maternal

My lovely Kitty attended her second ageplay adventure, this time as a 'Mommy' and had a much better time than at her first one. You can read about it here.

talking and tabulating: my need for nurture and how it found an adult outlet

The last several weeks have really changed some of my thoughts and views on ABDL stuff, you know?

Don't worry, I'm not going to suddenly come off as completely anti it. I haven't done a 180 and become a complete anti-pervert, no fear.

Still, as our wildly differing reactions to the 'Ageplay Adventure' clearly showed, Kitty and I really needed to do some thinking about where our ABDL play was going to go. I still had desires that I wanted met, but didn't want to make Kitty feel uncomfortable about trying to meet them.

So, following the oldest and best relationship advice there is, we talked. We talked about this conflict, openly and sincerely. I'll admit, Kitty instigated things, and I was a little slow to get started, still thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could avoid all of this and the tension would go away.

Then, I came upon a solution.

Kitty has long been a proponent of the idea that my ABDL side is a way for me to ask to have needs met that I don't feel comfortable asking to get met as an adult. I never really got what she meant by this until I had a minor epiphany...during a handjob.

Ok, not a handjob, a 'genital massage' according to the wonderfully hippyish book we were copying techniques from. Kitty gets all sorts of tension in her muscles and also likes feeling that her lovers are actually learning new skills in order to best help her, so I'd actually been trying to be a better masseuse. Plus, there's the obvious benefits for me, too: getting to rub myself all over my gorgeous Kitty and getting a more relaxed, happier and more body-aware Kitty to cuddle up against after its all done.

Anyway, one time, Kitty decides to reward me for my efforts by taking a look through the book herself and giving me some moves pulled from the page marked 'genital massage: male'.

Needless to say, I came. Not only that, I had a frankly amazing orgasm.

Still, something I realised later was this: I got a lot of the same feelings and sensations from genital massage as I do when Kitty changes my nappy. It surprised me but it was true. In both, I feel completely at ease, taken care of by a loving Kitty. I feel like she is paying very close and delicate attention to me and my privates (without simply 'jacking me off'). I feel more aware of my body, and like my body is, temporary, the key site for Kitty's attention too, in a way that is completely removed from the way I'd feel during just regular sexual activity. No, this way far more relaxed, and with a focus on taking care of me. The physical sensations weren't that different either: I was lying on my back while Kitty leaned over me, carefully applying her hands to my genitals. The pleasant smells of the massage oil that we were using even mirrored - to me, at least - the scent of baby powder and lotion that I find so comforting.

I felt completely and totally at ease.

Now, I have a hard time asking for my needs to be met. I find it very tough to ask someone, even someone with whom I'm intimate, to take care of my need to be nurtured, sometimes. I think that - without it any way being too critical of my AB side - a large reason I even have an AB side is so that I have a persona in which I can feel comfortable asking for my most essential needs for comfort and nurturing can be met. Now, Kitty is awesome at taking care of me, just so we're clear. I just need to communicate my needs better and also find ways in which we can both benefit from the experience.

But anyway, yes, back to the talk and my little epiphany. I realised that one of the ways I could make things easier for both of us would be if I took a long look at the various elements of my ABDL kink, my fetish, looked at what exactly got me off or made me feel better in each instance, and looked for a way to take that element and make it something perhaps more age-appropriate and definitely something we could both enjoy.

Just to be clear: I'm not trying to 'purge' my ABDL side or ignore it. I'm not wholesale swapping it out for something 'better'. It's still there, I just needed to consciously evolve it somewhat.

So I went and did some self-improvement homework. And there were spreadsheets, yay! Kitty was mighty pleased that I would even get so excited about self-improvement and self-development, and it was great just to see her so happy over that, let alone to see her so relieved that I was finally dealing with what is, if I'm being honest here, one of the big bugbears of our relationship. Now, once again, Kitty doesn't detest my AB side, but I think she rightfully has said that it does some developing before it becomes something we can both enjoy equally.

