Fall 2012

It's been a weird year for my diapered side. In my last post in August 2011, I talked about an ebbing in my desire to be diapered followed by a moment of sudden longing for them. It hasn't been as drastic since then, but the whole diaper thing has definitely fallen on my list of priorities. To a large extent, feel like a lot of the psychological territory which I needed to explore through diapers has been covered, in a large part thanks to the fact that I was able to organize my thoughts on the matter through this blog. My control has been at an all time peak over the past year. I've kept accidents to about one a month, and these have been pretty small leaks that didn't even justify posting about here. Recently though, my control has taken something of a dip.

On September 22, 2012, I wet the bed for the first time since I was 16. I was on a trip, camping at a music festival. I was trying to do some writing while on this vacation, and as excited as I was to be there, I was also under a lot of strain. There had been a lot going on when I left, including issues with our landlord. Whatever the reason, I completely peed my pants. I remember sort of waking up when it was happening, not really sure what was going on, before drifting back to sleep. I woke up later in the night wet and cold, and at first I thought that it was a wet dream, because I had already peed right before bed. It still would have been embarrassing, but it would have made me feel at least slightly more grown up. I got out of the tent to avoid waking my girlfriend and check myself with a flashlight. I was way too wet for it to have just been a nocturnal emission. It surprised me, because every other time I can recall wetting the bed it was a full bladder wetting. This time, I totally could have held it until morning, but for whatever reason I didn't.

I think it has something  to do with stress. Although I do feel like I have a generally weak bladder, I've been noticing that my most recent accidents have coincided with times of unusual emotional extremes. This evening a friend of mine (who has no idea about my wetting or diapered desires) recounted an interesting psychological case that I feel might shed a little light in that direction.

This friend was really into hypnotism for a while, (medical, not stage) and was training to become a professional. During his study, he encountered the story of a case in which a young girl came to a particularly famous hypnotist to solve her severe bedwetting issues.

The girl did not believe she would ever be able to control her body like that. It gave her all kinds of confidence issues, including her ability to do simple tasks like tie her shoes. The hypnotist decided to approach her problem by helping her to master tying her shoes. Once she had done that, he helped her learn a few more skills. Finally, after having conquered a number of the other difficulties in her life, she stopped wetting the bed on her own.

Maybe this whole fetish is just some kind of complex. Maybe my desire is diminishing because I'm working other things out. Maybe my wetting only comes back when I feel like I can't face the other challenges in my life.

On the other hand, I had an incident where I was counting a cash register at work and couldn't leave it to use the bathroom even though I really had to pee. I held it for a long time, but after a little while I started to feel a little leak. Nothing major or visible, just my underwear getting a little damp. I finished the drawer, made it safely to the bathroom, and didn't think too much of it. All weekend though, I've been having little drips. It sucks because my underwear has been pretty much constantly damp and uncomfortable. I doesn't quite justify a diaper, but some of those Depends "Guards For Men" would probably help. Honestly though, incontinence products are so expensive that I feel like it wouldn't be worth it, and as far as fetish stuff goes, the guards have no attraction for me. I feel like the leaks may have something to do with stress at work and difficulty completing personal projects because I am devoting so much time to a job I don't enjoy.

These little leaks will probably disappear on their own, but if they get worse I will probably see a urologist. To be honest, I don't have the desire to be in diapers full time like I used to. It might be liberating to take a vacation from the toilet now and again, but these day I want to be a normal, continent adult. If I ever have kids, I don't want to be hiding my diapers from them. Whatever the reasons may be for my wanting or sometimes needing them, I hope they continue to fade. So much about the politics of sexual identity have come to strike me as excuses. Having lived my whole life with this fetish, I have really come to regard it as something that is not an immutable part of me, but a pattern of behavior I fell into because my life was in some way unsatisfying.

