169: What if you were an Adult Baby Diaper Lover?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Today's episode marks the third and final part of our Happening series on kinks and fetishes. Our featured guest today, Maz, came to us by way of sexual folklorist Dixie De La Tour, creator and host of the incredible sex and storytelling series, Body Storytelling.

Dixie and Body Storytelling have been running live storytelling events for almost 14 years and a podcast for four of those years, and recently received a Best Erotic Podcast award from Oprah Magazine. You can find out more about Body Storytelling's podcasts and live stream shows at bodystorytelling.com. That's B-A-W-D-Y storytelling.com. Thank you for listening.

I would do everything I could that had to happen to engage with this object, with diapers that I needed to do, and then I would hate it, and then I would bury it, and it would come back, and it would happen over and over and over again. And I had to realize at a certain point that it was just not going to work. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 169.

What if you were an adult baby diaper lover?

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You know those vague memories that you have when you were very, very young? You know those memories from two years old and three years old that are a little more than the same way you remember a dream? I can remember being two, three years old and having an attraction to this object, to diapers, that I could not for that time explain.

I just knew that I liked having them. I liked wearing them. I liked being around them, that they gave me comfort and they provided some kind of solace from what I don't honestly know. But it's something I liked and something I enjoyed.

I mean, I'm just kind of the quintessential Midwestern white boy born in the middle of a city and stayed here my entire life so far. I was born in Omaha, Nebraska in the late 80s, grew up in a white middle-class family. My parents did get divorced at a very young age, but my mother remarried when I was five, and my stepfather has been more of a father than he ever needed to be. And so my family life has really been really quite stable. Yeah.

I can think of really vague memories of my mother trying to potty train me and me just being reluctant, saying, no, I don't want that. Why the hell would I want to do that? The diaper is just too awesome. Of course, as life goes, it's a skill you kind of need. And we eventually got there, probably three or so, you know, not an unreasonable age, but the urge to have them never went away.

I can think of those memories of times where the opportunity arose to get back to wearing diapers, to get back to finding them and using them and getting that sense of contentment that comes along with when I am wearing a diaper.

As I got older, I can distinctly remember a specific circumstance where my father, after my parents had gotten divorced, went through a series of relationships. And one of them in particular had a younger child who was still wearing diapers. And on one particular time, I can remember sitting in his room, seeing the stash of diapers in the corner and thinking,

Very sneakily taking one, going to the bathroom and putting it on without anybody in the apartment ever knowing. The feeling of elation, the feeling of excitement of not only having the opportunity to engage with this object, with a diaper, but the excitement of sneaking around and getting away with it was equally exciting.

It was a recognition at the time that I was different, that it wasn't something I was supposed to be doing. Why would I sneak around if it was something I was okay with doing? At an elementary school age, you are transitioning from your entire identity being defined by what your parents want it to be to understanding that you are different from the other people around you in certain ways. These different characteristics that you look around the room and say –

What makes me different from other people? And of course, what makes me the same as other people? But the one thing that certainly stood out was the fact that I had a very, very specific interest in this object that was not reflected in any way by anybody else around me.

Our society has a lot of focus on how a child should be raised and what milestones a child should reach. And potty training specifically, we make a very clear black and white distinction between what is appropriate and what is not.

To a certain extent, that is absolutely important to do. But when you're very, very young, that black and white there is more well-defined. And so being potty trained and not wearing diapers was good and wearing diapers was bad. Because I had the urges to want to wear diapers, that was bad.

I would not discuss that with my friends or my family or literally anyone except for making weird pokes and jabs at it in conversation. And it started building that sense of shame, that sense of being different. And if I were to ever expose this part of myself, that is an immediate ticket to being a social pariah.

When you're going through middle school, you're starting to discover sexuality as a more defined role in your life. And before that time, diapers were an object that I was emotionally attracted to. But as I was going through middle school, I started recognizing diapers as an object that I was not only emotionally attracted to, but this object was also sexual to me.

And there was a lot of circumstances at the time where I would engage with diapers. I would take them, use them, and find them emotionally and sexually gratifying. And that's where I really started getting hit hard by this binge purge cycle.

