PS003 - Age Role Playing and Projecting On Others
This month on Erotic Awakening, Lee Harrington shares his passion around the topic of age play, which he sees as “any sort of role play that includes an age component”. It might be a much broader topic that you think- from adult babies to school girl dress up, Santa Claus to bratty boys and more! And, Lee also addresses how some people within the community respond to this concept in a way unlike how they respond to any other kink.
Also, Lee talks about taking one heck of a road trip – and how you can be a part of it! Plus, the secret of the Stinky Cheese ManNext month: Lee brings on guest speaker Scott Thompson, and they’ll chat about making safer sex fun, as well as talk about sex, STI’s, and all kinds of kinky sex goodness.
Passion And Soul Podcast:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-passion-and-soul-podcast-by-lee-harrington/id840372122
RSS Feed: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/660e243b2f834f0017de9181
Erotic Awakening Network: http://www.eroticawakening.com/podcast/
Lee’s Upcoming Events/Appearances:
http://passionandsoul.com/appearances/
Lee Harrington Contact Information:
http://www.FetLife.com/passionandsoul
http://twitter.com/#!/PassionAndSoul
https://www.facebook.com/lee.harringon
https://www.facebook.com/passionandsoul
Support the Passion And Soul Podcast – Join our Patreon today!
-
[music intro]
Announcer:
Welcome to Erotic Awakening, a weekly view of all things erotic. From BDSM to erotic spirituality, from swinging as a lifestyle to simply fun kink. Each week we bring you a diverse offering of erotic and alternative lifestyles in its many forms. This podcast includes frank discussions of highly sexual topics. This podcast is intended for consenting adults over the age of 18. If you are offended by this type of content, we recommend you stop listening right now.Lee:
Hello fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit, and welcome to Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington.During my monthly show, appearing on the third Monday of the month, give or take some minor scheduling adventures, I discuss my ideas and thoughts on a topic, but also answer listener questions that have been sent in. I'm also a big fan of announcing the next month's show a month in advance that you have a chance to take, to have questions of your own answered if you have any. It's really interesting for me that I've been doing this podcast for a couple of months now, and some months are absolutely packed with questions, dozens in fact, but this one has a, this one was a little bit drier.
This month’s topic, which is going to be Age Play, was a special request from a few listeners. That - age play is everything from age role playing, adult babies and schoolgirls, and role playing to bullies, playing Santa Claus and everything else in between.
I got plenty of squees. “Oh my God, that's so exciting! You guys are going to discuss age play. Yay! Go for it! Go for it! Thank you, Lee. Thank you, Dan and Dawn for doing, you know, having Lee on your show, all of that kind of stuff.” But nobody wrote it with specific questions, so I'm going to have plenty to say, don't worry about that. But I did want to let people know ahead of time that this month is going to be a little bit different.
However, for folks who are curious about next month's show, I'm actually going to be having a guest star on, which is Minnesota sexuality educator Scott Thomson, who's going to be discussing with me questions around safer sex, making safer sex fun, steamy, sexy, anything involving sex, sex, more sex, and of course sensuality. And as well, we're also going to be doing this crazy cross-country road trip.
So for people who don't follow me, I'll get to age play in a few minutes, but for people who don't follow me online, I am traveling. In fact, not just traveling, I'm moving. I've been based in Phoenix, Arizona for a little over two years. I moved out here from the Washington DC area in January 2009, and I've absolutely been loving Phoenix. It's beautiful, there's an amazing community here, an incredibly broad and diverse community here.
I, not too long ago, put together a resource list for Fascination sex shops of different sexuality groups in Arizona, and found more than 27 in the greater Phoenix and Tucson metro areas, which is staggering. And that's before I even knew about some of the private house parties happening up in Prescott and all of that. Note, I said Pres-kitt, not Pres-cott. I've gotten better, I became an Arizonan over time, I learned.
However, I am moving to New York because my boy, my property, my partner, AidenFyre, is a student in New York and in graduate school. And I want to go live with them and be closer to them, because this whole cross-country, long-distance thing, for me, is not working right now.
