Kinky people have better mental health than everyone else

I find this from an article posted on io9.com

(DSM5) does not list BDSM as a disorder, and instead refers to the practice as a paraphilia, or unusual sexual fixation.

Either way, studies have failed to link BDSM and other kinks with psychological problems, so some psychiatrists see the manual's inclusion of the practices as a bit stigmatizing, according to LiveScience.

 Which refers to an article on livescience.com

The new results reveal that on a basic level, BDSM practitioners don't appear to be more troubled than the general population. They were more extroverted, more open to new experiences and more conscientious than vanilla participants; they were also less neurotic, a personality trait marked by anxiety. BDSM aficionados also scored lower than the general public on rejection sensitivity, a measure of how paranoid people are about others disliking them.

 The original study was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine and you can read the abstract for free online. You have to be a member to read the actual article, but if you live near a university you might be able to find the article in a science library.

Now this study isn't on ABDLs specifically, and I am skeptical of online questionnaires, but it does seem interesting. It's also important to point out that there are no studies supporting the idea that Adult Babies specifically, or kinky people in general, have a higher rate of mental illness, let alone that we are somehow all insane. Yet it is quite easy to find people that insist that we are all insane with nothing more to back that claim up then their say so.

Six Things You Should Never Do On Social Media

The context of running a business is much different from Adult Baby advocacy, but I think the advice given in this article is good advice for anyone on the internet. I recommend everyone read the whole article. It is actually very entertaining, but the advice is worth gold.

Here are the bullet points:

1. Don’t Reply To Everyone
2. Don’t Respond to Trolls
3. Don’t React Right Away
4. Reddit is Not for the Weak
5. Don’t Insult People
6. Learn When To Walk Away
7. Don’t lie     

Don't rush to judgement or attack people

(I think I had a better title for what I am going to write here, but it will due for now.)

Besides the comments from Haters, quite often comments from ABDLs themselves will bother me. The Tyra interview is a good example. Now, I don't know the woman who went on the Tyra show. Maybe she did actually have a bad experience, but that's not the way I see it. I think it was more or less an impartial interview. Some people even get upset that Tyra is asking her questions. It is an interview people, of course the host is going to ask her questions. To a certain extent I can understand how people can get a bad impression from Tyra. She has an imposing manner and body language. But anyone who has watched a significant amount of Tyra's shows would know that Tyra is like that all the time. Some people are also put off by the opening statement "How freaky are we" and complain that Tyra is calling Adult Babies freaks. But let us examine that phrase again. "How freaky are we." The phrase is being used inclusively not exclusively. "How freaky are we" includes everyone. She is saying everyone is freaky in their own way and that's not a bad thing.

My next example is from a woman who made a youtube reaction video after seeing Riley's My Strange Addiction episode. In this case she actually was making an anti-AB rant when she made this video. However, she had a change of heart. That's right, after making the video she had time to think about the situation and she realized that she had been wrong and was not only brave enough to admit it, but she was brave enough to leave the video up. This is a good thing. It shows that people can change their mind on this subject and I hold her in high praise for doing so.

If you read the description to the video she explains this, but she still gets many very negative comments from ABDLs and their supporters. I would advise people avoid being negative when posting comments to youtube in general. I can't tell you what to do but I have explained why in this blog before. You are not going to win anyone over to tolerance by being negative. Anyone who is impressed by negativity is a lost cause in the first place. If someone is going to be persuaded to live and let live they will be persuaded by logic and reason. That goes double if you are going to go in writing comments half-cocked without reading the video's description, to say nothing about actually watching the whole video and reading other comments first. If you cannot bother to understand the full context of the video, and at least the recent history of what people have already written, you should not be posting comments to that video.

Before I move on to my next example I would like to point out a very positive reaction video a woman made after watching The 15 Stone Babies. I don't have much to say about it. Just watch it. It is a great video and it shows that not everyone is going to have a bad first impression of ABDLs.

Speaking of The 15 Stone Babies, there was a fairly short video posted to youtube that has since been deleted that looked like it contained unused footage from that documentary. There was a comment that claimed to be one of the couple in the video that said they were not told that that particular video was going to be posted. There was a reaction video from a popular youtube channel I'm not going to bother linking to because neither the video itself, nor most of the comments it gets, has anything intelligent enough to make it worth responding to.

There was another reaction video that seemed to be plagiarizing the first reaction video, but there was also yet another reaction video that was more or less neutral. I can see a lot of Adult Babies jumping to the conclusion that he is being negative towards us. His first impression is WTF, but really, if someone has never heard of Adult Babies before, it is understandable for a person to be thrown off guard. I posted a comment addressing some of the questions he posed in his video and he replied back thanking me with a live and let live attitude towards ABDLs. I call that a win.

