CSI Episode

Well, the CBS crime drama "CSI" (the original one, not the spinoffs) did an episode which featured an adult baby. It aired Thursday night. The AB/DL groups were all talking about this episode, "King Baby," before it aired, and one person even included a preliminary plot summary (not full of spoilers; it had the sort of plot detail you might find in TV Guide -- maybe that's where they got it; I don't know).

Anyway, without spoiling the episode for those in other countries who will be seeing it eventually, I think it was pretty well done, and it didn't paint all adult babies with the same freaky brush. There was an earlier episode that dealt with furries, but it painted the entire furry community as fetishists who dress up in costumes and have sex in them. This episode was almost the opposite: it didn't deal with any sort of adult baby community at all. The CSI team investigated the death of a wealthy casino owner (the show takes place in Las Vegas, for those who don't watch it) who, it turned out, had a secret adult baby life. He was also cruel and manipulative and had a lot of enemies, but none of his enemies had discovered this particular secret.

There was an adult baby store that the team visited; there were some uncomfortable laughs as the lady behind the counter mistook the two investigators for a daddy and his adult baby boy, but once she learned they were investigating a crime she assumed they were from Vice and went on the defensive, assuring them that she was doing nothing illegal. Not the first time that's happened on CSI. But anyway, the store had other customers in the background, though we never focused on any of them or heard them speak. The store was called "Forever a Baby," and as it turns out there's a real Nevada store called "Forever Baby," but they only sell goods for real babies, not adult babies.

In the end, I think, the verdict is that this show was "not that bad," by which I mean yes, it was bad. There were cries of "freak" from the trained investigators when they found out the victim had worn diapers and enjoyed enemas and drinking from baby bottles. One would think that they've seen far weirder things, but of course the writers are writing for an audience who (they think) hasn't seen this before. They've investigated furries, they've investigated dominatrixes, and they must have investigated closet crossdressers (though I can't remember an episode like that, but then I haven't seen every episode). Guys with weird sexual secrets would have to be no big deal to people like the CSI team; you'd think they would have seen it all.

In addition, the episode did not portray the victim as part of any kind of adult baby community. I don't see why this guy would have been in contact with anybody else; with the kind of life he led he wouldn't have wanted anybody else to know about this part of his life, even others who shared the same fantasies. And I'm not sure we as adult babies would want this horrible man to be part of our community. But the fact remains that this episode didn't show any examples of adult babies other than this cruel, manipulative blackmailer (there were the background people at Forever a Baby, but they were more scenery than characters; the camera never focused on them, and we never heard them speak -- and the proprietress of the store was apparently a professional mommy; she was our only hint of what any other adult babies were like, and she only told us about them; we never saw them). The image of adult babies presented by this show was that they are isolated freaks.

The lady at the store said a few other things: infantilism is "completely nonsexual," apparently, and people become adult babies because "some men never really love anybody but their mothers," and some never had a mother figure who loved them. No other reasons were presented; the writers obviously didn't bother to talk to many (if any) real adult babies. They probably asked a few psychiatrists or read a few case reports (and the only people who end up in the medical records are people who come in with problems, not people who are healthy). The writers clearly took it from there, bolstering the usual TV fantasy world in which everybody not in the mainstream is sick. As it turned out, the victim's mother had been a heartless disciplinarian who never even let her son breastfeed because, following her own mother's tradition, she thought boys should be raised to be tough, so they could learn to survive in a harsh world. So the "reality" of the show's millieu is consistent with itself -- but it's not reality. In reality, people, both male and female, come to enjoy adult baby and diaper play for many reasons, possibly too many to list, and many things are meant by the phrase "adult baby."

The word "infantilism" was used only once during the entire episode, near the end. I thought that was a nice touch: it shows style to use the name of the topic only once. The victim's wife used the word, and she was clearly embittered by her husband and his peculiarities. She had unkind things to say about her husband and what he was into, but they were about her husband.

In the end Grissom had his usual words of understanding and wisdom. If you had all the money you could ever want and could go anywhere you want, he asked, where would you go? Some would wish for a nice tropical vacation, but what if you could go to Fiji anytime you felt like it? This man took vacations all the way back to his childhood. Not the choice others would have made, perhaps, but in a sense understandable. So in the end, the episode wasn't that bad. It didn't exactly do us a service, but it could have been so much worse.