The Infantile Identity
Lee on Nov 01 2008 at 9:15 pm | Filed under: Culture
I tend to take a liberal attitude toward alternative lifestyles generally. Apart from the moral requirement to protect personal freedom, I like to think they do more to enliven the human experience for spectators, than they do to exert the kind of apocalyptic moral corrosion envisioned by the likes of Robert Bork, et al. But there are occasions I must confess, when the alternatives become so silly that even I must shake my head in dismay at the state of things. It happens that the practice of paraphilic infantilism tests my limits for liberal ataraxy quite well.
Thus meet Heidilynn, a fifty year old AB (adult baby) in California, who has intentionally undone his toilet training through a process of hypnosis. Heidilynn lives his life almost entirely as a female infant you see. But after having spent thousands of dollars on adult-sized high chairs, frilly onesies, and related paraphernalia, a moment of lucidity finally struck him: “This is ridiculous.”
In this moment Heidilynn sought help from a mental health professional at Vanderbilt Hospital, but was advised that he ought to accept his infantilism as a lifestyle and merely integrate it into his day as best he could. According to this therapist, once acquired, it is apparently impossible to overcome the desire to wear a bib and diapers. Heidilynnn maintains it was the best advice he ever received –which makes one wonder at what else people have been recommending for him– and the window of recognition closed. Now he spends his days laying in a playpen, gurgling, urinating on himself and sucking on a rubber nipple.
That is, when he’s not venturing out to pride parades to increase awareness of the legitimacy of the lifestyle. Trouble on the horizon there, so get your snickering in before it’s a hate crime. Yet perhaps a street demonstration for the recognition of intentional incontinence as socially legitimate, is an entirely fitting metaphor for identity politics itself.
Or, perhaps I should welcome another intermediate stage toward the permissive society. With San Francisco about to legalize prostitution –something evidently too libertine even for Gavin Newsom– at some point we will run out of new corridors for inclusion, and may have to confront assailants at the dread barriers for incest, pedophilia and bestialism. The faith has always been that those barriers will remain intact, given that in each case there is an identifiable (or at least assignable) victim. The common thread in the legitimation of lifestyle taboos has been their voluntary nature, and infantilism is no exception (although there is a coercive strain of it, where ABs secretly wish to be forced into rubber pants). My worry about that though, to the extent that I have one, is that there is a momentum to the cause of social legitimation which undoes the identification of victims.
It wasn’t all that long ago that it was conventional to perceive the prostitute as a distinct victim for instance. Something that has been rather easily done away with as prostitutes demand liberalization of their trade. At least we presume it is they demanding it. Well, perhaps you see what I mean with that.
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yeah, there’s extremes to everything. Heidi Lynn is to infantilism as Clay Aiken is to homosexuality. anyway you size it, as long as you contribute to society in some way, what you do behind closed doors shouldn’t make you any more or less of a person. we’d all be surprised at what we could find if we tapped into our ‘fancies’ with a little less predjudice. hell i know i was. this is no ‘pre-apocalyptic’ sign or whatever. that’s global warming. go ahead and shake your head in dismay. this is just society, doing what society does best: being human. bub byes, idiot.
-Baby Gerardito