Lets get analytical

It's a good idea to rise above the compulsive-obsessive nature of p.i. and treat it analytically, this in turn changes its hold on the personality. I often wonder, not in condemnation but amazed curiosity, at my own behaviours and preferences. The overriding question is, Why?

Bm has made has made a fine start with linking the p.i. impulse to deep archetypes of humiliation and domination with interesting historical examples. With respect to the psychs, I believe it is impossible to generalise the aetiology of p.i. beyond the wearing and use of ds, which comes in as varied forms as people themselves, and all the things that can possibly happen to them. I will though make some guarded comments about certain types based on observations and information derived almost entirely from the Internet.

1. Intrinsic pleasure of ds.

Wetting a d is a vastly underrated pleasure: it's being naughty and involves unusual tactile stimulation in the genital area. Despite a strong social taboo it is not dangerous or illegal, and a liberal-minded person can appreciate the pleasure after an initial period of shyness. There are many examples (e.g., P) of the normophile discovering this pleasure and enjoying it at face value with no associated childhood complex. In P's case, this was initially to satisfy a partner before coming to enjoy it in its own right.

2. Impulse for p.i. can come at any age.

There may be a connection between early toilet training and p.i., but this is not true for most, although events before and around puberty appear to dominate. In the generalised case these important events (Tommy's 'triggers') which lead to p.i. can happen at any age, from childhood and through adolescence to adulthood (see 1.)

3. Incontinence and p.i.

Many incontinent people are drawn to p.i. mainly through 1., as a means of living with the need to wear ds, and a few even play the whole "dependence" game to babyhood. They interface with psychosexual p.i. individuals on the Internet, who at the very least look positively on them wearing ds (no stigma) and at best can offer them friendship, support, and practical information (e.g. about buying ds). I have come across several accounts of continuous d wearing leading to practical incontinence (can the doctors check this one), so this constitutes a grey area of "d dependency" between incontinence and p.i.

4. Women and p.i.

Female involvement in p.i., although less than male, is still rather extensive, and wider spread than previously thought. There are plenty of woman, and now talking in the large numbers to be a culture of their own, who are p.i. to the core just like the men. Women are more coy for the good reason that they are entering a male-dominated field which is populated with many unpaired men (see 5. below), which leads to singling out and harassment. This has been now corrected somewhat with female web-sites and strictly controlled female chat areas, and this control in turn has encouraged more women to make their existence known.

5. Demographics of p.i.

Worldwide, the number is at least 100,000 individuals with females accounting for at least 10,000 (statistics from web counters, web-site guestbooks and chat rooms, and extrapolating these from Internet users to populations at large. The logged-on population is at least 30 percent of this, so these numbers really are minimum guesses). These are concentrated in North America, Western Europe, Aus/NZ and Japan. -- my guessed explanation for this geographical distribution is liberal social attitudes, leisure time and prosperity, the culture of computers, and a culture of d'ing infants/children. In most hot countries, for instance, infants are d'd only when very young; toddlers are left naked from the waist down and their accidents easily mopped up from wooden or tiled floors, while carpets are relatively rare.

6. The asexual ideal of p.i.

Summed up by the extremely atypical life of k, involved in a violent incident that grabbed world headlines, who suffered the most horrendous ordeal. For k, p.i. is a flight of the imagination to the ideal of a loving childhood and p.i. people are the only true friends. For this subgroup, p.i. represents a rigorously asexual ideal of physical safety and security, from which loving relations can emerge, and as such it strongly distinguishes p.i. from other paraphilias.

7. Sexual trends associated with p.i.

Normophilia, bisexuality, homosexuality (both lesbian and gay), transvestism, transexuality, gender dysphoria (both male > female and female > male), age regression, 'sissyism', fetishism (for ds and baby clothes, as well as rubber and plastic), role play, consensual BDSM, bed/clothes wetting, watersports, scat. In short, the polymorphously perverse, or in other terms, associated paraphilias and love-maps. There is also another big class of individuals involved in p.i. by playing parenting roles. It must be noted that the d is central to many sexual ideas: control, dependency, bodily functions, tactile genital stimulation. A clear trend has been the separation of d lovers (dl) as a distinct group, who would prefer 1. as their explanation rather than being classified as a p.i. However, there is also obvious overlapping as both groups have ds as the central object. Conversely, there is a strong trend for explicit disassociation from paedophilia from all truly p.i. individuals, where those ideas are mutually exclusive (see 6. above.)

8. The Internet and p.i.

Present status of p.i., people meeting each other, making contact and exchanging ideas on this scale is entirely due to the Internet, as p.i. people, scattered randomly in the population and isolated in geographical space, see the weight of their numbers and the power of collective action in cyberspace. Pre-Internet p.i. was characterised by printed media, much lower in quality and on a much smaller scale (even the best psych texts suffered from a paucity of data). Nearly all the web users involved thought they were completely alone. In the space of a few short years, a fully fledged subculture is endlessly elaborating its formal structures of existence both on and outside the ephemeral Net. Viz. the wedding of ld and t, as reported on dpf, a party with nearly 50 guests -- an event which regrounded the p.i. Net community in physical space and networks in the human sense.

8a. Chat.

A discourse dominated by greetings and farewells, and having evolved rituals of etiquette. Growth of large chat rooms with 100 or more people, and the inevitable subdivision of preferences. The roles of channel operators in enforcing etiquette. The distinction between real life talk and fantasy play. There is the importance of establishing trust, while the syndrome of a blank screen with nobody chatting is contrasted with the importance of maintaining conversations. Finally, although there is ephemerality of contact, the community itself continues and grows.

9. Evolution of p.i.: the individual and general cases.

9a. General case first: on current trends more people will continue to come online and discover the Internet version of p.i. This in turn gives greater security, but presents the ironic problem of too many people to know rather than too few. Expansion of fractal subgroups and strengthening of institutions will occur. Teenbabies are in a bad position while still underage, falling foul of Internet paedophile paranoia. Along with the dl evolution, the large numbers of teenbabies suggest a pattern of future growth of p.i. as a subculture that is getting more balanced by gender. There is also a trend to more detailed subdivision of groups to establish greater trust and make p.i. a more physical, as opposed to cyber-, activity.

The Internet is fundamentally limited to those who wish to make p.i. a public, social activity, where many fully contented p.i.s are happy to keep it private, like any other sexual activity, besides those who are merely in the closet, with the justified fear that it would affect their social positions. Despite the large numbers of p.i.s, they will always be a minority in society at large. However, the growth of a mutually supportive subculture will diminish the perception of p.i. as a 'disease' to be 'treated,' although psych methods still seem viable for those whose compulsions-obsessions lead to dangerous or illegal acts or just those who need a "holiday from their sex-drives." In general, there is still a fine line between over-indulgence, and managing p.i. in the context of an otherwise normal life of work, etc.

9b. My own situation: I'm amazed that this huge development of p.i. is still not better known and discussed, although it is a subtext to the revolutionary interaction of the Internet with sexuality, which is still a subject of controversy. I am very geographically isolated and not in a position to make easy contact. However, with the overload of information, I've refined my tastes, getting into what I really like and finding the people who like it. This is because the general effect of overload is over-stimulation and burn-out, again making it easier to stand back and be analytical.

Cold wires span oceans, bits are beamed around space
linking different segments of the fuzzy human race
Why would we want to be safe and have a smiling face,
happy in the free zone of play,
unburdened with the brutality of every-day?

If you read this poem don't condemn sweetness
Look at the news to see the ugliness
of power imposing its will, of making it ok to kill,
when our sin is to want to be helpless and harmless.

This file was last modified on August 29, 2005.