Since when is M/F strap-on sex "vanilla"?

Last night, I was up late burning some DVDs to make some space on my hard drive. Bored, I went over to the television, which I almost never turn on, and flipped through the channels. The Oxygen channel, which is one of those "for women only" channels, had something on called "Erotic Showcase."

Curious, I turned it on.

It was a home shopping network kind of show. Only, instead of pocket fisherman and fat-draining autogrills, they two women were holding up a vibrator! A big, fat, aquamarine vibrator, with an inner ring that moved up and down behind the surface. "Isn't this great? Women love that. And feel it." The other woman ran her hand up and down the phallus appreciatively. "I love this new suede-like material they're using. It's very natural feeling, isn't it?"

"And men love it too," said the other woman. "You can use it with one of these." She reached off-camera and picked up an equally garish dildo harness, the kind with three metal rings to fix the dildo into place. "See, it goes into here, and you clip this, and there you go. A great gift for either him or her."

I was just about floored. The two women were so perky, chatting so amiably and ordinarily, just as if they were selling in-the-egg scramblers or Ginsu knives. I wondered when they would get to the point that "fingers are fine, but you can't go very deep with them!" kind of line.

On one of the more vanilla channels on the air, a sex toy sales show during which the hostesses discussed strap-on sodomy as if it were just another vanilla sex act everyone knows about and lots of people are curious about. We truly have made progress in this world.