So the joy of my career is that I'm on the road 50% of the time, sometimes more, right now closer to 70% of the time. And the joy about that is that I have the opportunity to live pretty much anywhere, because I travel for work as well as writing, and these are all very, very modular things. So for people who want to catch me on my crazy Lee Harrington moving, fundraising, cross-country tour adventure, I am going to be going, leaving Phoenix, Arizona, on Tuesday, April 5th, I'm having a going away party here in Phoenix at America's Taco Shop, which is one of my favorite local haunts.
And then Thursday, the 7th, I'm going to be teaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico at Self-Serve Toys. Friday, I'll be in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Scott Thompson, he's joining me on this cross-country adventure. He and I will be appearing at the Expressions Dungeon. Saturday, April 9th, I'll be in St. Louis, Missouri for KUFF in conjunction with the Charenton Social Club doing a class on Rope Sex, which I'm also teaching at Self-Serve Toys in New Mexico, and also being there at their Kinky Prom. Kinky Prom, yay!
Crashing the night in Columbus, Ohio on Sunday the 10th, but don't worry, Columbus, even though I'm not teaching on this tour, I will be coming through Columbus later this summer. Keep your ears open. I'll be announcing that soon on my website, the details of that. And then on Monday the 11th, doing a whole bunch of fabulous stuff, as will Scott Thompson, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He'll be teaching a class on making the - on sensational safer sex, making your sex hot, and steamy, and safer.
And I'll be doing stuff on rope and breath, bondage and breath, and talking about positional asphyxiaphilia, uh, positional asphyxia, excuse me (laughs), and talking as well about how to make our bondage less challenging, more challenging, for breathing and moving with intention, connection, and training our breath for bondage working, as well as doing a special dinner event there in Pittsburgh, and then unloading on Tuesday the 12th in Brooklyn.
Now, I'm mentioning all of that because I think there might be some folks who are interested, but also because it allows that I'll be traveling with Scott and therefore have him stuck with me for an entire week. I shouldn't say stuck, he and I love spending time together as Leather family with one another. And I'm going to be able to ask him a lot of questions and be able to have some really great dialogue for next month's podcast. For people who want more information on my tour, you can go to passionandsoul.com/news and you'll find all of the details there.
So with that in mind - oh, of course, for those who have questions, I should mention this before I get moving. For those who have questions for Scotty or myself, for next month's podcast around safer sex, making it fun, steamy, or discussing issues around STIs, sex in general, sex and kink, any of these kinds of things, feel free to drop me an email at lee, L-E-E, atpassionandsoul.com with the subject line “Ask Lee” or find me through any of my various social formats, which I'll list later. And those questions will be answered on the podcast, and if they aren't, I'll be posting them to the Ask Lee column on Passion and Soul.
So without further ado, let's talk about age play. Age play is something that I am incredibly passionate about. I've been what is referred to as an age player since… I can't even remember. I've been playing around the notion of age and identity, and mixing it with that gender, since I was a little kid.
Age play, in my definition, is any sort of role playing that involves an age component. So that, I mean, a lot of people I know out there say, oh, age play, that's anytime that you want to pretend to be younger. Now, that's one way of looking at it, but I think that age is a much broader category. I think that it is age play when you are in your 60s and pretending to be 18 years old sneaking into a bar. That's age play to me. I think age play is grown adults pretending to be or enjoying for a time being little kids or babies. I find that age play is an incredibly diverse series of things that it can be.
Now, I mention that because there are, as I said, some people who think that age play is only about being little. Age play is anything that involves consenting adults playing with age. So the reason I bring that up, and I could go into all of the different things on levels of investment, and universal cultural and personal archetypes, and all that kind of stuff, but people who want to read that, hop on Amazon, buy a copy of Toybag Guide To Age Play that I wrote a couple of years ago. That information is easily accessible in written format.
What's really interesting to me right now, though, is this idea that - oh, how to phrase it - that there's this community and culture that has come up around age play. There is an adult baby population. In fact, there is such a distinct adult baby population that there are professional dominatrixes who specialize as mommies, or as babysitters, that don't even use the word dominatrix. They don't even use, necessarily, the terminology of “professional dominant" or any of that kind of stuff because they're not necessarily being dominant.
