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Originally Posted by spectre
The way I see it, even if you push yourself into the kinkiest and "least Christian" situation you can think of, you're still being controlled because you're not doing it out of a desire for that experience, you're doing it because of your aversion to being like other Christians.
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Hey spectre, thanks for the sincere thoughts. I'm not offended. But I think I need to clear up a couple of things before this discussion goes on (and btw, I did not intend for this thread to become a personal dissection of what vanilla and kink mean to me, but I guess it has taken that direction).
1) You have some aspects of it correct above, but it's not a 100% cut and dry thing. What I am talking about is a relationship of correlation, not causation. I DO try things because I am curious about them, not *just* because it's "anti-Christian." But many of the things I try happen to be non-Christian, and I don't mind that association, either.
For example, I didn't start masturbating until I was 22... and I didn't start because I wanted to rebel, but because I started thinking about sex, feeling horny, and a friend of mine suggested that it might be fun for me to experiment with myself. I gave it a try and liked it, and kept on doing it. I didn't feel guilty, I didn't feel like I was being "sinful," I just plain liked it and felt good about myself doing it. And, I also realized that Christians should not do "those" kinds of things and take such pleasure in it... so that was yet another step in my distancing, that I did not want the label that constrained me. But it was not a *cause*, per se.
Also, I was a wait-till-marriage type until I was 24 and went to grad school, dated a guy for a few months without sleeping with him (after 4 years of being single), then decided that hey... I really just wanted to have sex (though not with that particular guy), and I didn't want to wait until marriage. I just wanted to be with the right person, not necessarily my husband. Not because I was "rebelling," but because I honestly didn't want to wait anymore. I was curious about the experience and didn't want my wedding night to be the first time I "knew" someone, especially if I didn't get married for several more years. (Of course, the irony is that I ended up having sex with a stranger when I was drunk, which was not ideal, but the desire was already in place beforehand and I followed through with it.)
So, what I am saying is that while yes, I want to distance myself from being Christian and from sex that is "only for procreation within marriage," as ubertuber said (vanilla or not, I suppose), it is not purely because of a desire to "rebel." It's because it's what *I* want to experience and try and find out, to explore for myself... and always have, if I had gotten to know myself better at an earlier age. It's what some might call a "sinful" nature, and because it's inherent in my personality and I'm not sorry for it, I saw that as being inevitably irreconcilable with evangelical Christianity.
2) As I explore more with my husband, I find that there are things I am comfortable with, and things that I am not. I would not know where that line was until I crossed it, most of the time... and that is the process I am in the middle of, right now. I don't think it means I prefer vanilla 100% of the time, nor does it mean I am forcing myself to endure kink 100% of the time. I am somewhere in the middle... the line always moving, as ubertuber said.
However, it needs to be said that kink (at least my kink) does not happen in a vacuum of a relationship. I did not start this thread because I play with myself in a kinky way, or go out and find random partners to do that with. But my husband has a higher level of curiosity about kink than I do, and he often brings up new ideas for us to try. This can be pretty exciting, but it is not always easy for me to get turned on by new things. It takes me a long time to get used to things, especially if they were not my idea. That is something we are always working on together, since we have pretty much only been with each other, sexually, and *will* only be with each other, from now on. We are figuring out what each other's sexual needs are, and how to meet them comfortably. But a lot of the way I deal with new things is to talk about them, and this thread (like many others on TFP) is a way to ask about other people's processes of becoming comfortable with those kinds of differences in a long-term relationship.
Hope that all made sense.