This Store Caters To Adults With A Fetish For Wearing Diapers

As part of Huffington Post’s Sex Heroes Q&A series, the website interviewed a man who runs a store in Mount Prospect, Illinois, that caters to adults who want to wear diapers.

Tykables’ owner John-Michael Williams admitted his store doesn’t just supply diapers for people who are incontinent or autistic, but also those who have a fetish or sexual interest in dressing like or pretending to be a baby, known as the ABDL community.

The interview featured repeated statements claiming that those in the ABDL community are not interested in sexual contact with children or babies.

Williams described the ambience of the store: “It’s designed in a very playful way. It looks very much like a nursery, with oversize baby items, like a seven-and-a-half-foot crib and an oversize rocking horse, among our other things around the store. And we have our diapers and our full line of clothing items: our Snappies bodysuits, our denim jeans that we make, our padded briefs and our diaper line.”

Williams, who is gay, also pontificated about the shame people feel about sex: “Whether you look at it from a fetish aspect or not, a lot of people feel shamed by having sex that is not the traditional, missionary man and woman — or man and man or woman and woman, perhaps — style sex. I find that odd. I find it strange that you can feel shame in something that makes you feel pleasure. I can’t understand that mentality.”

Then came the moment when Williams was asked about “the distinction between those who are interested in adult baby diapers for a sexual or fetish reason and those who are into them for other reasons.” Williams answered, “From a fetish or sexual standpoint, it’s pretty self-explanatory. They are aroused sexually, either through role play or from the product itself — the sound, texture or feeling. Or, for some people, there’s a humiliation aspect. It could be any one of those things, or something else I haven’t mentioned.”

The HuffPo interviewer insisted, “But it has nothing to do with children. I want to make sure we’re making that very clear. This is about wanting to act like or be children, not wanting to be with children, correct?”

Williams, gratified by the clarification, replied, “Absolutely. It has nothing to do with actual children. The gratification comes from the objects or the role play and the persons themselves “being” the child. From a fetish standpoint it could be like… being treated as a child can be a degrading thing. If someone has a sexual response to being degraded, then being treated as an infant can be very embarrassing.”

Williams cited gay advocate Dan Savage to support his view of sex:

About four years ago Dan Savage was talking about one of the companies that I owned at the time, it was a social networking site, and I think he said it best: whether straight or gay, mainstream or not, sex is bizarre. We all look silly doing it. We all look silly in the pursuit of it. We do silly and stupid things in the pursuit of it. But when it comes down to the enjoyment of pleasure and sex, it doesn’t matter if we look funny or not.

Look funny or not, wearing diapers because it’s a fetish seems rather regressive.