These are people who make their full time living - okay, there's not a lot of them, there's seven or eight in the United States. But still, that notion that there are a large number, in my opinion, compared to other jobs that are out there, of people who are making their living, taking care of adult babies. That delights me.
There are people making furniture where you can spend time in, where you can buy a crib that is your size, you, a person who is seven foot tall or 400 pounds, or an average size human, five foot ten. You can have a crib that fits you. You can have a high chair that fits you. There's an entire homegrown industry right now of people who are making wardrobe - from frilly little nightgowns to adult size diaper covers, to big binkies for people who are into this stuff, which tells me that there are a lot of people into this.
And it's not just my guessing based on the number of businesses that are out there. If you hop on a system likefetlife.com and type in adult baby, if you even type in the words “adult baby” or “AB fetish” or whatnot on the internet, you'll get a really diverse group of people out there doing this stuff. This is not just high-end CEOs who need to release, relax a little bit, be little for a little time. There's a lot of different reasons people do this stuff.
I am going to confess something that I haven't talked about a lot, because it's really personal to me, but I've decided that it's time, having had some conversations with friends. I do stuff as an adult baby. I don't do it in public. I personally don't think it's anyone's business to see me do that stuff in public, because it's a deeply intimate thing to me. Most of the time, it's me alone, being an absolute little kid. Now I'm out about the fact that I do stuff, you know, role-playing somewhere between, you know, eight to eleven years old. Coloring, doing math, playing video games, watching Saturday morning cartoons. But I'm also someone who does stuff with diapers and binkies and curling up with soft blankets and teddy bears when I'm all alone.
So there you go. I said it. Consider this an Erotic Awakenings first. That I came out about being an adult baby from time to time.
Part of this culture that's really interesting to me, though, part of this age play and whatnot culture, is that there's been a shift in the past 10 years, of me being actively involved with public age role playing stuff, probably more than a decade at this point, that there's been a distinct shift - and I would almost say a split between what I would call “littles” culture and sexualized age play.
Now, I didn't really get that fact. I didn't really understand it because even when I was writing The Toybag Guide to Age Play, I didn't really get this notion. Because people were like, oh, so you're a little? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. Little equals adult age player. Just… being an age player and those are synonymous with each other, right? That they're just equal. So it's like saying, well, I'm a kinkster/pervert. Okay, slightly different language, but I consider them synonyms of one another.
And I thought that “littles” was synonymous with age play. Until about a month and a half ago. And I went to a littles party here in Arizona. Now, as I said, I've been doing age play for quite some time. And when my boy was visiting here in January - and my boy is a consulting adult - and they were like, “Oh, there's this age play party happening in town and Touches really, really wants to go. And are we, can we go? Can we go? Huh, huh? Can we go?” And I thought about it like, yeah, that sounds fun. We had just gotten a pair of matching hooded pajamas, fuzzy pajamas from jumpinjammerz.com for Christmas. And so I'm like, okay, we could go, we could play, we could dress up. I'll show up in a suit. They'll show up in, you know, in overalls and, you know, kind of “little boy” gear and we'll do the whole Daddy/boy thing or, you know, more like evil possessive Daddy, I guess. But anyway, that is what it is.
And we showed up and I'm thinking, okay, cool. So it'll be people doing some age role playing, and there'll probably be some games, and then there'll probably be some kinky sex happening in the back room. That'll be cool.
No. No, that's in fact not exactly what it was.
I was expecting a BDSM play space that happens to have an age role players area, which are incredibly common in the United States right now. If I go to The Floating World in New Jersey, if I go to Dark Odyssey, if I go to - a number of different events have these little corners that get set up, where there are toys, where there is adult, you know, age play related equipment, all of that kind of stuff. But it's in the corner of the dungeon, so the music that's playing is still Enya, Nine Inch Nails, Butt Boy, whoever happens to be on the speaker system And it just happens to be the age players are in there.
Now, this littles party was held at a private home, and we went to the house. And they'd set up one corner with kind of like, you know, padded area and all these toys in one corner. There's a food spread, with lots of kids' finger food, and apple juices in those little Capri Sun containers, and things of chocolate milk, little kids' packs of chocolate milk, and this kind of back room that was full of more coloring supplies and all of this kind of stuff.
