Somewhere in the last decade or so, "vanilla" became an insult. Not a gentle tease, but an actual put-down, deployed online and in bedrooms to suggest that someone's sexual preferences make them boring, unsophisticated, or sexually underdeveloped. It's worth asking how we got here, because the answer is more interesting than it might seem.
The term "vanilla sex" has roots in mid-twentieth century queer and kink communities, where it was coined as a label for the conventional, heteronormative sex that society deemed acceptable while simultaneously pathologising everything outside it. Sex historian Hallie Lieberman traces the term back to 1970s kink scenesters, who used it to define conventional sex as an absence of kink – a way of naming the mainstream from the outside. In other words, vanilla started as an act of linguistic self-defence by a marginalised community. Ironic that is later became a tool to shame people for their preferences.
The word solidified in mainstream usage over the following decades. In 1997, the Oxford English Dictionary expanded its definition to include sexual contexts, particularly "vanilla sex," referring to conventional, non-kinky activity. By that point, the term had already done a lot of cultural work.
The journey from underground to commonplace is not a simple one, but a few cultural moments accelerated it significantly. The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, whatever its faults, introduced explicit conversations about BDSM to an enormous mainstream audience. The rise of the internet gave kink communities visibility they had never had before. TikTok, in particular, created an entire subculture (sometimes called FreakTok) in which explicit discussion of kinks became content, and conventional preferences became the punchlines.
By the time listing fetishes on your dating profile became completely normal, the frame had shifted a lot. But research into what people actually want in bed tells a more complicated story. A significant portion of self-identified kinky people still want vanilla intimacy too, either some of the time or most of it. The cultural story and people's real preferences weren't quite lining up. As one investigation found, as kink positivity went mainstream, so too did the idea that anyone who isn't into kink is a boring partner – an attitude that plays out across social media in ways that veer well past teasing into outright shaming.
What's interesting about the vanilla shaming phenomenon is less the shaming itself and more what it reveals about how sexual culture moves. Trends in sexuality, like trends in fashion or food, tend to follow a predictable arc. The underground becomes visible, visibility becomes cool, cool becomes mainstream, and mainstream eventually becomes mandatory. Some research into this shift found that people advocating for the validity of vanilla sex were being met with genuine surprise; the assumption being that conventional sex is so normalised it couldn't possibly need defending. The reality is that the stigma had simply changed direction rather than disappeared.
This is worth paying attention to, because it suggests the problem was never really about kink or vanilla at all. It was about the very human tendency to sort preferences into acceptable and unacceptable, sophisticated and basic, evolved and boring. The category changes, but the dynamic doesn’t.
The conversation is starting to shift. The definition of vanilla is increasingly being reclaimed to mean a cluster of simple and tender ways to have sex – something with its own distinct value rather than merely an absence of kink. The framing matters. Vanilla as a lack of something is a very different proposition from vanilla as a deliberate, considered, emotionally present way of being intimate with another person.
Both things can be true simultaneously: Kink deserves the normalisation it has fought hard for, and vanilla deserves to be treated as a legitimate and meaningful preference rather than a problem to be fixed. And culture is catching up, even if the TikTok comments section has not quite got there yet.
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