If, on the other hand, some ABDL had posted comments attacking him I could see that going the other way around. That's why I ask if you are going to interact with vanillas on youtube or elsewhere that you try to be positive about it and not attack people. Try to see the good in people and give them the benefit of the doubt that they might be persuaded by logic and reason. 

Regarding adult babies and littles who say this isn't roleplaying.

I responded to someone who brought this up. I don't think they were claiming it themselves, but it is something that when I hear people say it I really don't understand what they are saying. My guess is it is just a different understanding of language. Some might not consider it "politically correct" for me to question this, but I'm not telling people what to do with their lives or pretend that I know more about other people's lives than they do themselves. I simply think it is an issue of language and want to write my opinion on this. Here is what I wrote on youtube.

Well, I know some people say it isn't roleplaying or a  role but I don't really understand what they mean by that. In psychology it is understood that people, everyone, has different roles that they present throughout the day. There is the role you present when you are at work, another when you are with your friends, or with your family etc. etc. I think this is just one more role that we play in our lives, just one that is very special to us.

Now, all these roles that we present in our day to day lives may be distinct, but they are a projection of our personality, something that is unique to each of us. A role is the part of us that we present at each moment of the day. In this sense we are always playing a role. When we are "roleplaying" we are just making a more conscious effort to present a specific or idealized role.

As I write that I think I realize why people might have a problem with the words role and roleplaying. I guess many people associate these words with acting or pretending to be something you're not. One thing I would say to that is that words can have more than one meaning. The other is that to a certain extent we ARE pretending to be something that we are not. The fact is that we are adults first, and being adult babies (or adult littles) is just one of many parts of our lives. Remember the saying that you can't be an adult baby without first being an adult.

ABs who live as babies 24/7 are extremely rare. ABs who wear diapers (and are not incontinent) are fairly rare but people actually live it as an actual lifestyle are almost nonexistent. Just about all of us have the regular, normal, day to day issues of adult life as everyone else in the world. We go to work, we pay our bills, take care of our adult responsibilities as well as adult hobbies and outside interests. Being an adult baby is only a part of our lives, even if it is our very favorite part, and part of having a well balanced life. If you are going to claim otherwise then that implies the alternative, that your life is out of balance. I think we all know that this is not true in most cases.

Look I understand that sometimes it feels more you are a little kid that is pretending to be an adult than the other way around. The fact is that most of us are quite capable of being responsible adults when we need to be or when we want to be. That is the difference between Adult Babies and people with arrested development. Language can be confusing when words have more than one meaning. I don't want to insult anyone, tell them what to do or who they really are. I am just suggesting that you be careful with the words you use and their multiple meanings, especially when interacting with vanillas who may be critical of us.

Dan Savage on Fetishes and Kink etc. in general

If you don't read Savage Love you might want to give it a try. At the very least I find it entertaining, and it is interesting reading about all the strange fantasies some people have. There are a lot of things he has to say about other fetishes etc. that would be of interest to Adult Babies. I thought I would create an entry for these quotes, and I will update when I come across more.



May 22, 2013

You love your new wife, she loves you, you're both GGG—it all sounds so good, so functional, especially compared to your nightmarish first marriage. Congrats. But you held your two biggest kinks back from the new woman in your life, PUNT, and now you're sweating the reveal because the stakes are so high. This is precisely why I urge people to lay those kink cards on the table early. The longer you wait, the more emotionally invested you become in the relationship, the higher the stakes. Because what if your kinks aren't just things your second wife isn't interested in exploring, PUNT, but attraction-killers?

...

Pro tip: Nervous kinksters can screw up indirect here-are-two-things-some-people-do conversations by telegraphing disgust. Someone who's into rubber says, "Isn't it weird how some people get off on wearing rubber clothes and gas masks?" The non-kinky partner picks up on the word "weird" and responds with, "Yeah, that rubber stuff is fucked up." If you set a negative tone, your wife is likely to pick up on that. So keep your reactions—at the drag club, during the porn—as neutral as possible.

May 15, 2013

Here's what you need to tell your boyfriend: "Vaginal intercourse without consent is rape, but vaginal intercourse with consent is sex. You can wrap your head around that, right? So you should be able to wrap your head around this: Spanking someone without consent is assault, but spanking someone with consent is sexy. And you're going to spank me right now, with my consent, and it's going to be hot."