And the music that was playing the whole time was Disney. The whole time. There was no sexy music, unless you're deeply turned on by the Little Mermaid soundtrack, which, you know, that's cool if you are. But it was Little Mermaid, and Fox and the Hound, and Wall-E and movies playing in the back, like movies on silent in the background, and all of this stuff being played at the same time, and people just being little kids. Chalk, you know, being drawn outside, like on the ground, and people doing coloring.
There was no sexy time. In my perception of sexy time.
It was people in a safe space exploring being little kids with other little kids. I was also the only adult role playing character, or adult persona, that evening. And that was- well, I shouldn't say that, there was one other person, but they weren't hyper interactive with the group. They were just kind of there watching, hanging out for about an hour, maybe two hours, and then left.
But it was really interesting to me that here I am, in this suit, with my boy, thinking that, okay, I'll be able to be there and maybe do some role playing around having my cock sucked by my little boy, or doing a spanking scene that would be really hot and sexy, or doing something along those lines, later on in the evening. And about half an hour into the party, I realized that that would be really out of place.
For me, when I enter into a new culture or a new party of any sort, I like to take the first half hour to just kind of see what the lay of the land is, what's going on. So if I wander into the play space and realize, oh wait, everybody's dressed in high full formal fetish and I'm not, I have a chance to leave, go away, get changed, come back. Or if I don't have the wardrobe, to talk to the hosts and make sure whether or not it's appropriate for me to stay around in the current wardrobe that I'm in.
If I see a lot of really heavy SM in the first half hour, oh, this might be a really good time to pull out my canes and be incredibly brutal. If I'm gauging a party and it's incredibly talkative, it doesn't really matter to me whether I had a huge plan of doing this crazy grandiose scene, with suspending somebody by one ankle and torturing them or something like that, or having a really big sexy orgy. If I am going to do that stuff, I'll wait till later on in the evening, and talk to people as I'm wandering around the space and be like, “Oh, this is a really, really social party. Is it social throughout the evening?”
Now, notice that I didn't say, this is a really social evening. Is it going to be this the whole night? Or when does the party get started? That's really not a way for me, in my opinion, when I go into a new party to make allies, because it sounds like there's a judgment there. I don't really want there to be a judgment, I just want to know what the culture of the space is.
Is the culture of the space that it's a social party for the first two hours, and then usually the party hosts go and have a play out on the dungeon floor, and then things get started? Is it going to an event and having only one scene happen at a time? Is it going to be 40 people playing on the floor, and nobody really cares who touches who? Asking around about, sometimes asking or sometimes watching, about what the culture is, is really useful for me when I'm at events.
And so here I am at this little party, and I've been to other TNG parties. It was hosted by the Arizona TNG, which is The Next Generation, a group for folks, consenting adults between 18 and 35, playing with each other within their pure bracket. Actually, TNG might be 18 to 39, I'm not entirely sure. Anyway, you can find them at AZTNG.
And I'm at their party, and I've been at a couple of their parties before, but I've never been to any of their littles parties. So I wander in, and I realize as soon as I've wandered into the space that this is not set up like other BDSM spaces at all. This is a private home, and there's not a single piece of SM stuff to be seen. Nowhere. And I'm going, okay, that's cool. I get an apple juice, get chocolate milk for the boy, and we sit around, we talk. The boy runs away. Aiden runs away to go have fun with various people, and go coloring and all this kind of stuff. And I have some of the little kids - when I'm saying little kids for the purpose of this conversation, I am talking about people in their 19, 20, 25, 35, in that various age range.
So the “kids” ask me, “oh, Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, um, did you bring any of your books?” And by books, I knew that they weren't talking about the books that I'd written, but they were talking about books because they know that I like doing story time and reading to stuff as an age role player.
So I pull out a copy of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and a copy of Dr. Seuss's The Sneetches. And I'm like, yeah, sure, absolutely. I have a couple of stories. And are you guys game? And they’re like “Yeah, yeah!” And so we're now at about an hour and a half in the party. So people kind of hole up in one room with me, and I'm against one wall, and I've got like ten littles, ten littles, who are all sitting on the floor with their binkies, or with their lollipops, or eating some rice krispy treats or drinking some soda. And they're all going, “OK, story time, story time.”
