Do gay men wear diapers

Objects such as diapers might appear trivial to the violent politics of homophobia. These may be casual hobbies for some, like Leo, and sexual kinks for others.

A lack of demographic research makes it difficult to say how many people identify as AB/DL, or how long they have been around for, but online communities have been growing over the last few years.

What happens when all of the stress at school makes you feel like you can’t get into “little space”? We market [them] based on color, styles, absorbency, fit, and function.”

Polokoff and Kissee said My Inner Baby is not a sex shop but a safe space where people don’t have to fear judgment. If concealment can both protect or break social ties, does intimate exposure share this double edge?

Kenya’s “war” on plastic waste, I show, has thus resonated with everyday struggles over bodily health, ethno-regional autochthony, and various possibilities for imagining a future. Does it mean you’re turning into…*gasp*…an adult?

I like to remind little ones that they have a secret super power. This literature’s more general point about a vital excess generated through customary modes of concealing (and revealing) the sexual has important implications for a late capitalist context.

After a year, Brown noticed people were not only buying these products daily but also bringing in their friends to introduce them to AB/DL. They want to sleep in a crib, be fed in a high chair, wear diapers 24/7, be put in a playpen during the day and given a bath at night.

As a Daddy, I love the idea! He said there’s always space for more in Ottawa’s AB/DL community, so he welcomes every opportunity to help someone accept themselves.

“I couldn’t live without [AB/DL] to be honest, but what I like the most about it is being able to help others,” Leo said.

What else can you tell us about the effects of diaper discourses on those recruited to embody the figure of the “anti-citizen”?

GPM: You are referring here to Kent (594–95), a young gay man who told me that, growing up, his mother, among others, continuously warned him that, were he to practice gayism, he would end up in diapers.

But, I suggest, they aren’t. This expert consensus, however, has not stopped misconceptions from harming the community.

Bias In and Out of the Courtroom 

Ummni Khan, a Carleton University associate professor of law with expertise in kink-related law, said judges are likely to rule against an AB/DL parent in custody battles.

Smook, meanwhile, spent those years coming to terms with his interests, finally taking the leap into Seattle’s AB/DL community in November 2022. A frequent cause relates to prostate health, often following treatments for prostate cancer, such as a prostatectomy.

These questions also posit an interesting challenge for ethnographic writing: How does one describe intimate worlds nowadays without reproducing the prevalent logics of intimate exposures? In August 2022, the pair were forced to close the company’s brick-and-mortar store in Noblesville, Indiana after the city canceled an unrelated multimillion-dollar construction project also led by Polokoff.

According to Polokoff, Noblesville officials withdrew from the project because they regarded My Inner Baby as a “sex shop” that “doesn’t meet the morals of the city.” The city has denied that charge, but theIndianapolis Star confirmed Polokoff’s claim in a review of internal city emails.

According to this logic, it is okay for me to expose intimate things from your personal, intimate life for, if what I expose is morally troublesome, my act of exposure becomes an act of good citizenship; through that act I come to see myself recognized as an “exceptional citizen” (Grewal 2017). What I call, in my article, intimate exposures—that is, “performative attempts to unmask signs of social failure hidden beneath the appearance of respectability” (578)—are not just ways of pastime, enjoyment, or amusement.

And often, especially when they’ve never had face-to-face experiences with other ABDLs, big bros or Daddies, they express a dream of regression.

They want to live a life where they are regressed to ‘babyhood’. But I think that the literature on secrecy can help us reflect further on that power or exuberance that accrues when someone exposes something intimate as troublesome; on why this act can so easily captivate an audience, mobilize affect, or seduce people into action.

JF: I was struck by one interlocutor who, after being outed as a sex worker on television, performs an “intimate exposure” of her own.

Four or five years ago, a quite fascinating instance of intimate exposures took place in the Kenyan public sphere. That being said, I hope to have shown that the seductive quality of diaper discourses did not revolve around their offering explanations that are fully commensurable with the “science” of public health. We provide a really small segment of that.”

All members of ABUniverse’s staff identify as AB/DL, including Roberts.