BDSM & ABDL

I recently made a long winded comment at iHeartDiapers.com dealing with the subject of seeking a more general kind of acceptance for ABDLs, of the sort that BDSM enjoys. It really was so long as to qualify as a blog post all by itself, so I polished it up at little to stand better on its own and posted it here. Maddie here on blogspot has been talking about a lot of these things for a while, so be sure to visit her blog for more thoughts along these lines. I've hit on a few of these things before too, so if you've heard some this before, just bear with me. There's some good thoughts in here.

Anyhow, someone pointed out that BDSMs comparative kinkiness should, in all logic, make it a harder sell to the general public than ABDL. This is what I had to add:

In the public consciousness, BDSM, which was considered totally unacceptable 60 years ago, has now become what we think of when we think of sex. However, the key difference that holds the ABDL world back from that kind of public recognition is that BDSMers have been building a very open, intelligent, and supportive community since the 1950s. And let’s face it … the majority of people searching the Internet for ABDL material are not interested in the community. They are (for lack of a nice way of putting this) looking for something to jerk off to. They find it and they split. They have no interest in speaking with others intelligently via the web, don’t want to meet in public, and they won’t even risk outing themselves to their significant other. In short, they are closeted even from their own community.

BDSM had people like Betty Page to bring the subculture into the public eye and let everyone know that it wasn’t just gross old guys in dungeons, and that it could be fun, sexy, and tasteful. If some sexy young model or pop star came out publicly as ABDL and did a shoot in playboy or Esquire with Little Girl themes that had even a single diapered picture, you can bet that diapers and ageplay would be the new bondage.

However, there is a major issue in the community which will have to be addressed before ABDL subculture will be ready to “go public” in the way that BDSM has. That issue is the almost inseparable notions of shame and humiliation associated with diapers. We have got to have people out there who are willing to do some careful thinking, to find ways of making the general public ABDL-aware so that people who discover that they are ABDL don’t feel like it’s a good idea to closet themselves so severely they won’t even fill out a profile on a website. That’s going to mean risking shame for a lot of us. The community can’t remain faceless forever.

One person criticized Adrian Surley for endorsing more openness on her blog without showing her own face. This kind of behavior is another sad pitfall of our community; the idea that real participation in the scene means either total privacy or none at all. Certainly, there are plenty of people who, if approached in the right way, would open up as much as they felt comfortable doing. Unfortunately, such approaches are usually not taken. (Again, due in a large part to the fact that being highly closeted has been established as a norm within the community.) Now, I don’t show my (entire) face on my blog, but I come damn close. Close enough to where people who know me would probably recognize me if they somehow found their way to my site. That person would have to be surfing a diaper site to find it though … and that’s not likely unless they are also ABDL. But as I said, this really isn’t about forgoing all privacy, or convincing everyone who wants to mean something to the community to show their face all over the internet. In all honesty, I’m not even sure how much that would help. What the community really needs is someone young, attractive, and loaded with crossmarket-appeal who will be willing to not only show their face to our community, but to the world at large.

Once there are a few brave souls putting themselves into the public eye while laying down the dogma for people who aren’t in the know, (we’re not pedophiles, we play at a range of ages including adult, avoid the binge and purge cycle, etc.) more people are going to start finding their way to the community with a greater willingness to participate constructively. Reaching out to the BDSM community would probably be a good first step, including making a bigger showing at BDSM events with higher ABDL turnout, ageplay/diaper scenes and seminars, things like that. BDSMers are generally more accepting of alternative lifestyle choices than anyone else.

Personally, I try to keep a blog that non-ABDL people won’t be scared off by if they were to come across it. Adrian does a great job of this too; iHeartDiapers.com is probably the first site I would show to someone who had no prior knowledge of the ABDL subculture.

I'm currently in the process of organizing an opportunity for some college-aged ABDLS in the New York City area to meet each other discreetly over coffee in real life. Any of you teens/twenty-somethings in the area who are interested in participating should shoot me an email at diapermail@yahoo.com.

In any case, there are a lot of ways to help the community become more public … people are just going to have to organize and make a business plan before that can happen.

Meeting other DLs

So for a while I have been considering that I live in one of the biggest cities in the world and I know I'm not the only one into diapers. Sometimes I'll sit on the train and wonder if any of the strangers around me might be headed home to visit the same diaper sites as me, or if maybe someone might even be wearing one only a few feet away, wondering the same thing about me. After all, no one really knows how many of us there are. There are about 23,000 registered users on Diaperspace, which is probably the highest count I've seen. That's world wide, but I think it's fair to say that about half of those are in the USA. So, let's suppose for a moment that there are 10,000 here in the United States, and that they are evenly distributed throughout the population. 2.5% of that population is here in New York City, so by this method of calculation there would be 250 diaper lovers here. Regardless of the exact numbers, NYC is the most densely populated city in the country, so the probability of running into another DL is definitely better here than anywhere else. In short, I got to thinking how weird it was that with all of these people with secret diapered desires running around, probably none of them had ever met or spoken. So, I decided to arrange it.

My initial worry about setting up a meet up like this was that there was a pretty good chance that a lot of those people are years apart in age, from vastly differing socioeconomic backgrounds, and would otherwise have nothing to talk about. They might not even speak the same language-- after all, it is New York City.

By the same token though, an equal number could be living, working, or going to school in the exact same place. So what I decided was to make a proposal via the DailyDiapers message boards for a meeting of of college-aged DLs. Whatever else, everyone would be close to the same age, just getting established, and have a lot more in common than a general, all inclusive meet up.

So my meet-up proposal has been up for a while and I've finally started to get some feedback: four people in the city and three people within commuting distance have spoken up about wanting to meet. I'm in the process of collecting everyone's emails and deciding on a place.

We'll see what happens ...