Vanilla

The metaphor borrows from ice cream. Vanilla has been the default flavor in the United States for more than two centuries, which is why Wikipedia's entry on conventional sex traces the figurative use of the word back to the mid-twentieth century and notes that the Oxford English Dictionary added the sexual sense in 1997. Within kink and queer communities of the 1970s, calling a sex act "vanilla" was less an insult than a useful contrast: it described an absence of bondage, power exchange, fetish wear, role-play, or anything else that would mark a scene as kinky.

That neutral usage persists in the lifestyle. A "vanilla friend" is simply someone outside the community, and a "vanilla event" means a wedding, a work party, or any social setting where the lifestyle context is set aside. The label is most often used to describe the social compartment a person is currently operating in rather than to grade a sex life; many couples in the lifestyle have rich, conventional sex with each other and reserve non-vanilla play for specific partners or venues.

The term also marks a boundary against assumption. As Vice observes, what counts as vanilla varies across cultures and decades; oral sex, sex toys, and threesomes were each considered transgressive in living memory and are now firmly inside the vanilla envelope for many people. Lifestylers tend to use the word descriptively, not pejoratively, partly because most of them maintain working friendships, careers, and family relationships in vanilla worlds.