#its not good or more fun or hotter that way
Anyway as long as I’m yammering: I think vanilla sex would honestly benefit from adopting the green/yellow/red safeword convention used in kink. Like, the idea is that kink needs it because they’re doing kinky things, but a lot of it’s just, like, “is this new thing okay?” “do you want to keep going?” “is this too much too fast?” which is pretty relevant anytime. To someone with very little sexual experience, just doing sex stuff at all is as dicey a proposition as kinky stuff is for others, so I think this would be a welcome convention.
What makes safewords clever is that they recognize that sexual encounters happen within a distinct “space” and set up interrupts that explicitly lie outside that space and can’t possibly be mistaken for anything within it. This cleanly sidesteps a lot of the communication and deniability issues people talk about.
What I think gets in the way of this is the obsession with naturalistic, intuitive sex. Safewords are super constructed and artificial-feeling, and while kink and especially BDSM has to accept that as inevitable since the artificiality is essential to what it is, I feel like there’s this conception from the vanilla direction that the artificiality itself cheapens sex somehow. All the ideals of good vanilla sex are built around spontaneity, intuition, and natural bonding, which means that explicit safety systems or barriers between the social and sexual domains are emblematic of “deficient” sexual chemistry or technique. To continue the analogy above, the idea of having or needing a discrete “sexual space” is considered undesirable in vanilla. This attitude is a problem even in kink, but kink is naturally stigmatized and deals with some serious shit even by sexual standards, so they did at least come up with good solutions even if they aren’t always applied wisely.