Of wanting everything to do with diapers all the time and wanting them to be a core part of my life. And then getting hit hard with this sense of being different, this sense of feeling shame, throwing stuff out and saying never again. This is too weird. This is too different. This is not what normal people do. Let's get rid of this. Let's bury it. Let's never speak or think about it again.

which was not healthy and was a lie. When I was starting to discover who I was sexually, I didn't

have a full perspective on who I was or who I would be. Even now, I'm 32 years old and at this age, I still don't know what I'm all about. The best thing I can tell anybody if I need to put it into a word is pansexual because it doesn't matter what you got down there. It doesn't matter what's going on with you. If I look at you and go, I think I could make this work and you're into it too, that's

then we can probably move on from there. And I was certainly playing with those ideas at that age, but this is Nebraska. And that would once again add onto that pile of being different. And I was beginning to recognize, even though I really, really, really didn't want it to be that it was always going to be a characteristic of who I was.

I would do everything I could that had to happen to engage with this object, with diapers that I needed to do. And then I would hate it and then I would bury it and it would come back and it would happen over and over and over again. And I had to realize at a certain point that it was just not going to work.

Every ABDL out there has a story about buying diapers for the first time because you get to a certain age where stealing your younger siblings diapers is just not going to work because the diapers not fit. So you've got to get your hands on something that is going to work.

And so the only hurdle left is to figure out how you're going to get those diapers into your house, past your parents, past your family without them ever fucking figuring it out. Every CVS, every Walgreens, every store has an incontinence section. To almost everybody out there, it is a section of the store that is completely inconsequential to their lives. There's no reason they need to walk down that aisle. There's no reason why they need to engage with any of those products for the most part.

Every time I would walk through the store with my parents or by myself, just being near the object would excite me. And it makes you feel shameful because being sexually aroused in public, having that emotional response in public is in itself causes a feeling of shame. But we get to the point where I am now old enough to go buy a diaper.

I remember leaving the house, going down to the CVS and, and you know, the entire walk there, you just a bundle of nerves. And, and if you think about it logically, it doesn't make sense. It's not an illegal object. I'm not going to get in trouble for buying this thing. And why would anybody care? It's a product that they want to sell because the business wants to make money. But, you know, thinking in your mind on your walk there about grossing,

Grabbing the pack of diapers, walking up to the cashier, putting it down in front of them and them immediately making fun of you for buying this and just the tragic humiliation that goes along with that. And it feels like you're climbing this emotional Mount Everest.

It's not a great climax to the story. You walk in, you pick up the first bag of Depends, which are terrible, by the way, walk up, put them down, they scan them, say they're this much money, you pay them the money, you walk out.

But it was such a sigh of relief to have at least leapt over that hurdle. It gave me this great sense of elation that I have walked through the fire of a potentially humiliating situation. And now I'm a step closer to making a dream come true. This is who you are. And this is what you want. And now you have to go prove it. There were certainly opportunities to expand how I interacted with diapers in my life.

I would certainly wear diapers in private, but in what circumstances can you wear diapers? I can remember going out on walks or going out in public places. Now, I'm not the kind of person and never have been that wants to unwillingly make other people engage in my sexuality. They don't want to know this part of me, and more appropriately, I don't want them to know it.

So I'm not going to put myself in a situation where they have to know. But everybody likes a little secret. Everybody likes to have something that they can hide. And I would, therefore, wear diapers in public places, even to school. The ability to involve diapers in more activities of my everyday life certainly helped to normalize it.

Not necessarily something that I could tell anybody else about. The shame was there, but I was beginning to recognize that it's just part of who I am. At that time in my life, I'm searching for some kind of acceptance, searching for some kind of space for me to fit in. There's other people like me. I've been on the internet. I've been in these spaces. There's other people with the same interests as I have.

The first person that I really engaged in an intimate relationship with, we were actually in the same homeroom class in high school. And it honestly did not take long for me to expose that diapers were an aspect of my life.

I can remember doing it in the most awkward fashion possible. And her response was not scream and run for the hills. So good enough to a 17 year old's mind, probably more because she didn't really know how to take it. She didn't really know how to, to, to comprehend the situation. But in the longterm, I,

I came to realize that she suffered from this condition that a lot of people suffer from, and it's called being vanilla. And it's unfortunately terminal, and it doesn't mesh well with people who are not vanilla.

But I wanted her so very much to be excited about diapers, to be excited about age play. And it was never going to happen. And the relationship obviously would eventually peter out and just not work.

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You would not be wrong in assuming that smack dab in the middle of the Midwest in Nebraska, that the opportunities to express alternative sexual interests are difficult to come by.

And I would go on internet crusades trying to figure out these opportunities. And somehow, somewhere down deep in the depths of the internet, I found a Yahoo group in the Omaha area. And they were organizing activities and meeting with each other. And that was like, wow, that's not that far away from where I live. I can just go there.

