You’d be forgiven for thinking every living soul on Madonna’s good green earth is getting a little freakier. This year alone, A24 put a gay Dom/sub relationship replete with pet play, bootlicking, and public sex at the center of Pillion. Olivia Wilde got wild with knife play and threesomes in I Want Your Sex. And even the motion picture based on a book Emily Brontë wrote in the 1840s, Wuthering Heights, had some very 21st-century coded mouth spitting.
“Kink has gone way more mainstream in the media,” Rachel Wright, LMFT, a New York-based licensed psychotherapist, tells Cosmopolitan. For kinksters and the kink-curious, that increased visibility offers the invaluable gift of shame reduction, she says.
But some people are experiencing a darker flipside to that visibility, too. “It can be disorienting for people who aren’t interested in kink to see so much of it, because that visibility can become internalized as expectation,” Wright tells Cosmopolitan. That feeling can become especially potent for doomscrollers who find themselves on #FreakTok and #SpicyBookTok. “Because social media rewards novelty, because novelty gets clicks,” says Wright, the sex that rises to the top of our feeds isn't necessarily representative of the sex most people are having.
The word ‘vanilla’ carries baggage it never earned.
—Rachel Wright, LMFT, a New York-based licensed psychotherapist.
On top of that, social media moderation can create its own strange visibility gap. While algorithms are well-set up to censor so-called “traditional” sexual content, decidedly kinky acts like foot and armpit play can be harder to detect and therefore easier to disseminate, as sex educator Topher Cusumano, co-founder and creative director of queer-owned production company Daddy TV, previously told Cosmopolitan.
The result is that the kink deep-dives, which once required a visit to a sex shop or particularly niche corner of Reddit, are now just a screen away. See enough of them on your television or tiny phone feeds, and it can start to seem like everyone but you, has a leather, latex, or flogger collection.
But zoom out from these screens, however, and the picture of what people are actually doing sexually isn’t quite so… saucy. “There’s been a bit of a backlash against expressions of alternative sexuality,” says Stefani Goerlich, LCSW, CST, an AASECT-certified sex therapist and kink expert and author of With Sprinkles On Top: Everything Vanilla People and Their Kinky Partners Need to Know to Communicate, Explore, and Connect. “Younger people are much more sex averse than previous generations,” she says.
A Fall 2026 survey from The Kinsey Institute and Playboy reports that the so-called sex recession is, in fact, real. Of the more than 2,300 Americans ages 18 to 29 surveyed, 29 percent hadn’t had a sexual partner in the previous three months, while 19 percent reported never having had one. And partnered play isn’t the only thing some young people are opting out of, either. More than half (55 percent) of Gen Z have masturbated zero to three times in the last month, confirming previous findings that Millennials get down with themselves far more than younger generations.
Further, a recent report found that one-third of Gen Z said they don’t like seeing other couples make out, compared to less than twenty percent of millennials.
Altogether, the data reveals a pretty bizarre disconnect wherein the sex in film and at the top of our feeds is getting freakier at the same time that plenty of people are having run-of-the-mill sex—or none at all. In other words, vanilla sex—or no sex at all—may be considerably more ordinary than certain cultural markers might have you believe.
Still, when bondage, group sex, power play, and increasingly niche kinks are on every screen, it can be easy to look at your own perfectly satisfying sex life and wonder, Wait, am I boring?
First, Let’s Get Our Definitions Straight
“Vanilla sex broadly refers to sexual activities that are widely agreed upon to be acceptable,” Heather Shannon, LCPC, CST, a licensed professional counselor, AASECT-certified sex therapist, and host of the Sex For Couples podcast, tells Cosmopolitan. Kinky sex, on the flip, generally refers to any sexual interest, activity, and dynamic that falls outside whatever a culture considers convention, she says.
That last part is important because what is considered typical—and therefore what gets labeled atypical—varies across places, time periods, and cultures. With that, “the definitions of both vanilla and kinky are always evolving,” Goerlich says.
For a more current example of how quickly those boundaries can shift, consider choking during sex. One 2022 study reported that a whopping 58 percent of female college students surveyed had ever been strangled during sex. Meaning, a behavior that might once have been understood as squarely kinky has become remarkably common among some populations. (Common, it’s worth noting, does not mean safe. Goerlich notes that sexual strangulation can cause serious injury and there is no risk-free way to do it.)
The kinky-vanilla designation isn’t just blurry across decades, but within a single encounter, too. “Sex can be both vanilla and kinky at the same time,” says Shannon. You could, for instance, have oral sex—an activity now generally considered pretty conventional—while engaging in kinky dirty talk or within the context of a consensual, pre-negotiated power-exchange dynamic, she says. Or you could have missionary sex while incorporating a ball gag or sex toy typically associated with kink.
All of this is to say that vanilla and kinky are shorthand that can sometimes be helpful, but they're less definitive than their uses in pop culture might have you believe. Plus, “people can of course enjoy both vanilla and kinky sex; we’re complex beings capable of multitudes,” adds Shannon.
