary of sexual performativity) are reclaiming a chosen vanilla sexuality: consensual, affective, unspectacular.
Examples include:
Feminist Muslim women who reject pornographic sexuality yet claim pleasure as a right.
ACE (asexual or demi-sexual) individuals who refuse to rank desires by physical intensity.
Queer couples reinventing tenderness as a radical practice.
V. Cultural Examples: TikTok, Pegging, Feminist Rap, and Male Backlash
A. TikTok & Pegging
On TikTok, videos titled “When he lets you peg him 🥰” generate a new imaginary of inverted virility. Pegging (a woman penetrating a man anally with a strap-on) has become:
a test of masculine deconstruction;
an act of inverted power;
a paradoxical form of care—both humiliating and intimate.
Saying “No, I’m not vanilla” becomes a queerified self-affirmation, even among heterosexuals.
B. Feminist Rap and Sexual Assertion
Artists like Chilla, Megan Thee Stallion, or Lous and the Yakuza claim total mastery over the sexual narrative. In their lyrics, the question “vanilla or not” becomes a grid for decoding masculine domination.
C. Male Backlash
Yet faced with this codified postmodern sexuality, some men bristle, denouncing:
the loss of “naturalness”;
the symbolic violence of certain demands;
the kink-ification of relationships they no longer control.
The myth of the “naturally dominant” male—undermined by ironic questions like “Are you vanilla?”—fuels reactionary discourses (Andrew Tate, the manosphere, etc.).
Conclusion — What “Are You Vanilla?” Reveals About Our Era
The provocative banality of this phrase conceals a deep contemporary fracture:
between inherited sexuality and performative sexuality;
between normative desire and queer-inflected desire;
between reproductive heterosexuality and inverted jouissance.
Above all, it interrogates our relationship to norms: are we willing to accept the plurality of practices without ranking them? Can one desire gently without being labeled dull? Can one enjoy against the current without having to prove it?
“Are you vanilla?” is not a question of taste. It is a question of one’s position within the contemporary regime of sexual truth.
References
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (1990)
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976)
Žižek, Slavoj. The Superego and Enjoyment (2002)
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie (2008)
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004)
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity (1998)
TikTok dossier “pegging & vanilla,” accounts @feministtok, @dommietok
Ovidie. Libres! Manifesto for Sexual Emancipation (2019)