But hey, now I have a spreadsheet! The spreadsheet (more of a table, really, I just love saying 'spreadsheet') takes each little part of what gets me off about my ABDL kink and tries to think of a more adult way I can get that same need fixed and a way I can share that adult need with Kitty.

Take the above example: I like having my nappy changed because it makes me feel taken care of, relaxed, nurtured and also important to the person doing the changing, but actually, I get those same feelings from a more age-appropriate genital massage! It was an amazing realisation: that I could get these needs that I thought were taboo met, I just needed to rephrase and recontextualise them a little. Just to give you an idea of how much this table broke things down, wearing nappies, wetting nappies and messing nappies all had their own entries, separate from getting my nappy changed. Don't worry, there were loads of non-nappy related entries on there too.

Like being read to. I love being read to by my 'Mummy' before I go to bed at night. But here's another instance where Kitty is, in a way, more evolved than I am: she can easily enjoy snuggling into bed and being read a comforting story without the need to go into some sort of toddler headspace. A few nights later, we tried that too: seeing if I could get the same needs (closeness, intimacy) met from being read to as an adult as I would being read to as a child.

Eureka.

We really hit upon something here.

Now, I'm not turning against my ABDL side, it's still there and still comes out. I like regressing. Hell, Kitty likes regressing, and I love being her 'Daddy', but that's a subject for a whole other post. The point here is that I finally realised that a great way to let off some steam, to release the pressure that made me feel like I had to so frequently indulge this kink of mine, was to realise that there are a vast number of other ways to get the same needs met. I just needed to explore a little in order to realise and appreciate that.

And, most importantly, Kitty and I are now a lot happier for having that realisation.

Now, this whole incident happened a few weeks ago and things have changed a little since then (our living arrangements, for example) but the lessons learned essentially still hold. Oh, and I love Kitty so very much, still.

don't be that guy

This vid may be explicitly about not being a creepy foot fetishist, but I think lots of people with other kinks could learn from it too.

the adventure

So yes, as I mentioned, I went to an "Ageplay Adventure" party a few weeks ago. It's a regular event held here in San Francisco, but this was the first and last one that I would see in my stint here before heading back to London, so I thought it'd be a great idea to go and check it out.

And, ultimately, it kind of was and kind of wasn't.

The event itself was great. I really liked the space (a sort of club-lite type space with a "dungeon" downstairs, that in this instance was primarily used as a space for photo ops rather than any real hard play; at least, as far as I could tell), I really enjoyed chatting with a lot of the people there (which, after some initial shyness, I found really easy to do) and there were some well-chosen food, games and toys to help bring out the littles in a lot of us (including some peanut butter & jelly sandwiches which, as a Brit, I had actually never tried before, yet somehow I still fell victim to their comfort-food charms).

The problem, though, is that this is still not an easy kink for Kitty and I to discuss, sometimes, and throwing her into the middle of a big ageplay event was perhaps not the greatest of ideas.

Really though, we didn't have much of a choice, it seemed. Even though she is still uncomfortable with ageplay and ABDL stuff on the whole, Kitty appreciated that this would be my one and only chance (for the forseeable future at least) to go to a big ageplay event populated by open-minded San Franciscan kinksters: a place where I could really explore my kink in a kind of space that I had never really encountered before (my own ageplay picnic that I threw a few months ago was an entirely different kind of beast). She felt that to ask me to pass up this opportunity for the sake of her comfort would seem really unfair to me, and so felt that she had to push through, go out of her comfort zone and give it a try anyway.

I, on the other hand, didn't want to come off as forcing her to go to something that she didn't want to go to, especially if she was doing it solely for my benefit. I tried to argue that, seriously, we could just not go, but in the tense atmosphere in which we were discussing this I think I wasn't able to prevent it from seeming like a disgruntled and adolescent-sounding "fine, if you don't want to go, I guess we shouldn't go then."

