About Vanilla
“Vanilla” is notoriously (if a little unfairly) synonymous with “plain” or “boring”. It’s the flavour you’re given when you don’t ask for anything in particular. Both in terms of ice cream and in terms of life. Society (well, most societies) expect everyone to be vanilla, even when everyone isn’t.
These days, “vanilla” might as well be a synonym for “cisgender and heterosexual”. Which I am. Rather predictably, I was born female, I identify as a woman and I like penis.
Despite these odds, I’ve always identified (or wanted to identify) more with pistachio, liquorice, sea buckthorn or literally any other flavour. This was all going well, until I fell in love with a man (also cisgender and heterosexual) and discovered that I was, on some fronts, undeniably vanilla. And so began my identity crisis—brought on by the most conventional, vanilla setup imaginable: a heterosexual and (so far) monogamous relationship. The majority of our sex was penetrative, I made dinner in my housewife dress, he opened stubborn jar lids for me, I decided which colours to paint the walls and he made holes in the walls with the drill, that he owns.
And I questioned the shit out of it. Not just the #housewifelife stuff, but everything about the recipe for vanilla. Questions like “Do I have the male gaze?”, “Can I be heterosexual and queer?” and “Why do I still think it’s revolutionary when I see a man pushing a pram?”, and so on. I was (and still am) determined not to subscribe to to heteronormativity, despite my apparent heterosexuality.
Which is, more or less, the spirit of this newsletter, Vanilla. It’s about disrupting vanilla, and redefining it! Altering the age-old recipe for how a cisgender, heterosexual person is supposed to behave—in or out of a relationship. And sometimes, it’s also about being ok with a scoop of vanilla (or a housewife dress), so long as you’ve chosen it yourself.
If you still have no idea what I’m talking about, here it is in plain speak: this is a newsletter about sexuality, heteronormativity, gender, social norms and anything else that in some way relates to those things.
I, by the way, am H. E. You can stalk me here, here and here.
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