I would eventually go to a munch and the trepidation that you feel walking into a situation like that, trying to think, who are these people? What are they going to be like? But it did not take long to figure out that kinky people are in fact human.

Which is something that I always try to express to people. That you can be in the middle of the kinkiest play party and this person on your right has a collar on and this person on your left is, you know, dressed to the nines in all their leather and you're sitting there talking about taxes. Because humans are humans.

And going to Munch's quickly educated me on the subject that this was a place where I could feel just fine about having alternative interests and be able to talk openly about it with other people.

I was about 22 or 23 when I really started engaging with the kink community. And I went to a few munches, met with the same people several times, and eventually I would go to a play party. That was really an eye-opening experience.

I was at that first play party quickly pulled aside by the sadist I had met at this munch. And she said, do you want to try flogging? And, you know, got tied to the cross and spent about 45 minutes being flogged. And I spent the rest of the evening in this high place.

They said to me later at breakfast after the play party that my pupils were still blown out from riding that high of that experience. And it really made it known to me that, okay, we're in an okay space to learn more about what I want and who I am.

I had been going to munches. I had been going to play parties. I had met plenty of folks in the community, but I never really came across anybody with specific interests that meshed well with mine until I was on FetLife one wonderful evening back in 2012.

And on my feed comes up a event. And that event is a group called Lynn or Littles in Iowa and Nebraska. Littles, of course, being a general term for age players who like to play younger than their own age. And, you know, the description, of course, was for age players or ABDLs.

ABDL is an initialism that stands for adult baby diaper lover. ABDL is two different things. The AB part, adult baby, which is about emotional regression. It is about, you know, acting the part of an age that is different from your own. And in this case, being much younger.

The DL part of ABDL is a fetish. It's a paraphilia. It's an attraction to an object. But the things relate so closely that they're very often lumped in with each other. And I would describe myself more as a fetishist, more as a paraphiliac than I am into age regression. But I certainly do both because they both have their benefits and they're both fun.

Littles are really that younger age play. And when people engage with age play, they can be whatever age they want. And there's people that are bigs and bigs are the people who play the adult role relative to the littles. So this is an event that I look back on incredibly fondly.

I walk in there and there was about 10 people there that evening, some of them holding stuffed animals. And there was a couple there. The gentleman was was dressed up in his cardigan with his dad glasses on, full sleeve flannel shirt. And there was a woman sitting across from him who was wearing one of those 1950s styles floral dresses with the dress cut way too low.

They had specifically come there to be the mom and dad of the group for all of these adults acting as children. I immediately sat down and spoke with Manji and we really had a fantastic opportunity to hit it off.

We immediately started talking about diapers and I was wearing one at the time and come to find out, so were they. And I knew from that moment that not only was I comfortable in that setting and I knew I was going to be, but it was more than just a matter of comfort. It was a matter of incredible personal satisfaction and it was a matter of finding a person. And that's huge.

I don't want to make myself seem like a single-faceted person, but I think it's important to recognize for anybody that there are certain parts of your life that make up who you are and certain parts of your life that need to be aspects of your relationships when you build them and when you ignore those things.

and you try and hide them and your partners are unwilling to engage in that with you, then it closes a lot of doors in terms of your own satisfaction. And it doesn't help you build an open and honest relationship with people.

Manji having come up in the kink scene under more old guard rules, which is this very regimented idea about how to build a kink relationship, including sitting down and fully negotiating a written contract about what the expectations were. We did that.

We'd eventually sit down at a village inn and work out a contract of our relationship, what the expectations were and what we wanted and what we wanted to do. One of the things that was always a characteristic of Manji and I's relationship was that ABDL was going to be part of it and something that we would always engage in. And that has rung true for 10 years. Yeah.

A, B, D, L as a core aspect of my life is something that I think about a lot in terms of what it is, what it means to me, what it means as it fits into the wider culture. And it's important to understand that A, B and D, L are separate ideas that relate heavily to each other.

I would describe myself as a diaper lover primarily who engages in adult baby activities in terms of the regression. Manji would describe themselves pretty much the same way.

And there's certainly other people in our community that would call themselves age players. So it fits into that category. And they're the kind of people that have nothing to do with diapers. They think the idea is off-putting or gross. And I get that. But they still engage with our community. And, you know, they love doing the things that are the characteristics of childhood. Doing the things that we like to do but discourage as adults because we think it's childish and rude.

