Am I too vanilla for this?

No. There is no threshold, there is no entrance exam, and the people asking this question are the ones I most enjoy seeing.

The result page that brought you here offers you two personality quizzes. That should tell you how seriously the question has been taken until now.

Where the worry comes from

Almost everything written about this world is written for people already in it. Forums, etiquette guides, glossaries of terms nobody explains, photographs of equipment you can't identify. Read enough of it and you conclude there's a body of knowledge you were supposed to acquire before you were allowed to be curious.

There isn't. What you're looking at is a subculture talking to itself, which every subculture does, and it reads as a locked door when it's really just a conversation you haven't joined yet.

What you actually need

• Some idea of what draws you. Not a list of activities. A feeling will do.
• Some idea of what you don't want. "I don't know yet" is a complete answer to most of it.
• The ability to say so out loud, once, to me.

That's the entire prerequisite. Everything else is my job.

Inexperience is genuinely an advantage

People who've read for two years arrive with a script, a vocabulary and a set of expectations assembled from pornography and other people's accounts, and a good part of the first session is spent getting underneath all of it.

Somebody who has read nothing arrives with their actual reactions intact. I'd take that every time.

"Vanilla" is not the insult you think

It's a descriptive word for sex without kink in it, and it's the majority of everybody's life including mine. Nobody in this world uses it to mean lesser, and anybody who does is telling you something about themselves.

What a first session is actually like

Slower than you're imagining. There's a conversation first, in which you say roughly what draws you and what you'd rather not do. We agree a word that stops everything, and it keeps working the entire time, including for things you agreed to an hour earlier. Then it begins, gently, and builds only as far as you want it to.

Nobody is thrown in at the deep end. That is a thing from films.

If you'd like to

Say so in your own words on the enquiry form, and say it's your first time. It changes how I reply, and it is not a mark against you.

If you're a woman wondering whether that's a further complication: it isn't.