Baby, It’s Time for a Change
We’re a community of people committed to living out our fetishes. For that reason, it’s always seemed strange to me that some negatively judge certain fetishes — like AB/DL — even if they’re perfectly safe and consensual.
Over decades of activist-driven evolution as a Community, we’ve built overlapping connections with body modifiers, cosplayers, trans people, poly/swing, and other marginalized sex and gender communities. Built such good bridges that many of us have crossed them and discovered new pleasures and self-definitions.
But there’s this one fetish that’s been around our world longer than I have yet which remains marginalized and criticized. That would be all the eroticism that falls under the labels of AB/DL (Adult Baby/Diaper Lovers).
The Squick Factor in AB/DL
We know why the AB/DL people face rejection from parts of the BDSM Community. In very brief, they don’t look like they belong in the community in their diapers and pacifiers while we’ve got these rough sex players, fierce in leathers.
But there’s something deeper — fear of body wastes and becoming “too” helpless. This stems from attitudes we inherited from straight people in straightland. It comes from being raised by mainstream people who were taught to humiliate and frighten children to toilet train them. Teach them that everything “down there,” front and especially back, is dirty. You have to break their animal spirit. Maybe punish them later too if they wet their bed.
And that means that most of us grow up with intense inhibitions about all things associated with body wastes. And conformist teachings, in my observation, raise other questions that make us culturally anxious. What does it mean if someone enjoys wetting themselves when the world sees incontinence as shameful and disgusting? What does it say about adulthood if there are those who love squishies in a diaper and sucking on a bottle? And what does it say about masculinity if a man thirsts for emotional spaces men are never allowed to visit – for example, a place of profound vulnerability? Shame, shame, shame, I can hear our ancestors’ clucking. (As opposed to fun, fun, fun, which is how sane fetishists see their fetish.)
AB/DL is a great big mindfuck for people raised to hang onto the assumptions about gender and body wastes drilled into them by sex-negative, gender-conformist culture.
BDSMers should be wiser than that. We in the kink world already know that nobody can pick and choose which fetish they’ll have.
Growing into a Diaper
Now, imagine you have this fetish. Chances are it’s been a struggle to accept it and feel good about yourself. Still, those diapers that you fantasized about each night, you knew you couldn’t tell people or they’d run away screaming. Maybe you hope things will resolve if you marry, that your fetish needs will go away. Perhaps you will find someone who will love you as you are, unconditionally. It can happen.
If, at long last, you hook up with the legendary BDSM scene, it’s natural you may hope that in this sea of sexual diversity, people will understand. But then you may discover that your fetish isn’t treated like other fetishes. People might look down on you, or misjudge you because of your fetish, or think you’re into incest or maybe child predation, and basically perceive people who love the healing ecstasy of the AB/DL fetish as sick.
Why is it that while slavery is hot and mummification is delicious, wearing a diaper makes you freaky? To a sex scientist, it’s exasperating.
I went to a handful of my friends in the AB/DL world to let them tell you their stories.
Dating in a Diaper
Jessica Barnhill, a friend from FaceBook, told me about her experiences as a single woman.
“Women are, online at least, treated like strippers. All the guys want to be their “daddies” unless they go the pro route. Then they have to deal with the same issues Pro Domme’s have to deal with.“
“I’m a trans-woman looking for a mommy. It’s like questing for the Holy Grail of finding a unicorn. Add the fact that AB/DL is a selfish power exchange over traditional BDSM.“
“My roundabout point is that AB/DL has long been treated poorly by many of the BDSM groups, but is gaining more acceptance as more people come out as babies or older littles.”
“Dating wise, there are AB/DL munches and a couple of conventions where we can meet others, Some BDSM Clubs now have a “Little Space” for babies and older children to play. So pre-pandemic, it was not impossible to meet others, but finding a partner that wasn’t totally creepy was.”
“We face the same issues that submissive women face in the mainstream BDSM Community. A very limited dating pool of people that understand and the almost inevitable rejection faced by trying to date a “mundane.”
Struggles in Marriage
Others struggle hard with their marriages. One of my clients, Jambiwolf, agreed to share his story.
“I was trying to keep everything aboveboard and honest, even before we were married. I will say that we got married so young that neither one of us really understood anything… About anything. She knew that I had a plastic panty fetish and a regular panty fetish. I told her also about diapers at the same time but she doesn’t seem to remember that. Her tolerance was OK early on. She just thought it was maybe something some guys did and she thought I was cute so she was willing to go along.“
Unfortunately, like many non-kinky wives, his wife grew to resent his fetish, causing Jambiwolf to go through binging and purging cycles in the face of fights and recriminations about the fetish.
“When I came to you, I just wanted to be able to be myself totally at home and around my wife. That was my hope and I can pretty much do that now, but there are definitely strings attached. It’s been a challenge. We have been together 42 years but have nearly split up a number of times over this. Finally, we just decided we love each other no matter what.“
I asked him why he felt his wife and society, in general, took such a negative view of the fetish.
“Three words… Poop, pee, and pedophilia. The three p’s. Poop and pee are definitely part of it for me, but definitely not pedophilia. For some reason, most people just cannot make that distinction. They think all three things are equally disgusting. In reality, everyone comes to this fetish from their own perspective. Some people wear but don’t use. Just remember… It’s only a diaper… It can’t hurt you.“
When Your Husband Wears the Diapers in the Family
Jambiwolf had a fairly common experience for an adult baby husband married to a non-kinky woman. On the kink side, my friend TammyJo was much more enlightened and supportive of her AB/DL husband.
“He told me within a couple of months of dating when we talked about sex. I believe I brought up my kink interests and that gave him an opening. But I thought that once we were sexually active, it might “go away” because he spun it as a fetish to me. It isn’t a fetish; it is part of his identity. He was going through cycles of throwing things away and then buying more, so it seemed to me like it was something he didn’t need. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, AB wasn’t really talked about.”