And I pull out The Stinky Cheese Man, which is not the happiest of stories, right? “Run, run as fast as you can. You can't catch me. I'm the Stinky Cheese Man.” Until eventually the Stinky Cheese Man falls in a river and falls apart into a thousand pieces because he was so stinky that the fox wasn't able to carry him on his back. Sorry if I ruined the story, for you who were hoping to have secrecy around that story. But it's really funny, but depressing and somewhat, you know, schadenfreudian? Schadenfreude, the German term for deriving pleasure from the suffering of others. And I'm sharing what I consider very funny. Everybody is just like, (high-pitched voice) “But that's horrible! That's mean!”
Kids, I'm a sadist. I like making people who have consented to the experience uncomfortable. That gets my dick hard. Right?
As if this is a surprise to folks.
But people were just like, (high-pitched voice) “But no! We're at littles party, and everything should be nice, and should be happy, and sweet, and loving, and made of cotton candy.”
And I'm like, “oooookay.” And I decided to push it, I read The Sneetches, which is a happy story, but also kind of a messed up story, around capitalism, and oppressed societies and cultures, and the idea of body modification as a way to understand lower caste and upper caste populations, at least if we look at it on a deeper level.
Anyway, so I'm reading this story and it's like, (high-pitched voice) “But we're done with story time. You're a mean person. Why would you read a story like this?”
And it was about then that it hit me: that I was not hanging out with people doing sexualized age role play. This really was not an SM or what I would consider BDSM, SM, kink, etc. It wasn't a party like that. That littles culture is its own culture.
At APEX, Arizona Power Exchange, there is a littles party that happens twice a year. They have taken care of the challenges between sexualized age play and littles culture by having two different spaces. In the main dungeon, in the main play space, they set up all the stuff that is littles safe. And then in the side dungeon, if you're going to do a caning scene, or spanking that's going to be anything more than a minute or two, or there's going to be sex of any sort, you're able to go into the smaller dungeon and do the stuff over there so you can still be in the same building, but the main dungeon is considered littles-safe space.
And I didn't really get it until I'd been finally at this littles party for TNG, and I went, “Oh. Got it.” For these folks, at least this is my take on it, and having talked with a couple of other people since then, this is a safe space to actually have the childhood they never got to have, or to revisit childhood in a way that is understood and safe, and delicious and sweet. It's a chance to get to be seven years old, not to role play being seven years old, but to be seven, or four, or eleven, for a few hours. Of getting to hang out with a group of friends who are not going to judge you afterwards, and doodle! And play a board game. And giggle, and laugh, and have fun. That's pretty cool.
As someone who's been doing a lot of stuff with what I would consider sexualized age play, age play that involves the naughty teenage girl having to be bent over the knee and spanked because they're just not listening to their Daddy, and they can feel Daddy's cock pushed up from underneath their jeans.
As a role player who likes to do stuff around, you know, being the drunken Mommy and the 19-year-old son who comes home, who ends up being seduced by their own drunken mother kind of thing going on, I like sexualized age play. I like age play that involves spanking and caning and bondage and sex. But having been part of littles culture, I can see the appeal of it. And there are times when I can see that I've been a little, where I have sat with myself, and put on Saturday morning cartoons or popped in a copy of Beauty and the Beast, and curled up with my blankie and just watched, and spent some time as a kid.
But I'm really glad that a friend of mine, Jason, wasn't able to make it to the party, because I invited him saying, “Oh, isn't this going to be really, really fun?” He isn't into that at all. His entire thing is pervy Uncle Jay. And pervy Uncle Jay likes touching little girls in naughty, naughty ways. Mind you, his little girl is in her 30s. But, that's what he's really into, is being that pervy, sexy, evil uncle. And that's what gets his dick hard.
He would have had challenges, I think, at the littles party, because water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. He wasn't going to get his cock sucked there, at that party. It would not have been a good fit. Maybe in a back room, maybe in a bathroom with the doors closed, but the sex wasn't going to happen, because it wasn't going to be a way for those folks to feel safe.