We acknowledge that, you know, that's silly. When you play with the concept of age, you open up territory for a lot of questions about assault. And it needs to be understood at its core that this is consenting adults who have the capacity to consent, choosing to perform an activity that can be considered taboo.

There's a lot of hoops there, but there's a lot of hoops that a lot of kinky people either do or should go through in order to make sure that you're not crossing those boundaries into being unethical or actually victimizing somebody.

It is certainly a territory for big emotional responses. And that is what makes it exciting. But you're taking all the important steps to make sure that the dangers and the risks are mitigated and reduced as much as possible.

When it comes to kink, we say, you know, there's that safe, sane and consensual. We actually use a model called PRIC, which is a personal responsibility informed consensual kink, which is to say that everybody involved is responsible for the risk profile and everybody is responsible for communicating openly about your needs, either in the moment or before or after, including negotiation, doing the thing and then aftercare.

And that's what is certainly needed when playing with something as big as age play. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

There's lots of different ways that I have engaged with ABDL as part of my sex life.

It is a rare thing for me to have what most people would consider heteronormative sex.

Being involved with or aroused by or including this object, this diaper in my sex life is what my sex life is about. So if you're thinking missionary style, P&V or P&A or whatever kind of sex you're thinking, it doesn't usually play a role in my everyday sex life.

For me, being around diapers, the tactility of them, the sound that they make when they crinkle is arousing. We have certainly done scenes where I am the big and someone else is the little. I usually take the adult role. I usually like to be the caretaker for other people. I don't tend to regress in terms of the way that I act and

And the way that I portray myself in a kink scene, I like to be the adult in that relationship, which is great because it gives me the perspective of being an emotional provider, of showing love and affection for another person and taking care of someone else's needs.

As an adult for someone who is in a youthful state and the way that that plays out with my relationship with Manji Manji does like to be in a regressed state and when we do that.

But Manji could be more considered the dominant role, even though they are the youthful person. Whereas me as the adult is more of the submissive role because I am the doting caregiver position, the kind of demanding child and the parent who can't help but fulfill every need. And I love that.

We've also certainly done scenes where age regression is not really a factor. The age play factor is not there, but diapers are certainly part of the scene.

And taking away someone's ability to use the toilet is humiliating for somebody. And you are seizing control from somebody just like you would with bondage, where you are tying someone up and they're no longer able to use their limbs. In this case, you are restricting their ability to use the bathroom, which is both restrictive and humiliating. And that can certainly be involved in scenes.

You know, using degradation for sexual arousal is also certainly something that we play on often. And that is, you know, you absolutely haven't demonstrated a capability of using the bathroom like you should at somebody your age. So now we're going to just go ahead and keep you in diapers forever because you haven't proven that you're worthy of using the toilet.

That's really fun, too. For some people, diapers or regressing or whatever is sexual. That would be me. And for others, it's not. It's simply enjoying a state. And some people will wear diapers as a sexual fetish and have nothing to do with using them for peeing in or pooping in or whatever. They just like wearing them because it it creates an emotional response in them.

For us, sex is a wildly different definition. It's not about genitals coming in contact with other genitals. It's about creating sexual arousal in each other. One of my favorite things, one of my favorite ways to have sex is honestly to wear a diaper and use a strap on. So I use a strap on and fuck someone else. And that combines my interest in diapers with my interest in chastity, where I don't get an orgasm.

There's this thing in ABDL called binge purge. And I would say that probably relates to a lot of other kinks where you go through this cycle of really, really, really wanting to do the thing and having to do the thing and needing to do the thing. For me, that's wearing diapers. And then you will kind of fall off that train and it doesn't excite you anymore. And you really want nothing to do with it. And then you'll come back around the circle again and definitely want to do it again. Right now,

I would say I'm binging. I am exercising my interest in diapers extensively and more than I normally would. And there will eventually come a time where I'm just not as interested in it anymore and will not. Right now, for about five weeks in a row, I have been wearing diapers 24-7.

I do use the diaper for what it's intended for. As we're sitting here right now, the last five weeks I have been diapered 24-7. I have not used the toilet at all, but I feel like it misses the point a little bit because people who are interested in urine, that's a completely separate fetish. That's urolagnia. People who are interested in feces, that's a completely separate fetish. That's coprophilia.

The object in this case is the diaper itself and the emotions that it creates in the person. So using the diaper creates the emotions of helplessness. It is humiliating. Whatever the person feels from it is not in relation to the fluids. It's in relation to the object itself, the diaper.

