The wrong flavour of vanilla

[sqbr]

Two posts about the way "vanilla"/kink-free sex/romance/etc is as much a kink as anything else:
Gacked from Thingswithwings about kinkfreezone
Vanilla is not normal. Vanilla is a kink.

EDIT: It's been pointed out that I've conflated BDSM and unhealthy power imbalances (I do know they're different!) I can't fix my comments but will try and fix the post, sorry for being an ass.

Something the latter helped crystalise for me is the reason I get so irritated at a lot of romance stories. (EDIT: I'm not really talking about the whole kinky sex vs non-kinky sex thing in this post, that's just the topic that got me thinking)

I would not think that my tastes(*) are all that odd: I like romances to be between two people who I am convinced genuinely care about each other who take a while to realise they like each other and have an equal healthy relationship.

Most of these are either part of typical heteronormative expectations (eg the "two") or are popular enough to turn up most of the time (eg the "they tale a while to realise". I encounter "love at first sight magical soulmates" fiction rarely enough not to mind too much) The fact that a lot of romance novels seem to care more about sexual compatibility than romantic is a little annoying but hey.

But the thing that is surprisingly hard to find is the "equal". Even though I'm happy enough with stories where one partner might be more powerful etc in some ways, as long as there's some ways the other is more powerful and roughly speaking it all cancels out. EDIT: Of course there's no reason D/s relationships can't be entirely equal, but they set off my "not equal" squick regardless. Which... HMM.

On the one hand there's heteronormative conventional stories where the Man (or male figure) is big and dominant and powerful and older and the Woman is small and weak and submissive and innocent etc. A lot of people criticise this for feminist reasons, but there's sort of an assumption that that's what everyone wants deep down.

On the other hand there's deliberately kinky stories. There's the ones which are meant as fantasy and depict unhealthy or at least problematic relationships with a heavy power imbalance, which the reader is (one hopes) not supposed to think is actually ok. There's those which depict a realistically healthy D/s relationship. I am squicked by both sorts of stories, but the latter are less likely to push my "This is sexist" and "These characters are not happy" buttons. As with any anti-kink I take more convincing that the characters are happy doing it than with more conventional relationships/sex, and hey maybe that's something I should poke at.
EDITED to hopefully fix me conflating the two and being overall crap.

There's feminist deconstructions and stories which aren't about hitting people's buttons so much as just exploring two complex 3D characters, and I am totally a fan of those sorts of stories, but if they manage to be romantic by my standards it tends to be as an accidental byproduct of the deconstruction and sometimes I just want a satisfying romance dammit.

Anyway, I don't really have a point, I just felt like thinking aloud (this started as a comment but I decided it was too long and self indulgent to force on others).

(*)And I want to emphasise that this is about taste, I'm not judging people who like polyamorous D/s soulmates stories etc :)

Comments

[bunny_m]

I *think* it's the D/S - soulmates juxtaposition that messes with my head. The poly bit is just icing on the cake, really.

[sqbr]

Obviously I don't think there's anything with not being a fan of those things in a story, but I don't know, it feels like you're verging into "These thing are bad and creepy" rather than "this is not what I feel like reading".

[bunny_m]

Then I have a heaping dose of teh dub today, 'cause I definitely didn't mean 'This is bad and wrong!', just that it doesn't work for me.

[sqbr]

Nah, it's probably just me being over-cautious. And as has been pointed out, in my post *I* was conflating "I don't like it" and "this is wrong". So, yay me :/

[aris_tgd]

Heh, well, I suppose I could see "squick" being used to describe "D/s soulmates"; I've seen some squicky implementations of the concept, myself. I just have a hard time seeing poly as something to be squicked by.

[bunny_m]

Being somewhat poly myself I am totally not squicked at all by it. I think it was mainly the way I think of/compartmentalise D/S and 'soulmates' that was the problem really.

In other words, it's just a mismatch with how *I* see things, not a judgment call on anyone else's world.

[aris_tgd]

No problem. And, y'know, a squick is a squick and you shouldn't have to defend it anyway; I was just wondering what about it was particularly jarring because like I said, I've found some implementations that didn't work for me, but I would never have thought to blame the specific combination, just some of the other baggage the writer brought to the concept.

[aris_tgd]

Er, and by "blame" I mean "assign what I found uncomfortable about the story to". If that makes sense. I don't think you're blaming anything, much less unfairly, as that sentence construction might have implied.

[bunny_m]

=)