Now, sexualized age play does not have to be about the pervy uncle or the drunk mommy or the adult as the initiator. In fact, Lolita is a classic example. The novel Lolita is a classic example of the teenage ingenue as the sexual initiator.
For people who do age play combined with SM, who says that the little has to be the bottom? Who says that the age player has to be the one being spanked or being caned? What about, as I saw happen at Dark Odyssey Winter Fire, not this one that just happened in February, but the year before, a group of littles, of age players, all ganging up to beat up the giant, the full grown man in the bunny costume? Or, this year, same players, same people involved in it, a whole bunch of schoolkids teaming up on their math professor. Who says that it has to be the littles who are the bottoms, right?
There's an entire range, in my opinion, between littles culture, or what I would consider non-sexualized age role playing, non-sexual age role playing, and hardcore sex and SM. There's body care and grooming, bathing, dressing, petting someone, caring for them. That can have either complete innocence, or that really sexy undertone, where there's a sexual tension, but neither party is going to move on it.
I know for some people that age role playing has that opportunity for solo sexual scenes, where it's someone having the chance to masturbate, remembering what it was like that first time when you felt those little feelings… and oh, what's going on down there, and that feels good, I like when I touch me like that… that kind of memory, that kind of role playing to that moment.
For some people, it's a consensual sexual experience, where it is, you know, two people who are both agreeing in their role playing to be 13 years old, and fooling around with each other back behind the schoolhouse, and everybody's agreeing to that situation, both out of character and in character.
I know some people who are really into the notion of coerced sexuality, that whole idea of Mrs. Robinson, right? Where someone's being talked into it, and has to be lured into the situation.
I had a friend of mine who, one of his reoccurring sexual fantasies, since he was very, very young, because he had this whole mythology around the fact that women went off the bathroom in groups, right? That guys usually went and peed one at a time, but women would go away in packs. And he always wondered what was so interesting about women's bathrooms. I mean, like, this was him talking to me about his experience of being like 11, 12, 13 years old. And he always wondered what was going on in those women's bathrooms, because like 10 girls would go at a time. And then they'd come out as a group, and he didn't really get it.
So he had this reoccurring sexual fantasy where he snuck into a woman's bathroom. “I was looking around, and a group of women came in all at the same time. As they all came in at the same time, they were just like, ‘Oh, boy in the girl's bathroom, get him, get him.’” And they would grab him, throw him down to the ground, or strap him to some sort of apparatus in the woman's bathroom. And the 10 girls, or five girls, or however many girls had gone to the bathroom at the same time said, “You have to sexually pleasure all of us, or else we're going to tell everyone that you were in the girl's bathroom,” or some other threat, right? Or we're going to kick your butt, or we're going to ruin your life socially, or whatever it might be.
And his sexual fantasy was that he had to sexually pleasure all of these girls that were his age, or else he wasn't going to be allowed to get out of the bathroom alive, or at least with his life intact. So - and that's that line between coercion and extortion, right?
There's other people, though, that their age role playing is dark, is really taboo. I know some people that this is playing with underage prostitution, as being the role playing key. I know for some people this is sex with someone who's doing adult baby stuff, which even if it's consensual, the concept, the topic there, the notion that someone who is two consenting adults, one is role playing being in their 40s, and the other is role playing being six months old. For a lot of people, even hearing that role playing description can hit a lot of personal buttons. “Oh my God, you mean you actually want to have sex with someone who's six months old?” No, they want to do an age-based role playing scene with another consenting adult, and the role happens to be six-month-old. But it twigs a lot of people's buttons.
There's a lot of folks out there in the world at large that hear about age play, and really freak out. Because there's this notion that if you're doing it for role playing, you want to do it for real. That if you are into dressing up and playing with someone - and interestingly enough, the people who want to be the little kids, the people who want to be the little in the situation, the people who want to be the 7 year old, the 2 year old, the 15 year old, aren't usually seen as the villains.
It's the adult characters. It's the people who are putting on the persona of being the school teacher, or being the priest, or being the mommy, or being the evil uncle, or whatever it is. The adults in these role playing situations, the adult characters, the people who are doing that side of the role playing, are often villainized. Even within the BDSM population.
