It's Not All About Sex

If you do nothing but skim the surface, balloon fetishes seem pretty simple. Some guy or gal blows up a balloon until it pops and gets horny. Or does the nasty with a balloon or watches someone else play with a balloon.

And I guess for some balloon fetishists, it really is that simple: the balloon is an object that stimulates or enhances their sexual desire. There's a lot of variety within that description, of course, but it does cut to the chase. I think that my character in Popping Out meets that description pretty well, and maybe even the guy in Eric's Secret.

But for me, and I suspect a lot of us, it isn't nearly so cut and dried. I had a non-sexual relationship with balloons for at least eight years before they began to relate to sexual feelings at all. I will never understand how it started, around the age of three. I do know that I was deathly afraid of balloons popping, and that I felt a sense of loss when they were destroyed. I do know that I loved having balloons around whenever my parents would let me.

And for some reason that I do not understand, I loved having balloons stuffed into my pajamas. Aha, you say, a sexual relationship after all. No, not at all. A sensual relationship, maybe. It just felt good, like a stuffed animal or a particularly warm and fuzzy blanket. I just loved balloons. Even as I was afraid of them.

The sexual feeling for balloons came later, with puberty. Oh, there was probably some anticipation of that transformation earlier. After all, I was a boy, and things that get held against a boy's penis, especially with any amount of pressure, tend to cause an erection.

That's not necessarily a sexual response, mind you; often it's just the body protecting a vital reproductive organ from loss of blood flow. But your mind treats protective erections and erections from sexual arousal pretty much identically, and so the connection was made.

But discovering my sexual feelings for balloons did not take away the non-sexual feelings, and even decades later, as a middle-aged man, balloons in various circumstances can bring on waves of varied—and sometimes conflicting—emotional and even visceral responses.

I still love just having balloons around. At a former job, I decorated my office with them (we were in the entertainment business—such quirks were tolerated). Now I decorate my house with them in the winter. They oxidize in the summer, and I don't like oxidized balloons, even though when I was little, I kept them until they were oxidized and nearly flat. See? It's complicated.

I still like to cuddle with balloons, although I don't get much opportunity these days. Some of the cuddling leads to sexual activity, but a surprising amount of it does not.

And where popping balloons is concerned, things get even more complicated. I pop balloons now, something I never, ever did until I was in my teens. I can even do it without earplugs, in most circumstances.

But when I'm around someone else who has a balloon, I get a sudden flight response, and I want to get away as quickly as possible. I don't like being around popping balloons if I'm not in control of the situation.

And yet, watching a lovely lady do something that might pop a balloon is sexually arousing for me. So there's where the conflicting feeling come in. I really want to get away from the balloon, and I really want to stick around and watch the lovely lady pop the balloon.

Provided she's popping it the right way. If she's going after balloons with a pin, forget it, I'll run away as fast as I can. If she's sitting on it, I'll stay. If she's blowing it up until it pops...well, I don't know what I'll do because it scares the crap out of me and it turns me on. Conflicted!

I'm sure that there are a lot of stories out there just like mine—not in the details, you understand, but in the general sense that their feelings for balloons are not simply sexual.

Not, in fact, anything simple at all.

A New Story, Finally

I know that I have neglected this blog for a very long time; I have spent most of my balloon-fetish-writing energy on fiction for the past three months. And the result is a story that ended up being a novelette: Popping Out.

You can buy Popping Out on Amazon.com now. I'm still working out a few kinks that fail to link the  Kindle and paperback editions, so if you want print, search for "Tim Popper Popping Out" in Books, and if you want an e-book, search for that same set of terms in the Kindle Store.

Not sure if you're ready to buy? Then download a sample of the Kindle edition. Because the story is so long, the preview actually gives you quite a good feel for the story, without really giving anything away.

And, as I've mentioned before, if you don't have a Kindle, you can still read the sample (or the whole book—hint) on a free Kindle reader for your tablet, phone, or computer, or in the Cloud Reader.

And if you haven't yet, why not download samples from Blowing It! and Eric's Secret?

So no excuses! Download the samples today and get a little taste of inflatable latex fun.