There's No Such Thing as Normal When it Comes to Sex

In the Fifties, Alfred Kinsey found out that sexual orientation couldn’t be measured in binary. Even back in his era, people were highly responsive to sadomasochistic erotica. There was no such thing as normal when it came to sex.

Masters and Johnson arrived a decade later. They found out that some couples couldn’t have orgasms through vanilla sex. Maybe the libertines weren’t so odd after all. Maybe there was no normal when it came to sex. Maybe that leg of sexual research would finally teach us a new, evolved world view?

Or maybe not. Master’s and Johnson’s organisation frantically back-pedalled when it decided homosexuality was a condition that required a “cure”.

Why are we so resistant to the idea that there’s a normal way to have sex?

Bonobos use sex to solve disputes. Ducks are feathered versions of the Marquis de Sade. They have spiral tentacle-penises that lock into the female so she can’t escape. Honey bees can’t be bothered. They just leave their snapped-off parts inside their mates to prevent other male bees from trying their luck. There is no such thing as normal when it comes to sex for heaven’s sake.

Five years back, a badly-written pop fiction book about BDSM was unleashed upon the vanilla world, and suddenly, an entirely new batch of people started admitting they weren’t that vanilla after all. Maybe we were about to take that final step towards admitting there was no abnormal way to have sex.

Even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual recently decided that all kinks are healthy as long as we’re not harming others or ourselves. The word “abnormal” had been chased out of the building. Everything that didn’t harm was normal. If something as narrow-minded about sex as the DSM can stop judging, you’d think the kink community would, too; but no.

Somehow, we want to judge, no matter how many times we find out that there is no normal. Not with sex. Our collective memory is as effective as that of a goldfish.

We exist in a community of over 10 million kinksters. We, of all people, should know that there is no such thing as normal, but no. The way other people have sex is our business. We judge the Fifty Shaders for finding kink in the wrong way. We judge rare fetishes for being too weird. We judge sadists who don’t’ fit our view of ‘normal’ sadism. We just can’t get away from this idea that there is such a thing as normal sexuality.