Because, oh my gosh, if you're into having sex with someone who's pretending to be seven, how do we know that you're not actually wanting to go out and have sex with an actual seven-year-old? (sighs deeply)
How many people, really, who do role playing of pretending to be werewolves, really want to be werewolves? Comparatively few.
How many people who are role playing doctor and nurse in their bedroom really want to go to medical school and become a full time doctor or nurse? Comparatively few.
How many people who are playing pizza delivery boy, and “hey, I've got a pizza for you,” and naughty housewife, really want to take on a full time job, or even a part time job, of being a pizza delivery boy? Or who want to actually be a housewife and be a naughty sexy housewife? Comparatively few.
I find it disturbing and upsetting, that there's this notion that age play is any different. It's role playing. Or, it's shape shifting and time traveling back into a different part of our own history, and writing a happy ending for things that went weird. Or adding a sexy twist to our own experiences, or putting on a mask for five minutes, and pretending to be something that we really aren't.
The notion that people who are doing age role playing are outright pedophiles is upsetting, disturbing, and wrong. Have I met some folks, amongst the age role playing population, who - their sexual desires do go that way, and that age based role playing is a chance for them to exorcize their demons? Absolutely, and I think it's a really valid tool for that kind of exploration, and that kind of therapeutic work.
Do I know some people who are choosing to use age role playing as a way to re-traumatize themselves, and to go back and continuously hit replay on when they were actually traumatized as a child? Yeah, I know one or two.
But that's amongst knowing thousands of folks over the years that I've talked to, seen, met, or taught classes to, that fit in those populations. A handful. So the notion that it's everybody is really deeply, deeply upsetting. I also find it really interesting that even within the BDSM populations and kink populations, this thing called “fet,” “fet life,” or “alt sex,” that even within our populations, we villainize each other.
There's an amazing editor out of New York, who’s named Sassafras Lowrey, who edits amazing anthologies. She just did the Kicked Out teen anthology not long ago, which is a collection of short stories all from teens, or people who were teens, who were kicked out of their homes for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. And it's an amazing anthology.
But a number of years ago, she was going to do an anthology, and she put a call out for an anthology on real experiences of age role playing. Like, “Tell me your stories, I want to collect them,” because, you know, the book hadn't been written before. No one had done a collection like that, at that time. And so she did. She put the call out there and got a good number of people who were responding saying, oh, I want to write something or here's a submission, I've got a couple of good pieces.
But she also got threat mail. And I'm not talking light, fluffy, like, you know, “oh, if you do this, you're messed up.” No, she got mail from people saying, we know what your legal name is, and we know where you work, and we will out you at your work and have you removed from your job if you do this, because if you associate BDSM or kinky sex with age role playing at all, people will think that all BDSMers, all kinksters, all perverts are pedophiles. Are evil rapists, are all of this kind of stuff, and we're trying to distance ourselves, so how dare you? Don't you dare do this stuff or you will lose your career.
I see the same stuff happen, though not always to that level, between the Leather community and the gay, lesbian, and bisexual movements. That when people like the HRC, the “equal rights for all” kind of projects, say, “oh, but we're just like the rest of the population, we're just like you, we're normal like you, we want to have kids just like you, we want to get married just like you.” To hold on to those kinds of lines, sometimes groups like the HRC start saying things like, “oh, well, those Leather people, those crazy SMers, or those weird polyamorous folks, or those people who go to bathhouses, or those swingers over there. Well, no, no, no, we're not really like them.”
There's an attempt to distance, because if we can be just like everyone else, with the only difference being that it's a man loving a man or a woman loving a woman, that somehow it's okay to ostracize, villainize, push out people from within our own tribes to the edge of the tribe, and send them out into the woods to have them be the sacrificial lamb so that everyone else can get their rights met.
That's heartbreaking to me.
And it's heartbreaking that it happens almost in every population, that in an attempt - in every fringe population, that anytime there's one person that we just don't quite understand, or one group that we don't quite understand, there's this human desire to just say, get the hell out. Get out now, because you're uncomfortable for us.
You're uncomfortable for us.
