Interesting Article

[Burp_Cup]

I thought this was a well written article by someone outside of our lifestyle, mostly flattering too. This may have been posted here before, being that it is older. As I am a fairly new member here, and in the case you have all read it before, I apologize.

Child's play

November 21 2002

By Stephanie Bunbury

The babies like to roll on the floor, play with their bears and have their tummies tickled. Cathy is sucking a dummy but, of course, she likes mummy Linda's breast best. Darren definitely needs his nappy changed; let's get that wet one off right now. But look what Julianne is getting up to in the bath! She's shaving her penis!

Polly Borland, a photographer best known for her off-kilter celebrity portraits, spent five years documenting the lives of adults who, driven by who knows what, spend time dressed and behaving as babies.

Beginning with a contact number for a house catering to them in England, where she lives, Borland gradually unearthed baby fetish groups in Australia, France and the United States. Adult babies are everywhere, she says, even in Arab countries. The weirdness factor attracted her in the first place.

"They looked amazing," Borland says. "They are like giants dressed as babies; they are giant babies, crawling round the floor in all this satin, those frilly ribbons and little flowers. It appealed on some fantasy level; it was almost carnivalesque. There was something pretty and ugly about it: pretty yet ugly; baby yet not baby."

Almost at once, however, she stopped seeing all this as strange.

"It was fascinating, but, at some level, I identified with them. I felt for their loneliness. I felt I understood their lives and they picked up on that."

Borland hung out happily with the English group and travelled to the US with them. Their group outing to Disneyland, she says with a grin of reminiscence, was just terrific fun. "They often said to me: you know, we think you're one of us."

The photographs, now on show at Anna Schwartz Gallery, testify to that intimacy. The babies' lack of self-consciousness, whether dancing ring-a-rosey or masturbating, is almost as surprising as the first shock of seeing a hairy middle-aged man in a bonnet.

"I think part of the deal is exhibitionism," Borland says. Not for all of them, she stresses - it is a very individual fetish, the single universal being a fondness for nappies - but for some. "They liked the idea of being found out. Because it is all deadly secret, a lot of them get a thrill out of the idea of blowing their identity, revealing what they do."

She suspects that the fetish sides of their minds also liked being watched, often for hours, by a sympathetic female eye. "They liked me. I think the whole thing of the camera looking at them felt like a very intense gaze, a bit like a mother's gaze.

"They reacted to me like a surrogate mother and sometimes I would take that role on; I was very mothering and I was genuinely interested in the whole thing. I think they kind of liked that I was an outsider, because it validated what they were doing."

Borland decided before she began work that, for her, the sky was the limit. Nothing was too creepy for her, even the couple of men who liked to soil their nappies as well as wet them. "Obviously, there are limits in my life," she says. "And there are limits in my photographic life. But nothing arose that made me think I was going somewhere I shouldn't be going. I had made a commitment from the beginning and I wanted to know everything about it, even the moments that were - well, smelly."

Most of the babies are men, usually pretending to be little girls.

"I met some women, but they were kind of doing it for their boyfriends who were doing it. Also, the women seemed more secretive." Among the men, however, there was enormous variation: they were straight and gay, truck drivers and one High Court judge, men with wives and children and men who were too obsessed with infantilism to get involved with any other kind of life. One man had his home set up as a nursery; he slept in a giant cot.

Borland last exhibited in Australia 50 portraits of famous Australians living in England, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Fame, indeed, is her business.

More recently, she has photographed the Queen, as one of eight photographers chosen by the palace to commemorate the monarch's Golden Jubilee.

The famous like her photographs because she does not try to catch them out: her trademark portrait style is frank, but not confrontational.

Any hoopla or irony is confined to the glittery or floral backdrops she likes to use. The Babies, by contrast, is affectionate yet too close to the keyhole for comfort, a velvety kind of voyeurism.

What she wanted was to get away from the quick snap of the celebrity shot. "I thought I wanted to do a book, to broaden what I do. I wanted to get involved with the people I was photographing." Celebrities are often rude or abrupt. The babies were not. "They were just so easy, so lovely. I got respect from them and they got respect from me. It was a partnership."

And it was exciting. "I do enjoy the portraits," she says, "but I am jaded with it as well. I think the work is becoming more important to me; I think that's because I've achieved a lot of what I set out to do in terms of career - you don't get much more surreal and famous than the Queen in the Western world - and it just doesn't mean so much to me any more."

Getting to know this closeted world, however, made her feel excited about what she was seeing. "It was pure inspiration. And I hadn't had that in a long time."

Some casual observers, she says, assume they are some sort of paedophile. This scarcely makes sense - these are adults who want to be treated as children, not treat children in inappropriately adult ways - and Borland certainly saw no sign of it. It is a world unto itself. Since she finished the project, she has had a child, but she never feels a connection, never sees the fetish babies, who were so much part of her life, in the real baby. Strange, she agrees, but true.