This leads me to a chapter of my hidden fetish life I've never written about before. There was this weird thing in about fourth grade where I developed a smoking fetish for a couple of years. My fantasies were largely focused on the idea of a good girl who secretly started experimenting with cigarettes and became hopelessly addicted to the point where she couldn't hide it any more. The helplessness of addiction was, in my mind, analogous to my helplessness incontinence. I would sometimes fantasize about girls who were completely addicted to cigarettes in addition to being unable to control their bladders. As soon as I hit my early teenage years, the fascination with cigarettes and addiction resolved itself and disappeared. I remember having my fantasy girl quit smoking at the end of one of my fantasies about her, and that was that.

When I was seventeen, my sexuality metamorphosed again. I suddenly developed an intense desire to be forced to wear girls' clothes and have sex with guys. Much to my surprise, this has since gone almost totally away. I still think the idea is pretty hot, and I'm not ashamed to describe myself as open to homosexual experiences, but the desperate desire for it is gone. The furthest I ever went with it was to attend a fetish party in a pair of cute panties from Limited Too with rainbows and hearts on them. I got spanked, and that was it. I still have that underwear sitting at the bottom of my drawer, but I haven't felt the need to wear them since that night.

I think that all of these sexual quirks might have stemmed from unresolved issues regarding humiliation. They probably developed over some early encounter with that feeling. I can't really recall the first time I felt really humiliated, though. Nothing pops out, especially not prior to memories of wanting to wear diapers, which are some of the earliest things I can recall. Maybe it was during my very early potty training, when I was so young that my body wasn't physically capable of living up to my mother's expectations that I would make it to the toilet. Can a child less then two years old feel humiliation? Perhaps in feeling like I'm close to achieving real adulthood, my wetting and fetishistic desires are both going away.

I think that human sexuality is much more mutable than most people give it credit for. Based on my personal experience, I've come to hold the opinion that any person can, at the right moment, fall into any fetish, no matter how strange. It all seems to hinge on the way fetishes tend to fill some void in a person's life, or express something that they feel deep inside but can't quite put into words. Perhaps by putting the strange history of my desires down in writing, I've given outlet to the secret feelings they were expressing.

And yet, here I am wearing a diaper as I write this. The need to go is building, and I'm absolutely going to enjoy using it. I don't feel the need to push myself to give them up, but I feel open to the idea that at some point it might happen by itself. Come to think of it, this is probably what a healthy potty training feels like. An unusual feeling to be having at the age of twenty-six, but at this point I've pretty much stopped caring if I am unusual or not.

So, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to wet myself.

New stuff

I've been trying to dress more like a grown up lately. I mean, I'm in school to be a movie producer. How am I going to fly all over the globe to meet with investors if I don't look like someone who can be trusted with a couple million dollars?

I've gotten rid of my sneakers. I now have two pairs of very sharp looking leather shoes, one black one brown. I also have five amazing looking collared shirts and a waistcoat. Nearly everything came from Uniqlo.

Here is the big one though: I bought a tie. I don't know how to tie it yet, but that can come later. With everything on, I look like I stepped off the cover of Vogue. I want to get used to dressing this way during my last year of school so that I can actually feel like it's no big deal when I graduate and dress this way all the time.

Another big change that's taken place since the last time I posted is that my girlfriend and I moved into a huge fucking apartment, which we've been filling with things from Ikea. All of this is due to the fact that I have been working overtime and making more money than I have ever had.

However: my new-found financial freedom has also allowed me to indulge my more immature side more than ever. The absolute highlight of my summer was seeing Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular at Madison Square Garden. My girlfriend and I were screaming along with a stadium full of five-year-olds as each new dinosaur appeared. They were incredible. I was completely freaking out the entire time.

I'm slowly filling the holes in my comic collection too. There is this publisher I can't get enough of called Eclipse. In the mid-eighties, they put out some of the greatest comic series of all time, including Zot!, Airboy, and Mr. Monster. Not only do these books feature better writing and art than nearly any mainstream comics before or since, but they are also printed on better quality paper with a laser scanned color process which reproduces the painterly work of the colorist. The mechanically separated processes which came before and the tacky digital techniques which have been invented since are wholly inferior.

