During the whole Olympic controversy on the Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif, questioning her actual gender, someone was making mental gymnastics that she still has testerone level higher than "vanilla females".

Lol, vanilla females. That alone says a lot.

[–] hydrospanner@lemmy.world 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not that we need to open this can of worms here, but it's a pet peeve of mine that "vanilla" has become a term used to mean plain, boring, sheltered, standard, mediocre, underwhelming, basic, and uninteresting.

Vanilla is an amazing flavor that comes from orchids that must be hand pollinated to cultivate at scale, and has a long and interesting history. It's the second most valuable spice after saffron.

Just feels wrong to use that as a synonym for bland and blah.

[–] Tamo240@programming.dev 5 points 2 months ago

IIRC the reason for this is because synthetic vanilla flavour was one of the first to be produced, so while actual vanilla is still quite valuable, it became the go-to 'default' flavour.