April 24, 2013

No problem here. I'm a straight 36-year-old guy. My wife has always been great about my kinks—some femdom role play, OTK spankings, D/s three-ways—so when she announced at age 34 that she had a kink of her own, I regarded it as my mission to make it happen. We just got back from a trip to see a safe and trustworthy friend in Los Angeles who "paid" me to have sex with my wife. When it was over, she kept saying how much she loved me for being the person who made her paid-for-sex fantasy come true. People who stand in the way of their partner's fantasies don't realize what they're depriving themselves of—so much love and gratitude!

Some people are turned on by completely random shit, LHTB, and no one quite knows why. Probably something to do with our big brains—just think of all those billions of nerve endings, all those synapses making connections, all those formative childhood experiences getting all synapsed up and becoming adult erotic obsessions. Think of all that, and then count your lucky stars that studying turns you on. It could've been worse.

 April 17, 2013

 She's going to have to give you more information, AARP, and you're going to have to let go of the notion that being the Dom means not asking questions. A dominant's first job—before a role-play scene begins, before anyone gets tied up—is to ask questions and find out what his submissive wants to experience. The trick is to give her what she wants while building in small surprises and gradually, over time, pushing into new territories together.

 April 3, 2013

Normal? No, most men don't fantasize about their wives sprouting penises, CBH, so your fantasy isn't normative. But no one's sexual fantasy is. Fantasies are subjective and personal. Some are more common than others—a desire to be spanked, for instance—but even the most common sexual fantasies appeal only to small subsets of people.

March 27, 2013

Give yourself permission to do it "wrong," ANT. I don't mean "wrong" in the accidentally-injure-or-kill-the-boyfriend sense of doing BDSM wrong. I mean "wrong" in the go-your-own-way sense. You'll be less nervous about topping if you relax and give yourself permission to be yourself, i.e., nervous and inexperienced, a little awkward in your new role. Remember: You don't have to be the perfect snarling dominatrix the very first time you pick up a crop. You don't have to be a snarling dominatrix ever, ANT, if that's not who you want to be. Check out the wonderful Beyond the Valley of the FemDoms—beyondthevalleyofthefemdoms.tumblr.com—for some insight on being your own dominant woman, not some FemDom porn cliché. Good luck!

January 2, 2013

I have been treated badly in several past relationships. I am now in a great one, but I have a hard time believing/trusting that nothing bad will happen. How can I get over this dread?

Something bad is going to happen—believe it. Hopefully the bad that happens won't be as bad as the bad you experienced in the past relationships—no physical or emotional violence, no unforgivable betrayals, nothing that requires you to end this relationship—but your new partner will behave badly toward you at some point. And you will behave badly toward your new partner. There's some bad even in the best relationships. You'll experience less dread if you can accept that.

 December 26, 2012

When you're feeling like the third wheel, SUB, it's because you're probably functioning as the third wheel. While first and second wheels can make an effort to prevent thirds from feeling like the thirds they are, thirds that make a decision to roll elsewhere generally wind up feeling better.

 

Putting Away Childish Things

I noticed on a video that someone wrote "God tells me to put away childish things." This is something that I have seen before. I wrote a new comment rather than a reply because her comment is over a month old.

When someone makes a religious argument I generally feel it is a red herring to argue about religion. I live in the United States where our constitution explicitly protects religious freedom. You are free to believe whatever you want to believe but I am under no obligations to agree with you or follow your religion. For instance, if I am not a Muslim I do not have to follow their religious rules. That is not saying it is bad to be Muslim, it is just not my religion if I am not a Muslim.

This particular argument, however, brings up the fact that even within specific religions there are multiple interpretations of that religion. I also find it funny when people think the problem with Adult Babies is that they are not Christian, when the fact is the majority of Adult Babies in the United States ARE Christians, and there are multiple forums just for Christian Adult Babies.

As I am anonymous I am not going to disclose my beliefs here. I think the following quote from CS Lewis is a very good one. I have seen it paraphrased many times but the full quote is even better, and I think it can be appreciated by Adult Babies of any religious persuasion.

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.

Are fetishes sexual?

Here is something I just wrote in a youtube video. I like the way it came out. I really need to expand it though. It is tough to express a complex and still coherent thought in 500 characters.

Hard data is difficult to come by, but what does exists suggests that most fetishes develop before puberty. A fetish is just something weird that makes you happy. It is not that the fetish object is "sexy" but that being happy increases your libido. For vanillas as well as kinky folks, this might include dancing or walking on the beach or eating foods they enjoy.

When a person grows older they might or might not incorporate sexual activities into their fetish.