I asked TammyJo about her personal challenges as a wife.
“Because I’m a survivor of childhood abuse, I actually struggle a lot with this part of his identity. I can’t do anything that sexual in any way when he’s wearing or acting in an AB fashion. It is a trigger for me emotionally. We’ve had to work through that by setting limits and finding compromises that are not crossing boundaries.”
Boundaries to Smooth the Edges
TammyJo also had great advice on how to negotiate boundaries between two people with different kinks.
“All of our identities and fetishes need to be shared with potential partners as soon as possible.“
“His upfront honesty is really the only thing that made it possible for us to find a middle ground. I know I would have felt lied to and misled had he not told me about his interests, I would have felt stripped of my ability to give consent because I wouldn’t have had the full information. Then he kept me updated as he learned more about it and others with similar interests. He kept me updated as he learned to fully understand how much all of this means to him.“
“I also had to go to therapy for my own childhood challenges and that gave me tools to try and talk and think through things. Don’t dismiss therapy just because you are kinky.“
Be Honest With Yourself
TammyJo continues — “The flip of that is that if this is a hard limit for you, don’t pretend that it isn’t. Lying to yourself or your partner is just a setup for more pain down the road. Your AB/DL partner also needs to be accepting of your limits. Someone having a hard limit isn’t a rejection of you, it’s an acknowledgment of themselves.”
“Before you just declare it to be a limit because it freaks you, talk about it just as you would any other identity or fetish. Try something together twice. I always say twice because the first time, it is hard to honestly assess something new that you do in kink or sex because of the newness of it. Don’t assume that one type of activity means you can’t do others either. For example, I can’t combine sex with AB stuff but he can be my little helper in the kitchen, I can read him kids books, and we can play with toys together.“
Her Husband’s Perspective
Jennie is TammyJo’s husband and offers a complementary birdseye view into their nonconformative marriage. By the way, as Lil Jennie, Jennie hosts a happy story-reading space for fellow fetishists. You can find it here https://www.liljennie.com/?page_id=22
“The very first struggle was telling TammyJo about this side of myself! She had been sharing some of her kinky desires, and she wished there was something non-normative about me. I said there was, but was reluctant to say at first. Eventually, I realized that if this relationship was going to go on for any length of time, she deserved to know, even though I’d never breathed a word about it to anyone before. So finally I told her.“
Making it Work
Jennie says — “At first it was just hard to get across exactly what I wanted/needed. That, and finding a way to get it to mesh with her BDSM ideas.“
“Then there was her realization that she’d been abused as a child. That really complicated things. Also, we’d moved to NYC and had no money, so buying diapers or clothes for me was too difficult — those were two good reasons why real-world expressions of my baby side had to take a back seat.“
“There have been more struggles as I’ve gradually realized that my identity is very much little and a girl. Finding myself trans and asexual has changed things. The struggles are ongoing. TammyJo doesn’t see it as safe for me to come out and change my name or official gender in the times and state that we live in. And I’m not sure she’s wrong about that. Closeted, I’m the main source of income for the family, and job opportunities might disappear if I touched the third rail that is being trans today.“
“As for negativity about us, I’d like to ask people how they perceive us. I’d ask them to stop and think where they got that impression. Is it based on any actual reality, or is it based on assumptions?“
“I’d like to be perceived as a sweet little one who just wants to spread joy and happiness. I’m not out to harm anyone. I have nothing to do with real children. I just want to express my inner child and help others express theirs. “
A Matter of Perspective
Mako Allen is one of the best-known advocates and activists in the AB/DL world. You can find out all about his many projects on his blog, http://www.onlydoing.net. Mako and I go back a while so I laid it on him: what the hell is everyone’s problem with this fetish? And being Mako, he has strong opinions on that.
“It’s a lack of perspective more than anything else. There’s how AB/DL ACTUALLY is, and how people think it is.”
“Plus I think that there are members of our esteemed little community who are selfish, entitled, bad actors who do bad things in kink spaces. But I don’t think you can point the finger at any one thing that — if it were different — would suddenly radically and organically change the Kink world to a magical place filled with diapers and babies and mommies and daddies. I do see growing acceptance and a sense that the BDSM world is a better place for us than it was. But AB/DL will always be controversial because it is edgy.“
“You know that thing I’m always talking about, the cake and the icing? The cake is just being a good person someone who is honest and caring and compassionate, the sort of person he’ll pick you up at the airport at two in the morning, doesn’t lie to you, is generally a good person. Icing is the part where you snake your hands down the front of someone’s diaper to check that it’s wet and squeeze their penis or pull out the back and look in the seat to see if they messed themselves or to play with their bottom. Over and over I’ve seen hungry lonely ageplayers confuse having icing in common with having cake in common.“
“In reality, getting somebody else to like you is not a way to feel better about yourself. Teaching people to come at this from a place of self-love has been my life‘s work in this community.“
It’s Time for a Change Now
The good news is that we have made progress as a community. But we haven’t seen a full acceptance of all the SSC kinky fetishes yet. Many AB/DL feel lost or rejected in our world because they haven’t found what other kinksters experience — ACCEPTANCE.
What is it about an adult acting like a baby that is more upsetting than, say, a person hanging by flesh hooks? Is it somehow more moral to pee on someone else than to pee your own diaper?
We need to get real about AB/DL. The only question is “can it be done safely and consensually?” If the answer is yes, then it’s not up for judgment in the kinky community. They’re our people. They deserve the same welcome we show others in our world.
PS If you’re in a community that you think would benefit by reading this, please go ahead and post a link to it in your group.
