Am I Vanilla?

I have been on Fetlife for seven or eight months now. For those of you who don't know what Fetlife is, it's a place for kinsters to start groups and post their thoughts. It's run totally by kinky people, too, so there's no need to worry about your group or your photos being deleted because of "adult content". Now everyone who knows me knows that I'm a pure spanko. I don't do discipline or punishment spankings, I don't have a dom nor am I accountable to a disciplinarian. It seems to me that I'm really very much different from the other women on Fetlife--or at least most of them. Most of them go on and on about how their dom cherishes them (even though he's a sadistic S.O.B) and about how their "daddy" treats them like a little princess (between bouts of oral sex apparently). I can't relate to any of this. I can't relate to giving another human being control over aspects of my life that have always been my domain. I can't relate, as a 48-year-old woman, to having someone think I still need spankings to keep me in line. And I certainly can't relate to someone thinking I'm going to call him daddy or uncle when they aren't related to me. Honestly, it boggles my mind to think of some of the things I've seen posted there. And don't get me started on the photos. Yahoo would go into a frenzy of deletions if they ever got a peek at some of the photos on there. Many, that I can't even bear to look at, are referred to as art. OK, my idea of art may be different from some people's. Apparently, a picture of a woman tied from head to toe with red rope is right up there with Michelangelo's Pieta. I'm sorry, but the picture of the woman bound with red rope (lovely as it is) doesn't move me in quite the same way as the Pieta does. Ditto for pictures of men having their privates tortured.

So having said all this, I really have to ask myself: Am I vanilla? Because I get spanked only because I like it and it's fun, does that mean that I'm doing it wrong? Because I don't need a dom to order me around and make all of my decisions for me, do I not qualify as kinky? Or because I don't need to be held accountable to a man who's just as human as I am and therefore just as flawed? Or because every spanking I engage in doesn't end in sex, am I not really a spanko? I really have no idea what the answers to these questions are. And, until very recently, they weren't even a major concern of mine. But it seems like almost every time I post a response to a thread, I'm the only one who seems to have her head in the real world. Everyone else seems to have on the heavy duty rose colored glasses. And I'm beginning to think more and more that people resent my responses. In the middle of all that fantasy, there's my little post about being safe and making sure the person spanking you knows what he's doing. And what happens? I'm either ignored--glossed over until the reader comes to a post full of more fantasy junk--or I'm derided for daring to suggest a dom may not know what he's doing. I admit I'm not much of a romantic. Just too darn practical I guess. But it sure seems to me that the women in the scene lose their heads way too easily over men who call themselves a dom or master. I mean, all a guy has to do is post a picture of himself in a black vest carrying a flogger and they all just melt. Am I the only one who shrugs and says "Whatever blows your hair back"?
In the end, I have to be true to myself. But it sure makes me wonder.