I don't necessarily pay much attention to or put much thought into the idea of the origin of this. And people seem to be really stuck on, you know, well, how did it start? Who cares? You know, it's how I am.

There's this idea that because ABDL is so related to childhood that it needs to have some kind of basis in childhood trauma to make it happen. And I don't really see it that way.

My parents did divorce when I was very, very young, less than a year old. And the divorce itself was rather acrimonious. But the real attraction is to the emotions that it elicits in me. And that is certainly a sense of comfort. And it's entirely possible that it could have in some way given me those emotions in a time when I really needed them, such as when my parents were at each other's throats.

So was there potential for childhood trauma that could have led to who I am? Maybe, but you know, I just think that sometimes wires kind of get crossed and you get attracted to certain things and it's just part of my being and coming to a point as an adult and accepting that is also coming to terms with the mysteries that will never be solved. So not deluding myself with the idea that I need to explain this, but

is important to me. And so I don't. So Manji and I ended up moving in together. And right after moving in, it seemed like a really opportune moment to break my leg in three places. And it ended up with a three-day stay in the hospital and five screws in my leg. And they were there all of those days in the hospital, the entire time.

It was a long several months after that where I could not even put weight on my leg and I relied on Mandy to do things for me. And the question was never returned, why do I have to do this? It was a simple choice. I love a person. I'm going to do it for them. That's where it really shined. And that's when we got engaged.

We both agreed that marriage should not be a massive step forward in anybody's relationship. Marriage should be an acknowledgement of something that already exists. The day did eventually come and we had built the entire ceremony ourselves. And to both of us, from the very beginning of getting engaged to the moment that we were married, we were going to be married in diapers.

And we were. And only certain people in that crowd were any the wiser. But we did it because it was important to us. That will strike me as so immensely satisfying that I will never forget it.

There's always that little thing when you're engaging in public diaper play where, you know, I know something you don't know. I am wearing a diaper and you don't know it. There is something about my life that I can control that you don't know about.

That was certainly an aspect of it. But to know that the person standing across from you, the person that you are dedicating yourself to, you are vowing your love to, helps deepen the quality of what you are doing and is incredible.

Four months later, we buy a house and we start building a relationship with this couple. And suddenly I find myself in a poly relationship with four people, including myself. So me and three others. And that is something that was understood from the beginning of my relationship with Manji from both sides is that it is impossible for one person to satisfy another completely. We built this relationship with this other couple.

And our relationship with one of them had ended. But we've continued the relationship with the other, Olivia. And Olivia has now been in a relationship with us for over four years and is now currently planning on moving in with us. And we are taking classes to be foster parents, which the state of Nebraska certainly had some interesting questions and still does about what the hell that means. But

All of us have come together to build a kink family, and we use our connections in the kink community that we are heavily engaged with to bring educational opportunities to the kink community.

We see questions all the time. How do I find other people who are like me? How do I find a mommy or a daddy? Or how do I find someone who will do this thing for me? And we tell people continuously over and over and over again, other people are not your kink dispensers. You have to build long lasting human holistic relationships with them. You have to go out into the world and not hide behind your computer and find people

people and learn that they are humans being different, being weird, living life with shame and engaging with that idea on a daily basis. Every single day of my life has helped me come to understand the motivations of other people. And that's a motivation for me to be an educator, to help other people

find acceptance with who they are by learning to negotiate, learning to communicate, learning to actually do things that they want to do with other people that want to do them.

I have found a certain level of happiness. It does not mean that I have eliminated all the challenges that it comes with being different, but it does mean that I think I have a tool set to help other people. And there's just a lot of exciting opportunities that we are all engaging in that raise the bar of what it means to be in a relationship and raise the bar of what it means to be human.

Today's episode featured Maz of House St. James. Maz is a regular volunteer educator and leader in the kink community in Omaha, Nebraska. He and his kink family, House St. James, have run the sex-positive adult education organization Omaha Dinner and Demos for the last three years. If you'd like more information about Maz, House St. James, or Omaha Dinner and Demos, you

You can find them all on FetLife at house underscore st underscore james. Maz came to us by way of sexual folklorist Dixie DeLaTour, creator and host of the incredible sex and storytelling series, Body Storytelling. That's body spelled B-A-W-D-Y. You can find out more about Dixie and the Body Storytelling podcast and live stream shows at bodystorytelling.com. ♪

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the Wondery app, or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen ad-free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our shows for free.

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