In The Nursery: “Adult Babies” and The End of Cultural Maturity
In a culture as divided and divisive as our own, the sanctity of infancy and childhood is one of the few remaining subjects with the potential to unite all denominations. Those who contribute to prolonging this state of innocence and wonderment are held in the highest regard, while those who prematurely destroy it are seen as beyond any kind of redemption: violent offenders against children are regularly considered the lowest of the low in prison inmate populations, while imagery of maimed or slaughtered children in a foreign conflict may spur on hasty intervention where similar imagery of adult victims failed to do so. Even Arthur Schopenhauer, the godfather of philosophical pessimism, contended that “every child is in a way a genius; and every genius is in a way a child”.
While there are examples of this attitude dating back to antiquity, this exaltation of childishness really began to gain serious traction once the Age of Reason began in earnest: as skeptical counter-movements began to dismiss the idea that everything of value could be explained by the natural sciences, the cult of the charismatic child truly came into its own. Not surprisingly, 21st century culture is bursting at the seams with individuals and movements that have parlayed a kind of stylized childhood regression into considerable popularity. For example, the visual style of pop singer Melanie Martinez is aggressively loaded with childhood iconography, often as a framing device for predictably sardonic hit songs about dysfunctional families and lost innocence. Elsewhere, the same aesthetic of bright colors and reassuring soft edges is deployed without any apparent irony and with a much more celebratory sensibility: the “brony” subculture, named for the zealous, largely male fanbase of My Little Pony children’s cartoons, has ballooned into an astoundingly successful self-help group allowing otherwise reclusive individuals to role-play within a world of heightened childishness and reduced complexity, often building lasting friendships and increased self-esteem as a result.
For those who are on the outside looking in at these subcultures, it can become almost irresistible to attribute a “dark side” to the various modes of childlike regression, in particular to suggest that outward displays of innocence / naïveté are just a front for sexually deviant lifestlyes. It probably doesn’t help that some groups, like “furries,” do have their own sexual lexicon of terms like “yiffing” and “furpiling” to better articulate their paraphilic attraction to cartoonish, humanoid animals. There is also the phenomenon of “adult babies,” which raises many of the same skeptical eyebrows. As might be expected, participants in this subculture
…often wear nappies, may drink from a baby bottle and/or be wet-nursed (sometimes simulated), crawl about the floor, have baby baths, eat baby foods, play with baby toys, be spanked, and may roleplay and regress to an infant-like state.[i]
Though few rigorous studies have been conducted on the phenomenon, there are at least enough participants in this paraphilic lifestyle to support vendors specializing in ‘adult baby’ furniture like adult-sized cribs, or web stores like the ABDL Factory that offer a full inventory of adult pacifiers, diapers, and other infantile accoutrements. Though it is not exclusively a paraphilic phenomenon, “adult baby syndrome” is now recognized a spectrum condition, and as such has a complex etiology associated with conditions from depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder to histories of childhood sexual abuse. As to the latter, Freund and Blanchard’s extensive research on paraphilias revealed several cases of pedophilic men who “experienced sexual arousal when they wore children’s clothing (or replicas of such clothing) or diapers, and also who imagined themselves to be children while doing so (i.e. they experienced erotic target identity inversion)”.[ii] The same research also revealed, however, cases in which these activities were not bound to pedophilic urges, leading the researchers to conclude these behaviors originated from some “other paraphilic phenomenon, such as sexual masochism”.[iii]
I feel the connection to masochism here is one that we ignore at our own peril, if we wish to truly understand how the “adult baby” is a distillation of certain elements governing our digitally networked and managerial society. Masochism itself is a far more complex phenomenon, in terms of its root causes and its aims, than pop psychology lets on: its practicioners seem to inhabit a spectrum that includes everything from those who truly enjoy suffering as an end in and of itself, to those using masochism as a rebellious means to both comment upon and contribute to the erosion of harmful societal norms, while speeding along the process of self-actualization. Hybrid forms have also existed in which masochistic acts, ostensibly done in the service of higher authority, simultaneously delivered levels of physical gratification that would be forbidden in another context: self-flagellation within the Middle Ages was a practice that served socially approved spiritual ends of penance while also, as per the Historia Flagellentum (an early critique of the practice written circa 1700), “awake[ning] unchaste movements” within the body. Within modernity itself, theorists such as Gilles Deleuze did much to defend masochism as a short-term imposition of restraints that would lead to emancipation in the long term. Namely, the masochist’s strategy is to “[request] his punishment in advance of having committed any misdeed” — the masochist “derides the law and finds ‘liberation’ from it without disavowal, allowing himself to be reborn without the mediating tyranny of law…he or she also disavows the pleasure that should have come before the punishment, so that pleasure is interrupted, deprived of its geniality, and transformed into the pleasure of being reborn”.[iv]
Despite the compelling arguments of Deleuze and other like-minded philosophers, we should be wary of assuming that all masochism is a clever, calculated strategy to unmask the truth of our complicity in being abused by a massive technocratic system of control. Many who engage in masochistic practices do so upon resigning themselves to an oppressive reality, making a psychodrama out of their subjugation without introducing any additional ‘critical’ element: for them, the reality of being perpetually restrained, subjugated and monitored is preferable to a reality that provides chaotic freedom at the cost of heightened uncertainty. Once this trade-off has been accepted, the aesthetic trappings of idealized immaturity — up to and including transformation into an “adult baby” — fall into place easily enough.