Anytime we step outside the norm, we offer a mirror for people, every single time. Because at the end of the day, most people don't see us. They see a screen that they can project upon. They don't see us as individuals or as people. You probably don't see the person that you meet at the grocery store as a full person. You most likely see them as “the grocery store person,” and you have your own internal story about why they're there, what's working, and why they're working there, and what's going on in their life, that likely has little to nothing to do with their actual reality.
We project all the time. It's incredibly common for the human experience.
And yet, (sighs) and yet, what that means is that we become these funhouse mirrors. That if somebody is projecting on me, and they have this perception of what they think my storyline is, and I say something like, “Oh, and by the way, I happen to like being an age role player.” If they've been seeing themselves in my eyes or projecting their internal experience onto my body, there is a moment of shock sometimes because I've changed up the rules on their internal dialogue. I've changed their very experience.
And if I've been being a mirror to them, or if they've been going, “Oh, you know, that Lee Harrington, oh my god, he's gone through just the same stuff I have.” And then I tell you something totally different about my journey. If you see yourself in me and I am doing something that challenges you, what does that say about you?
Now, the reality is, other people's experiences are not about you. Your experience is not about me. Your experience is about your experience, and my experience is about my experience. But again, going back to that “childlike mind” concept that's still floating around in our heads, that my experience is actually about you. If my experience says that I am doing something that you are uncomfortable with, but it's about you, suddenly my journey is personal to you. You take it personally as if it's happening to you.
It's not wrong. It's incredibly human.
But in the case of role playing scenarios, in the case of kink and sex and BDSM, it means that sometimes those knee-jerk reactions are not actually about us. When someone looks at me and says, “Oh my god, you're into age role playing? That's so messed up.” That's not actually about me. That's about someone saying, Oh my gosh, this person who I thought I understood, and thought I knew what was going on, is into something that I don't understand, and might actually turn me on, or might actually intrigue me. But that means that I have to deal with my own shadows, and my own personal desires, and that's uncomfortable. And so I'm just going to be over here freaking out, and projecting that you are evil, that you are wrong.
My hope, my dream, as it were, is that down the road, we'll be able to have people of all shapes and sizes, and desires and connections, talk to each other. Within community, between communities, between tribes, that we will have an understanding between humans, that basically says that we will each try to project a little bit less, that my projections will at least become opaque so that I can see you through them. So I can see your truth and your experience and have it not be about me.
That's what I would like, that we can somehow find some sort of middle ground to actually have a conversation person to person instead of projection to projection, assumption to assumption. If you see someone doing something that you don't understand, wait until they're done with their deeply personal moment, and then ask. Politely, without judgment, without “what's up with that?” Try asking something like, “huh, I didn't really get what was going on over there. Would you be willing to tell me more?”
Consider asking questions, because really, that's how we get to know other people as people, is when we move to actually seeing them, and hearing their stories, and finding out what's going on for them, instead of making assumptions about everything.
So thank you again, everyone, for joining me. A reminder, next month's topic is going to be discussing with Minnesota sexuality educator Scott Thompson questions around safer sex, making safer sex fun, steamy and sexy, and everything else involving sex, sex, and more sex and some sensuality thrown in.
For folks who have questions about sex, safer sex, STDs, STIs, and all of that kind of stuff, or making these things sexy, approachable, or if you have personal challenges with them, or personal stories that are joys, please send them to Lee, L-E-E, atpassionandsoul.com with the subject line, “Ask Lee.” Questions that we're not able to answer on the podcast, either Scott or myself, we'll try to answer offline and post the Ask Lee column onpassionandsoul.com.
And for those who want to find out more from me, you can find me pretty much anywhere on the internet by doing a search for Lee Harrington. Or you can go on to look for PassionAndSoul, as one word, on FetLife, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, DeviantArt and more.
You can of course also go to my website,passionandsoul.com, where you can find all of my podcasts, downloadable media, lots of essays, constant stuff going out there in the world of all different shapes and sizes. So please feel free to find me, stalk me. In fact, if you scroll to the bottom of my website, there's a little thing that says, Stalking Made Easy, just for you.
[music outro]
Thank you again, fellow adventurers of sexuality and spirit for joining me. This has been Erotic Awakening with Lee Harrington. And until next time, stay cool, have fun, be authentically you, and don't do anything I wouldn't do, which luckily isn't much.
Have a fantastic journey.