Now, you'd probably imagine that Eclipse comics are really expensive, right? Wrong! They are cheap and they are everywhere. Look in any back issue bin of 80s small press stuff and you will find them for next to nothing. I've got tons of singles, but what I'd really been wanting for forever are the lavish and long out-of-print hardcover editions which Eclipse collected some of these series into. Now I've finally got them! :D

Last of all, I finally ordered myself a 24 pack of Bambino Biancos. For those of you who may not know, Bambino is the Cadillac of diapers ... and they only come in adult sizes. That's because they are the first designer diaper, made for and by diaper lovers. For the adult baby crowd, they offer a couple of options in childish prints, but I will stick to the all-white "bianco" style until they come up with some designs featuring space stuff, superheroes, or dinosaurs.

For a long time, I had been wearing Pull-Ups GoodNites, which are a lot of fun and more absorbent than people generally give them credit for. Unfortunately, the largest GoodNites are designed with pre-teen bedwetters in mind, and as such they are meant to be wet gradually over the course of the night. They are fine for recreational daytime wear, as long as you wet them a little at a time whenever you start to feel the need to go, but they can't really take a full bladder release all at once. You also have to be careful how full you let them get, as they have a tendency to overflow when you sit down.

For all their downsides though, GoodNites are nice because they are cute, trim, and readily available. There are 5-7 million kids in America who wet the bed, and as such, you would be hard pressed to find a drug or grocery store that doesn't stock them. When it comes to adult sizes though, a good diaper is much harder to find. This is pretty weird, considering that about 25 million people nationwide deal with some form of incontinence ... and that doesn't even count the recreational diaper-wearers out there who supplement that market.

In any case, the diapers you can get from your local drugstore which are actually intended for adults aren't much better in the absorbency department than GoodNites. Also, they look stupid as hell. Depends, easily the most recognizable name brand in the field, are notoriously bad, unless you get the "fitted Maximum Protection" version. These still have crappy tapes, but they at least provide sufficient absorbency to do their intended job.

The "fitted Maximum Protection" Depends aren't easy to find though. Most major chain stores seem to prefer to stock the more middle of the road ones, which in my experience are some of the flimsiest diapers ever.

So the question you are probably asking yourself now is, "if so many people in America wear diapers, why the hell aren't there better ones at my local drug store?" Well, as Justin Peters put it in his article for Slate magazine, "Like chocolate, beer, and jewel thieves, the best adult diapers come from Europe. This is not coincidental. European manufacturers don't have to cater to institutional purchasers' demands, so they're more likely to sell on quality rather than cost."

That's right. Because 50% of all people in nursing homes are incontinent, large institutional buyers make up a major part of the sales for products like Depends. The booming medical industry here in the United States knows that people who can't take care of themselves aren't in a position to complain about the inadequacies of cut-rate diapers. Keep in mind that Kimberly-Clark, the company which makes flimsy adult incontinence products like Depends and Poise, is the same one which makes better products like Huggies, Pull-Ups, and GoodNites for kids. This is because parents generally have a stronger interest in their children's well-being than professional caretakers, and are therefore more likely to purchase diapers based on quality rather than cost.

So what if Bambino products suddenly appeared on store shelves across the nation? My guess is that anyone who wears diapers on a regular basis and had a choice in the matter would switch over without a second thought. Think of the comics I mentioned above. If everyone had known about Eclipse when those comics were just coming out, they would still be around and probably be bigger than Marvel is right now.

Another bonus to having a company like Bambino at the head of the diaper industry would be the fact that they are so in touch with the recreational diaper-wearing community. Kimberly-Clark does so much to promote the statistics about how common bladder control problems are. Imagine if Bambino was out there, as visible as them, saying "Yes! It is totally okay to want to wear diapers, whether your bladder control is good or not. You are not alone." I know it would have done a lot to ease my mind as a kid.

As soon as people realize that there are alternatives to the vastly inferior, mass produced garbage that big companies force upon us, the world will be a better place. That's one of the reasons I want to produce movies. We need people out there with good sense and taste, and it's worth applying these attributes to selecting a necktie if it means I will have an opportunity to use them in bringing new films to life with previously unknown creative talent. After all, I can always go home to an apartment filled with toys, games, and other un-grown-up things.

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"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms.

"Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

-- C.S. Lewis