The whys and wherefores of the babies, meanwhile, remain a mystery. Most said they had felt the urge to infantilise since they were children, stealing nappies from clotheslines as children and secretly buying bottles and dummies with their pocket money. That was almost all they knew. They also knew they were weird. And for most of their lives, they thought they were alone in their weirdness.

By documenting them, Borland became intrinsic to their coming out, to self-acceptance. That was her privilege and, in return, she accepted them, too.

"I took delight in the strangeness of it," she says. "Really, it took me five years to work out that there wasn't a lot to work out about it."

The Babies, by Polly Borland, opened last night at Anna Schwartz Gallery, city, and runs until December 21.

[TheMagicDragon]

Everyone should read this!

[Zuesbaby]

Its good

[Depends1578]

Thanks for sharing.

[Crimson_Wolf]

Wow someone who wasn't creeped out or had a negative reaction to this type of fetish.

[boy ricky]

Its a good article but one that may be a little too simplistic and perhaps that is on purpose. I know most of my ab friends are not people that were unhappy as children. I was happy. I do not know myself why i am a the way I am but i do accept it.

This is not an acedemic article so the depth of study is not expected. You can find some of the pics here.

It is at least an unharmful look at Adult babies for consumption of the general public. Where was this article published?

[Guest Saya]

I echo boy ricky, not all ab/dl's are based on trama's that happend during childhood, it is just the way we are, the same with Transgend/vesits the hole thing about there being a medical reason for everyone I think is a way for the general public to discribe us as mentlly insane and push it under the bed sort to speak...

[oznappy]

Polly Borland took great pics. I saw the exhiibition when it first came out...actually that is back when I was a young ab and the ab world was smaller and everyone tended to get along.

In fact, there were pics of me in the exhibition and in the book she did

[aron in a nappy]

I agree with everyone else great article and nice to see someone understand the abdl comunity

[toon]

i wish they would show ab/dl's who arent old guys trying to be little girls. there are also boys in diapers who enjoy being little boys whom dont where frills or bonnets. I honestly cant stand bonnets or frills or dresses.

I dont think this article helped change anyones opinion of us. We're still a bunch of fat old weird guys who now dress up as little girls in diapers, frills, and bonnets.

[PreferWet]

i wish they would show ab/dl's who arent old guys trying to be little girls. there are also boys in diapers who enjoy being little boys whom dont where frills or bonnets. I honestly cant stand bonnets or frills or dresses.

I dont think this article helped change anyones opinion of us. We're still a bunch of fat old weird guys who now dress up as little girls in diapers, frills, and bonnets.

I agree. I never did understand the frills, dresses and bonnets either but, I'm not an AB. I'm just a young kid that is still wetting the bed.

[curiositykilledthecat]

Excellent article

[tris]

Indeed, good article, and great links -- although it's not entirely accurate to the broad spectrum of our world, it was for her little corner of it. That she gleaned something extremely positive from the experience and spoke well of it is the kind of good press that we all need.

As far as the men in dresses and whatnot -- The idea is such a turnoff because of their unkempt physical state. Perhaps if they had been shaved, and properly attired --with tasteful makeup-- they could appear close enough to fool most viewers. But, I'd like to point out that while girl-on-girl action has now made it to Prime Time TV, it was once a taboo topic reserved only for Mature Audiences. Do you think the same would apply for guy-on-guy action? Nuh-uh. The female form is considered artful and somehow more tasteful than man's. Still, movies like Brokeback Mountain garnered more attention because the two men are not only young, but considered attractive by a substantial margin of the population. And when they kissed (or made love on the rocks), it might have been awkward to witness, but they were tolerable because of their age and aesthetics. Try working out the same equation with Beau Bridges and Dom Delouis. Still tolerable to some, but not as many; and DEFINITELY not Prime Time material.

If she had photographed younger, less-hairy, and more attractive boys, do you think this would have been received differently?

[oznappy]

The reason there were so many old men in dresses etc is that Polly has a soft spot for them

[Angela Bauer]

Sometime prior to July 2001 when I wrote my final column for the DPF Newsletter, Polly Borland wrote a snail mail to me. She said she had seen my AB photos and wanted to photograph me for her book. I talked that over with Tommy at DPF, who endorsed Polly, saying he had met her and seen her work on this then recent trip to England.

I responded to Polly. We exchanged several e-mails. When she was proposing being in the Los Angeles area I was totally committed to a legal case. By 2001 it had been a few years since my most recent AB photos. The hair stylist (Chinzia) and makeup artist (Julie Hewett) who had helped me on all my previous AB photo and video sessions were no longer available at affordable prices. Polly's attitude was that she wanted to style all the photos and supervise hair and makeup personally.

That was not acceptable to me. I had no evidence she was qualified to do all that. I mean, it is not as if there are no talented photographers already working in Hollywood.

Back then I did see an exhibition of her AB photos. That could well have been on a trip to Australia. I thought she brought out the best of all her subjects. I assumed those were the ones willing to pose for her.