You’re Not Boring If You Like Vanilla Sex
“The word ‘vanilla’ carries baggage it never earned,” says Wright. The term was born in kink and BDSM communities as shorthand for ‘not kinky,’ intended simply to help people communicate their interests and find potentially compatible play partners. Inside those communities, it's far from a diss. “It's just a neutral shorthand, similar to the way ‘civilian’ is neutral to someone in the military,” says Wright.
“The trouble only started when it leaked into mainstream culture, where vanilla already meant plain, default, the flavor you get when you don't choose,” she says. Unfortunately, it’s not much of a leap to go from thinking vanilla is the least-exciting ice cream order to worrying it means your sex life is boring.
The thing is that vanilla and kinky describe what you’re doing, not how good (or bad), exciting (or meh) it feels while you’re doing it. Whether you identify as kinky or vanilla—or have sex that falls into one camp more often than the other—how exciting, satisfying, or downright toe-curling your sex life is has very little to do with which activities are on the itinerary, Wright tells Cosmopolitan.
“The menu of activities has very little to do with the quality of your sex. Being good at sex comes down to presence, communication, and paying attention to your partner or partners,” she says. “You can do all of that in the most conventional sex imaginable, just as you can also fail at all of it while wearing a latex suit.”
What If My Partner Is Kinkier Than Me?
Sadly, it isn’t just social media and movies that can hold a funhouse mirror to your sexual preferences, making you question whether your tastes are adventurous enough. The person(s) you’re having sex with can, too.
To be frank, you should never (ever!) feel shamed for your preferences by a partner. A partner having kinkier preferences than you is one thing, but a partner making you feel ashamed of yours is another. If your S.O. mocks, belittles, or pressures you because you don’t share their sexual interests, the problem isn’t that you’re vanilla but that they aren’t respecting your boundaries. And that, dear friend, is grounds for Relationship Termination.
But—and this is important—one of you being kinkier than the other isn’t necessarily a relationship dealbreaker. “Mixed desire relationships—where one person identifies as vanilla, and the other identifies as non-vanilla or kinky—can absolutely work,” says Goerlich. Shannon agrees, noting that the key is getting curious about common ground, using respectful communication and non-judgmental language, and allowing yourselves to be surprised.
“It’s not about whether or not your labels align, so much as finding sensations that are mutually enjoyable,” says Goerlich.
How to Be Vanilla With Your Whole Chest
Inside you are two wolves: one insists your vanilla interests make you boring, while the other knows that’s bullshit. And it’s time to starve the former while feeding the latter. And that’s where positive self-talk comes in.
“If you're telling yourself your partner is going to cheat on you because you're boring in bed, you're not going to have a lot of confidence in or out of the bedroom,” says Shannon. And that lack of confidence can, in turn, create the very sexual disconnect you were so desperate to avoid. Similarly, if you ask a partner over and over (and over) again to affirm they enjoy sex with you even though you’re not interested in satiating a certain kink, you could both become fed up with your constant need for reassurance.
Getting out of these self-defeating spirals requires replacing those assumptions with kinder, more accurate stories, says Shannon. In practice, that could mean arming yourself with reminders like:
- My sexual tastes are perfect as they are.
- I am allowed to have sexual boundaries.
- Pleasure is the measure.
- I trust my partner to tell me if something isn’t working for them.
- The overlap in our sexual interests is a magical place.
Building confidence in what you do like—not just defending what you don't—can help, too. “Knowing your body and your mind is something that can and will be learned over time if you have the intention to learn it,” Shannon tells Cosmopolitan. Reading books about sex (yes, smut counts!), taking an in-person or virtual workshop, or watching YouTube videos made by credentialed sexuality professionals can introduce you to possible techniques and activities that pique your fancy.
As you’re learning more about your desires, take a beat to consider why certain activities remain firmly off your sexual menu. Are you avoiding them because you’re nervous or ashamed—or because they simply don't float your boat? With some attention to what’s happening in your body, you may be able to start teasing apart the difference, says Shannon. “Our brains and bodies are constantly giving us signals about what we want,” she says.
“If you’re ashamed, you might feel a darkness or heaviness in your body, while if you’re nervous you might have butterflies in your stomach or a lump in your throat,” she says. And if you haven’t permitted yourself to want something, you might notice a forbidden curiosity, a kind of push-and-pull tension, she says. Conversely, if you simply don't want something, you’ll likely be able to consider it with a relatively relaxed affect, absent of the aforementioned signs of internal conflict, says Shannon.
And if you decide something just doesn’t tickle your fancy? Well, there’s no need to turn your no into a yes just to beat your self-imposed boring allegation. As Wright says, “At the end of the day, exploring because you're afraid of being boring in bed is a different flavor of shame, and shame has yet to make anyone better in bed.”