terminology, bdsmThe word vanilla is often used in a sexual context, to describe either practices or people’s tastes (or, sometimes, the people themselves). What does this mean?
##Summary
Vanilla sexual tastes are “conventional” or “ordinary”, by contrast to BDSM (Bondage, Bondage & Discipline, Dominance & Submission and Sado-Masochism).
Of course, people can have different ideas about what counts as “ordinary”, but the term was invented in contrast to BDSM, so vanilla basically means “non-BDSM” and perhaps also “non-fetish” (language can be slippery, and pinning down definitions is tricky).
That’s the full answer, really, but if you want some of the history of the word, read on.
##Linguistic Background
The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about vanilla:
1660s, “pod of the vanilla plant,” from Spanish vainilla “vanilla plant,” literally “little pod,” diminutive of vaina “sheath,” from Latin vagina “sheath of an ear of grain, hull of a plant” (see vagina). So called from the shape of the pods. European discovery 1521 by Hernando Cortes’ soldiers on reconnaissance in southeastern Mexico. Meaning “flavoring extracted from the vanilla bean” is attested by 1728. Meaning “conventional, of ordinary sexual preferences” is 1970s, from notion of whiteness and the common choice of vanilla ice cream.
Etymological dictionaries tend to work in reverse chronological order, as they describe where words come from. So let’s recast this. A Latin word for a sheath, scabbard, or the hull of a plant was inherited into Spanish, where a diminutive (“little pod”) was applied to a certain plant. That plant name came into English where the meaning was expanded to include the flavouring extracted from the beans of the plant.
As this flavouring was the default in ice-cream, it was expanded metaphorically to refer to “conventional” or “ordinary” sexual preferences (i.e., non-BDSM).
From there, the term has expanded to various other meanings of conventional, default, or ordinary. In technological circles, for example, vanilla means “default, unmodified, standard”. When specifically applied to gaming, for example, it means the default game, without any add-ons.
This use of vanilla to mean “ordinary” is found in all sorts of contexts, but in my personal experience the two most prevalent contexts are the original (sex) and technology.
##Etymological Sidenote
Incidentally, the word vanilla is etymologically related to vagina, but the derivation is completely unrelated to this usage. They developed independently. (Vagina was deliberately coined in English from the Latin word for “sheath”; the word was never used in this sense in Latin itself, and has nothing to do with the completely separate derivation of vanilla by way of Spanish seed pods.)
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.