No Such Thing As Normal Sex

I witnessed a small revelation yesterday. Sir Stern and I meet sporadically for caffeine and conversations about love and life and the women he’s being intimate with.

He’s something of a dominant when it comes to sex, but he’ll describe himself as being to the ‘left of vanilla’ and ‘really quite normal’.

But he dropped an interesting penny: He’s never met a woman that hasn’t enjoyed a bit of ‘something else’ … a bit of rough or teasing, some bondage of sorts, a blindfold perhaps or a taboo fantasy. ‘It’s as if the idea of “vanilla”, or “normal” sex,’ he said, ‘is as outdated as the idea that the only sex is missionary position.’

After all, what is ‘normal’? Sex once a week in missionary? That’s just unimaginative and boring. Not normal.

Where does ‘normal’ begin and where does it end? Years ago anything other than missionary was akin to heresy, oral sex anathema and BDSM something freaks did.

Sir Stern believes that the women he’s bedding are naturally kinky and saucy – that everyone is – and that the fact that he’s open to it is what allows them to be comfy enough to express themselves and their sexual needs better than they feel able to with their more shy partners.

So the difference in ‘vanilla’ and ‘kinky’ sex lies simply in being able to say what you want. And if Sir Stern is to be believed, everyone wants a little kinky business – and THAT’S the normal of it.

And I’m inclined to agree.

‘Normal’ is a sliding scale marked by degrees of comparison. A recent lover struggled with the idea that I had Tantric swami who practiced yoni massage on me. ‘I’m just a normal guy,’ he wailed, flustered by the idea. ‘I’m just a NORMAL guy that likes NORMAL sex stuff! This is all just too weird!’

Turns out, ‘normal’ for him involved a whole lot of bound and blindfolded kinky play with sharp objects and wax.

From the moment we start experimenting sexually and testing the limits of our bodies’ capacity for sensation and our brain’s capacity for eroticism, we inch towards and, hopefully through, a range of experiences.

Or, at least, we could if we weren’t so hung up on being ‘normal’.

In my experience, when people freak out about some crazy kink they think they have, they want to be assured that they’re ‘normal’.

And that’s where Rule 34 comes into play – if you’ve thought about it, someone has made porn about it. Simply Google your ‘thing’ and you’ll find forums, communities and image galleries dedicated to it. I Googled ‘snot fetish’ and sure enough… (DO NOT DO THAT)

I reckon many people stop themselves experimenting because they’re too scared to venture off to far from ‘normal’ and worry they’ll find themselves deep in something ‘extreme’ later – as if it’s an obvious hop skip and a jump from asking for dirty talk or a hair pull to finding yourself in a red corset, strung from the ceiling, ball-gagged and flogged.

But then, maybe that would be your kinda normal then and how bad is that?