So, if a masochistic type of infantilism is indeed on the rise within the present information age, what could possibly be responsible? I’d submit that an increased reluctance by authority to treat mature adults as such has done plenty to accelerate this state of affairs. In his book The Authenticity Hoax, Andrew Potter makes a strong case for the linkage between the growth of the digitally networked surveillance state and the atrophying of societal maturity:
Sometime soon, constant surveillance will become almost costless, and each company will be able to track listless workers, and every spouse will be able to track his or her wayward partner. It could very well be the end of laziness and the end of infidelity, and there may be some public benefit in that. But there’s no dignity in doing your job or remaining faithful simply because you have no other option. Thus the end of privacy will also mark the end of our cultural adulthood. Surveillance is for criminals and pointless gossip is for children, and it may turn out that this “getting over” privacy will mean getting over the dream of liberal democracy.[v]
As adults have become increasingly burdened with the kind of security measures that would otherwise be associated with helpless infants, I believe there has become a greater compulsion to take this state of infantilization to a kind of logical endpoint. Finding themselves helpless to escape from an entangling mesh of GPS trackers, backscatter scanners, and endless varieties of tools devoted to “personal metrics,” some must surely see no better alternative than to personalize this culture of dependency and submission. Having committed to this, all that remains is to change the window dressing: to switch out the hard-edged sensory schema of digital modernity with the softer-edged, more pliable forms that typify infants’ developmental environments.
I will not attempt to argue that “adult babies” and other manifestations of paraphilic infantilism are dealing with an oppressive culture in a way that is morally inferior. At the very least, what they do seems to have less potential for lasting trauma than other available flavors of masochism, such as the physical and psychological abuse carried out at ‘torture houses’ like McKamey Manor. However, I will also refrain from finding joy in cultures that romanticize or fetishize dependency, particularly at a time when a desire for independent agency is being shunned by authoritarians as a veiled admission to criminal, even terrorist, behavior: there is still the old canard that those who desire enough privacy to hear themselves think are “hiding” something malicious. At some level, it must delight the despotically-minded to know that concepts such as “being spoon fed,” and confining one’s creative activities to non-threatening arenas like an “adult baby” playroom, are enthusiastically accepted by individuals that might otherwise turn their energies towards more critical forms of self-expression.
My diagnosis of the “adult baby” population may be completely wrong: it’s possible that they could still exist irrespective of how much authority treats its subjects like literal infants who are incapable of being trusted with even the most elementary unsupervised actions. There will always be attempts to resurrect a lost golden age, no matter what level of personal freedom exists within a society. However, there is a point where this activity has to be understood as a tragic act of “kicking the can down the road;” a rejection of personal responsibility in shaping the future that can only intensify the problems which currently exist. As Schlegel stated, “the mirage of a former golden age is one of the greatest obstacles to approximating the golden age that still lies in the future”.
[i] Griffiths, Mark D. “Child’s Play: A Brief Look at Paraphilic Infantilism”. Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/in-excess/201310/childs-play. Retrieved April 12, 2018.
[ii] Lawrence, Anne A. “Erotic Target Location Errors: An Underappreciated Paraphilic Dimension.” The Journal of Sex Research, vol. 46, no. 2/3, 2009, pp. 194–215.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Hinderliter, Beth. “Citizen Brus Examines his Body: Actionism and Activism in Vienna, 1968”. October, no. 147, 2014, pp. 78–94.
[v] Potter, Andrew. The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves. Harper Collins, 2010.
