Why So Vanilla?

From a thread on Fet:
"Earlier today, I was reading a comment and it was describing the day in the life of a lifestyle slave.

It showcased how she got up at 6:30 and prepared breakfast. She did the laundry and helped her children with chores and homework. It reads to me like, it was describing a normal day in America to which every housewife must do or chose to do those tasks.

I wanted to ask her, " Did you mean to make it sound like that? " Is she more of a service type slave? Or is housewife now the new definition of slavery?"

There's an epic battle in the Kinkyverse that has been ongoing since time beyond memory. Folks have been doing their damnedest to illustrate the point that D/s, M/s, whatevs, is not always all about kinky fuckery or overt shows of authority. That the fantasy portrayed in books and movies (and porn) isn't how it is for the vast majority of us, because life.

And I've done my part in this battle. I've outlined what a Day In The Life of Squeaky looks like:

I get up after Cookie because I'm an insomniac who seldom falls asleep before 5am.
If he's hungry, I feed him before he goes off to work.
While he works, I do my work (and fool around on the computer). Laundry gets done, Dishes get done, dogs and small people are cared for, errands are run, Farm hero Saga is played.
Cookie comes home at some point in the evening and we do what millions of other folks do at night- We lump on the couch and watch TV.
After that? We either scromp, play and scromp, or sleep.
That's life. It's pretty average. It looks pretty vanilla and I sound like your average housewife.

And that's the point- This display of vanillaness is one of the best tools kinky people have to remind newbies that our lives are not All Kink All The Time. They're real lives with real responsibilities, and those responsibilities sometimes overshadow WIITWD. It's not all Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty non-stop.

But I can see where that guy I quoted above is coming from. From the day I described, it's hard to see the underlying authority of the dynamic. It might be hard for a newbie to look at that and say, "So how is D/s different from what I've always done?"

Well...
A lot of the vanilla-looking stuff I do, I do it with his preferences in mind. I've been doing that for so long that I really don't think about it when I'm talking about A Day In The Life. A lot of that vanilla stuff has his authority in our relationship buried somewhere in it, it's just not obvious to outside observers. Hell, it's not even obvious to people watching closely, I bet.

That's how it is for a great many kinksters. It's NOT obvious and it DOES look vanilla quite often.

But... Just because it looks vanilla doesn't mean that it is.

Someone describing their day might not think to point out, "When I make breakfast I'm thinking about what my partner would enjoy because I want to please him. I'm not going to cook something that I like but he hates. I'm going to make his coffee just the way I know he likes it (black, 2 sugars) and serve it in his favorite mug. I'll also dish up his meal and bring it to him."

When someone talks about doing the laundry they may not think to point out that their partner has preferences for detergent, softener, and how his clothes are folded and put away, and that they'll do the laundry with those preferences (or orders, for the really bossy sorts) in mind.

Chores may be assigned tasks, and may need to be accomplished in a specific order or fashion.

Childcare might need to involve running decisions past her partner so that his input can either be considered or abided by.

There might be protocol involved that wouldn't be obvious to children/friends/family members... "Dear" can be a great vanilla-friendly version of "Sir."

Vanilla life is something that happens to all of us, even the hardest-core kinksters still has to do laundry and pay bills, but it can be kinky or D/s when someone with authority is making the decisions about how that vanilla stuff happens.

It's all in how you look at it.

And as a snarky aside: When slavery was a legal thing, who does that guy think took care of the housework? The lady of the home or the slave?