So yeah, horrible relationship stalemate argument thing. She didn't feel comfortable going but felt that I would ultimately hold it against her if we didn't go, I didn't want to force her into something she'd feel uncomfortable going to, but still really wanted to go myself. I tried telling myself that I would in fact be fine not going, but Kitty was right, I was probably just fooling myself by saying that, and would inevitably, immaturely bring up the fact that she "didn't let me go" in some hypothetical puerile future argument.

So in the end, we went, trying as much as possible to forget the drama that almost led to us not going. And like I said, I had a really great time. Kitty, on the other hand, felt really out of place. I would periodically check in on her and make sure everything was ok and ask if she wanted to leave - as per an agreement we had reached just before turning up - and she admitted that she wasn't exactly in the best place but was fine to stay if that's what I wanted. It was a little awkward, yes, but I knew that if I had said "well let's just go then," it would probably start a tiff.

This is, of course, one of the main reasons I have waited a little while before writing this. I thought it best to lay off writing or talking some more about AB stuff immediately after an event from which neither of us came away completely happy. The other reason is that I've been at Burning Man, which took up a couple of weeks of my time, so yeah, I feel that that was a fair excuse to not do some writing for a bit. I thought it best not to drag my laptop out into the middle of the desert.

So yeah, other observations/experiences from the event:

• I was positively surprised by the female-heavy turnout. I actually always feel more comfortable in female-dominated spaces. Even so, the men that were there were, on the whole, not the fetishist creeps that I feared, but were actually really fun to talk to. There was one major exception though: one guy who honestly talked in nothing but those horrible, clichéd lines one often uses to begin harassment-conversations on Diaperspace. Seriously, he was all "so, do you wear diapers all the time? What kind of diapers do you like to wear?" I didn't realise people actually talked like that in real life. I didn't realise it was feasible to start a real conversation that way. The worst part? He kept failing the Turing Test and when I posed him a question or try to turn the conversation a certain way he would just revert to one of his set questions like I hadn't asked him anything. Truly bizarre. Still, he was an amusing exception, not the rule, thankfully.
• I got talking with the event's hosts, which included veritable celeb of the ABDL world Penny Barber. We chatted somewhat about the event and about the scene in the UK. I must admit, after talking to Penny it sounded like there was some kind of huge scene in the UK that I am just missing out on. I'll clearly have to talk to some people when I get back, particularly the guy behind Care4Baby, apparently. Penny also had a changing table set up as part of the event and I even got changed by her after I had wet my diaper (after checking with Kitty that getting changed like that would be ok, of course). I must admit, this was the realisation of a long-time fantasy of mine. So yeah, once again, thanks, Penny!
• This kind of relates to what Charlie said, and what I was discussing some more in a previous post, but I actually felt really at home and really comfortable amongst the people there, even though many of the people there were people who had been at the previous event that had made me feel so uncomfortable I didn't even join in properly. I guess a combination of factors helped me feel more comfortable: the greater number of people made me feel less like I was intruding on a small, intimate group and more like I was at a club of like-minded people, and could step out of my relative anonymity and into talking to people whenever I felt like it. It also helped that, at this event, there were a lot more people around my age. The previous event had seemed to skew a bit older, making me feel a tad left out, but this time I felt fine.

So yeah, all in all, I had a lot of fun and would love to go to something like that again, if I'm being honest.

However, it did expose some issues that Kitty & I clearly have around this kink of mine, and we'll have to discuss those further (and have been discussing them since this event happened). I don't want to make her feel uncomfortable, but she doesn't want to feel like she's not allowing me to experience this kink of mine. It is a bit of a dilemma. Still, that's a post for another time, I think.

Plus, I imagine I'll come back and write some more about this event when I look back at this post and realise all the things that I forgot to write about this time.

and in other news

I'm going to an "Ageplay Adventure" this weekend. Wish me luck! I'm sure I'll report back afterwards with the good, the bad and the naughty.

feeling lost - making space

I keep finding myself in instances where, although I like what a particular community does/is about, I cannot find myself feeling like a part of that community at all.

