FETISH NATION | PAGE 1, 2, 3
He's the first fetishist I've met who has no fetish community. Not surprisingly, he's also the first one without an intimate relationship to the computer. Has the Internet simply unearthed an already extant seething subterranean world of perversion, the way a trowel exposes creepy-crawlies to the light? Or is it actually promoting and spreading alternative sexual practices? It's difficult to say, but I have noticed that a startling number of the dozens of fetishists I encounter are not simply computer savvy but professional techies. Domina Cleo Dubois, a woman who has devoted her life to educating men and women in the ways of fetish reality, confirms my observation. That so many computer programmers are also into SM is more than a coincidence, she says. She believes that SM and other extreme forms of sexuality are a way of balancing a life filled with abstraction and isolation. "I don't think we would need SM in a primitive society where you sit around the fire and wrestle in the dirt," she said. "But I see people who need to be beaten to get them back into their bodies. Then they can make love." Something about this resonates in me as I wind my way up the side of Mount Tamalpais above Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. The sun beats into a blue sky with lavish sensuality, and the trees hold up their arms so effortlessly. It is a perfect Northern California day and I realize how long it's been since I've done anything like commune with nature or anything else uncivilized. I'm far from a techie, but I do spend more and more time staring into a screen thinking in tiny bites of abstract data. An e-mail, a to-do item, a Web site URL, a bit of HTML code -- they tap-tap together into the bulk of my life. At the end of the day, if I am lucky, I jog or dance until it hurts, but maybe an equally exerting sexual ritual would work even better. Baby Tommy lives in a split-level redwood house with his partner Marky. Nineteen years ago he started Diaper Pail Friends, an organization providing more than 13,000 members with "Adult Baby" parties, networked mailing lists, literature and products like hypnotic audiotapes for achieving "total incontinence." They also host parties all over the nation, which allow ABies to make friends, wet their pants and change each other's diapers. (Adult Babies are not to be confused with "Plushies," people who make love to their stuffed animals and sometimes like to dress up as their furry friends.) Tommy's platinum blond hair frames his wizened face with the lavish hope of an aging Caesar. Once a systems analyst, he quit his job 10 years ago to see if he could pay his substantial mortgage from hawking baby clothes to overgrown infants. His scheme paid off: Although he won't say how much he rakes in, he hints that it's in the multiple hundreds of thousands. "I'm a late bloomer," he brawls in a burnished Bronx accent. "Most ABies begin around the age of 7, but I only started wearing diapers when I was an adult. I've been in the military, I've been married, I have two grown kids and now I'm about 70 percent gay. I've been very fortunate," he beams, looking out on a bristly sea of redwoods. "I've lived a full life." Like most fetishists, infantilists are predominantly men. "Men aren't allowed to be submissive, or soft, or feminine, so it comes out as a fetish," says Tommy, explaining that he is currently struggling to find sane female ABies for a Jerry Springer show. Tommy believes that the rise of infantilism is a response to the limitations of traditional masculinity. "My father was very domineering and very unfeeling," he explains. "So I began to develop ways to avoid being like him. First of all: Don't grow up! If you grow up, you're going to become a man." He shudders at the thought. Tommy maintains that while most ABies regress only for short periods within the sexual play of intimate relationships, sometimes people fall into what he calls "the black hole." "You can get sucked into it," he says. "You can find it's so wonderful to wear a diaper and pee into it and be a baby that it becomes an addiction. I've seen it happen." Inside his cabinets, enormous diapers, white plastic panties, pink flannel sleepers, bibs and big baby bottle nipples all float in a fantasyland of balloons, bunnies and teddy bears. Behind him stands his office where he works with his two employees: It's a small neat room brimming with state-of-the-art computer equipment. "Gosh, some of these are nice," he says. "I never get to look at them, I'm always on-line." In the past few years the sexual underground has forged a public voice like never before, penetrating mainstream culture. The American Psychologists Association recently removed "SM" and "fetishism" from the DSM, their manual of disorders. Last month Paul Theroux lavished more than 5,000 words profiling a cheerful dominatrix in the New Yorker. Movies like "Crash" have exposed middle America to bizarre fetishes involving technology, and fashion designers like Versace have outfitted their runway models with riding crops, as did the advertisers of Altoids Mints. Finally, two pan-sexuality magazines made their debut this year: Larry Flynt's "Taboo," whose introductory, how-to prose reads like a "Perversity for Dummies," and the intellectually highbrow "Fetish," which targets both men and women. Just how big is kinkdom? From an admittedly self-selecting survey on Survey.net, out of 26,477 respondents, 1,894 people (7.1 percent) responded that they were into heavy or mild infantilism, 3,775 people (14.2 percent) into mild or heavy foot fetishism, 2,690 people (10.2 percent) into some form of bestiality and a whopping 13,055 (49.4 percent) involved in some kind of dominant or submissive play (not necessarily BDSM). Jay Wiseman, author of "SM 101," has estimated that 33 percent of all people enjoy a little SM play. Carlos, former president of Threshold, a Los Angeles-based sex club, points to the sheer volume of companies appealing to fetishes. "There are hundreds of video companies devoted only to smoking fetishes or only to spanking or bare feet or ropes," he says. "Ditto with magazines. There are dozens and dozens of book publishers. There are hundreds of fashion companies devoted to every possible piece of paraphernalia." Perhaps the best evidence of this is the flourishing of San Francisco's 15th annual Folsom Street Fair, scheduled in coordination with National Leather Week. Ten years ago, the nation's largest leather and fetish party across the nation was a backdoor affair catering to gay men into leather. Last year the fair attracted over 300,000 people of all sexes and colors (many of them admittedly non-pervs practicing nothing kinkier than a little garden-variety voyeurism), making it the third largest street event in California, second only to the Rose Bowl and the Gay Pride Day Parade. But if fetish culture is streaming over the networks into the hearts and homes of America, will it simply find the fetishists that are already out there or will it, like many mass movements, create new followers? In her book "Close to the Machine," Ellen Ullman suggests that where programmers go, our culture is sure to follow. "We think we are creating a system," she writes. "But the system is also creating us." I wonder how sexuality will transmogrify in our technology-obsessed, disembodied age. Will we all find the one person in the world who shares that arcane lust imbedded in the genetic code? Will our increasingly sedentary, abstracted lives drive us to greater visceral experiences to remind us we live in bodies born of irrational urges? Fifteen years ago, I stood alone at the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, watching a tiny chain gang trudging down Market Street. I was newly bisexual -- something I would have rigidly denied a few months before -- and had recently broken down and, against my previous vows, bought my first computer. The chained marchers wore costumes I'd never seen before: black leather vests over pale flaccid frames, tattoos swirling across their flesh like a collective map to another world. Probably a criminal world, I thought, as hisses whizzed like stray bullets. Now when I stare at a branding scar or a corset or a man in a powder blue diaper, I can't say I shudder with excitement, but I do wonder if I am glimpsing the future.
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