I remember an instance when I was in my first year at university; I was full of the joy that comes with a new locale and an apparent new lease on life, and one of the ways my excitement was showing itself was in my manic joining of every single university society ('soc'), group or team that I could possibly join. Almost none of these ventures of mine really went anywhere: I sucked at the sports teams I tried out for (which, frankly, were some of the geekiest sports ever anyway, including fencing and "Ultimate") and quickly got bored of PhilosophySoc et al.

One group I joined was the RPGSoc, that is, the role-playing games society. My tenure with them did not last long at all. Despite having spent many a geeky Saturday in my teenage years playing Dungeons & Dragons and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG with my schoolmates, for some reason I felt so incredibly out of place amongst the members of the RPGSoc that I actually, bizarrely, had a minor freak-out during my second meeting with them and ran out on them in the middle of a session.

The truth is, I just felt really out of place there. Sometimes I will encounter something that I enjoy immensely that I would still rather do with my friends and other people who casually enjoy it. Sometimes 'legitimate communities' turn me off.

It's like I said to someone who once asked me whether I was going to go and see The Mighty Boosh live: I love The Mighty Boosh, but I would absolutely hate to be in a room full of Mighty Boosh fans (since I'm not a teenage girl, I'm sure you can imagine why).

The point of all of these anecdotes? Sometimes I feel like I just don't belong in certain 'kink' or ABDL communities, no matter how much I'm into the particular kinks involved. Sometimes I feel like Bitchy Jones going to femdom clubs and wondering why on Earth a place supposedly dedicated to meeting my desires doesn't meet them in any way at all. I feel more out of place and alone than when I thought I didn't really have a community.

What brought all of this on? A recent munch I attended. Now, I know ageplay munches can go well. Hell, I've hosted one. Still, most of the time, when it comes to ageplay get-togethers, I (and Kitty too) really do end up feeling like we don't belong.

Kitty's solution to all of this is, of course, deceptively simple: make your own community. Kitty is somewhat an adept at this. Disappointed with most kink/sex communities and club nights, she got involved in making one of her own (which has now turned into something of a cult international sensation, thanks, in a very large and real way to her own efforts).

Now, I'm not sure what's going to happen with my own munch. The second one didn't quite go to plan and now I'm (temporarily) a few thousand miles away from where I'd like to be hosting one. Still, I'd love to continue with them when I get back. I'd love to continue with this Kitty-inspired experiment in seeing if I can create a community of people that I do get on with better, people with whom I have more than just my kink in common. It should be interesting.

mess

**warning - scat**

Kitty, being a relative newbie and naif to the whole ageplay thing, will sometimes ask me questions about the ABDL community that make me realise what an odd set of things I've normalised.

Kitty, coming across an article on stuffing oatmeal into one's diaper in order to simulate having messed oneself, asked me why people into diapers don't just mess themselves.

I initially answered that, weird as it may seem, a lot of people in the ABDL scene, despite its seeming focus on nappies/diapers, are actually about as poo-phobic and weirded-out by scat-play as 'normal' people. Still, Kitty looked at me and just asked me "Why?"

Indeed. Why? Kitty is very pragmatic when it comes to kink, you know, and is pretty much open to people doing anything as long as they do it safely and sensibly. Plus, as she said in a recent podcast interview (in which both of us talked about ageplay a little bit), one sees a bit of poo anyway when one engages in anal play, so really, sometimes one has to be a grown up about it and just deal with it. Don't get too squicked by poo.

So yeah, long story short, after thinking about what she'd said for a little while, the other day, I decided to have my first real experience of messing my Bambinos. I won't go into the gory details, that's not what this post is about. What it is about is realising that I can feel free to play around with my ageplay boundaries and even get a bit gross and disgusting sometimes (in a controlled and safe environment, of course) and realising that that's ok.

One big advantage to the oatmeal, however, is that you can get the 'just messed' feeling whenever you want, not just when you actually have to go.

Another big advantage though: if your early messing experiments do go a little wrong and end up creating a small mess outside of your diaper, I'm sure you'll feel a lot better cleaning up oatmeal.

Ok, that's singularly the most squick-tastic post I'll write for a while, what's next...?